This was Andrew Sullivan’s reaction to the bad poll numbers that came in yesterday:

Sullivan is a self confessed drama queen, but this really is taking it too far. He writes:

Look: I’m trying to rally some morale, but I’ve never seen a candidate this late in the game, so far ahead, just throw in the towel in the way Obama did last week – throw away almost every single advantage he had with voters and manage to enable his opponent to seem as if he cares about the middle class as much as Obama does. How do you erase that imprinted first image from public consciousness: a president incapable of making a single argument or even a halfway decent closing statement?……Maybe if Romney can turn this whole campaign around in 90 minutes, Obama can now do the same. But I doubt it. A sitting president does not recover from being obliterated on substance, style and likability in the first debate and get much of a chance to come back. He has, at a critical moment, deeply depressed his base and his supporters and independents are flocking to Romney in droves.

I’m not sure whether Sullivan really does think Obama has blown the entire election because he looked bored at the debate, or he’s sending a plea for help directly to Obama to get his act together. The President is known to read Andrew Sullivan’s blog, so there’s a good chance Sullivan is being over dramatic in order to get his attention.

However, I don’t think this type of public panic from Sullivan is helpful. Sure, Obama looked pretty bad in the debate and Romney looked pretty good, but so what? It was one debate on one night with one week of decent polling numbers for Romney. It’s way too early to assess the long term effect of the debate, the good jobs numbers that came out on Monday and Romney’s brand new persona he’s rolled out 4 weeks before voters go to the booths.

The more panic that is spread the more excited the Republicans get and the better the chance they have of winning. Sullivan may think he’s being helpful here, but he’s only adding to the chaos of an enormously complicated process that requires level headedness and strategy rather than wild swinging instinctiveness.

I certainly think that the poll numbers should alarm the Obama campaign, and a strong performance from Joe Biden in his debate against Paul Ryan this Thursday is an absolute necessity. But Obama has most certainly not thrown ‘the entire election away’ as Sullivan believes he may have.

Nate Silver, who is generally regard as the authority on polls and how to interpret them warns against taking one or two polls from a specific day too seriously:

It’s one thing to give a poll a lot of weight, and another to become so enthralled with it that you dismiss all other evidence. If you can trust yourself to take the polls in stride, then I would encourage you to do so. If your impression of the race is changing radically every few minutes, however, then you’re best off looking at the forecasts and projections that we and our competitors publish, along with Vegas betting lines and prediction markets.

I worked as a boxing journalist for several years so understand exactly how accurate Vegas betting lines are when it comes to picking fights. To correctly pick a fight, you have to be able to match intricate styles, have a detailed understanding of the history of the fighter, the trainer he has, the type of training camp he’s had, who he has been sparring with, what weight the fight is taking place at, the size and brand of the glove, the size of the ring, the location etc etc. It is an intricate art that requires an understanding of many different and seemingly unrelated events that can often interplay and change the odds of a fight. It is sometimes incredibly difficult task, but Vegas odds are almost entirely correct. And if they can accurately assess odds in a sport as unpredictable as boxing, a Presidential election is pretty easy to figure out. The information available to Vegas bookies is astonishing – they have multiple national and local polls, decades of history, inside info on candidates, their team, their strategy, detailed demographics by age, race, gender etc etc. And as it stands, Obama is still the favorite.

Maybe it’s time for Andrew to take a break from the 24/7 Presidential election blogging cycle. It looks like it’s getting a bit much for him.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

Andrew Sullivan’s post about ‘How to Survive a Plague’, a new film on the gay civil rights movement and AIDS epidemic is an absolute must read. Key quote:

If you want to understand the gay civil rights movement in the last twenty years, you need to see this film. None of it would have happened as it did, if we had not been radicalized by mass death, stripped of fear by imminent death, and determined to bring meaning to the corpses of our loved ones by fighting for the basic rights every heterosexual has taken for granted since birth. No spouse was ever going to be turned away from his husband’s deathbed again, as far as I was concerned. Never. Again. For me, marriage equality is not an abstract concept. It has always been my attempt to make my friends’ deaths mean something more than tragedy. And it is non-negotiable.

Sullivan’s personal account of living through what he describes as a ‘mass sickness and death that killed five times as many young Americans as the Vietnam War in roughly the same period of time’ is a harrowing read in itself:

People forget that HIV decimated the immune system – but people actually died from the opportunistic infections. These “OI”s were something out of Dante’s Hell. So many drowned to death from pneumocystis. Or they would develop hideous KS lesions, or extremely painful neuropathy (my “buddy” screamed once when I brushed a bedsheet against the tip of his toes), or CMV where a friend of mine had to inject himself in the eyeball to prevent going blind, or toxoplasmosis, a brain degenerative disease where people wake up one day to find they can’t tie their shoe-laces, and their memories are falling apart. Within the gay community, 300,000 deaths amounted to a plague of medieval dimensions. Once you knew your T-cells were below a certain level, it was like being in a dark forest where, at any moment, some hideous viral or bacterial creature could emerge and kill you. And for fifteen years there was nothing to take that worked, just the agonizing helplessness of waiting to die, and watching others get assaulted by one terrifying disease after another.

