The Great Debate

The Republican drive to delegitimize President Barack Obama’s possible second term has started.

As recent polls have allowed for the possibility that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney could win the popular vote while the president carries the Electoral College, the conservative blogosphere has lit up not only with long-overdue attacks on the Electoral College but also with the specious argument that a popular-vote loss for Obama will undermine his mandate and justify continued obstruction by Republican lawmakers.

Nonsense.

Under the Constitution, the Electoral College winner becomes president. Candidates know that when they plan their campaigns, and wise candidates could care less about the popular vote when they plot strategy and deploy resources. The popular vote, therefore, is a misleading measure of a candidate’s success or the strength of a mandate.

Obama came into office in 2009 with a powerful mandate after an overwhelming victory in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. Yet the experience of his first term demonstrates all too painfully that Republicans feel no need for excuses to obstruct every initiative the president supports. Rather, it is enough for them – as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) so boldly stated – to pursue the goal of defeating the president by denying him success.

Their strategy has been to refuse to compromise, or even support, measures they had previously promoted, so they can assert that the president failed to bring people together and could not forge legislative results. They have worked tirelessly to stymie him ‑ and then accused him of being stymied.

As national attention focuses on the devastation inflicted on Atlantic states by megastorm Sandy, polls show the same basic electoral reality that has prevailed throughout the presidential campaign: Without a strong turnout among young voters, President Barack Obama loses on Nov. 6.

So, Obama may need more than fiery “go vote!” entreaties to students to overcome his presidency’s disorganized, mixed record on youth issues.

New polls taken nationally and in key swing states (Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Iowa, Florida, Nevada and Wisconsin) show how crucial young voters are to the president’s reelection. Obama leads Republican challenger Mitt Romney among 18- to 29-year-olds by landslide margins, more than offsetting the mildly pro-Romney sentiments of their elders.

Even though politicians don’t control the weather, voters punish them for the damage it causes. But analyzing all county-level election results for incumbent governors and presidents from 1970 to 2006 also shows that this punishment is dwarfed by the reward for taking action.

In my study with Professor John Gasper of Carnegie Mellon at Doha, published last year in the American Journal of Political Science, we examined countywide damage caused by natural disasters in the three months preceding elections. When a governor requested aid and a president approved it, presidents received a half-point increase in their county vote share while governors saw a four-point bump.

Hurricane Sandy was unprecedented because it was so destructive and occurred so close to Election Day, which makes its political impact difficult to predict. The impact on state and local elections may take time to discern, but it is clear that Sandy put the brakes on a Romney campaign that had been gaining momentum and thrust President Obama into a leadership role. Actions the president took and images he created will help determine how voter emotions about Sandy are expressed in the voting booth on Tuesday.

What we expect to hear in the closing days of a campaign is a call to arms.  Instead, what we’re hearing from both sides is a call to disarm.

“I’m going to have to reach across the aisle and meet with good Democrats who love America just like you love America,” Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney told a recent campaign rally in Virginia.  “And there are good Democrats like that.”

“In the end, we’re all in this together,” President Barack Obama said at a rally in Wisconsin.  “We rise and fall as one nation, one people.”

The New York City Marathon should be run on Sunday. Not because it is easy, but because it is hard. This is unpopular to say in the hours since New York Road Runners club CEO Mary Wittenberg, with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s support, announced the marathon would go on. Anger and outrage have been the prevailing emotions on TV call-in shows, on social media and in media reports on the controversial decision.

Staten Island, home of the marathon’s starting line, is a disaster zone. The south shore has been wrecked, and residents are rightfully scared and angry. In many cases, their basic needs for food and shelter, let alone their pleas for security and recovery efforts, have not all been met. Many residents say the city police and fire departments are nowhere to be found or are not penetrating deep enough into neighborhoods that need help. Borough President James Molinaro has called the American Red Cross a “disgrace.”

Many also say the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been absent from the recovery effort. Rumors of armed robbery by criminals dressed as utility company employees have spread like wildfire online. Yet the NYPD says that, with out-of-state help, it has searched Staten Island for victims and survivors since the storm abated, and would likely complete the search Thursday night. The aid situation seems to be rapidly improving.

The Asian-American and Pacific Islander vote could very likely be the margin of victory on Tuesday.

From health care to education, this community has a lot to win, or lose — based on who shows up at the voting booth. The group’s buying and political power is irrefutable. There are more than 1.5 million AAPI-owned firms in the nation, which added  more than 2.8 million new jobs to the workforce.

