What the Debate Snap Polls Looked Like this Morning

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We are correctly warned by knowledgeable election-watchers not to put much trust in instant polls conducted immediately after debates as they may tend to have screwy samples, but seeing a collection of seven of them all trending in the same direction, confirms what I sensed during and after last night’s tilt between President Obama and Mitt Romney: the president was a big-time winner. Please look at this screenshot I made of a tweet by @MiddleAmericaMS, whom I thank for collecting this info. Averaging the margin by which PBO won all 7 of these surveys yields a definitive 23-point winning gap.

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Mitt Was Dishonest On How He Appointed Women to his MA Cabinet

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Not only did Mitt utter that ridiculous expression “Binders full of women,” even more substantively he fibbed in claiming that he requested his gubernatorial staff find women for him to consider for his incoming administration. David Bernstein has written about this overnight in a Boston Phoenix column:

Not a true story.

What actually happened was that in 2002 — prior to the election, not even knowing yet whether it would be a Republican or Democratic administration–a bipartisan group of women in Massachusetts formed MassGAP to address the problem of few women in senior leadership positions in state government. There were more than 40 organizations involved with the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus (also bipartisan) as the lead sponsor. . . .

Secondly, a UMass-Boston study found that the percentage of senior-level appointed positions held by women actually declined throughout the Romney administration, from 30.0% prior to his taking office, to 29.7% in July 2004, to 27.6% near the end of his term in November 2006. (It then began rapidly rising when Deval Patrick took office.)
Third, note that in Romney’s story as he tells it, this man who had led and consulted for businesses for 25 years didn’t know any qualified women, or know where to find any qualified women. So what does that say?

Because of the humor Mitt inadvertently his absurd image that evoked women somehow enmeshed in binders–which instantly grew into a hashtag and trending topic on Twitter–the saliency of his remark is likely to be heightened the fact he didn’t actually make a proactive effort to hire women, and didn’t even tell the truth in relating the (bogus) story.

H/t TPM for tipping me to Bernstein’s column.

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Weird Moment Today

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Got off the bus in midtown Manhattan today, right in front of Rockefeller Center. Walking toward my lunch destination, I suddenly noticed a familiar male face from the news. Black hair, dark complexion, very self-satisfied look on his face, even a smug expression, carrying a big shopping bag in his right hand. “Oh, jeez, it’s one of Mitt Romney’s many sons,” I realized, suddenly remembering that the Romney campaign is having a three-day NYC retreat for donors.

Update: I later established that the Romney I saw in midtown Manhattan was Craig Romney. It was a strange moment, especially seeing his smug expression.

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Shades of George W. Bush

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The NY Times reports that while MA Governor from 2003-07, Mitt Romney spent 25% of his time in office away from the state. Danny Hakim writes,

When the ceiling collapsed in [Boston’s] . . . Big Dig tunnel . . . Gov. Mitt Romney was at his vacation home in New Hampshire. When the Bush administration warned that the nation was at high risk of a terror attack in December 2003, he was at his Utah retreat. And for much of the time the legislature was negotiating changes to his landmark health care bill, he was on the road. During Mr. Romney’s four-year term as governor of Massachusetts, he cumulatively spent more than a year—part or all of 417 days—out of the state, according to a review of his schedule and other records. More than 70 percent of that time was spent on personal or political trips unrelated to his job, a New York Times analysis found. Mr. Romney, now the Republican presidential nominee, took lengthy vacations and weekend getaways. But much of his travel was to lay the groundwork for the presidential ambitions he would pursue in the 2008 election, two years after leaving office.

It’s amazing the Times was even able to piece this together, considering the well-known fact that Romney’s gubernatorial staff, encouraged by the outgoing Governor himself, bizarrely were able to buy the hard drives to all their office computers, and then disposed of them. Like so much in Mitt’s life, a fog surrounds the secrets.

The story ends on a ruefully humorous note, with this coda:

Mr. Romney’s visits to New Hampshire became so frequent that The Manchester Union Leader, the state’s largest paper, wrote an editorial complaining about attempts by his security detail to cordon off a section of the lake around his home. “The Massachusetts State Police have no jurisdiction over Lake Winnipesaukee,” it said, adding that troopers from a neighboring state should not be allowed “to harass and intimidate people who are out to enjoy that section of the lake.”

