There was a positive jobs report today, and the markets, starved for encouragement, rallied. Obviously any upbeat economic news is to be welcomed, but it’s election season too, and so for the loyal opposition these little silver linings come complete with little clouds. (Those who found the Bush years unbearable often found themselves rooting for things to go badly in Iraq, for example.)
But there’s no question that good economic news is what the nation needs, so it would be churlish of me to rain on the parade.
Fortunately, I don’t have to, because the sedulous statistics-gatherer @Iowahawkblog spent the day doing just that. Here are a few of the observations he made as Friday rolled along:
— UNEMPLOYMENT DOWN!!!! because 1.2 million people mysteriously dropped out of the labor force last month.
— If the labor force participation rate was at Jan 2009 level, unemployment would be 11%.
— %of population over the age of 16 with jobs: Jan 2011, 58.4%; January 2012, 58.5%.
— There are 1.5 million fewer people working today than in Jan 2009. There are 13 million more people on food stamps.
— America added 2.3 million more jobs in the last 12 months. It added 3.56 million more adults.
— Today there are 3.06 Americans employed for every American on food stamps. This is the lowest it has ever been. Ever.
33 Comments
Better a skunk at the garden party than a turd in the punch bowl.
(Whether that comparison has any relevance to the stats you’ve cited is a question I leave for better minds than mine.)
I can’t wait to hear one-eye’s contortional “proof” that, “Obama is awesome!”
The statement that “those who found the Bush years unbearable often found themselves rooting for things to go badly in Iraq” is both wildly inaccurate and deeply offensive. No responsible person wished for American soldiers to die because the policy which sent them there was catastrophic or the President who ordered them to go was feckless. What utter nonsense.
Iowahawk’s statistics are either irrelevant or misleading.
1) The percentage of the population over sixteen is a meaningless statistic, principally because this group includes retirees, which are an increasingly large part of the population. Hence the statistic which he quotes actually shows that the percentage of the population between sixteen and retirement age has increased, because more than 0.1% of population growth retired. Also, how many people do you know who started working at 16?
2) The comparison of the number of newly employed with the population growth of adults is similarly misleading because of the baby boom bulge. Also, lots of adults are not in the job market — for example, stay-at-home parents — so the economy can do just fine when more adults than workers enter the population.
3) The comparison of the number of people working today with January 2009 is also meaningless. The economy lost over 700,000 jobs that month and lost almost two million jobs in the next few months. While the right wing is happy to put these lost jobs on Obama’s tab, the fact is that no person could walk into the White House and turn catastrophic job loss to immediate job gain. Ocean liners don’t reverse on a dime. Obama can fairly be judged on the results of his economic agenda, which first had to be passed, then go into effect, and then allow the results to permeate through the economy. This took a few quarters, but starting in 2010 there was consistent economic and jobs growth. More net new jobs were created in 2010 than the eight years of the Bush administration, despite the fact that the preponderance of job growth under Bush was in government jobs, while the number of people working for the government (state and federal) has decreased under the Obama administration. So what was a tailwind for Bush is a headwind for Obama.
4) The number of Americans on food stamps is tangential to unemployment because they are available to the working poor. They are also a lagging indicator, because many people go on food stamps after unemployment has run out, reflecting people who lost their jobs two or more years ago.
5) There is nothing mysterious about the 1.2 million people who exit the work force — this is a reflection of the way the BLS uses seasonal adjustment to compute the unemployment rate. I will take the liberty of a long excerpt from this week’s Barron’s, because the link is password protected from non-subscribers:
“January is the cruelest month by far for the labor markets, given the combined effect of the onset of winter and the slowdown in sales after the holidays. Over the past 20 years, January has never witnessed a decline of less than two million payroll jobs even in boom times. Most recently, in the recession year 2009, the plunge came to a record 3.7 million. All of which is before seasonal adjustment.
Similarly, the actually recorded unemployment rate always rises in January, an unblemished record over the past 64 years, or as far back as data are available.
This January, the actual loss in jobs came to nearly 2.7 million, the smallest fall since Jan. 2006. The rise in joblessness ran half-a-percentage point, also the smallest in six years.
For that reason — because this season’s January carnage was less severe than usual — the reported figures after seasonal adjustment showed employment rising more than usual and unemployment falling another two-tenths of a percent.
