WASHINGTON – Mark Halperin provides what he calls the “informal slogan” of Obama reelect: “be confident, but take nothing for granted.” One reason team Obama is confident is that the Electoral College helps him tremendously.
Halperin’s insider-itis and penchant for dishing out insipid Beltway baloney cannot be shaken, but even he gets one thing right when he analyzes the obvious that the popular vote will likely be close, with the electoral map favoring Obama. From Halperin’s TIME magazine piece on Monday, which lays out four problems for Mitt Romney, from the view of the ultimate insider’s insider.
First, in the view of the Obamans, Romney is still a weak candidate. His stump skills continue to be uneven at best, with speeches plagued by awkward jargon and passionless rhetoric. They believe his tenure as head of Bain Capital and his term as governor of Massachusetts conceal vulnerabilities yet to be unveiled. “No one’s ever looked at Romney’s record, and there’s a lot there,” said one senior campaign official. “He developed this set of values at Bain about what the economy is all about… Whatever it took to make money… He took that same philosophy to Massachusetts” as governor. Obama’s team is sitting on a multimedia treasure trove of research about both phases of Romney’s career and expect to launch powerful missiles at key moments throughout the campaign, discombobulating the Republican each time.
[…] Because Chicago has expanded its electoral-map targets by exactly one McCain 2008 state – Arizona – and because the popular vote is expected to be closer than it was four years ago, the Obama team is not being coy when it admits this will be a close election. But as of the first week of May, it is not a close election any of the team’s members expects to lose.
To Mark Halperin I’d simply respond, austerity is a loser. See France. Ask David Cameron, no, strike that, because he’s another bloke who can’t admit when he’s wrong.
It’s very difficult to beat an incumbent president, but when you have an inferior politician whose base is also not enamored with him it makes it even rougher. And since Mitt Romney has also been short-sided enough to vilify any sort of sane immigration policy, going up against the toughest deportation president who bests George W. on enforcement, while also supporting the DREAM Act, it’s near to impossible with the Electoral College in play.
Of course, if the Electoral College was to be abolished, which it should be, in favor of the national popular vote, Pres. Obama wouldn’t be nearly as confident and his team would be scrambling to truly get out each and every out.
The American public agrees, with Gallup reporting back in October 2011 that 62% of Americans want to “scrap” the Electoral College.
The Electoral College got a brief spate of attention in 2000, when George Bush became president even though he lost the popular vote to Al Gore by more than 500,000 votes. Many people realized then for the first time that we have a system in which the president is chosen not by the voters themselves, but by 538 electors. It’s a ridiculous setup, which thwarts the will of the majority, distorts presidential campaigning and has the potential to produce a true constitutional crisis. There should be a bipartisan movement for direct election of the president. – MAKING VOTES COUNT; Abolish the Electoral College (New York Times, 2004)
Instead, it’s a contest of a handful of states that will get the attention, as well as the avalanche of negative ads.
Taylor Marsh is the author of The Hillary Effect, which is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, where it was 1 of only 4 books in their NOOK Featured Authors Selection launch. Marsh is a veteran political analyst and commentator. She has written for The Hill, U.S. News & World Report, among others, and has been profiled in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and seen on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic, as well as on radio across the dial and on satellite, including the BBC. Marsh lives in the Washington, D.C. area. This column is cross posted from her new media blog.
PHOTO: President Barack Obama walks along the Colonnade of the White House on his way to the Oval Office, May 3, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)