Category Archives: Barack Obama

Why Biden Won

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Two of the big research themes of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab converged in last night’s VP Debate: Social Sentiment Analytics and Transmedia Storytelling. The analytics part is fairly straightforward. For the last year in association with the Signals Analysis and Interpretation Lab, we have been recording the real time sentiment on Twitter of the Presidential Candidates. This is a huge corpus of data and during last week’s Presidential debate we were analyzing about 1400 tweets per second. Last night Joe Biden seemed to overwhelm Paul Ryan both in volume and in positive sentiment on our real time dashboard.

Which leads me to the second part of our work, Transmedia Storytelling. As our Chief Advisor Henry Jenkins has taught us, Transmedia is the art of telling a single story across multiple platforms, with each piece adding to the total narrative. The story cannot be told in a single commercial or a single debate as each piece adds to the transmedia narrative. Last night Joe Biden helped clarify the Democratic narrative that had been so muddied in the first debate by Mitt Romney’s desperate dash to the center.Two elements of the Democratic difference were hammered home relentlessly.

Clashing in a feisty, hard-edged debate, Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday night repeatedly accused challenger Paul D. Ryan and his running mate, Mitt Romney, of favoring the rich at the expense of middle-class Americans and engaging in loose talk that could lead the country to another war.

Ryan tried to put Biden on the defensive over Libya, but it didn’t work.

BIDEN: I will be very specific. Number one, the — this lecture on embassy security — the congressman here cut embassy security in his budget by $300 million below what we asked for, number one. So much for the embassy security piece. Number two, Governor Romney, before he knew the facts, before he even knew that our ambassador was killed, he was out making a political statement which was panned by the media around the world. And this talk about this — this weakness. I — I don’t understand what my friend’s talking about here. We — this is a president who’s gone out and done everything he has said he was going to do. This is a guy who’s repaired our alliances so the rest of the world follows us again.

On Tuesday Obama will have an opportunity to press this theme. Romney has surrounded himself with Bush era Neocons like John Bolton and Dan Senor, who clearly would like nothing more than to start another war in Iran (and maybe one is Syria as well). I’ll have more to say on that subject on Monday, but for now it is safe to say that Biden got the Democratic Transmedia story back on track.

 

Debate Post Mortem

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For Obama the debate was an unmitigated disaster. It was a low energy performance by a man who seems to think he is sitting on a lead and has to play a conservative game. Obama kept looking to moderator Jim Leher to be the fact checker on Romney’s rather outrageous statement that his tax plan didn’t mean what it means. But Romney had already intimidated Leher, who effectively became the empty chair.

From a body language perspective, Obama seemed listless and disengaged, almost as if he didn’t want to be there. He kept looking down and seemed to be constantly on the defensive. Most of all his “no drama Obama” demeanor was the wrong tone to carry in the face of such aggressive attacks from Romney. If Axelrod and Plouffe advised him to abstain from attacking Romney (not one mention of 47%, Cayman Islands, Vouchercare) they made a terrible miscalculation. Even if that was the game plan, why didn’t Obama realize it wasn’t working and assume a more aggressive stance in the second half?

Now it will be up to Joe Biden to take Paul Ryan to the woodshed next week. And then Obama will have to drink a double espresso in two weeks and come into round two ready to confront Romney on every issue.

Political Endgame

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Nate Silver is the most reliable assessor of political polling in our country. His latest column seems to indicate that President Obama is in pretty good shape. Here are some highlights

This is probably about the last week, for instance, in which Mitt Romney can reasonably hope that President Obama’s numbers will deteriorate organically because of a convention bounce…

First, the polling by this time in the cycle has been reasonably good, especially when it comes to calling the winners and losers in the race. Of the 19 candidates who led in the polls at this stage since 1936, 18 won the popular vote (Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 is the exception), and 17 won the Electoral College (Al Gore lost it in 2000, along with Mr. Dewey).

There has not been any tendency, at least at this stage of the race, for the contest to break toward the challenging candidate.

Instead, it’s actually the incumbent-party candidate who has gained ground on average since 1936. On average, the incumbent candidate added 4.6 percentage points between the late September polls and his actual Election Day result, whereas the challenger gained 2.5 percentage points.

The last point seems the most salient. Political races often become self-fulfilling prophecies in the last few weeks. The stench that Romney is a loser grows and so contributions slow down.

But Mr. Romney’s grass-roots fund-raising is not nearly so robust as Mr. Obama’s. In order to match Mr. Obama dollar for dollar, as he intends to, Mr. Romney must therefore spend more time than the president at big donor events, at a time when challengers might traditionally spend more time on the road campaigning.

The conventional wisdom was that Romney would not need to raise as much money as Obama because he had the mighty Super-Pacs behind him. In a little noted article, the Wall Street Journal reported that Karl Rove and company are not have the influence they thought they would.

But signs are few that super PACs have had the major impact that both supporters and critics predicted. The flood of spending doesn’t appear to have significantly influenced voter opinion in key states in the presidential contest or in top congressional races.

On the presidential front, conservative outside groups backing Republican candidates say they already have played their most significant role, and that their influence will fade as the candidates themselves present their closing arguments to voters.

I believe this is because at a certain point there are diminishing returns to carpet bombing ads, especially for a product that people don’t want to buy like Mitt Romney. So now the remaining danger for the Democrats is overconfidence. If Obama can use what Nate Silver calls the “tendency of the contest to break towards the incumbent” and run a “throw the bums out” campaign (chart above) against a “do nothing congress” in the last month, then we really might have a choice election.

Karl Rove’s Nightmare

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The conventional wisdom is that Republican Super Pac money will overwhelm Democrats in the last six weeks of the fall election. This week Bernstein Research put out some data that lead me to believe that the returns to scale on TV advertising may actually be diminishing.

