September 24, 2012



September 24, 2012

Dick Morris analyzes polls.

Republicans are getting depressed under an avalanche of polling suggesting that an Obama victory is in the offing. They, in fact, suggest no such thing! Here’s why:

1. All of the polling out there uses some variant of the 2008 election turnout as its model for weighting respondents and this overstates the Democratic vote by a huge margin.

In English, this means that when you do a poll you ask people if they are likely to vote. But any telephone survey always has too few blacks, Latinos, and young people and too many elderly in its sample. That’s because some don’t have landlines or are rarely at home or don’t speak English well enough to be interviewed or don’t have time to talk. Elderly are overstated because they tend to be home and to have time. So you need to increase the weight given to interviews with young people, blacks and Latinos and count those with seniors a bit less.

Normally, this task is not difficult. Over the years, the black, Latino, young, and elderly proportion of the electorate has been fairly constant from election to election, except for a gradual increase in the Hispanic vote. You just need to look back at the last election to weight your polling numbers for this one.

But 2008 was no ordinary election. Blacks, for example, usually cast only 11% of the vote, but, in 2008, they made up 14% of the vote. Latinos increased their share of the vote by 1.5% and college kids almost doubled their vote share. Almost all pollsters are using the 2008 turnout models in weighting their samples. Rasmussen, more accurately, uses a mixture of 2008 and 2004 turnouts in determining his sample. That’s why his data usually is better for Romney.

But polling indicates a widespread lack of enthusiasm among Obama’s core demographic support due to high unemployment, disappointment with his policies and performance, and the lack of novelty in voting for a black candidate now that he has already served as president. ...

 

 

More on polls from Pajamas Media. 

In most all things, I try to follow Hanlon’s (or Heinlein’s) Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

This is particularly important to remember when looking at polls, Sometimes, however, one must wonder.

As I pointed out yesterday, the result of Romney’s “really bad week” was that Romney had gone from 5 or 6 points behind in Gallup, to essentially tied. Even so, a number of people have noted that there are some odd assumptions in that poll, and others. Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen talked about it recently. Asked if the polls were, in his opinion, a fair representation of the electorate, Schoen said:

“The simple answer is no John. The bottom line is there were seven percent more Democrats in the electorate in 2008 than there were Republicans. That’s from the exit polls and that’s about as accurate as you can get….President Obama won by about seven points. Given 90 percent of Democrats vote for the Democrat and 90 percent of Republicans vote for the Republican, every time you reduce the margin between the parties by one point, roughly it’s about one point off the margin.”

Schoen pointed out that the Pew poll was based on Democrats sampled for having an 11 percent voters registration edge over Republicans. He further added, “saying that America has gotten more Democratic than 2008, which is a questionable assumption.” ...

 

 

Andrew Malcolm tracks the administration's shifting story about Benghazi.

You know that act of terrorism in Benghazi last week that saw four Americans killed on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 and the consulate shelled, burned and destroyed and fleeing Americans killed in a nearby safe house that turned out to be unsafe and the Obama administration, alone in the world, said it was all clearly a spontaneous reaction to an old anti-Islam YouTube video?

Remember that? They said it for days. Susan Rice, the U.N. ambassador, was sent out as sacrificial lamb on no less than five Sunday shows to peddle the same hooey about spontaneous Muslim anger.

Because if the attack wasn't spontaneous, then it was by definition planned.

And if it was planned, why wasn't Barack Obama, who's skipped so many daily intelligence briefings to campaign for reelection, doing his real job?

Being, oh, say, forewarned and forearmed to protect these valiant Americans serving abroad whom he later lauded as so brave? But they couldn't hear the presidential praise because they were dead far from home. Then, totally tone-deaf to tragedy, Obama dashed off to a Vegas fundraiser.

This administration was too clever by half. On Wednesday, when Obama was up in the Big Apple chatting with Dayyyy-vid Letterman and hobnobbing with Beyonce at $40K per head, the administration sent the director of the National Counterterrorism Center to Capitol Hill. There, Matthew Olsen testified that, yes, the Benghazi attack was an act of terrorism.

Here's the clever part of that. At first it appeared Olsen disagreed with the White House. But the next day Obama press secretary Jay Carney was able to consult his notes, agree with Olsen and baldly tell reporters: "It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack."

Wait! What?! Now, it's obvious and self-evident? ...

 

 

The Washington Examiner has produced a series of pieces about the background of Barack Obama. Mark Tapscott has the introduction.