Now, while this might sound like the statistical equivalent of making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, it does have an underlying logic. The mild weather definitely helped limit the normal job losses in January. And strictly speaking, the seasonally adjusted gains were phantoms. But when industries like construction, manufacturing and wholesale and retail trade show smaller job declines than usual — which they did — that does signal underlying strength.
Further credence was lent to the upbeat jobs data by the Institute for Supply Management’s indexes of manufacturing and nonmanufacturing activity, reported last week for January.
Both indexes have been above 50, and therefore in expansionary territory. But the manufacturing index picked up to 54.1 from 53.1, while services rose nearly four points to an 11-month high of 56.8. Also, the employment component of the services index leapt nearly eight points to 57.4, its highest reading since February 2006.”
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424052748703964504577193150354154504.html?mod=BOL_hps_mag
6) The labor force participation rate is a perfectly valid metric, and it is troubling. It should be considered along with the unemployment rate in evaluating the health of the economy. However, there are a number of metrics which are at least as important as those relating to employment in showing economic growth. GDP has been at a record high for about two years. You will never hear Sean Hannity or NRO ask why we are making more stuff than we ever have before with fewer workers. The simple answer is that American companies are much more productive: great for the economy, not so great for redundant workers.
Another headwind which faces the economy is the huge overhang of housing inventory, which has an outsized effect on employment numbers because construction is a labor intensive industry. The housing bubble took decades to build and precedes Obama, which has not stopped his opponents from adding its effects to his tab.
The right wing argument against Obama’s economic agenda basically blames him for the continuing effects of the 2008 economic crisis but fails to give him credit for reversing them once his policies were enacted and put into effect. In addition, employment is a lagging indicator, and continues to fall after the trough is reached and does not reverse until well after economic trend lines go up. This explains the continual focus on unemployment statistics while ignoring those metrics which pertain to economic expansion, factory production, GDP, and the like.
The 800 pound gorilla question for the Republicans — which I would love to see asked in one of their debates — is this: while you have consistently criticized the President for his economic policy, the policies you propose are essentially identical to those of the Bush administration. What evidence can you present that your policies, if enacted, would have led to better economic results than those we’ve seen, and what evidence can you present that they will not lead to a repetition of 2008 if they were put into place again?
Typical rubbish from the one-eyed verbosity. It’s like asking, “What evidence can you present that if your grandmother had balls she’d be your grandfather?”.
Clearly, no such “evidence” can exist. But there is ample evidence that every grandparent who has had balls has indeed been a grandfather.
OK, I guess the field of macroeconomics doesn’t exist, economic modelling hasn’t been invented yet, there are no historical analogies to draw from, and statisticians at the CBO and similar entities who purportedly make a living doing stuff like this are just a big hoax, like global warming. Silly me.
One proxy for the economy is the stock market, which is an apolitical system which is recalibrated every day based on investors’ collective judgments on current and future economic health. It’s pretty simple: stocks tank when investors think the future is dark, and they rise when they view it positively. Despite a tsunami, unrest in the Middle East, and the European debt crisis, the Obama administration has had the fourth best stock market since Dow met Jones. It’s doubled since Obama took office, and has handily beat the stock markets of virtually every other developed country.
For those who eschew facts and ratiocination in favor of blind hatred of the Marxist freedom-hater from Kenya, this sort of information doesn’t register. However, for those interested in monitoring how the economy is actually doing, the path is to balance the many different indices which paint the full picture, and not those (misleading and cherry picked) data which are chosen to fit ideology instead of reality.
Which part of your muddled retort is supposed to comprise “evidence”, as it is normally understood by serious people?
All of it. Most is straight from the BLS and Fed sites. The rest from noted Leninist publications Barron’s and the Wall Street Journal.
So much rubbish; so little time to address every morsel:
1. Opinions are not “facts“.
2. There is nothing blind about it.
3. History has shown to all but those who will not see that Marxism is the most disastrous socioeconomic system ever to plague humanity.
4. Indeed, freedom-haters are to be despised.
5. Kenya, in this conversation, is a red herring and a scurrilous instance of race-baiting.
6. Information does “register”, but only when it’s forthcoming.
Peter, while nobody will accuse you of pithiness, you’ve obviously made quite an effort here, and indeed have made some good points. Nobody would deny that there are some positive indicators here.
That said, the CBO itself (since you mentioned it, and economic modeling), has just in the past week released some rather gloomy models regarding unemployment. And for all the effort you’ve made to brush aside Iowahawk’s most important point — that the numbers look as good as they do only because so many have left the workforce — it is at the very least, as you say, “troubling”. If you had told anyone in 2009 that there would be ticker-tape parades down Pennsylvania Avenue on the occasion of an 8.3% official unemployment rate, eyebrows would have been raised.
