Quick Hits - August 27, 2012

Today is the first day of the Republican National Convention.  However due to the threat of Hurricane / Tropical Storm Isaac on the Tampa, Florida area, the activities for the day have been postponed and the convention restructured to consolidate 4 days of speeches into 3 days.

The storm is passing well to the west of Tampa, and apparently is on a direct path towards Louisiana / Mississippi - with a direct hit on New Orleans a real possibility.  This week is the 7th anniversary of the region being hit by Katrina - which devastated the city of New Orleans as the Democratic political leadership of then Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco utterly failed.

In one of the stupider observations of Isaac's change of course, actor Samuel L. Jackson tweeted:

Unfair Shit: GOP spared by Issac ! NOLA prolly Fucked Again! Not understanding God's plan!

... before trying to backtrack / blame his moronic tweet on those who highlighted it.

The Republican National Committee has announced a revised schedule for the remaining three days of the convention - which is at this link.

The media swarm was in full effect on Monday, even if the Convention activities were minimal.  One of the most notable examples of media bias and moronic behavior came, unsurprisingly, on MSNBC, as the feckless and vapid Chris "Tingles" Matthews led an inquisition of RNC Chair Reince Priebus during the 'Morning Joe' program.  Matthews collapsed into full frothing meltdown mode - accusing the GOP / Mitt Romney of racism in one of the most pathetic plays of the race card this election season...

The fact that Chris Matthews would play the race card in such a manner is hardly unsurprising as he remains one of the most pathetic hard left commentators on the air.  That supposed Republican Joe Scarborough would permit him to do so in such a manner on his program speaks volumes about Scarborough - as it also does for the supposed 'dean' of NBC News, former Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw, who also sat quietly as Matthews skewered the slim remains of NBC News' credibility.

It wasn't until later in the day for Matthews to get his comeuppance - being delivered by Newt Gingrich who had little time or patience for another Matthews play of the race card....

Newsbusters.org also highlights another new low point being reached by NBC News, as their Senior Political and White House Correspondent Chuck Todd, on Sunday's NBC Nightly News broadcast, decides to invoke a false meme around President George W. Bush and Hurricane Katrina to denigrate the Romney-Ryan ticket in a particularly vapid cheap shot...

Well, look, there are folks with the Romney campaign who think, "Boy, Romney can't catch a break." Ever since he named Paul Ryan, got a little bit of momentum, after the Ryan pick, and then he's disrupted by two storms -- one, a political storm in Todd Akin which we just brought up, but now an actual storm. And when you think, as this storm moves to and closer to Louisiana, the specter, the sort of shadow of Bush and Katrina does hang over this convention. It is something organizers are concerned about.

And don't be surprised if Tuesday gets changed again. They've already gotten rid of Monday, but they could change it again and have to squeeze it into some form of, say, two and a half days, Lester, basically, out of sensitivity.

The desperation of the media over the trend within the Presidential election is only matched by the increasing desperation within the Obama Campaign team.  The increasing requests for campaign contributions coming out of the campaign are ratcheting up the desperation and reaching new levels of whininess as they continue to trail the RNC / Romney-Ryan team in fundraising.

Both Weasel Zippers and Powerline focus their analysis on one of the most recent email pleas sent by the Obama Campaign team...

[Name redacted] –

When I’m out there talking to voters, we talk about what we’ve done, what we plan to do over the next four years, and why the other guys have dangerous plans to go back to the policies that failed America for almost a decade.

But there is another question that keeps coming up, and you need to know about it: “Why do I see so many more ads for the other guys?”

You don’t need me to tell you that the Romney campaign is outraising us — that billionaire ideologues and corporate interests are piling on tens of millions more in negative ads trashing us, and that all of it means that undecided voters in battleground states like Iowa could be seeing false, misleading, negative attacks at a rate almost twice as often as they hear from us.

Last week, when I was in Iowa, voters told me they were feeling it. The numbers back it up: Our side is getting outspent 2-to-1 on the air there.

