Will Ferrell Endorses Eric Garcetti for Los Angeles Mayor

This is a gamechanger ...

Obama and His Base

I like Ben Smith a lot. He writes a lot of good stuff. This is bad stuff. Really stupid to be honest.

Smith argues Obama is about to "screw his base" because Obamacare is going to raise health care costs for the young (Obama's base) and reduce health care costs for the elderly (they vote for the other guy - ANY other guy). Ezra Klein points out various reasons Smith is just wrong. But the worst part of it is this:

Imminent elements of Obama's grandest policy move, the health-care overhaul known as ObamaCare, are calculated to screw his most passionate supporters and to transfer wealth to his worst enemies.

What in the world are you talking about Ben??? Obamacare is "calculated to screw his most passionate supporters?" Come on. And he's transferring wealth to "his worst enemies?" Obama is not Nixon. Old, sick people are not his "enemies." The provisions Smith is referring to are a BADLY needed fix the health care system needs. Young people need to pay in when they are healthy and they have been behaving as free riders. It is a collective action problem. Obamacare fixes it.

And guess what else? Young people hope to someday ... ya know ... be old. They get the benefits of Obamacare back then.

This is horserace, slice-and-dice politics at its worst. Awful Ben. Just awful.

ST6 and the Raid on bin Laden's Compound

An absolutely riveting piece by Phil Bronstein of Esquire on the Navy Seal who shot bin Laden and, more importantly, on the life of Navy Seals both in the military and after the military. Tough piece. But this is my favorite snippet from the long piece:

One of the snipers who'd seen the disabled helo approached just before they went into the main building. He said, "Hey, dude, they've got an awesome mock-up of our helo in their yard." I said, "No, dude. They shot one of ours down." He said, "Okay, that makes more sense than the shit I was saying."

I guess keeping their sense of humor even in the most scary and dark moments is the only way to move through it.

Papal Elections Are Complex

This ought to make it harder to reform the presidential selection process. The Electoral College looks democratic and simple in comparison.

Biden

The blog has been radio-silent for some time so my apologies. No better way to kick off the new year though than this perfect mash-up of Joe Biden meeting with families of senators being sworn in. Pure joy ...

The Way Forward for Republicans

Jeb Bush is not it. Sorry.

I'm not saying Jeb Bush isn't someone Republicans might choose as a presidential nominee. I could see that happening. And that's part of the problem Republicans have. They need a sharper break with their recent past and they seem unwilling to make that break.

As for Jeb himself, some Republicans think he's the way forward because he is well-regarded for his job as Governor and because he is more "Latino-friendly" (not a hard-liner on immigration and his wife is Mexican).

Here's why that's wrong:

1) "Bush" - You can pretty much count the number of times Romney said the name in 2012 on one hand. And this was not a mistake by Romney. The name remains toxic among too many independents and even among some Republicans. Jeb gave a full-throated defense of his brother's presidency at the Republican Convention this year. It didn't rehabilitate GW's image any.

2) Between 1952 and 2004 (52 years and 14 presidential elections), Republicans put together a ticket that didn't have a Nixon, a Dole, or a Bush on it just 1 time (1964). That's kind of creepy. These days, there's a fine line between partisanship and tribalism. Turning back to another Bush gets way too close to the tribalism side of things. The turn to McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012 was not quite the "fresh" makeover the Republicans needed. They desperately need that now.

3) Republicans don't so much need new ideas as they need a return to reason and "reasonableness." Mitt Romney actually pledged during the Republican primaries that he would not support $10 in spending cuts in return for $1 in tax increases because this would be $1 in tax increases too much. Voters sense this lack of reasonableness on various issues. A CNN poll out today indicates that 70% of Americans believe the Republican Party does not do enough to compromise with the President while just under half say the same about the President. Jeb Bush cannot be the new face of Republican reasonableness. And that brings us back to the root of the problem ...

The Republican Party has a problem with their base. Both political parties are prone to extremism in their primary processes. But it is worse in the Republican Party. How do we know? Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich (not to mention Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain and Rick Perry and Donald Trump) were serious alternatives to Mitt Romney in the primaries. They won serious primaries and got lots of votes. Dennis Kucinich ran for president but he never got a significant number of votes anywhere. The radical left does not hold the same sway in Democratic primaries as the radical right does in Republican primaries. It is not enough for Chris Christie or Mitch Daniels or Jon Huntsman to run. They need to have the space for these candidates to say reasonable things and still win the nomination. That space didn't exist in 2012.

It is a long way to 2016 and Republicans have time. But I'm not hopeful that Republicans have learned the key lessons yet. Nominating Jeb Bush would be a sure sign they haven't learned these lessons at all.