With the possible exception of Harry Truman, the tendency of sitting presidents is to take credit for the good things that happen on their watch, and blame others for the bad. The current president is exemplary in this regard. Any positive datum is incontrovertible evidence that his machinations are working; any uncomfortable facts, such as that the average span of a given worker’s unemployment is now the worst since the Great Depression, is to be laid at the feet of George Bush and Republican obstructionism (despite the Democrat’s having controlled both houses of Congress for the first two years of his term). It’s the same as the the deal the financial institutions got under the bailout: privatize gains, socialize losses. The conservative view, of course, is that for Mr. Obama to take credit here is post hoc ergo propter hoc argument in its purest form, and that any progress here is being made in spite of the current regime’s efforts, and not because of them.
But bickering here will be unproductive; there’s data enough for everyone to pick and choose from. At this point, in a presidential election cycle, it’s all spin, all the time. Iowahawk is doing his part, and you are doing yours (and to your credit, you can always be counted on to defend your ideological keep with the attentive diligence, and unswerving partiality, of a Rottweiler).
As for your opening remarks, and your assertion that “no responsible person [no true Scotsman?] wished for American soldiers to die because the policy which sent them there was catastrophic or the President who ordered them to go was feckless”: it has been fashionable on the left to revile the military for most of our lifetimes, and to disparage them as the tools of evil American imperialism; just look, for example, at the way returning Vietnam vets were treated, and the continuing resistance on the part of elite academic institutions to the ROTC. Just recently former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura told the renowned SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, shortly after the helicopter crash that killed many of his teammates, that the SEALs “deserved to lose a few guys”.
I can personally attest to bad news from Iraq and Afghanistan having been welcomed by people on the Left. I have heard it first-hand, again and again, from a great many of them (including at least one commenter at this blog, and lots of blue-state types both here in New York and out in in Wellfleet): the idea is that such setbacks and embarrassments served to discredit our policy of swaggering American militarism, and that in the long run the world would be better off. (Stories like Abu Ghraib were seized upon with slavering relish by the Left, as much-needed evidence of moral equivalance and Western arrogance.) It was simply an expression of the larger Howard-Zinn style worldview that America is generally a malevolent presence in the world, and that the sooner it is laid low the better. (This in turn is part of an even more inclusive, if slightly less prevalent, worldview that extends this visceral antipathy to European culture generally — and often even more inclusively, as expressed by people like Susan Sontag, Tom Hayden, Tim Wise, etc., to the whole of the white race.)
“Obama is awesome!”
The CBO report came out before this week’s employment and ISM reports, and its baseline assumption is no change in current fiscal or monetary policy, which is unrealistic. The manufacturing report is arguably more impressive than the employment report, because the second derivative – i.e., the rate of change – increased sharply. These bumps typically indicate an inflection point where a virtuous cycle of increased production leading to increased employment leading to further increased production starts.
However, I wouldn’t put too much weight on one month’s report. Numbers fluctuate, things change, and economists exist to make weathermen look accurate. In economics, just when life looks like Easy Street, there is danger at the door. So we’ll see.
My point is simply that Obama’s opponents have focused exclusively on a single metric which lags the economy by nine months or so. The economy bottomed in June 2009, and unemployment bottomed in March 2010. When you look at things in totality – hours worked, factory output, average hourly wage, productivity, and so forth – the economy is much better than Obama is given credit for.
The Democrats did not “control Congress for the first two years of the Obama administration.” They controlled Congress for about four months. Once Scott Brown was elected, the Republicans could (and did) block any agendum with the filibuster.
You are correct that the bailouts of financial institutions – which largely took place under the Bush administration – privatized gains and socialized losses. Some losses, anyway: lots of people at failed institutions lost gobs of money. The best available antidote to that is Dodd Frank, which is being fought tooth and nail by the Republicans.
The fact that the length of unemployment is at historic levels has much to do with factors beyond government control. Here in the Valley, anybody who knows Java can get multiple offers, while the older workers who designed semiconductors for Intel or printers for HP are stuck. The only government policy which addresses that is retraining – but try to get a budget for that in the current atmosphere.
