sign of the times

The Sign Museum in Ohio  as sign of the times….The love of looking back but an equal fascination with what Joseph Schumpeter called the creative destruction of capitalism. And if there is anything Americans dislike, its the status-quo, albeit the double take on future uncertainty. It really doesn’t look good for Romney as he has been unable to tap into a popular vein that carries the imagination and Obama has too many boots on the ground, too much money and too savvy a campaign staff to really lose; they are experts in gaming the electoral college system in the same way that income inequality is often a result of gaming the political system.

There are just  enough fringe electoral constituencies for Obama to manipulate into getting re-elected. That, and an impressive flank of elitist dog bowl lickers like Thomas Friedman, Michael Lewis, Rolling Stone magazine, Paul Krugman, Ed Koch and a host of champagne soft socialists to spin Obama’s pose and gesture into the vaguest of narratives. We are entering a phase of “cold civil war” that foreign adventure distractions like Iran can only hold the attention span for so long. …

(see link at end)…“We’re trying to make sure everybody has a plan for how they’re going to go vote, so — want to say Monday? You’ll go Monday morning?” asks Carney, who has trudged down weed- infested streets, past abandoned buildings and a dilapidated “HOPE” placard from Obama’s first campaign, and through a fluorescent-lit lobby with a uniformed security guard to knock on this door. Only after the voter assures him she has a ride to the board of elections does Carney move on to his next target….

Fifteen miles to the northeast, Kathy Wheeler, 51, a homemaker from Sharonville, and her 9-year-old daughter, Anne, are going door-to-door on a tidy, tree-lined street of mostly brick, one-story, single-family homes. She offers a softer sell for Republican nominee Mitt Romney in Madeira, a Cincinnati suburb that voted 62 percent for Arizona Senator John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. …

…This is the grind-it-out reality for the Obama and Romney forces as Nov. 6 Election Day approaches in Hamilton County, the third-largest in the state. Former President George W. Bush carried the county by a little more than 20,000 votes in 2004 and Obama won in 2008 by just under 30,000 — making it the epicenter of a state that may decide the presidential election. Both campaigns are grappling for advantage in turning out supporters and appealing to the sliver of voters who are still undecided and may hold the key to victory — both here and in the national election.

While neither campaign will reveal the full picture of what it knows about these voters, it’s now possible to purchase databases of consumer information that guide political targeting in the most detailed ways. The statistics include where people shop and buy gas, and even what products, movies and books they enjoy. This adds to the information that campaigns have long collected about whether people are members of a gun- or abortion-rights group; attend church and how often; and whether, how often and for whom they have voted in past elections.

…On Nov. 6, both campaigns will use technology-driven systems to track which of their target voters have already cast ballots and who still needs to be prodded to do so — Romney’s is code-named “ORCA.”

If Obama wins Hamilton County, it will be in large part because of this data-fueled ground game. It melds old-fashioned grassroots organizing with sophisticated targeting, which has allowed his campaign to track, register, persuade and turn out more supporters than his rival.

“It’s a unique county and really a microcosm of the state,” Jeremy Bird, Obama’s national field director who directed the 2008 campaign’s successful Ohio operation, said in an interview at the campaign’s Chicago headquarters. As it did elsewhere across the country, Obama’s team invested early in Hamilton County in field organizers and volunteers on the ground, breaking out neighbo

d groups with specific goals for contacting, persuading and getting voters to the polls.

There are eight Obama offices to the Romney campaign’s three. “A strong get-out-the-vote operation is a decentralized one,” said Mitch Stewart, the Obama campaign’s battleground state director. “This electorate is going to look much more like 2008 than it is like 2010, and we’re seeing that in the makeup of the early-vote electorate.”

Romney’s operation is working to match the Obama team’s organizational prowess, arguing that its secret weapon — raw enthusiasm driven by broad disaffection with the president — will overcome a structural deficit. Romney and the Republican Party have 40 state offices compared with Obama’s 131 grassroots outposts. Read More:http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-11-01/romney-fate-is-hamilton-county-as-obama-angst-vies-with-unknown

Its very difficult to dislodge an incumbent president. They have too many tools available. Particularly Obama’s turning on the faucets of government spending to juice the economy. It may be like putting make-up on a pig, but small improvements in the economy can usually be leveraged into bottom feeding vote grabbing. Of course, even Obama has to crap and wipe his arse, and when unemployment drips over 10% again, we’ll see how he and Axelgod, or is it Axelrod, Houdini themselves out of that after the famous Obama “firewall” gets torched to national de-installation status….

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…For several weeks now, political polling guru Nate Silver has been taking a lot of heat from conservatives who don’t like that Silver’s statistical models have consistently given President Obama a sizable edge over Mitt Romney. In his latest model, Obama ticks above 300 electoral votes for the first time since the first debate a month ago, and Silver gives him a 79 percent chance of winning next Tuesday, which is also about the same chance he gives Obama for winning Ohio.

Silver compares it to another statistical probability: “An NFL team that leads by a field goal with three minutes left to go winds up winning the game 79 percent of the time.”

So now it’s come down to an actual wager, a face-off between mathematics and emotions.

On Thursday, Silver offered to bet MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough $1,000 that Barack Obama will win re-election. Scarborough echoed the sentiments of conservative critics when he said earlier this week, “Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue … they’re jokes.” He was specifically talking about Silver’s FiveThirtyEight page on the NY Times website, which shows Mitt Romney with now less than a one-in-four chance of becoming president. Read More:http://www.examiner.com/article/nate-silver-takes-on-his-clueless-detractors