The Real Significance of the Obama Win

As the 2012 election fades into history, let's take stock.

The Obama campaign made two major mistakes: failing to tout the president's successes in the early stage of the campaign when Romney wasn't advertising, instead focusing on defining Romney negatively, and failing to prepare adequately for the first debate. The first failure meant the second failure left the president with a very weak message: Romney is a flake, but I'm not very convincing in making that case. It also allowed the Republicans to run riot with defining him negatively. According to some of the propaganda, he's a fundamentalist Islamist Europe-loving Marxist. If you can believe all of that simultaneously, you have a very weird head. Or you're a tea party Republican. (Did I say "or"?)

That takes me to the real significance of the campaign.

Obama won despite these very significant mistakes in a year when the economy has been doing poorly. Had he defined himself positively, taking credit for health insurance reform (emphasizing it's essentially the same model as Romney's in Massachusetts), stopping the Bush-era slide, saving Detroit and putting an end to expensive and damaging foreign wars, he should have won easily. So why did Romney still contrive to lose? Part of if was an astonishing succession of mistakes, including:

• having aligned himself with the tea party in the primaries, he compounded the mistake by choosing a running mate notable only for being the poster child of that side of politics (without e.g. the sort of state-wide profile that could deliver his home state... did Romney really think he needed to pander so comprehensively to one niche of voters who would never vote Obama?)
• letting Clint Eastwood do an unscripted monologue at his nominating Convention, shifting the news coverage from the candidates
• being caught on camera dissing 47% of the electorate (incorrectly claiming that non-taxpayers are all Obama supporters: retirees for example disproportionately vote Republican)
• taking positions to win over the tea party, then reversing himself when those turned out to be unpopular, yet failing to repudiate in no uncertain terms weird views of Republican senate candidates on rape and abortion
• an advertising campaign in Ohio that earned the ire of auto executives for inaccurately claiming that Jeep production was to be moved to China
• a failure to offer a clear economic alternative: I'm a businessman and I know best is not exactly compelling
• tying himself in a knot in the foreign policy debate over what was or wasn't said about the death of the ambassador in Libya
• a chaotic attempt at converting a rally to a hurricane relief event
• a last-minute dash to win over Pennsylvania, when the vote in Ohio, Virginia and Florida was much closer (the only rational explanation I can think of for this was an attempt at diverting Obama resources from tighter races, but it didn't work)

But the real issue is demographics. The Reagan winning coalition changed the Republican Party. It used to perform poorly in the South, yet no Democrat has won Texas since Carter's 1976 victory. Hubert Humphrey won Texas in 1968, the year of Nixon's first win: a hardly imaginable outcome today (see map: contrast it with the 2012 map at the top of the page). Reagan's combination of fundamentalist Christian "values", low taxes on the rich, spending wildly on the military and simultaneously pandering to plutocrats and the racist white poor can't win any more because it appeals to a dwindling constituency of ageing white males. CNN's exit polls show the demographic that splits most sharply Republican (61%) is whites aged 45 and above. As age drops, the skew narrows with 18-25-year-old white voters voting Republican 51%. CNN doesn't break out white males by age as category, but white males as a whole vote Republican 62% vs. white women 56%. Contrast this with other demographics: 93% African-Americans voted Democratic, as did over 70% of Hispanics and Asians.

Aside from demographics, there are other interesting breakdowns. Let's look at one, ideology:

• liberal (25% of voters) voted Democrat overwhelmingly (86%)
• moderates (41% of voters) voted Democrat by a significant margin (56%)
• only 35% of voters identify as "conservative" and the Republicans win 82% of those

The last set of figures illustrates the Republican's dilemma. Having embraced the tea party, they are setting themselves up to be unattractive to all but 35% of the electorate. Conservatives may outnumber liberals, but the tea party brand of conservative is unattractive to anyone who thinks of themselves as "moderate".

As long as tea party activists retain their enthusiasm for voting in primaries that gives them a disproportionate say in choice of candidates, the Republicans will battle to nominate electable candidates. About the best they can do is find one who is willing to say different things to different audiences. And that worked, didn't it?

What about finding another Reagan, someone who can seem friendly, fun and caring, while promoting these positions that, objectively, most voters see as completely wacko? There's little chance of that. They've been trying since and not found anyone. And anyway, it's a hard act to follow. If you've done it once, the other side sees through it and attacks you on substance.

Finally, a word on polls. Various right-wing pollsters claimed that the mainstream polls were all wrong, and created their own. The narrative was that the polls were "skewed" so they "unskewed" them. This is all very reminiscent of attacks on climate science. Real-world data is noisy, and any proper analysis of it should eliminate sources of bias, like artificial warming in urban areas, and artifacts like moving the location of a weather station. Properly done, these measures produce reliable data. The anti-science position is it's all just data massaging, and they can do it just as well to produce the result they want. With electoral polling, we've seen how well that works. Good scientific analysis requires honest unbiased processing of data. That applies as much to polling as it does to climate science.

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BONUS: Here's another view of the demographic time bomb facing the Republicans.

Is Romney Right on the Money?

For the delectation of those who like cryptic crosswords and wordplay:

And here’s one for the 47%:

Republicans Go To Hell

Something that no longer astounds me is the way people claiming extreme religious devotion are capable of unspeakable acts of barbarism. I grew up with a church-going mother who really believed the bits about good works, etc., and would never relate to this sort of behaviour.

In the latest example, Republican Missouri senate candidate Todd Akin has caused widespread offence and even a little dismay in his own camp by claiming that “legitimate rape” victims can’t get pregnant, echoing a superstition long debunked by medical science that you can only get pregnant if you enjoy it.

He’s subsequently issued a non-apology (I used the wrong words) and refused to withdraw (ironically the only form of contraception his end of the loony bin recognizes) from the race. Other Republicans have urged him to withdraw (that word again), without specifying exactly what he said wrong.

The problem is, they don’t want to say, because they want the votes women haters represent.

Women’s groups have been rallying to support Akin’s Democrat opponent Claire McCaskill, as they should – and I hope not only women but also men and others who have less bizarre takes on religion work hard to stop him too. I know my mother would have.

I wonder how soon we’ll see a PAC formed by Rapists for Republicans. If his views ever became enshrined in law, all a rapist would need to do to escape conviction (in line with 13th-century British law) is to ensure the victim became pregnant, thereby enabling the “she must have enjoyed it” defence.

If anyone cannot see how unspeakably barbaric these views are, tell us your secret. How did you manage to live to be 800 years old?

I should also add here that though this is very much a Republican disease – the “religious right” has become something of a tapeworm in the brain of the Republicans – there are plenty of Democrats on the wrong side of women’s issues. But the Republican position has become so extreme that I focus on them specifically.

The US right has a long and repulsive tradition of denial of rationality, including tobacco denial, ozone hole denial and climate change denial. If there’s evidence for something, that doesn’t count, if it contradicts you beliefs. It’s sad that this sort of thing has become mainstream in a country that could land astronauts on the moon and bring them back safely, and pushes the boundaries of science in so many areas.

The root cause of this sort of lunatic view is a deeply anti-rationalist view of the world that says you literally believe what you are told by your religion, even if it’s contradicted by obvious, verifiable evidence. The thing that’s behind that is the bizarre view that there is a supreme creator of the universe, who is infinitely wise and powerful, and has the ego of a spoilt toddler, who smashes everything if he doesn’t get his way. If you think about this for only a second, why would someone that wise and powerful care a jot what I think of her? This representation of the creator serves one and only one purpose: the personal agenda of the religious hierarchy. Create extremes of afterlife – a wonderful paradise versus an extreme of barbaric punishment in hell – and a set or rules that must be followed to get to the right place, and you have a wonderful control tool for the gullible.

