2012 Race for the White House II: The Two Towers

Santorum dropping out of the race has had a Dodgers leaving Brooklyn effect on the Elections forum....this place is now a wasteland

 

ahh memories

 

To be clear, I don't think Germanamerica is intentionally cherrypicking data. He just doesn't get why that date explains why any attempt to draw conclusions about polling from the 1980 election is the height of stupidity.

 

I agree completely. Very few people bring that up to intentionally cherrypick, more as an example why their personal beliefs are more trustworthy than the mountains of polling data out there.

 

Memories,
Light the corners of my mind,
Frothy fecal-colored memories,
Of the way, we were.

 

For tbose of us that weren't even in grade school in 1980, care to enlighten? I know the Iran hostage crisis pretty much cost Carter the election, but not familiar why there was that big swing in a week.

 

As you may have guessed, election coverage back then wasn't what it was then.

But what made 1980 unique was that there was only one televised debate, really late in the campaign. Carter wasn't that thrilled about going 1 vs 1 with Reagan, and rightly so. So the one and only debate was held on October 28, seven days before the election.

Carter went in leading in the polls, but during that debate, Reagan said "There you go again" and closed with "Are you better off now than four years ago?", and Carter was toast.

 

An interesting thing about that debate. People who watched on tv thought that Carter got creamed. People who listened on the radio thought that he destroyed Reagan. RWR won largely because he was better on TV. Not unlike JFK v. RMN 20 years earlier.

 

Carter vs. Reagan was the debate, the hostage crisis, and ... something else. Not sure what. At any rate it was the biggest last-moment swing that I can remember, people even on voting day thought the election would go down to the final few states. Anything but.

 

Believe it or not, you can actually watch the debate via the Internet:



Decide for yourself.

 

My favorite part of that story (and another data point showing how our media is conservatively biased.)

Reagan got off that line in response to Carter accusing Reagan of planning to do something he ended up doing. (Going after Medicare.) IOW, Reagan's great line was a lie.

4 years later Mondale hammered Reagan in their first debate when Reagan tried the same "there you go again" line, and Mondale replied with an obviously rehearsed zinger pointing that out, that Reagan wasn't telling the truth in that debate with Carter. Reagan's response was feeble.

My recollection here is hazy, but I think Mondale got a huge, huge boost from that debate. It looked like he might pull it off.

Then came the next debate, and Reagan was terrific, and that was that.

Anyway, the media love to mention that line from 1980, but never the context. It's poor form to point out that the GOPs hate Medicare and always have. Cuz they hate America.

 

There you go again.

 

I'm either incredibly insulted by or ecstatic about this comparison, I'm just torn about which...

 

Getting back on topic.... This should be a talking point but it requires SAT level reading so it will just fly over GOP's heads...

http://groobiecat.blogspot.com/2012/05/funny-thing-happened-on-way-to-election.html

Why do people think Obama has spent like a drunken sailor? It’s in part because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the federal budget.​

What people forget (or never knew) is that the first year of every presidential term starts with a budget approved by the previous administration and Congress. The president only begins to shape the budget in his second year. It takes time to develop a budget and steer it through Congress — especially in these days of congressional gridlock.​

The 2009 fiscal year, which Republicans count as part of Obama’s legacy, began four months before Obama moved into the White House. The major spending decisions in the 2009 fiscal year were made by George W. Bush and the previous Congress.​

Like a relief pitcher who comes into the game with the bases loaded, Obama came in with a budget in place that called for spending to increase by hundreds of billions of dollars in response to the worst economic and financial calamity in generations.​

 

That, and the (D) after his name.

 

Not that this is related to Romney's quote (and really, who can trust a single word that comes out of his mouth), but the spending like a drunken sailor comment is generally a different measuring point than your chart. The Republicans tend to use total government spending under Obama compared to history, while your chart is showing the increase in growth of that dollar figure compared to history. Since they are different measuring points, they both can be true.

 

What 'GroobieCat' fails to note is 2009’s spending should have been an annomoly but he is using it as Obama’s baseline making the comparision meaningless. What should have been a one time spike in spending to offset a crisis is now the norm with bloated spending extended out for the next decade. Run the same numbers using 2008 spending as the baseline and see what happens. And it isn’t as if 2008 spending was the result of 8 years of deep Bush spending cuts, it was the product of a huge expansion in the Federal Government.
Here are the numbers, have fun:

Code:

Year          GDP      Spending (in billions)
2000        9.9515     1.79 a
2001        10.2862    1.86 a
2002        10.6423    2.01 a
2003        11.1422    2.16 a
2004        11.8533    2.29 a
2005        12.623     2.47 a
2006        13.3772    2.66 a
2007        14.0287    2.73 a
2008        14.3691    2.98 a
2009        13.939     3.52 a
2010        14.5265    3.46 a
2011        15.094     3.60 a
2012        15.6015    3.80 b
2013        16.335     3.80 b
2014        17.1556    3.88 b
2015        18.1778    4.06 b
2016        19.2611    4.33 b
2017        20.3686    4.53 b
 

Bush added a trillion $ to the size of the government during his eight year term, Obama will have added nearly another trillion in his 4 years, and together they've doubled Federal spending.

 

I was talking specifically about the tendency by both partisans and low information voters to assume that Obama must be spending simply because he's a Democrat. That's different from the blame assignment that you're talking about - we're talking about verifiable facts that people ignore, willfully or otherwise.

 

Is your chart actual spending, or just the budget? One of the big changes from Bush's budgets to Obama's budgets is that Obama included the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the budget, Bush put them in supplemental spending bills so that they didn't show up in the federal budget bills.

 

Whether Obama is a big spender all depends on whether you say that 2009 was Bush's budget or his. You can tell the story both ways -- for example, in real terms (i.e. inflation adjusted) the budget for 2010, 2011, and 2012 are all lower than the 2009 budget. It's been since forever since we've seen that pattern, a as basically no matter who the President the budgets tend to go up in real terms each year.

But of course the Dems haven't told their side of the story well. So the public perception is nearly entirely from the one perception. Which is accurate in its way but incomplete, just as my account above is accurate in its way but incomplete.

Same with jobs. Job growth was sliding every month under W, and immediately when Obama came in job growth reversed its trend. I think peak job loss was Bush's very last month in office. But again, that story has not been told well or effectively.

It seems to me that the Dems are better off dropping the Bain/corporate raider them and returning to what worked in 2008, running against W. Since Romney's economic policy's are W's, that should be easy enough to do.

 

Actual spending. The numbers are from the White House Office of Budget Management. Those with footnoted with an ‘a’ are actual spending #s, those with a ‘b’ are OBM guesstimates. If there was a change in their accounting they don’t note it, but since we no longer operate under budgets the point seems moot.