Very Good Debt to Have

Too much has been made of exit polls showing Obama won voters whose primary consideration was "cares about people like me" as that question is almost certainly a dog whistle for "will not vote for a white man".

More damning for Romney were exit polls showing voters believed Obama's economic policies, more than Romney's, benefited the middle class. For all the talk that the G.O.P. must moderate, this may indicate that a return to strong economically conservative policies that can demonstrate how progressive policies crush the middle class is now needed.

An illustrative case in point is the situation of recent middle-class college grads, entering a workforce with six figure debt, but without marketable skills or decent opportunities. Conservatives can convincingly argue that government subsidies have mostly served to increase middle-class indebtedness, while enriching college administrators who, in return, do their part for Democrats. A Conservative could point out that a college education is (alongside housing), the largest investment middle-class families make, and ought be treated as such: Colleges ought have the same basic fiduciary obligations to their student/clients and responsibilities to disclose/report (eg, on historical economic outcomes of students in particular majors or who have taken particular classes or Professors) that other financial service providers have. Democrats who would oppose this would plainly be selling out middle class families. In this light, the administration's assertion that this is "very good debt to have" could have been made toxic.

Similar avenues also resonate: Recent college grad's job-prospects are particularly sensitive to entrepreneur killing over-regulation and taxation, more than any other group of Americans, they understand the difference between making $250K one year and being a millionaire and, as Ron Paul has proven, they are receptive when one explains how inflation targets cloud their future.

But when asked, instead of drawing sharp distinctions, Romney rattled on about scholarships and Pell grants and allowed the President to draw him into a discussion of whether or not he wanted Detroit to go bankrupt and, perhaps, in that moment, lost the election.

Political (Game) Theory

If one wanted to apply game theory to national politics, as a first pass one could roughly model it as a "board" with N "issues", each issue has 3 positions: conservative, moderate, progressive. Each position has a payoff that is a function of the opponents choices, the rest of the board, what we seem to call "branding", and the "focus" the candidate draws to that issue. Candidates have limited "focus" to spend, and how they spend it determines the election.

On immigration, for example, the conservative position is deport all illegals, the moderate position is to grant illegal immigrants extended, or permanent residency, and a "back-of-the-line" path to citizenship, but stop future illegal immigration, the progressive position would grant illegal immigrants a path to citizenship and do nothing effective to stop future illegal immigration. Romney's position "self-deportation" was understood by the electorate as, effectively, the conservative one, which was helpful in the primaries. In the general, taking the moderate position would not have cost Romney many conservative voters -- who had higher priorities -- and would have forced Obama to clarify better where he stood -- forcing him to alienate some of his own voters. While there is good reason to believe the direct payoff would have been small, there would have been indirect "branding" payoff had Obama, or other Democrats, been cornered into clearly taking the progressive position.

On abortion, Democratic politicians mostly believe abortion should be always and everywhere legal, most voters believe it should be sometimes, or in some places (=federalism) legal and many conservative Christian voters believe it should be always and everywhere illegal. The Obama campaign spent a great deal of its focus and was successful in making an issue of the conservative Christian position taken by two Senate candidates, severely impairing the Republican brand. Almost more than any other issue, this buried Romney.

Romney chose, instead, to spend his focus on Obama's partisan lack of leadership, his unwillingness reach across the aisle to get things done for America. This choice was undercut, fatally, by Sandy and Christie. While its impossible to prove one way or the other, from the polls and the post-election reactions of both candidates, the notion that Sandy/Christie turned the election is credible.

Finally, the results reflected that in spending focus on "branding", Obama helped downstream democrats. Romney's focus spent on Obama's personal failings (and his success, in contrast) offered no such help.

Decisions

Depending on one's bubble, Romney is either neck and neck or has, basically, no chance. People are going to be bitterly shocked tonight.

Republicans' primary causes for optimism -- Obama's inability to pass the 50% threshold in many swing state polls and Romney's upward trend -- seem dampened post-Sandy. The Romney campaign's decision to sit that out, rather than have surrogates (accurately) screaming "Staten Island is as bad as New Orleans", may haunt them. This reflects the general tenor of the campaign in which the President wildly portrayed Romney as being an evil, corrupt man, and Romney, with great discipline and respect, portrayed the President as like-able enough, but, not the right choice. These strategies reflected the reality of the President's like-ability, now largely spent. Should he win, he may wish, in trying to govern, that he had sacrificed it less.