Few if any of his predecessors took the oath of office with higher public hopes for his success than President Obama on Jan. 20, 2009.

Millions of Americans hailed his election as an end to partisanship, a renewal of the spirit of compromise and a reinvigoration of the nation's highest ideals at home and abroad.

Above all, as America's first black chief executive, Obama symbolized the healing of long-festering wounds that were the terrible national legacy of slavery, the Reconstruction Era and Jim Crow. We would be, finally, one nation.

But after nearly four years in office, Obama has become a sharply polarizing figure.

His admirers believe he deserves a special place alongside Wilson, the Roosevelts and LBJ as one of the architects of benevolent government.

His critics believe he is trying to remake America in the image of Europe's social democracies, replacing America's ethos of independence and individual enterprise with a welfare state inflamed by class divisions.

In an effort to get a clearer picture of Obama -- his shaping influences, his core beliefs, his political ambitions and his accomplishments -- The Washington Examiner conducted a four-month inquiry, interviewing dozens of his supporters and detractors in Chicago and elsewhere, and studying countless court transcripts, government reports and other official documents. ...

 

Part One of the Examiner series covers the falsehoods about the president's background.

First lady Michelle Obama told the Democratic National Convention that "Barack and I were both raised by families who didn't have much in the way of money or material possessions."

It is a claim the president has repeated in his books, on the speech-making circuit and in countless media interviews. By his account, he grew up in a broken home with a single mom, struggled for years as a child in an impoverished Third World country and then was raised by his grandparents in difficult circumstances.

The facts aren't nearly so clear-cut.

Ann Dunham was just 18 years old when she gave birth to Obama. She was a freshman at the University of Hawaii. His Kenyan father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., was a few years older than Ann. They were married against family wishes.

Obama Sr. does not appear to have been welcoming or compassionate toward his new wife or son. It later turned out that he was secretly married to a Kenyan woman back home at the same time he fathered the young Obama.

He abandoned Obama Jr.'s mother when the boy was 1. In 1964, Dunham filed for a divorce that was not contested. Her parents helped to raise the young Obama.

Obama's mother met her second husband, an Indonesian named Lolo Soetoro, while working at the East-West Center in Hawaii. They married, and in 1967, the young Obama, then known as Barry Soetoro, traveled to Indonesia with his mother when the Indonesian government recalled his stepfather.

In Indonesia, the family's circumstances improved dramatically. According to Obama in his autobiography "Dreams from My Father," Lolo's brother-in-law was "making millions as a high official in the national oil company." It was through this brother-in-law that Obama's stepfather got a coveted job as a government relations officer with the Union Oil Co.

The family then moved to Menteng, then and now the most exclusive neighborhood of Jakarta, where bureaucrats, diplomats and economic elites reside. ...

 

 

WSJ OpEd provides update on Scott Brown's race against the harpy.

With polls putting the race for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts in a statistical dead heat, supporters of consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren eagerly awaited Thursday night's first head-to-head debate between the Harvard Law School professor and incumbent Sen. Scott Brown.

It was inevitable, their oft-heard reasoning went, that the frequent Wall Street critic would use her superior intellect and unimpeachable moral standing to vanquish Mr. Brown, who for more than two years has held the seat occupied for decades by the late Edward M. Kennedy.

But like the overall campaign so far, the debate did not go the way Ms. Warren must have planned. Mr. Brown attacked during the opening minute and kept her on the defensive for most of the hour-long exchange.

Now, with a little more than six weeks to go before the election, Democrats fighting to keep control of the U.S. Senate find themselves scrambling in a state where President Barack Obama is expected to trounce former Gov. Mitt Romney, and where Democrats hold every U.S. House seat, every statewide office, and an overwhelming majority in the state legislature. ...

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 Dick Morris

Why The Polls Under State Romney Vote

Republicans are getting depressed under an avalanche of polling suggesting that an Obama victory is in the offing. They, in fact, suggest no such thing! Here’s why:

1. All of the polling out there uses some variant of the 2008 election turnout as its model for weighting respondents and this overstates the Democratic vote by a huge margin.

In English, this means that when you do a poll you ask people if they are likely to vote. But any telephone survey always has too few blacks, Latinos, and young people and too many elderly in its sample. That’s because some don’t have landlines or are rarely at home or don’t speak English well enough to be interviewed or don’t have time to talk. Elderly are overstated because they tend to be home and to have time. So you need to increase the weight given to interviews with young people, blacks and Latinos and count those with seniors a bit less.