Don’t get me wrong: I know some very religious people who are wonderful, and do not fit the characterisation here. The point is that there is a huge self-interest for the megalomaniac to twist this sort of belief system to advantage. And look at what they’ve done:

• politicians who all but justify rape because they have a pathological objection to abortion
• suicide bombers who have no scruples about killing dozens or even thousands in the most barbaric fashion
• Zionist zealots who cannot see that the Palestinians may have some sort of case

I would personally rather believe that there is no supreme creator being and be totally responsible for my own actions. If I’m wrong, a being powerful enough to create a whole universe is unlikely to be so capricious as to punish an honest mistake. On the other hand, such a being is certainly not going to take lightly being held responsible for all manner of barbarism for such a feeble reason as “I thought I was meant to take everything literally, especially if I could read it as excusing extremes of cruelty and treating my fellow humans as worthless.”

One reason though I really would like there to be a hell is so I could see the faces of the Republican women haters, suicide bombers, apartheid politicians, Zionist zealots and others who used their creator’s name to excuse unspeakable barbarity at the point when they realise their mistake. To echo a line from The Simpsons: “See you in hell. From heaven.”

And since we are ending with comedy, here’s a starting point for the new Republican approach to trying rapists:

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Update

In case you think this is a random outlier, here's another one (not the actual candidate speaking but a pretty convincing take-down of Indiana Republican senate candidate Richard Mourdock's position that a woman gets pregnant from a rape because “it is something God intended to happen”):

Like Akin, he doesn’t understand what the fuss is about, and claims his words have been taken out of context. Then there’s the tea party Tennessee Republican congressman Scott DesJarlais who was recorded making a phone call to his mistress urging her to have an abortion. To add insult to injury, he's a doctor, so he's facing an ethics enquiry.

Small government, it seems, is one small enough to get into your bedroom. But not if you’re a Republican. Maybe they have smaller bedrooms.

You can’t make this stuff up. I write novels in my spare time, and I certainly wouldn’t.

Lucky Americans

Lucky, lucky Americans.

You may be wondering how I can say this when your economy is in the toilet, the war in Iraq is a disaster, Afghanistan is unravelling and there is no obvious end in sight.

Well, one thing is obviously ending soon: the Bush presidency.

Can George Dubya Bush be as stupid as he sounds? People have argued that you have to be smart to get to be president of the US. However, we have some contrary precedents. Not only was Ronald Reagan not exceptionally intellectually gifted, but he was sliding into Alzheimers. To what extent his trademark ad-libs were carefully scripted and the property of well organized reminders we'll probably never know, but that he used cue cards extensively and could be totally incoherent without them has been widely reported.

Look at Bush's record on Iraq. The ostensible reason for the war was weapons of mass destruction. WMDs of course are not a new issue, so why the urgency? Because Bush somehow connected Saddam's alleged WMDs to 9/11. What's the connection? If Al-Qaeda somehow got their hands on WMDs, there would be big trouble. Well, maybe. That part makes some sort of sense. But why would Saddam give an Islamist organization WMDs when he is one of their natural enemies? Some of the enmity between the US and Saddam would have pushed him closer to Al-Qaeda but would Saddam have really contemplated giving such dangerous weapons to an organization fundamentally opposed to his style of government? It's unlikely to say the least.

The more obvious explanation is that Bush's inner circle with their oil connections saw it as a hostile takeover of one of the world's biggest oil resources. That they saw the whole thing in terms of a minimal-cost war, with fewer ground troups and a smaller post-invasion effort than most experts considered reasonable is an indication of a closed mindset with limited objectives in mind.

So, yes. I do think there's a case that Bush is not that smart, and is there primarily because he has powerful backers.

So why the “lucky” thing?

Because none of the frontrunners are nearly that stupid. While they may have widely differing positions on some issues like how to get out of Iraq and how to run the economy, they are all candidates of substance. Not only the election, but the final stages of the primaries are shaping up to be a great contest.

None of this of course eases the short-term pain of the downhill slide of the economy and the continuing disaster in Iraq, but an end is indeed in sight. I don't know exactly what it will be because the candidates have different takes, and there are no obvious answers to some of the hard problems up ahead – but at least they are candidates with the potential to take them on. And it seems unlikely that whoever wins will carry on with the Bush approach to climate change denial.

So, not just lucky Americans – lucky rest of the world too.