Romney supporters' last hope lies in the idea that the pollsters demographic-adjustments and likely-voter models are biased. Its certainly true that pollsters (like universities) are more concerned with fairly representing "under-represented" democratic leaning demographics than others. But the more one reads of the sophistication of Obama's turnout operation, the less likely it seems Romney is going to win the "ground game". Obama seems closer to the future, where campaigns use big-data to micro-target swayable voters and leverage affinity networks (including families) to deliver their votes.

If Obama wins the election, Tea Party voters can take heart in this: Republicans have nominated the most moderate voice in the room two elections in a row now and lost to a President from the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." In 2016, Rubio or Christie may find themselves too moderate for Republican primary voters. How does "President Cruz" roll off the tongue?

Revenge of The Fallen

My initial impression is this sequel is almost superior to the original. RoTF is a near perfect summer blockbuster. It has inspiring heroes and heroics, over the top special effects and no shortage of girls in their summer clothes. I absolutely loved the score, which framed and held the movie together in the absence of a particularly coherent plot.

That the characters are cartoonish, or the plot a loosely woven pastiche, is hardly, in this context, criticism.

It is unfortunate that apparently because the script had the audacity to tweak Obama (in much the vein that the original tweaked W) proffessional reviewers wanting to keep their jobs were not allowed to simply enjoy the movie. Instead they felt obliged to instruct us along the lines of:

The man just wears you out and wears you down, so much so that it’s easy to pretend that you’re not ingesting 2 hours and 30 minutes of warmongering along with all that dumb fun.

or

Memo to Michael: It's a toy movie. Your audience is predominantly teen and pre-teen. My kids don't need to see your salivating soft-porn fantasies or your reactionary militaristic politics.

Not that these reviewers should be taken seriously -- and, of course, they aren't. RoTF may earn more in its opening weekend than all the star studded Hollywood anti-war-movie efforts to date combined -- but its worth noting the precise "warmongering" "reactionary militaristic politics" embedded in the move, which reduce to: Don't negotiate with Decepticons.

Alito and Empathy

Alito made waves in his Ricci opinion with an overt critique of empathetic judging:

“sympathy” is not what petitioners have a right to demand. What they have a right to demand is evenhanded enforcement of the law... what, until today’s decision, has been denied them.

The core of opinion itself however, is a much more subtle, and damning critique of the President's nominee, in line with my prior analysis.

As discussed in that post, the President's view is:

I will seek someone who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a casebook; it is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives.

Alito's opinion exemplifies this sort of understanding. While it doesn't lack for cogent legal analysis, its heart is dedicated to plainly describing how the legal theory in question -- what Roberts more artfully elsewhere labeled "a sordid business" -- affects the daily realities of ordinary people's lives. However justified, the sort of race-conscious judging Obama and Sotomayor favor, gives life, or at least terra-firma, to characters such as this Reverend Kimber, and the ugly and corrupt role they play in our political (and economic) lives.

Given that the President is no fan of Alito or his manner of judging, one is led to suspect that the President's judicial philosophy is less about a general framework for making wise judgements and more about reliably supporting a particular political agenda.

Restoring America's Moral Standing

On of the key promises of Obama's candidacy was that he would "restore America's standing in the world"

The divergence between what that means to the hard left and what that means to main street America is illustrated by the Administration's in-action towards the Iranian election.

Most Americans, I think, have difficulty seeing how remaining silent, or neutral, in the face of a stolen election is a recipe for restoring, rather than undermining, our global standing.

Should Ahmadinejad steal this election with our implicit acquiescence, we can add Iran to the list of Muslim nations whose populations resent us for talking about freedom and democracy while supporting their own oppressive governments.

On the other hand, should the election turn out to have been legitimate, Obama's inaction will prove to have been wise.

On a related note, one can't but be amused by the observation that while only a few years ago, to the hard left Kissenger equaled Satan, right now, our President, who was their candidate, is pursuing "realist" policy that would make Kissenger proud.