Normally, this task is not difficult. Over the years, the black, Latino, young, and elderly proportion of the electorate has been fairly constant from election to election, except for a gradual increase in the Hispanic vote. You just need to look back at the last election to weight your polling numbers for this one.

But 2008 was no ordinary election. Blacks, for example, usually cast only 11% of the vote, but, in 2008, they made up 14% of the vote. Latinos increased their share of the vote by 1.5% and college kids almost doubled their vote share. Almost all pollsters are using the 2008 turnout models in weighting their samples. Rasmussen, more accurately, uses a mixture of 2008 and 2004 turnouts in determining his sample. That’s why his data usually is better for Romney.

But polling indicates a widespread lack of enthusiasm among Obama’s core demographic support due to high unemployment, disappointment with his policies and performance, and the lack of novelty in voting for a black candidate now that he has already served as president.

If you adjust virtually any of the published polls to reflect the 2004 vote, not the 2008 vote, they show the race either tied or Romney ahead, a view much closer to reality.

2. Almost all of the published polls show Obama getting less than 50% of the vote and less than 50% job approval. A majority of the voters either support Romney or are undecided in almost every poll.

But the fact is that the undecided vote always goes against the incumbent. In 1980 (the last time an incumbent Democrat was beaten), for example, the Gallup Poll of October 27th had Carter ahead by 45-39. Their survey on November 2nd showed Reagan catching up and leading by three points. In the actual voting, the Republican won by nine. The undecided vote broke sharply — and unanimously — for the challenger.

An undecided voter has really decided not to back the incumbent. He just won’t focus on the race until later in the game.

So, when the published poll shows Obama ahead by, say, 48-45, he’s really probably losing by 52-48!

Add these two factors together and the polls that are out there are all misleading. Any professional pollster (those consultants hired by candidates not by media outlets) would publish two findings for each poll — one using 2004 turnout modeling and the other using 2008 modeling. This would indicate just how dependent on an unusually high turnout of his base the Obama camp really is.

Pajamas Media

Skewed and Unskewed Polls

by Charlie Martin

In most all things, I try to follow Hanlon’s (or Heinlein’s) Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

This is particularly important to remember when looking at polls, Sometimes, however, one must wonder.

As I pointed out yesterday, the result of Romney’s “really bad week” was that Romney had gone from 5 or 6 points behind in Gallup, to essentially tied. Even so, a number of people have noted that there are some odd assumptions in that poll, and others. Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen talked about it recently. Asked if the polls were, in his opinion, a fair representation of the electorate, Schoen said:

“The simple answer is no John. The bottom line is there were seven percent more Democrats in the electorate in 2008 than there were Republicans. That’s from the exit polls and that’s about as accurate as you can get….President Obama won by about seven points. Given 90 percent of Democrats vote for the Democrat and 90 percent of Republicans vote for the Republican, every time you reduce the margin between the parties by one point, roughly it’s about one point off the margin.”

Schoen pointed out that the Pew poll was based on Democrats sampled for having an 11 percent voters registration edge over Republicans. He further added, “saying that America has gotten more Democratic than 2008, which is a questionable assumption.”

In fact, Rasmussen keeps a running monthly poll of party identification. In the latest poll, released September 1, they found:

During August, 37.6% of Americans considered themselves Republicans. That’s up from 34.9% in July and 35.4% in June. It’s also the largest number of Republicans ever recorded by Rasmussen Report since monthly tracking began in November 2002.

Other polls — including Gallup — apparently have similar assumptions (called “turnout models”) in their polls.

There is a new website, called , that basically reweights the data to fit the Rasmussen party identification. Their results are quite different, giving Romney somewhere between a five and eleven point lead.

Now, this should also be taken with a grain of salt. Basically, they claim (by the site name) to be an unskewed poll. In fact, they’re just a differently skewed take on existing polls. Instead of taking their numbers over, say, Gallup, though, what it should tell us is that even if the polls are being heavily weighted to Obama, Romney’s still essentially tied. Any difference in Romney’s direction in real turnout from the pollster’s assumptions would bring Romney into a lead.

 

 

Investors

What's really behind Obama's Benghazi bunkum

by Andrew Malcolm 

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You know that act of terrorism in Benghazi last week that saw four Americans killed on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 and the consulate shelled, burned and destroyed and fleeing Americans killed in a nearby safe house that turned out to be unsafe and the Obama administration, alone in the world, said it was all clearly a spontaneous reaction to an old anti-Islam YouTube video?

