Joe Biden had the last laugh this week, but this whole debate season still depresses me.
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I agree so, so much. I think this election dog-and-pony-show bums Obama out too. You have no idea how badly I want to see Obama in the White House without the looming threat of re-election. I have enough wild optimism and blind faith to think that we'd see at LEAST poverty and civil liberties come back to the table. The fall is going to hurt, isn't it?
Listen, the thing to remember is that this is all theater. It's all fake, and you don't have to be depressed about that, too much. Everybody talks about the poll numbers, but they're talking about the wrong numbers. Yes, according to the popular vote, Obama is just barely ahead of Romney, but that doesn't matter. Because when you look at the electoral college, the odds of Obama losing are just next to nil. He's so far ahead it's silly. Even the good conservative sites have admitted this.
So with that in mind, Obama is mostly doing something very smart: he's keeping his mouth shut. People excoriated Obama at the debate for not brining up the 47% comment. But if he had, then Romney would have had the chance to get out of that morass with the comments he had prepared for just that occasion. Why give Romney a multi-network, nationally televised opportunity to do that? Instead, Obama just kept plugging on about Romney's tax plan.
Obama was flustered, but mostly because Romney COMPLETELY LIED about his tax plan that night. He flat-out said that the plan he had promised for 18 months was not what he said. And when Obama finally said something along the lines of "For 18 months Romney's had a tax plan, and now it's 'nevermind'" that was apparently when Obama's second-by-second poll numbers were lowest of the whole night. Obama and Co. are not stupid. They know that their best bet is to just give Romney enough rope to hang himself with.
So don't be too down. This is just theater. None of it matters. This campaign is just theater at this point.
I appreciate your confidence in an Obama victory, Nushustu, but I am uncomfortable with depending too much on the electoral college for a victory; that whole system of deciding presidential races seems kind of sketchy in a democracy that is supposed to be one person/one vote. A slim margin for a popular vote is still a victory, yes; but I would hate it to be so slim there is some question of losing the popular vote but winning the election due to the electoral college.
I agree that a lot of this "story" about poll numbers may be just part of election theater – the media is very vested in elections being a horse race. People generally get very passionate about supposed media bias one way or the other. But bring up the point that much of media is now being driven by profits and that could be a problem, and that statement elicits shrugs and/or glazed eyes. However, I do think that fact contributes heavily to how elections are covered here. Being dependent on ad dollars means being dependent on people watching, and, rightly or wrongly, the media does not think people will tune in if the elections aren't close. Nor does media think people will tune in to watch a 4-hour round table on poverty, or other substantial policy issues that could make up our election coverage instead of the steady stream of changing poll numbers. They likely are right about that, although I think that could be changed with some effort on the part of both the media and the public. But it's not where we stand now, and while I don't think we should necessarily be depressed about this latest round of poll numbers, it might be appropriate to feel a little despair over some of these other issues.