As for the purported revilement of the military: I don’t know what your comrades (oops! associates!) in Wellfleet had to say, but I can tell you that when I hang out with my fellow lefties at the Ho Chi Minh Social Club (take the Hugo Chavez exit off the Louis Farrakhan Expressway), you never hear that sort of stuff. Like bra burning and flag burning, the baby-killer thing is one of those iconic things which got a lot of publicity because of its shocking nature, but never really happened that much.
Former SDS leader Tom Hayden, radical professor Noam Chomsky, and complete idiot Howard Zinn are irresponsible people who are far off the mainstream. Just as there are responsible people on the right – George Will, Krauthammer, and the always interesting Joe Scarborough – there are also people who are irresponsible (Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity) or just plain delusional (Glenn Beck, Pamela Geller). To say that because someone like Ward Churchill says objectionable things, therefore the millions of people who “found the Bush years unbearable often found themselves rooting for things to go badly in Iraq” is nonsense.
Defendant didn’t realize what’s legal “in the Valley” may not be legal in the saner parts of the country.
You are seriously mistaken about this: this sentiment was everywhere during the Iraq war.
This was borne home for me, completely unexpectedly, just tonight: we were out to dinner earlier this evening with friends, and the subject of the jobs report came up. I mentioned to my friend that this news presented a bit of a conflict for the political opposition, because any good news might give a boost to Obama’s chances of re-election.
Immediately — completely without any prompting from me — he said that it was like the way people on the Left felt about bad news from Iraq; that he had had argument after argument with people he knew who said they hoped we got our asses kicked over there, etc.
This was exactly my experience as well, over and over. This view was absolutely commonplace among angry Bush-era liberals.
I hadn’t mentioned Ward Churchill, who has receded into well-deserved obscurity, but Howard Zinn is still enormously influential, particularly in academia. You can blithely wave him off as “irresponsible” and a “complete idiot”, but that just shows how out of touch you are; in many circles he’s God.
You’re like one of those people on the highway who think everyone going slower then they are is blocking traffic, and everyone going faster is some sort of maniac.
Regarding Dodd-Frank: I doubt very much indeed that you, or for that matter any living person, fully understands the intricacies of this gigantic bolus of legislative mucilage; entire industries have been spawned merely to explain it to the nation’s businesses, and a generation of lawyers will put their children through college on the lucre it sucks out of the economy to send their way.
As for the manifold blessings it will confer upon the American way of life: opinions vary.
I don’t waste my time on left wing blogs, but I watch a lot of MSNBC, and I have yet to see a reference to Howard Zinn, Tom Hayden, Susan Sontag, etc., much less a guest appearance. If these people were as “enormously influential” as you claim, one would expect the largest left wing medium in America would at least mention them from time to time.
As for Dodd Frank: the problem of banks using federally guaranteed funds for proprietary trading exists – what to do?
At one extreme, you can do nothing, which is what the Republicans want to do. However, this virtually guarantees that you will have a reoccurence. To make the case for the status quo, one must explain why the risk of a second financial meltdown justifies letting financial institutions do whatever they want. Given that their agenda are all subsumed under a single banner (“we’re against everything”), this is too much to ask.
The other extreme is to revert to status quo ante and reinstate Glass Steagall.
Dodd Frank is somewhere in the middle. I have no idea whether the compliance burden is reasonable or onerous. However, Glass Steagall will essentially turn large banks into highly regulated utilities, and I’m not sure that’s what we want. Doing nothing is not an option. Hence the qualifier above that Dodd Frank is the best available antidote. If you can show me something better, I am eager to see it.
Peter, you really do have your head in the sand if you don’t think Howard Zinn’s work doesn’t continue to exert a great deal of influence; his People’s History of the United States is assigned reading in high schools and colleges all over, and has sold more than a million copies. When he died a couple of years ago, all the liberal media sang panegyrics, and lefties from coast to coast gnashed their teeth and rent their garments.
You really need to get out more, or at least pay attention to things.
Further evidence of that:
Your silly, apophatic definition of conservatism — “we’re against everything” — is nothing more than a lazy-minded caricature, effectively an admission of complete ignorance as to what motivates the plurality of Americans who identify themselves as conservative.
Likewise, your glib admission that “I have no idea whether the compliance burden is reasonable or onerous” undermines anything else you might have to say about it: it is precisely the onerousness of this Leviathan of a bill that has engendered such outrage. Go and read the linked article.
The Democrats did not “control Congress for the first two years of the Obama administration.” They controlled Congress for about four months. Once Scott Brown was elected, the Republicans could (and did) block any agendum with the filibuster.