Remember that? They said it for days. Susan Rice, the U.N. ambassador, was sent out as sacrificial lamb on no less than five Sunday shows to peddle the same hooey about spontaneous Muslim anger.

Because if the attack wasn't spontaneous, then it was by definition planned.

And if it was planned, why wasn't Barack Obama, who's skipped so many daily intelligence briefings to campaign for reelection, doing his real job?

Being, oh, say, forewarned and forearmed to protect these valiant Americans serving abroad whom he later lauded as so brave? But they couldn't hear the presidential praise because they were dead far from home. Then, totally tone-deaf to tragedy, Obama dashed off to a Vegas fundraiser.

This administration was too clever by half. On Wednesday, when Obama was up in the Big Apple chatting with Dayyyy-vid Letterman and hobnobbing with Beyonce at $40K per head, the administration sent the director of the National Counterterrorism Center to Capitol Hill. There, Matthew Olsen testified that, yes, the Benghazi attack was an act of terrorism.

Here's the clever part of that. At first it appeared Olsen disagreed with the White House. But the next day Obama press secretary Jay Carney was able to consult his notes, agree with Olsen and baldly tell reporters: "It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack."

Wait! What?! Now, it's obvious and self-evident? After a week proclaiming clearly it was an organic video outrage? A week, by the way, spent by distracted media members castigating Gov. Romney for so hastily -- and now, so self-evidently -- criticizing the Obama responses. These guys don't have the, uh, balloons to admit a bungle.

(And get this: Thursday the Obama administration spent $70,000 for ads on seven Pakistani TV networks showing the Democrat explaining the U.S. had nothing to do with the anti-Islam video, thus exposing millions more to the hated video.)

Here's the strategic political context of the Carney maneuver: In a close-fought election campaign like this one the last thing an incumbent (or his mouthpiece) wants to do is say, well, yes, as a matter of fact, we blew it. We were wrong. We weren't properly prepared and then afterward, we were in full CYA mode and thought you'd fall for the video line.

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(Demonstrators express appreciation for U.S. aid

 

An incumbent president's strong suit always is foreign affairs and national security. He's supposed to know all kinds of secret stuff that we don't, which is OK because it's to keep us and our people safe, right? Except sadly not Amb. Chris Stevens and his colleagues because someone(s) were asleep at the switch. Who would ever anticipate violence against Americans in a lawless Muslim country jam-packed with weapons on 9/11?

Obama's poll approval on handling foreign affairs has exceeded Romney's, as expected for an incumbent. But, actually, it's not all that great. Less than half of Americans (49%) now approve of Obama's foreign affairs job performance, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC Poll.

While nearly as many (46%) disapprove. 

Obama's foreign policy approval has plunged five points (or 10%) from 54% just in recent days. Americans may be inattentive much of the time, but they are not dumb. Further unraveling of Obama's cockamamie Benghazi claim and cover-up with additional evidence of mishandling the lead-in seriously jeopardizes his reelection chances.

If all Obama can claim is he let the SEALs kill Osama bin Laden while he watched and his vaunted Muslim outreach got slapped away. Iran got the bomb anyway. Qaddafi and Mubarak are gone. But al Qaeda is moving into the Libya, Syria and Egyptian power vacuums to help ensure the Arab Spring becomes a democracy-free Arab Winter.

So, there goes the president's foreign policy standing. And he's sure got no economic accomplishments to vaunt, even with a teleprompter.

Already, the Journal reports from Libya that for months hopeful Americans ignored numerous warnings of trouble in that lawless land from government and militia sources and followed shoddy security procedures. The Brits had already pulled out of Benghazi. For days the State Dept. didn't even know what its admired ambassador was doing in Benghazi.

After a classified Thursday briefing from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sen. Susan Collins said security in Libya was "woefully inadequate, given the security threat environment." Rep. Buck McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, added, "The story now has been changed. There was a planned, premeditated attack."

The State Dept. is launching an Accountability Review Board to investigate. What do you bet its findings and the FBI's will be unavailable before Nov. 6?

The Obama crowd regularly seeks to reap credit for its boss by, for instance, leaking details of the Bin Laden hit and counter-espionage operations, even when they're actually British or Saudi. Now, some apparently are seeking to discredit the ambassador's dead security team, who were former SEALs and not armed with the mortars and rocket-propelled grenade launchers that the spontaneously attacking video-protesters spontaneously produced.