47% ...

... of Americans voted for Mitt Romney as it turns out.

That's poetic justice.

A Serious Question About Benghazi-gate

What's this about now?

Let's posit for the moment that Susan Rice was lying on the Sunday talk shows as McCain et. al. seem to be implying. What does she ... or Hillary Clinton ... or President Obama ... or the United States stand to gain from doing that?

In other words, what exactly are they accusing her of lying for? Richard Nixon was lying to cover up a criminal act. Bill Clinton was guilty of lying to save himself from embarrassment. I don't get what Rice, etc., is accused of lying for. And if you can't explain that piece of it, if you can't outline for me what the motive is here, there's no scandal.

So, again, what's this about now?

"Totally disappointed, man"

That's what one Romney supporter said in the wake of Mitt Romney's loss last Tuesday. Of course, this isn't just any Romney supporter. This is the guy who had a Romney/Ryan logo tattooed on his face ... as in permanently. Here's the best part of the article:

Hartsburg’s tattoo covers a 5-by-2 inch space on the side of his face, and he did it after raising $5,000 on eBay for the effort. He didn’t even tell his wife he planned to get the tattoo until about an hour before.

“Right away, she was taken aback,” Hartsburg said, adding that his wife is also a Romney/Ryan supporter.

“My 15-year-old son, however, he was all about it.”

At least Romney has brought one family together. So that's nice.

Sorry Ohio ... Colorado Was the Key State in 2012

It turns out Colorado was the tipping point state, not Ohio, in 2012. What do I mean by this?

I took all the states and listed them in the chart below in descending order by the size of Obama's margin of victory (or loss).

Of course, most of the states on the edges are irrelevant to this story so let's drill down to look at the states that Obama won or lost by 10 point or less.

It may not look like it but there is so much worthy of discussion here. First, notice that Obama did better nationally than he did in Ohio. This was not true in much of the pre-election polling and represented a moderate surprise to me. The final pre-election polling average on Pollster had Obama up by 1.5% nationally but up by 3.4% in Ohio. PPP's final national poll had Obama up by 2 but up by 5 in Ohio. There was much discussion in the final days of the campaign that the Romney campaign did not see an easy path in Ohio and that explained the last-minute (and futile) effort in Pennsylvania. But Ohio really was reasonably close.

Don't get me wrong here. That 1.9% victory is not tiny. Remember that Ohio was so saturated with campaign visits and campaign ads that it was probably going to be very, very difficult for Romney to move enough voters to win there. But it was a little bit closer than we thought it would be.

Second, notice that the three closest states Obama won were, as Chuck Todd likes to call them, "FLOHVA." And they were in that order - Florida, then Ohio, then Virginia. Chuck Todd talked a lot about how the election was going to come down to these three important states. I certainly agreed but figured that Florida was kind of irrelevant because, if Obama won Florida, he would already have won Ohio and would already have the 270 he needed. I was right about that latter part but was wrong that ... Obama didn't turn out to need Ohio either. Or Virginia. Wow.

And this brings me to, what is to me, the most interesting point. Colorado was the key "tipping point" state (Nate Silver's terminology), not Ohio. In arguing that Romney was wasting his time in Pennsylvania, I pointed out that the leads Obama had in Ohio and Virginia were so critical that

he can lose Florida, Pennsylvania, and hell, let's give Romney Colorado too. It is still an Obama victory.

But, of course, Obama was never going to lose Pennsylvania. So, when you give Pennsylvania to Obama, it turned out that Obama didn't need Ohio or Florida or Virginia.

Obama finished with 332 electoral votes. But some of these states were close. If Obama lost Florida (29 electoral votes) and Ohio (18 electoral votes) and Virginia (13 electoral votes) - a complete sweep of FLOHVA - he would still have had 272 electoral votes ... because of Colorado. Colorado is the state that won it for Obama.

And here's the interesting thing about that. Obama won Colorado by 4.7 points. Imagine for a moment that the states all shift equally as the national margin moves. This is not quite true but is not a crazy approximation of reality. If this were true, you could move the national vote 4.6 points in Romney's direction and Romney would still lose. You would be moving from a +2.7 Obama margin to a 1.9-point margin for Romney ... and Romney would still lose.

For most of the 2012 campaign, Colorado was thought of as a sort of safety-valve swing state. It was not given as much attention because the Obama campaign knew they win if they win Ohio. And, while that was true, it was also true the Obama campaign was winning without Ohio. Colorado was the true tipping point state.

When you start to meditate on that reality and then think about what drove Obama to victory in Colorado, you start to realize the trouble the Republican Party is in at the national level.