If the new definition of controlling Congress is having a filibuster proof majority, then no party (other than the Democrats for those “four months”) has “controlled Congress” in several decades.
As usual you are just making up definitions to suit yourself, and patting yourself on the back for your supposed intelligence in doing so.
Whether it’s “in the sand” or “up his ass”, it is abundantly clear that he will not see anything that doesn’t fit his leftist worldview. Be that as it may, I am interested in knowing how you muster the energy to persevere with seemingly infinite patience.
What is your secret?
What’s my secret? Just plenty of sitzfleisch, I guess.
The comparison of the number of people working today with January 2009 is also meaningless. The economy lost over 700,000 jobs that month and lost almost two million jobs in the next few months. While the right wing is happy to put these lost jobs on Obama’s tab, the fact is that no person could walk into the White House and turn catastrophic job loss to immediate job gain
I’d point out the the Democrats had no problem in blaming Bush for the fact that the stock market and employment numbers were worse after three years under him than they were in December 2000 – if I didn’t know that you’d come back with “I never heard of any Democrats doing any such thing”.
The definition of controlling Congress is having the ability to pass legislation. Since Senate Republicans consistently used the filibuster to block Democratic agenda after Ted Kennedy’s death, it is therefore inaccurate to assert that the Democrats controlled the Senate. They didn’t.
It is a historical rarity for either party to have a super-majority, so in the technical sense you could say that neither party had absolute control. However, the filibuster was not used as a routine way for the minority to obstruct the majority’s agenda until this Congress. You can find plenty of examples of legislation which passed during the Bush administration with less than sixty votes. It was not until Mitch McConnell’s declaration that defeating Obama is job number one that the Senate minority used the filibuster promiscuously as a substitute for governance.
You are equally wrong about the Bush unemployment record. He should be judged by the same standard as Obama: unable to meaningfully affect the economy in the first two or three quarters but accountable for its plight thereafter.
The unemployment rate in February 2001 (which reflects January) was 4.2%. It stayed relatively flat through August, when it rose to 4.7%, and then continued to rise steadily throughout his administration. Bush has the distinction of being the only President since the Depression to see the unemployment rate double under his watch.
Severn: the fact that you are wrong about pretty much everything is excusable. The fact that you are unable to make a comment without being puerile and venomous is not.
If you think that “we’re against everything” is apophatic, then I am eager to hear what the conservative agenda actually are for balancing the budget, dealing with the uninsured, restoring American competitiveness, dealing with a resurgent China, etc. There may be think tanks which generate white papers somewhere, but you certainly don’t hear serious proposals from the Republican Presidential candidates.
For example, a plan for the budget which uses real numbers on a spreadsheet to say which programs will be cut and what revenue will pay for things. Romney’s plan to balance the budget is to lower taxes and raise military spending without cutting entitlements. How does he achieve this feat of prestidigation? We don’t know. His pitch is that since he made a lot of money as a corporate raider, he therefore is qualified to manage the economy (presumably similar to the two other Presidents of the past century who were businessmen: Herbert Hoover and W.) If Romney gets elected, it will be the Bain of our existence.
As for Dodd Frank: those who oppose it will claim that compliance will be unimaginably cumbersome, just as those who support Keystone will claim that it creates tens of thousands of jobs. Those on the other side will argue that the bankers’ claims are wildly exaggerated and Keystone only creates 6000 (mostly Canadian) jobs. I am disinclined to get into the nitty gritty to offer a qualified opinion. I’m simply saying that there are no alternatives on the table to Dodd Frank except repeal, and if there is a better mouse trap, let’s see it.
Mal,
Based on my very limited understanding of the martial arts, my intuition was that your patient ability to muster and direct your energy toward a seemingly futile task was a consequence of some aspect of your expertise in the martial arts (or, perhaps, marital arts vis a vis the lovely Nina). Sitzfleisch seems counter-intuitive.
What bilge (and what a favorite trope of yours). The Republicans have offered all sorts of detailed plans, for years now. Each of the candidates has put out lengthy descriptions of what they intend to do (if you were to bother even to look). Paul Ryan offered a detailed budget plan last year that attracted a good deal of support.
Meanwhile President Obama plops down budget proposals so unserious that that even Harry Reid won’t support them.
As for Dodd-Frank: the question here is whether the cure is worse than the disease. If that’s so, then repeal is the wiser course.
Henry,
I’m sorry if I disappointed you as regards martial arts vs. sitzfleisch.