SEALs are well-known as seriously tough dudes. They are beyond bodyguards. They don't get to play much golf. But here's the sort of thing they do get to do:

Leap from airplanes over one country just after midnight at 40,000 feet, wearing oxygen masks and 120-pound packs. Using GPS screens on their chest, they silently steer their chutes a couple dozen miles into an adjacent country, land in the planned field and accomplish their mission.

By dawn that day or maybe several later, if all goes well, they're hiking back out eating lizards and leaves and back at home base watching an NFL game via satellite on AFN.

On an ideal SEAL mission, no one ever knows they were there and their weapons go unused. "If I'm firing this a lot," one SEAL told me last summer, tapping the M-16 clipped to his full gear and body armor, "then I'm having a very bad day."

Those four lost Americans had a very bad day on 9/11. Maybe 11/6 will be a bad day politically for those responsible.

 

 

Washington Examiner

The Obama you don't know

by Mark Tapscott

Few if any of his predecessors took the oath of office with higher public hopes for his success than President Obama on Jan. 20, 2009.

Millions of Americans hailed his election as an end to partisanship, a renewal of the spirit of compromise and a reinvigoration of the nation's highest ideals at home and abroad.

Above all, as America's first black chief executive, Obama symbolized the healing of long-festering wounds that were the terrible national legacy of slavery, the Reconstruction Era and Jim Crow. We would be, finally, one nation.

But after nearly four years in office, Obama has become a sharply polarizing figure.

His admirers believe he deserves a special place alongside Wilson, the Roosevelts and LBJ as one of the architects of benevolent government.

His critics believe he is trying to remake America in the image of Europe's social democracies, replacing America's ethos of independence and individual enterprise with a welfare state inflamed by class divisions.

In an effort to get a clearer picture of Obama -- his shaping influences, his core beliefs, his political ambitions and his accomplishments -- The Washington Examiner conducted a four-month inquiry, interviewing dozens of his supporters and detractors in Chicago and elsewhere, and studying countless court transcripts, government reports and other official documents.

Over the years and in two autobiographies, Obama has presented himself to the world as many things, including radical community organizer, idealistic civil rights lawyer, dynamic reformer in the Illinois and U.S. senates, and, finally, the cool presidential voice of postpartisan hope and change.

With his air of reasonableness and moderation, he has projected a remarkably likable persona. Even in the midst of a historically dirty campaign for re-election, his likability numbers remain impressive, as seen in a recent AP-GFK Poll that found 53 percent of adults have a favorable view of him.

But beyond the spin and the polls, a starkly different picture emerges. It is a portrait of a man quite unlike his image, not a visionary reformer but rather a classic Chicago machine pol who thrives on rewarding himself and his friends with the spoils of public office, and who uses his position to punish his enemies.

Peter Schweizer captures this other Obama with a bracing statistic in his book "Throw Them All Out," published last year. In the Obama economic stimulus program's Department of Energy loans, companies owned and run by Obama contributors and friends, like Solyndra's George Kaiser, received $16.4 billion. Those not linked to the president got only $4.1 billion. The Energy Department is far from the only federal program in which favoritism has heavily influenced federal grants.

To paraphrase Tammany Hall's George Washington Plunkitt, Obama has seen his opportunities and taken them, over and over.

 

Washington Examiner

A childhood of privilege, not hardship

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Obama and his bride Michelle Robinson, a fellow Harvard Law School graduate, on their wedding day, Oct. 3, 1992, in Chicago.

First lady Michelle Obama told the Democratic National Convention that "Barack and I were both raised by families who didn't have much in the way of money or material possessions."

It is a claim the president has repeated in his books, on the speech-making circuit and in countless media interviews. By his account, he grew up in a broken home with a single mom, struggled for years as a child in an impoverished Third World country and then was raised by his grandparents in difficult circumstances.

The facts aren't nearly so clear-cut.

Ann Dunham was just 18 years old when she gave birth to Obama. She was a freshman at the University of Hawaii. His Kenyan father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., was a few years older than Ann. They were married against family wishes.

Obama Sr. does not appear to have been welcoming or compassionate toward his new wife or son. It later turned out that he was secretly married to a Kenyan woman back home at the same time he fathered the young Obama.