Well, after all, it is his lake…
 

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#FridayReads, Oct. 12–“The New New Deal” & “The Night Strangers”

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#FridayReads, Oct. 12–The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, Michael Grunwald’s deeply reported revelatory account of how the 2009 Recovery Act put the brakes on the financial collapse, prevented a depression, and jump-started President Obama’s agenda for change by distributing hundreds of billions of dollars of stimulus to create whole new parts of our economy such as green energy and electronic medical record-keeping. Grunwald makes clear that the conventional wisdom around the oft-maligned bill is in many instances just plain wrong. For instance, the extent of fraud and corruption was minuscule, “about 0.001%.” He also details in new ways the fact that congressional Repubs–in the period after the election and before the inauguration–resolved on “a strategy of uniform resistance to the president’s agenda, so that Obama would be unable to keep his post-partisan promises.” Joe Biden tells Grunwald that he was told, “For the next two years, we [Repubs] can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back.” So much for the false Romney-Ryan claim that the president has been insufficiently bipartisan.

Also, finished The Night Strangers, the first novel of Chris Bohjalian’s that I’ve read. I’ve posted about it in #FridayReads twice before, as it took me a little while to get going in this contemporary haunted house story set in my old college town of Franconia, NH. But I found it totally engrossing once I got over the initial hump. Interesting characters, especially the evil and diabolical ones, and excellent use of structure in the novel to build suspense. It also had a satisfyingly creepy “Village of the Damned”-type denouement, where it’s clear that the evil, far from being extinguished, is actually free to carry on. I’m sure I’ll read more of Bohjalian’s work.

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Romney Advisor, on CNN to Articulate Mitt’s Foreign Policy, Can’t Do It

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Romney advisor Tara Wall gets roasted by CNN’s Soledad O’Brien in a preview of Mitt’s ballyhooed foreign policy speech to be given later today. In the 5-minute video O’Brien plays back key parts of the 47% tape, in which Mitt describes what he believes is the futility of dealing with the Palestinians; she then contrasts those surreptitiously recorded  statements with the transcript of today’s speech, where he claims to be in favor of a two-state solution. She asks Wall if she can resolve the obvious contradictions, when things get a little surreal. Transcript after the jump.

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Today’s Encouraging Job Figures

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At a doctor’s office right now, but finding I have good wifi so can blog a bit while waiting. It’s great to get word of the upward revision to jobs #s for July & August, the #s for Sept. and the resulting drop in UE rate to 7.8%. Under PBO USA has created more jobs in 4 years than GWB did in 8! The upward revisions show that even though there’s still a long way to go, the national trajectory is definitely moving in the right direction. Meantime, Jack Welch is disgracing himself by pushing out a tweet that ‘Chicago’ has cooked the numbers to give the president and DEMs a boost, as if the Bureau of Labor Statistics were in on a fix. This guy was CEO of a major corporation-what an idiot.

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Don’t Panic*, Continue Doing What We’ve Been Doing

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Two key data points and a message for worried DEMs and other Obama supporters:

1) In today’s Gallup poll President Obama’s job approval rating is 54%, the highest he’s ever had in that poll.

2) Also, in CBS’s snap poll overnight, while it did show improved numbers for Romney on the question of who you think can most help the country (from 30% to 63%), for the president the same figure went from 53% to 69%, still a 6-point edge.

The president’s got most of the country with him. I believe he can keep the people with him. Even though he didn’t do as well in the debate as we hoped he would–I think he was befuddled, unfortunately caught off guard by Romney’s ambidextrous shape-shifting and unabashed dissembling, as TPM’s Brian Beutler’s written–but I would add the president has no small reservoir of goodwill, the truth, and a skillful campaign, all on his side. My message is don’t panic, keep doing what we’ve been doing, especially all the truthtelling and fact-checking that the campaign has done all day–with the blogger community, including this one, pushing out that information–and things will be okay. And we get another crack at Romney/Ryan next week. It’s still a race, but the president remains in a strong position.

*Thanks to the late Douglas Adams for his book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its valuable nostrum, “Don’t Panic.”

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