It is certainly the case that studying southern kung fu (Hung Ga in particular) does teach a person to endure suffering patiently. But that’s for training, and these interminable disputes with Peter have nothing whatsoever in common with the way an experienced martial artist confronts a dangerous opponent. In such a situation there is no room for patient fencing and jousting and humorous asides; one focuses all one’s energy and attention on killing or disabling one’s attacker as swiftly and certainly as possible. Every moment that the fight is prolonged is a further opportunity to get hurt or killed yourself.
Let me assure you also that the marital arts play no part whatsoever here.
Not disappointed, Malcolm; only surprised. Thanks for the detailed explanation of the non-role of patience in actual combat.
I didn’t say that Republicans have not offered plans – 9-9-9 anyone? – but rather that they have not presented a quantifiable plan “which uses real numbers on a spreadsheet” to balance the budget.
Paul Ryan’s plan does not purport to balance the budget, but only to reduce it, and it claims to do so using wildly implausible assumptions (such as projecting that the rate of health care cost increases will be no greater than the rate of inflation, which hasn’t happened in decades),
Romney and the other candidates have vociferously supported balanced budget amendments. while being vague about how they would get there. This is for a simple reason: you can’t balance the budget without raising taxes, which is anathema to a party which believes that taxes are always too high and should never be raised for any reason.
There is a word for politicians who campaign on raising taxes and cutting benefits: loser. I will cheerfully concede that the Democrats have also refused to embrace political suicide by telling the simple truth that you can’t make significant progress on the budget deficit any other way. However, I think they are far less guilty (if at all) of making balanced budgets the centerpiece of their Weltanschauung while offering nothing but rhetoric on how to get there.
Right, and President Obama has presented a balanced budget? [snort]
The fact is that spending is so wildly out of control, and the electorate so addicted to government goodies, that an actual balanced budget is just a fantasy at this point; the reality is that we’re screwed. The political will to really do something before it’s too late just isn’t there, among either the people or their “leaders”. All the bickering in Washington is really just about whether we go over the cliff sooner rather than later.
But if anybody had the balls to really address the problem, there are plenty of folks on the Right with suggestions on offer for a balanced budget, and yes, without raising taxes. Here’s what such an approach might look like.
I’ll remind you also, regarding raising taxes, that your guy said he would raise the capital-gains tax even if he knew that doing so would produce less revenue. It is this sort of thing that enlivens both the conservative and libertarian bases with to pry this man out of office before we see what he’ll do when he doesn’t have to worry about re-election.
With an approval rating of 52% and an 11% margin over Romney, you only have to wait until November 7 for Obama’s worries about re-election to cease, as he will have been re-elected by then.
Fair enough: Williamson shows a way to balance the budget without raising taxes. But how do you actually do it and is it worth it?
If you cut 20% off Medicare and 10% off Medicaid, how do you decide who doesn’t get an operation?
Pushing education spending from the federal government to the states merely shifts the burden for a zero sum gain.
If you want to cut off foreign aid, don’t complain to me when Israel gets overrun by its neighbors.
If you want to end government grants for medical research, then you should pray that you’ll never get cancer or Alzheimer’s.
While one could quibble with Williamson’s suggestions, I would give him credit for at least putting some ideas on the table. My point is simply that this kind of quantifiable analysis is missing from the political debate, for the simple reason that any politician who suggested cutting Social Security by 20% or ending crop supports would be out of a job toot sweet.
Ah, but you see, electoral votes are apportioned state-by-state, and Mr. Obama’s approval ratings in the all-important swing states should give you pause. And then there are things like this.
Anyway: 52%? Not so fast.
This thing’s still a horse-race; a lot can happen between now and November.
Fair point. George Bush lost by 500,000 votes nationwide in 2000 but won the election because of 513 disputed votes in Florida. However, Obama is trending up, and Romney is trending down. Romney is a smart guy and a decent man, but he is an awful campaigner. He comes across as so wooden that he makes Al Gore look like Captain Beefheart by comparison. If the economy continues to improve – a big if – then his whole raison d’etre falls apart.
We’ll have to see whether it is the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat for His Awesomeness. It sure is a great year for political junkies, however.
The 52% number comes from
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hxKVbZ0awfSvfkBPv3rh79me_Saw?docId=CNG.a7acbb8a05b443b493ed5f589a6c264c.651
From today’s Scott Adams blog:
Replace “dyslexia” with “monocular-vision” and you get the peter-head in a nutshell.