He abandoned Obama Jr.'s mother when the boy was 1. In 1964, Dunham filed for a divorce that was not contested. Her parents helped to raise the young Obama.

Obama's mother met her second husband, an Indonesian named Lolo Soetoro, while working at the East-West Center in Hawaii. They married, and in 1967, the young Obama, then known as Barry Soetoro, traveled to Indonesia with his mother when the Indonesian government recalled his stepfather.

In Indonesia, the family's circumstances improved dramatically. According to Obama in his autobiography "Dreams from My Father," Lolo's brother-in-law was "making millions as a high official in the national oil company." It was through this brother-in-law that Obama's stepfather got a coveted job as a government relations officer with the Union Oil Co.

The family then moved to Menteng, then and now the most exclusive neighborhood of Jakarta, where bureaucrats, diplomats and economic elites reside.

A popular Indonesia travel site describes Menteng: "Designed by the Dutch Colonial Government in 1920s, Menteng still retains its graceful existence with its beautiful parks, cozy street cafes and luxurious housing complexes."

In 1971, his mother sent young Obama back to Hawaii, where his grandmother, Madelyn, known as Toots, would become one of the first female vice presidents of a Honolulu bank. His grandfather was in sales.

Obama's grandparents moved the same year into Punahou Circle Apartments, a sleek new 10-story apartment building just five blocks from the private Punahou School, which Obama would attend from 1971 to 1979.

Obama explains in "Dreams from My Father" that his admission to Punahou began "the start of something grand, an elevation in the family status that they took great pains to let everyone know."

To his credit, Obama did not downplay Punahou's upscale status, noting in his autobiography that it "had grown into a prestigious prep school, an incubator for island elites. Its reputation had helped sway my mother in her decision to send me back to the States."

Obama also admitted in the book that his grandfather pulled strings to get him into the school. "There was a long waiting list, and I was considered only because of the intervention of Gramps's boss, who was an alumnus."

The school still features a lush hillside campus overlooking the Waikiki skyline and the Pacific Ocean. It was one of the most expensive schools on the island, and both Obama and his half sister Maya Soetoro-Ng received scholarships.

While the Dunhams were not among the wealthiest families on the island, he nevertheless studied and socialized with the children of the social and financial elite. Obama has said he didn't fit in at the school. But that's not how other Hawaiians remember it.

Associated Press writer Sudhin Thanawala reported from Honolulu in 2008 that "classmates and teachers say Obama blended in well. He served on the editorial board of the school's literary magazine, played varsity basketball and sang in the choir. He went on the occasional date."

In his recent book "Barack Obama: The Story," Washington Post reporter David Maraniss said the future chief executive often smoked marijuana with prep school friends, rolling up the car windows to seek "total absorption," or "TA." They called themselves the "Choom Gang."

Edward Shanahan, a retired newspaper journalist who now edits and makes no effort to conceal his admiration for Obama, retraced his Hawaii years shortly after the president was elected.

Shanahan wrote that Obama lived in a "well-off neighborhood near the University of Hawaii where Barry, as he was known, resided in a comfortable home with his mother and her parents before she took him to Indonesia."

Sanahan said "our tour ended up on the lush, exquisitely maintained and altogether inviting campus of Punahou School, which we can imagine was a place of great comfort for Obama."

Tellingly, Obama has never lived in a black neighborhood. Maraniss reported in his book that when leftist activist Jerry Kellman interviewed Obama for a community organizing job in Chicago, he asked Obama how he felt about living and working in the black community for the first time in his life.

Obama accepted the job but chose not to live among those he would be organizing. Instead, he commuted 90 minutes each way daily from his apartment in Chicago's famous Hyde Park to the Altgeld Gardens housing project where he worked.

It was an early instance of Obama presenting himself one way while acting in quite a different way.

 

 

WSJ

Elizabeth Warren—Liberal Sweetheart, Massachusetts Underdog?

The Wall Street critic, Harvard Law professor and maybe Native American is having a hard time in her bid for Ted Kennedy's old seat.

by Eric Convey

Gloucester, Mass.

With polls putting the race for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts in a statistical dead heat, supporters of consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren eagerly awaited Thursday night's first head-to-head debate between the Harvard Law School professor and incumbent Sen. Scott Brown.

It was inevitable, their oft-heard reasoning went, that the frequent Wall Street critic would use her superior intellect and unimpeachable moral standing to vanquish Mr. Brown, who for more than two years has held the seat occupied for decades by the late Edward M. Kennedy.

