The Buzz

Lately many commentators have whipped themselves into a foam claiming that Obama can “define” Mitt Romney in a way that would prevent a GOP win in November. They claim we’re at a critical time for image branding, when voters’ minds are still open and uncluttered before the convention. Political scientist Brendan Nyhan does not agree.

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Nyhan argues that journalists are overblowing the risk that Romney will be pigeonholed early. Contrary to the notion that Americans’ minds are a blank slate for whatever image the Obama camp wants to paint of Romney, Nyhan cites research that suggests otherwise: “The latest Gallup poll finds that 91% of Americans already have an opinion of [Romney].” They’ve also found that “Romney’s favorable numbers are predictably improving as Republicans and GOP-leaning independents return to the fold.”

To further dampen the hype of journalists pushing the “image war,” Nyhan consulted with fellow political scientists Christopher Wlezien and Robert Erikson. They found that pre-convention “news about the campaign affects voters but is eventually forgotten and thus has little impact on the final outcome.” It seems that candidates’ images are more often a reflection of their past performance than a cause of it.

Nyhan’s says that it's easy to select candidates who lost after the act and then claim that their image ratings were the problem. Some have pointed to Michael Dukakis, Bob Dole and John Kerry as prime examples. Yet Nyhan counters with a great point: these three candidates lost in economic circumstances “that would lead us to expect the incumbent party to hold the White House. The state of the economy—and the extent to which Obama is blamed for it—is still most likely to determine Romney’s fate.” In short, it seems relatively certain that “it matters far more how Obama is defined than Romney, whose image is likely to matter only on the margin.”

Nyhan’s piece is a smart take on this new stage of the election.

Let’s stipulate that there’s no political advantage in Republicans resurrecting the question of the true nature of President Obama’s twenty-year relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whatever it was before the Illinois senator left Wright’s church during the 2008 presidential campaign. And let’s accept that whatever there is to be said about that relationship probably has already been said.

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker seems to agree with those stipulations. Yet she raises disturbing questions in response to reports that a GOP political strategist and billionaire donor contemplated raising the issue again in an effort to defeat Obama’s reelection bid. The reaction was so swift and severe that they quickly abandoned the idea.

Parker asks the question of just how close Obama was to the fiery Chicago preacher, whose fulminations could be called anti-white racism. As Parker notes, Wright inspired the title of one of Obama’s books. He conducted the Obamas’ wedding ceremony and baptized the Obama girls. He led the family prayer when Obama announced his first presidential run. That seems like a pretty close relationship, and it begs the question of what Obama really thought about Wright’s persistent anti-white rhetoric.

And yet she notes: “Four years later, the mere mention of Wright by political opponents is considered racist.” She raises questions of political equity when the putative Republican candidate for president, Mitt Romney, is forced on the defensive by such an independent ad proposal, which was leaked to The New York Times and appeared on the paper’s front page.

“Romney is nothing like a racist,” writes Parker, “yet suddenly he is forced to distance himself from ads about which he knew nothing.”

This is merely another example of Democrats and Democratic-leaning journalists curtailing the range of political discourse in America by forcing opponents on the defensive on delicate racial questions. It probably isn’t smart politics to press such an issue now against a sitting president so long after it was vetted—however inadequately—four years ago. But raising it is neither racist nor inappropriate. In saying so, Kathleen Parker has rendered a smart analysis. 

If you’re curious about Michele Bachmann’s recent foray into Swiss citizenship or outraged over Eduardo Saverin’s decision to renounce his U.S. citizenship and run off to Singapore with his Facebook winnings, Jacqueline Stevens has a way to slake such curiosity and assuage such outrage: Abolish the United States.

Stevens, a political science professor at Northwestern University, hates nationalism so much that she wants to rid the world of nations. As she puts it, writing in The New York Times: “We need governments, but we don’t need nations.”

The good professor thinks it’s ridiculous for countries to convey citizenship on the basis of territorial birth. Why not let people just wander the globe looking for the best place to live, and then everyone can be the citizen of whatever country in which he or she happens to alight? She explains, “People should be free to move across borders; they should be citizens of the states where they happen to reside—period.”

I like that “period.” It denotes the finality of her argument and its presumed impregnability from silly nationalists such as myself.

But if I may, Professor, how do you figure that this approach would, as you say, “help end inequality among countries, by letting people move for greater opportunity”?

In fact, as anyone with half a brain knows, such a global practice, even if practicable, wouldn’t end inequality among countries at all. It would instead create chaos and poverty, as rich countries would be brought down by an inundation of teeming—and unabsorbable—masses desperate to better their station while poor countries would deteriorate into ghost countries.

But why am I even trying to counter such cotton-candy propositions and outlandish anti-Americanism? Perhaps because of this passage:

“Impossible? Utopian? That was the response to those who proposed the elimination of slavery.” So Stevens conflates Americans who wish to preserve their nation’s sovereignty and borders with those who defended Southern slavery in the 1850s. It’s difficult to imagine a level of mental abstraction that would conjure up such an analogy.

Her suggestion is impossible, and, yes, utopian. And it’s a howler. 

Of all the commentary unleashed by "The Life of Julia," the Barack Obama campaign’s interactive web ad that follows a faceless cartoon "everywoman" through life, probably the most perceptive is Jessica Gavora’s analysis in the Washington Post Outlook section. Gavora notes that the ads touch on such life milestones as education, work, motherhood, retirement. But one is missing: marriage.

There is a reason for this: Democratic operatives increasingly see unmarried women as a crucial voting bloc. Indeed, she says, these women represent "the most reliably Democratic voting group outside African Americans" –manifest in Obama’s 71-to-29 percent majority among such voters in 2008.

But there is a problem. These women don’t vote in the same numbers as married women. So "Julia" really is a clever get-out-the-vote effort aimed at luring to the polls a much higher proportion of these reliable Democratic voters. And the way to do that is to tout government programs designed to assist and benefit women—educational assistance at early stages of life, equal-pay requirements for later life stages, set-asides for entrepreneurial women seeking Small Business Administration loans, free health screenings, insurance for contraceptives, retirement benefits. In other words, just about cradle to grave.

Polls show women generally favor such governmental largess far more than men do, and single women tilt even further in that direction. But it’s intriguing to note that, while single women tilt toward the Democrats, they tend to revert back to previous voting patterns once they get remarried.

And so the Democratic Party has begun to combat marriage in subtle ways. Says Gavora: "The decline of marriage and Democratic political opportunism have combined to transform what used to be a situation to be avoided—single motherhood—into a new and proud American demographic, citizens of Obama’s Hubby State." The political significance of this, as Gavora notes, is seen in the fact that most of American households are now headed by unmarried people.

And so, says Gavora in this smart analysis, it’s inevitable that Democrats would exploit this cultural decline by offering governmental protection and comfort as a substitute for a husband.