But the folks asking me about this don’t want an explanation — they want to know what I’m going to do about it.

And the fact is that solving this problem is up to you.

You’re getting this email because you know what the stakes are in this election. You know the facts about what we’ve done to prevent a deeper crisis and to start building an economy that works for the middle class.

We’re losing this air war right now.

I don’t have as much time to campaign this time as I did in 2008, so this whole thing is riding on you making it happen.

Thank you,

Barack

As highlighted by the bold, one of the messages of this email plea is that it Barack Obama loses in November, it will not be because of his fault - his failed policies - his misguided, arrogant, and feckless effort to 'fundamentally change' the country.  No, it will because his supporters will be the one's who failed - failed to turn out as they did in 2008 and anoint him, 'The One', for another term as the Dear Supreme Leader.

At Powerline, they focus their attention on the whiny tone of the narcissist in chief...

Four years ago, when he broke his promise to accept public funding of his campaign and became, as I have termed him, the greatest money machine in the history of politics, and outspent John McCain four or five to one through the heart of the campaign, you didn’t hear any whining about being “outraised,” or about “billionaire ideologues and corporate interests.” Before they found out through bitter experience that he is a lousy president, the corporate interests were on Obama’s side. Many of them still are.

It also should be noted that the ads Obama is whining about–the ones that “trash” him–simply point out his terrible record as president. He is the one running a smear campaign, not Romney…

… Obama’s plea exhibits his trademark dishonesty. The fact is that so far, he has vastly outspent Mitt Romney. It is true that in the last couple of months, Romney has outraised him. Altogether, however, Obama still has hauled in something like $300 million more than Romney. Obama decided to use his money advantage by blanketing the airwaves pre-convention, in hopes of “killing Romney,” as one of his advisers put it, before Romney had a chance to introduce himself to voters. Unfortunately for Obama, that strategy hasn’t worked. While he did succeed in damaging Romney’s image with lots of voters, Obama’s smear campaign can’t wipe away the memory of four years of failure.

Speaking of the narcissist in chief, we see all we need to of his character in his commemoration of the passing of Neil Armstrong on Saturday at the age of 82.  Armstrong, the commander of Apollo 11, was the first man to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969.

How did Barack Obama commemorate Armstrong's passing?  With a photo of himself...

Demonstrating far more class than Barack Obama, jazz singer, Diana Krall, also made her own commemoration of the passing of Neil Armstrong during her concert Saturday evening at the Hollywood Bowl in Hollywood, CA.  She offered the signature song, 'Fly Me to the Moon' in tribute of that great American hero - here's a more upbeat cover of that classic by Krall...

Late last week, the Washington Post began to tease their latest WaPoo / ABC News poll on the state of the Presidential election.  QH noted the tease and report, while offering the caveat that this poll had a long history this election cycle of oversampling Democrats on a D+7 - D+9 basis.  Today, the full results of the poll are out - and when we look at the big picture - there is very little good news in this poll for the President.

At the top, the poll shows that Mitt Romney has moved to take a one point lead on Barack Obama, 47-46, across registered voters who participated in the poll, and a 4 point lead among self-described Independents in the poll.

But this alone is not the real story - or the real bad news contained in the poll.  That comes courtesy of the D+9 oversample that the poll is based on.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air cuts to the quick in his analysis of the poll and oversample...

As mentioned, this poll has a D+9 sample, with Republicans ridiculously undersampled at 22%. The 2008 election had a split of D+7, 39/32,29, and the 2010 midterms had a split of 35/35/30. The likelihood of getting a D+9 turnout in this election is nil, as is the likelihood of an electorate that is comprised of 22% Republicans. Even if we saw it, Obama would still only get 46% of the vote as an incumbent, hardly a gratifying position for Team Obama.

There is even more bad news in the internals. Until Ryan joined the ticket, Romney had a deficit among the definitely-decided voters, a small one of 3-5 points. That has disappeared, and now Romney gets 82% certainty to Obama’s 84%. Romney’s running ten points better than John McCain did at this point — as Obama is over his own 2008 performance.