But like the overall campaign so far, the debate did not go the way Ms. Warren must have planned. Mr. Brown attacked during the opening minute and kept her on the defensive for most of the hour-long exchange.

Now, with a little more than six weeks to go before the election, Democrats fighting to keep control of the U.S. Senate find themselves scrambling in a state where President Barack Obama is expected to trounce former Gov. Mitt Romney, and where Democrats hold every U.S. House seat, every statewide office, and an overwhelming majority in the state legislature.

Back in September 2011, the Warren campaign seemed to be off to an easy start. Once she announced her intent to run, other Democrats who had expressed interest dropped out. A minor candidate tried to oppose Ms. Warren in a Democratic primary but didn't survive the party's state convention.

Early press coverage of Ms. Warren was overwhelmingly favorable, and the Massachusetts political climate is hospitable to her. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans, 36% to 11%. Voters not registered with any political party make up 53% of the electorate, but they tend to vote Democratic.

"It's a heavily Democratic state in which liberal political views really do prevail," says Marc Landy, a professor of political science at Boston College. "There's a presumption in favor of the Democratic candidate."

But problems came early for the Warren campaign. Ms. Warren proclaimed herself the intellectual force behind the Occupy Wall Street movement, raising eyebrows even among Democrats who didn't count themselves as Occupy supporters.

Her own television advertising was less than flattering—until recently, when the commercials stopped featuring the candidate herself and instead highlighted prospective voters praising her. "She's earnest and tends to be hectoring. The consumer advocate role comes across as somewhat one-dimensional for a candidate for U.S. Senate," said Timothy Sherratt, a professor of political science at Gordon College in Wenham, Mass.

And in April, when reporters began questioning whether Ms. Warren concocted a Native American ancestry to advance her career (a charge that Mr. Brown led with during Thursday night's debate), she responded clumsily. As a result, her campaign lost valuable time over the summer playing defense when it should have been introducing her to the electorate on its own terms.

Throughout the race, Ms. Warren has highlighted her fight against Wall Street, apparently without considering that the state is home to major employers such as Fidelity Investments and State Street Corp. According to the Boston Business Journal, the six largest financial-services firms in Massachusetts employ 35,000 people in the state and are important fixtures of the region's culture.

Ms. Warren has also struggled to shake an elitist image. At various points, including during Thursday's debate, Mr. Brown has made hay of the fact that she reported making $349,000 at Harvard in 2009 yet argues that college costs too much for students. In defense, Ms. Warren said Thursday that she has taught for far less in the past and is proud to have landed at a prestigious private university.

Mr. Brown is not without his own political challenges.

He seldom refers to himself as a Republican and at times appears even to be running against his own party. In polls conducted in late spring by David Paleologos of Boston's Suffolk University, Mr. Brown could not clear the 50% hurdle against Ms. Warren or other hypothetical opponents. That's a substantial red flag, Mr. Paleologos says.

And as much as Mr. Brown portrays himself as an independent-minded Republican free from the party's right wing—he supports legal abortion and gay rights—he's still a reliable GOP vote on a number of issues. That doesn't play well in Massachusetts.

Analysts across the political spectrum agree that the election is likely to come down to independent voters—a group that broke substantially in Mr. Brown's favor when he ran for the seat in early 2010.

"Warren just needs to keep it close among independents," Mr. Paleologos says. Mr. Brown, by contrast, will have to win the group by 20 or more percentage points. He generally had a slight lead over Ms. Warren in polls taken in late winter and spring, but the race has tightened. In such circumstances, the courtship of independents is ever more vital.

For Mr. Brown, that means keeping voters like Jim Ugone, who agreed to chat about the race on a recent evening at a bar along the waterfront in Gloucester.

Mr. Ugone, who works in financial services and isn't affiliated with any party, voted for Mr. Brown in the 2010 special election but is considering voting this year for Ms. Warren. Doing that might help maintain a balance of power in Washington, Mr. Ugone surmises.

But he also feels a certain loyalty to Mr. Brown. "He got elected because of guys like me—business people who want to hold up some of the values we represent in a very Democratic state," Mr. Ugone said. "He's a good guy. He's a regular Joe."

The candidates debate again, in the second of four meetings, on Oct. 1.

Mr. Convey is a vice president at O'Neill & Associates, a Boston-based public-relations and government-relations firm. He was a journalist in Boston for 17 years

 

 

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