That type of fear is unimaginable to most people – and to live with it for years defies the boundaries of human tolerance. It’s a topic I don’t know a huge deal about, but Sullivan’s post alone has given me even more respect for the gay community that not only fought to be treated as human beings, but suffered horrors akin to war – and for far, far longer.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

After an epic essay outlining how brilliant Obama has been over the past four years, Andrew Sullivan shot down the President's State of the Union address for being 'too liberal':

I was hoping for a vision. I was hoping for real, strategic reform. What we got was one big blizzard of tax deductions, wrapped in a populist cloak. It was treading water. I suspect this will buoy liberal spirits, but anger the right and befuddle the independents. It definitely gives the Republican case against Obama as a big government meddler more credibility. I may be wrong – but the sheer cramped, tedious, mediocre micro-policies he listed were uninspiring to say the least.

We voted for Obama; now we find we got another Clinton. The base will like this. I'm not sure independents will. As performance, he did as well as he could with the thin material he had in his hands. As a speech, I thought it was the worst of his SOTUs, when he really needed his best.

Really Andrew? Obama's speech was too liberal?

I sometimes wonder what planet Sullivan lives on – some days, his knee jerk libertarianism is under control and he seems to understand how devastating 'small government' conservatism has been to the United States and global economy. To his credit, Sullivan has moved away from the Randian economics he advocated a couple of years ago in response to the crash in 08, but every now and then, he reverts back to type and blasts the President for wanting to tax the rich.

Sullivan's points weren't without merit though, as he did point out that tax breaks were not the solution to stimulating the economy:

He's given up on real reform, it seems to me, in favor of more tax breaks and deductions for his preferred companies and sectors.

Sullivan prefers comprehensive 'tax reform' that would simplify the tax code and stop government meddling with the economy (whatever that means) – a typical conservative over simplification that defies the reality of an incredibly complicated topic. Yes, tax reform is a good idea, but exactly how would he go about doing it? For someone wedded to ludicrous economic philosophy that has been proven wrong over and over again for most of his adult life, I don't think Sullivan has much credibility on this topic. 

There is no way Obama will be able to enact the tax reforms people like Sullivan want – he has to make do with the ridiculous system as it is and try to make it work for more people. The Republican Congress will attempt to block everything he tries to do anyway, so he has to come up with lots of incremental changes that he may actually have a chance of passing.  This unfortunately means piecemeal policies that won't necessarily have a huge impact. But overall, they will have some effect on people's lives and dent a system that is verging on self destruct.

Again, I'm not sure how this is 'too liberal'. Perhaps Sullivan has forgotten just how far to the Right America is. Obama's policies on taxing the rich are still way to the Right of anything you'd see in Europe and less 'redistributionist' than Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon.

Reality check Andrew. Seriously.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

In an article on The Daily Beast that is well worth reading, Andrew Sullivan takes apart myths perpertuated by the Right (and Left) about President Obama. Here he is on Obama's fiscal policy:

In retrospect, they [the decisions made after the economic crash] were far more successful than anyone has yet fully given Obama the credit for. The job collapse bottomed out at the beginning of 2010, as the stimulus took effect. Since then, the U.S. has added 2.4 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe, and more than the net jobs created under the entire Bush administration. In 2011 alone, 1.9 million private-sector jobs were created, while a net 280,000 government jobs were lost. Overall government employment has declined 2.6 percent over the past 3 years. (That compares with a drop of 2.2 percent during the early years of the Reagan administration.) To listen to current Republican rhetoric about Obama’s big-government socialist ways, you would imagine that the reverse was true. It isn’t.

Sullivan's article goes on to discredit Republican critiques of his foreign policy and slams the Left for projecting 'onto Obama absurd notions of what a president can actually do in a polarized country, where anything requires 60 Senate votes even to stand a chance of making it into law'.

I don't completely agree with Sullivan's rosy picture of Obama and his brilliance as a strategist, but it is a coherent and well argued piece that puts in perspective some of the President's achievements against truly massive odds.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

In a nutshell:

I suspect every other Republican would launch a war against Iran. Paul wouldn't. That alone makes a vote for him worthwhile.

Sullivan's overall argument is of course, far more nuanced, and it's difficult to disagree with him on many points – particularly the one regarding the honesty of debate we would see between Obama and Paul:

I believe an Obama-Paul campaign would do us all a service. We would have a principled advocate for a radically reduced role for government, and a principled advocate for a more activist role. If Republicans want a real debate about government and its role, they have no better spokesman. He is the intellectual of the field, not Gingrich.

Sullivan is not endorsing Paul for President, just as the GOP nominee. I'm sure he'll stick with Obama as he regards him as fellow conservative (in the British mold, not the American), but his call to elevate Paul to mainstream status is an interesting one.

Sullivan, like most sane observers, is so exasperated by the current crop of Republican candidates that he is willing to endorse a slightly loopy, unelectable but un-corrupt 76 year old. Sadly, his argument makes a lot of sense, a testament to just how dire Right wing politics in America has become.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below: