incurious sumbitch . . .

As he often does, I think James Wolcott nails the campaign both now and for 2016 . . .

I confess that as a liberal Democrat I'm amazed that Obama isn't 20 points ahead in the race. Yes, he had that one lousy debate, but what a truly vapid, uninspired candidate Mitt Romney is, standing for nothing, a glistening shrine to hackitude. Romney's been compared to Nixon in his mendacious duplicitous insincerity but Romney's actually worse: Nixon knew stuff, he did his homework, not like Romney, who has a vacancy sign on his brow whenever he's forced to discuss an issue--usually foreign-policy related--that he's had six or seven years to study up on if he hadn't been such a complacent, incurious sumbitch too busy admiring his fucking hair and winning smile in the mirror. I really thought he'd be smart enough not to glue himself to Tea Party positions that become a mite uncomfortable in the general election, such as hey let's send disaster relief back to the states or better yet privatize it, but no, he pandered like a fan dancer. His shape-shifting about the Detroit bailout couldn't be more spazzy. And he's the best the Republicans had! Santorum, Cain, Rick Perry, et al are even more ignorant than Romney, and Newt Gingrich is a yeast infection. In 2016, assuming Romney loses, the Conservative Base isn't going to want Chris Christie, they're going to want Allen West spraying the air with machine-gun fire, like Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos.

Assuming, that is, West wins reelection. Me, I'm pulling for Patrick Murphy.

what tribe do these people belong to . . . ?

Some swing voters spell out their indecision on their checks . . .

Meet the undecided donors. They are not lobbyists or other members of the political class — donors with a professional imperative to hedge their bets — but ordinary voters whose back-and-forth donations mirror the undulations of the swing electorate.

Some have attended small fund-raisers for both men, curious to hear what the candidates’ more ardent supporters have to say. Others have responded to the campaigns’ daily barrages of e-mail solicitations, or to the ups and downs of the candidates’ debate performances and public gaffes. Still others said they simply could not make up their minds.

“I’m all mixed up between being a conservative and a liberal,” said Kurt Schoeneman, a grape grower from Northern California, who added that some of his friends thought he was “senile.” He had found himself seized by waves of enthusiasm, Mr. Schoeneman said — first for one candidate and then for the other.

“Some of these people, they just loathe Obama, and they’ll write something really nasty about him,” said Mr. Schoeneman, who has given checks to both candidates, most recently $100 to Mr. Romney in June and $100 to Mr. Obama in July. “And then something else will happen, and I’ll go give Romney some money.”

Charles Y. Chen, a salesman in Virginia, gave Mr. Romney $100 on the day of his convention speech in late August. But in September, Mr. Chen donated to Mr. Obama every few days, $50 here, $55 there. Then he switched again, giving Mr. Romney $50.

“I think the Republicans have better ideas on the economy and the Democrats have better ideas on social issues, immigration and social justice,” Mr. Chen said in an interview. “Just like anything, both have something that they do great and something that they need to improve.”

Gretchen Davidson, a homemaker in Birmingham, a Detroit suburb, said she had gone to several events to hear different ideas and arguments. She gave $500 to Mr. Romney in early August and $1,500 to Mr. Obama in late September.

“You have friends that throw parties on each side, and honestly, I am someone in the middle that didn’t really know which way I was going,” Ms. Davidson said. “You try to sort of see what people are so excited about.”

minority of white men . . .

I'm obviously a member of the white man minority that will vote for President Obama; somehow, the Romney message people have not been able to find the right message to pull me in . . . Tom Scocca has an interesting story on Slate about the passions of the Romeny campaign and why white people (mostly men) don't support the President . . .

The passion comes from what Romney is running against. For more than four years, without pause, Republicans have been campaigning and propagandizing against an imaginary Obama. At the most grotesque end of the fantasies, he is a foreign-born, anti-colonialist Muslim. In more reputable precincts, he is a power-mad socialist and a dumb affirmative-action baby, promoted all the way to the presidency by a race-crazed, condescending liberal elite. (As if the presidency of the Harvard Law Review were awarded to anyone but the hungriest shark in the shark tank.) This is the position of the party's mandarins and reputable spinners—that Obama was foisted off on regular Americans against their will, despite all those votes last time around.

Hence the baiting of Obama, throughout his term, for supposedly being unable to speak without a teleprompter. Republicans predicted, over and over, that the president would be exposed and humiliated in face-to-face debate with an opponent (Newt Gingrich especially fantasized about being that foe). Eventually this led to Clint Eastwood haranguing the empty chair. And then in the first presidential debate, Obama was slack and ineffectual against a sharp Romney. See? It was true!

And then Obama shredded Romney in the second debate, and kept cuffing him around in the third. Now Romney was the deflating balloon, wild-eyed and babbling and licking his dry mouth in desperation. From which Peggy Noonan—whose proudest credential is having written the scripts for a Republican president who couldn't function without being fed his lines—concluded in the Wall Street Journal that the only meaningful debate was the first one.

Mr. Obama is the Electoral College favorite . . .

From 538 Blog, here is The Simple Case for Saying Obama Is the Favorite.

Please know that

Today The Times will reinstate the free article limit on nytimes.com and its mobile apps that was lifted during and after the storm.

O yeh . . .

Good poll day for O.

7.9 is not good enough . . .

The U.S. economy added 171,000 jobs in October, according to the Labor Department's monthly jobs report. The unemployment rate is 7.9 percent. The recovery is slow but continuing . . .

I, too, trust the veracity of Nate Silver's wager . . .

Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer at The Atlantic, says that Nate Silver's wager makes him trust Nate all the more . . .

America is filled with people who think its okay to lie, bullshit, or otherwise misrepresent the truth in order to advance the electoral prospects of a politician or the cause of a governing coalition. Let's call them shills. Other people aren't necessarily aware that they're misrepresenting the truth, but their work is so shaped by what would advance the causes of a candidate or governing coalition that it's often indistinguishable from the shills. We'll call them hacks. In a better world, journalists would be sworn enemies of shills and hacks, and the best are. Unfortunately, the press, especially the political press, has more than its share of shills and hacks.

There are shills and hacks in the polling business too. You'd think that all pollsters would have an incentive to be as accurate as possible. But telling partisans what they want to hear, or telling undecided voters what partisans want them to hear, can be lucrative - it is widely believed in politics that if enough people say something will happen, there is a better chance of it happening.

And that may be correct.

. . .

I thought [the wager] was pitch perfect. It communicated, in one provocative Tweet, I am not a shill, I am not a hack, I know my business, and just to prove I am not bullshitting about any of that, I am willing to risk $1,000 of my own money on the accuracy of my model. It's the reaction of an honest professional confident in his craft - and it's very difficult to imagine, for example, Dick Morris reacting to Dave Weigel's criticism in the same way. For all I know, Silver would lose the bet, but the fact that he made it seemed to exude earnestness, and probably caused Scarborough to reassess how sure he was about his own claim. (Of course, since his claim was that the election is a tossup, Silver should've given him odds.)

Hello?

Quickie: I'm seeing reports of citizens in the NYC area "losing patience" with the response to Sandy. Two observations:

1. These people don't seem to grasp that they've just gone through a major storm that's done about $50 billion in damage. This is not like TV or the movies, where everyone lives happily ever after by the end of the show; things take time to get fixed.

2. Everyone is clamoring endlessly for ever-lower taxes, yet they expect universal and instantaneous aid from tax-supported institutions when something goes wrong. Can they not connect the dots?

3. (OK, so three observations) This nation is plumb eat up with the dumb-ass.

Yo - it's the bad penny again, slowly climbing up out of the Valley of the Shadow. Got a ways to go yet, but I figgered to keep my hand in with a short recommendation.

If you were raised with the standard American education, especially one dating from the Eisenhower-Kennedy years, unless you've tried to continue it on your own, I think it's fair to say you've been led down the garden path, at least in regard to American history. Now, I always detested history as it was taught to me, so much so that I didn't pick it up again until I was well into my forties. But when I did finally resume - actually, begin is probably more accurate - reading history, the scales began falling from my eyes, and continue to do so, even today.

I just happened across a book a few days ago that I've been engrossed in ever since. It's by Colin Woodard, entitled American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, and as the Boston Globe says, it "feels particularly timely now, when so many would claim a mythically unified 'Founding Fathers' as their political ancestors." It offers a different perspective on how the US came to where it is now, a provocative and stimulating one that meticulously debunks a whole lot of myths so many of us labor under. A few quotes:

Americans have been deeply divided since the days of Jamestown and Plymouth. The original North American colonies were settled by people from distinct regions of the British Islands, and from France, the Netherlands, and Spain, each with their own religious, political, and ethnographic characteristics. Throughout the colonial period, they regarded one another as competitors — for land, settlers, and capital — and occasionally as enemies, as was the case during the English Civil War, when Royalist Virginia stood against Puritan Massachusetts, or when New Netherlands [New York City and environs] and New France were invaded and occupied by English-speaking soldiers, statesmen, and merchants. Only when London began treating its colonies as a single unit — and enacted policies threatening to nearly all — did some of these distinct societies briefly come together to win a revolution and create a joint government. Nearly all of them would seriously consider leaving the Union in the eighty-year period after Yorktown; several went to war to do so in the 1860s. All of these centuries-old cultures are still with us today, and have spread their people, ideas, and influence across mutually exclusive bands of the continent. There isn’t and never has been one America, but rather several Americas. [Emphasis mine]

America’s most essential and abiding divisions are not between red states and blue states, conservatives and liberals, capital and labor, blacks and whites, the faithful and the secular. Rather, our divisions stem from this fact: the United States is a federation comprised of the whole or part of eleven regional nations, some of which truly do not see eye to eye with one another. These nations respect neither state nor international boundaries, bleeding over the U.S. frontiers with Canada and Mexico as readily as they divide California, Texas, Illinois, or Pennsylvania. Six joined together to liberate themselves from British rule. Four were conquered but not vanquished by English-speaking rivals. Two more were founded in the West by a mix of American frontiersmen in the second half of the nineteenth century. Some are defined by cultural pluralism, others by their French, Spanish, or 'Anglo-Saxon' heritage. Few have shown any indication that they are melting into some sort of unified American culture. On the contrary, since 1960 the fault lines between these nations have been growing wider, fueling culture wars, constitutional struggles, and ever more frequent pleas for unity.

The event we call the American Revolution wasn’t really revolutionary, at least while it was underway. The military struggle of 1775–1782 wasn’t fought by an 'American people' seeking to create a united, continent-spanning republic where all men were created equal and guaranteed freedom of speech, religion, and the press. On the contrary, it was a profoundly conservative action fought by a loose military alliance of nations, each of which was most concerned with preserving or reasserting control of its respective culture, character, and power structure. The rebelling nations certainly didn’t wish to be bonded together into a single republic. They were joined in a temporary partnership against a common threat: the British establishment’s ham-fisted attempt to assimilate them into a homogeneous empire centrally controlled from London. Some nations — the Midlands, New Netherland, and New France — didn’t rebel at all. Those that did weren’t fighting a revolution; they were fighting separate wars of colonial liberation. [Emphasis mine.]

Right now, I don't necessarily agree with all of Woodard's conclusions - but I haven't finished reading the whole book yet, and I'll need to think some when I do. Still, it's a good read and very refreshing. Highly recommended.

Okay . . . now I can sleep at night . . .