The AAPI voting bloc was the crucial coalition in 2008 — voting overwhelmingly for President Barack Obama over Senator John McCain. In this election, we cannot afford to overlook a single AAPI voter in the turnout efforts.

We have been told throughout this presidential campaign that the contest is a referendum about two visions of government, one activist, the other passive ‑ like every presidential election since 1980. But that may actually understate the stakes. In a larger context, it is a choice between maintaining the last 80 years of American governance or abruptly ending it.

In fact, this election is really about whether the New Deal and its descendant, the Great Society, will survive or whether they will be dismantled. And that is historic.

What does dismantling the New Deal and Great Society mean? It means converting Medicare from guaranteed medical insurance to a possible privately run system of health procurement. It means Medicaid could be capped, which could strip millions of children of their healthcare. It means scaling back financial regulation. It means poverty programs, like food stamps, may be cut dramatically. It means the Davis-Bacon Act, insuring that workers on government projects receive the prevailing wage, could be revoked. It means the end of subsidies for public transportation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and, of course, the Public Broadcasting System. It even means slashing disaster relief.

This essay was submitted through the Romney campaign as a response to Lawrence Summers’ most recent column, “This election, Obama is the wiser economic choice.”

The large budget deficits and expansion of the national debt under President Barack Obama, unprecedented since World War II, have him set to bequeath an immensely costly legacy. Each of his deficits as a percentage of gross domestic product has been larger than the previous post-World War II record, for which Democrats excoriated President Ronald Reagan. Between the debt already racked up and what Obama’s FY13 budget projects, each income-tax-paying family will owe more in Obama debt than a new mortgage on a median-priced home and four years of college costs.

Yet more than three years into recovery from the recession, the president has not proposed a program to deal with the massive debt. Indeed, he abandoned even the long-run goal of a balanced budget, adopting the much weaker goal of stabilizing the debt-GDP ratio at the higher projected FY2016 level. But he did not budget for it, appointed the Simpson-Bowles Commission to propose how to do so, then ignored its recommendations. He has no serious proposals to deal with the even larger eventual long-run deficits in Social Security and Medicare, which total several times the current national debt. When Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was asked by Congress what the administration’s plan was, he said, “We don’t have one.” Vice President Joe Biden guaranteed, “No changes to Social Security.”

Today’s U.S. Labor Department report on jobs confirms what we’ve known for more than a year: We have entered a new normal for jobs, with marginal gains, marginal losses and higher levels of unemployment becoming the unfortunate norm.

It also confirms that where you live, what you do, what race you are and what level of education you’ve attained profoundly shape your employment prospects. In spite of claims of a youth unemployment crisis and ample anecdotes about a punishing job markets for recent college grads, there is – statistically – no job crisis for the college-educated, with their unemployment rate hovering around 4 percent. That contrasts with the national average of 7.9 percent and an average in the mid-teens for those with a high-school degree. For African Americans of any education level, the rate is 14.3 percent; for Hispanics, 10 percent; for Asian Americans, 4.9 percent. If you live in Nebraska or North Dakota, the jobless rate is less than 4 percent, thanks to robust prices for grains and corn and the oil and gas of the shale revolution. If you live in Oklahoma, Iowa, Minnesota or Kansas, the rate is below 6 percent. But in California, Nevada or New Jersey, it is at or above 10 percent.

Above all, the jobs report confirms that the campaign rhetoric about what the next president and Congress will do to “get jobs moving again” is hollow at best. As the numbers starkly demonstrate, the notion of an evenly distributed national jobs crisis is a fiction. Yet all the vague plans touted by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney treat the challenge of employment in 21st century America as a shared national dilemma. Unemployment is a shared affliction the way Hurricane Sandy is a shared affliction. People who live in the Northeast and Northwest may be linked by common citizenship and a shared sense of community (at least in crisis) but not by equivalent pain and suffering. Same goes for unemployment.

It’s all in the wording. Throughout this presidential campaign, voters have heard a stream of claims and counterclaims about “entitlements” – payments the federal government makes to individuals.

The power of words to frame political ideas can’t be overemphasized. How we label specific practices and proposals affects the ways we think about them. Decades ago statisticians and economists used a neutral phrase, “transfer payments,” to describe various government disbursements: unemployment assistance, old-age pension support, food for the hungry, disbursements to veterans and federal employees.

By calling these “transfer payments,” they sought to focus on accounting techniques. They wanted to avoid the kind of charged labeling and stigmatization that we see today -‑ which prevents thoughtful discussion of the effects and benefits of these practices.