Even worse, the gender gap on which Obama is counting is not materializing. The only two issues on which he reaches 50% against Romney are “social issues” (52/38) and “women’s issues” (51/35), but that’s not translating into an electoral advantage. The pollster memo which accompanies the ABC story shows unmarried women breaking sharply for Obama (57/32), but married women favoring Romney by 15 points (55/40). The split among single and married men is similar, with Obama up 10 points among singles (51/41) but down 24 points among marrieds (35/59). That translates overall to just a six-point lead for Obama among women, 49/43, while Romney takes a nine-point lead among men, 51/42.

As if that wasn’t bad enough news, Obama’s draw among younger voters has substantially decreased as well. He only leads the under-40 vote by 13 points, 51/38. Obama loses the seniors by eight, 43/51. For the first time in a while, the Republican leads in the college-graduate demo too, 49/47, although that’s obviously a virtual tie. Obama has dominated among college graduates until now.

This poll hits just as another poll is published from Michigan which clearly demonstrates that this state, won by Barack Obama by a 16.4% margin in 2008, is now not only in play, but is a toss-up.  With this poll being based on likely voters, which is more representative than the usual 'registered voters' sample, it's one that we need to take seriously.

No wonder the President's campaign's tone has become whinier and whinier.  I wonder if the President has taken to roaming the halls of the White House, talking to the portraits of previous President's, and complaining about how the ungrateful people of this country are failing to see how magnificent he is.

The WaPoo's article touting their poll makes no mention of the ridiculous D+9 oversample.  It also makes no note of the delusional 22% GOP turnout that the poll is based on.  In fact, it fails to mention their blatant attempts to 'cook the books' on the poll.  Instead, the continue with the meme that the race is 'too close to call' - downplaying the evidence from their own cooked polls of a clear enthusiasm and momentum advantage owned by the Romney-Ryan ticket.  Even more dishonestly, they devote an entire paragraph to the diversionary issue of Romney's tax returns - which even this stacked poll's respondents clearly show is a non-issue despite the media and Obama Campaign team flogging it incessantly.

Hot Air has another excellent post featuring a look at the advertisements in the Presidential race offered by both teams by Frank Luntz.  Luntz's analysis is showing that several of the more recent advertisements by the Romney-Ryan team and the Super-PACS supporting them are proving to be very effective with swing and independent voters... particularly those that highlight disappointed and disenfranchised former Obama voters...

Has President Obama earned your vote?

It's OK

This approach may also have the benefit of closing the Romney-Obama likeability gap. A Gallup poll on attack ads this week found that 44 percent of Americans think Obama’s attacking Romney unfairly while only 40 percent believe Romney’s attacking Obama unfairly. Among independents, the number who think Obama’s attacking unfairly rises to 46 percent while Romney’s number falls to 38 percent. Up against a guy with Obama’s charisma cachet and media protection, this is an encouraging sign.

On the international front, today we have reports of a massacre on an 'unprecedented scale' in Syria as fighting continues unabated between Syrian rebel groups and the despotic regime of Bashir al-Assad.  Evidence is being uncovered that over the weekend, Assad's troops 'executed 300 men, women, and children' in the conflict's bloodiest day.

This as international organizations like the UN remain unable and unwilling to take a strong stand against the Syrian strongman - and he remains protected by Russia, China, and Iran.

Today in History

1789 - The French National Assembly adopts 'The Declaration of the Rights of Man'.

1859 - The first oil well was successfully drilled in the U.S. by Colonel Edwin L. Drake near Titusville, PA.

1894 - The Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act was passed by the U.S. Congress.  The provision within the tariff for a graduated income tax was later struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

1939 - Nazi Germany delivers an ultimatum to Poland, demanding that the Poles cede the 'Polish Corridor' and the city of Danzig to Germany.

1990 - The U.S. State Department ordered the expulsion of 36 Iraqi diplomats.

2001 - Work begins on the construction of the U.S. National World War II Memorial on the National Mall of Washington D.C. between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.