We believe it is not implausible that at some point, consumers will get so annoyed at having seen a commercial over-and-over again that there could actually be a negative impact. The logic being, consumers would attach negative feelings toward the brand (e.g. presidential candidate), instead of positive ones.

Here is how Bernstein charts it.

Bernstein calculates that in the battleground states 95% of the viewing public will see between 75 and 100 ads for Romney per week. Although classic marketing theory suggests that seeing more than three spots per week on a product produces diminishing results, we have never seen such “ultra-high frequency” in advertising.

Only time will tell if we have hit a wall on political TV advertising and Karl Rove’s grand scheme for buying the election fails.

Turning Point

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The apparent Obama post convention bump does not surprise me. Much of my life has been spent evaluating cultural projects as a producer or manager, from the early records of The Band, to Mean Streets or The Last Waltz, I was always pretty sure when the production made an emotional impact on the audience. Mitt Romney’s convention, with the exception of the Clint Eastwood/Samuel Beckett Moment, was as dull as dishwater. It felt like a Lions Club convention and all the faces of color seemed planted by a casting director for diversity on a reality show. In contrast the Democratic Convention had an air of authenticity that felt like the real America of 2012, not the fantasy America of Romney and Paul’s Back to the Fifties movement. The Republicans want to re-litigate issues like birth control, voting rights, and abortion that most of us thought were settled by 1964 when the voting rights act was passed or 1973 when Roe vs. Wade was settled by the Supreme Court.

So the Obama slogan of “Forward” worked. It would not only be back to the fifties socially with Romney/Ryan, but back to the freewheeling days pre 2008 crash on Wall Street. All it takes is a head of the SEC in the bag for Wall Street (like Chris Cox), for the Masters of the Universe to be unleashed again. John Paulson’s million dollar donations to Romney’s super pac will be a bargain. But I don’t think Paulson’s bet will pay off. Willard is a loser.

But more important than all of Republican convention failings was for the Democrats to give a series of really fine political speeches from Deval Patrick, Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Every one of them had passion, ideas, poetry and hope. For the Democrats the staging was perfect (at least showbiz support counts for something) as when Barack arrived on stage at the end of Bill Clinton’s speech. For the Republicans it was amateur hour in Dixie to allow Clint to ramble on unscripted for the first 13 minutes of your prime time final night. Once you’ve screwed up the opening (as any film, TV or stage director will tell you), it’s almost impossible to get the audience back emotionally. Mitt didn’t. And so he left Tampa soggy and with a negative bounce down even before the Democrats started.

Hope and Work

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There have been times in the last four weeks when I have wondered if the Republican’s overwhelming money advantage and their very effective voter suppression operation might overwhelm Barack Obama in November. But listening to Michelle Obama’s inspired speech tonight has done what political conventions are supposed to do. It has given me the encouragement to get to work helping to re-elect the President. What I liked so much about the speech was that it felt so damned authentic. Yes I know there were speechwriters involved, but it felt like Michelle’s voice from the first word to the last. I loved this section.

And I didn’t think it was possible, but today, I love my husband even more than I did four years ago…even more than I did 23 years ago, when we first met.

I love that he’s never forgotten how he started.

I love that we can trust Barack to do what he says he’s going to do, even when it’s hard – especially when it’s hard.

I love that for Barack, there is no such thing as “us” and “them” – he doesn’t care whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican, or none of the above…he knows that we all love our country…and he’s always ready to listen to good ideas…he’s always looking for the very best in everyone he meets.

And I love that even in the toughest moments, when we’re all sweating it – when we’re worried that the bill won’t pass, and it seems like all is lost – Barack never lets himself get distracted by the chatter and the noise.

Just like his grandmother, he just keeps getting up and moving forward…with patience and wisdom, and courage and grace.

And he reminds me that we are playing a long game here…and that change is hard, and change is slow, and it never happens all at once.

But eventually we get there, we always do.

And as she was speaking these words the camera was on shots of the wonderfully rainbow colored audience, drinking it in and basking in the pride that we all feel in Barack and Michelle. My sense is that Barack is now moving into the lead in the race. Nate Silver tells us why.

1. Polls usually overrate the standing of the candidate who just held his convention.
2. Mitt Romney just held his convention. But he seems to have gotten a below-average bounce out of it. The national polls that have come out since the Republican National Convention have shown an almost exact tie in the race.
3. If the polls overrate Mr. Romney, and they show only a tie for him now, then he will eventually lose.

Michelle is right that we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us to defeat the plutocrats. But it is work worth doing.

Globalization Fail

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A few weeks ago I wrote about the anomie that enveloped me when I attended the Aspen Ideas Festival. The sense that what was taking place in our economy and society was the effect of forces outside our control. The term used for this notion is globalization. So yesterday the New York Times put out a long piece about how through a combination of carrots and sticks we had gotten the Japanese auto manufacturers to put plants in America and hire American workers. The article asked this question.

For years, high-tech executives have argued that the United States cannot compete in making the most popular electronic devices. Companies like Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, which rely on huge Asian factories, assert that many types of manufacturing would be too costly and inefficient in America. Only overseas, they have said, can they find an abundance of educated midlevel engineers, low-wage workers and at-the-ready suppliers.

But the migration of Japanese auto manufacturing to the United States over the last 30 years offers a case study in how the unlikeliest of transformations can unfold. Despite the decline of American car companies, the United States today remains one of the top auto manufacturers and employers in the world. Japanese and other foreign companies account for more than 40 percent of cars built in the United States, employing about 95,000 people directly and hundreds of thousands more among parts suppliers.

I posted the article on my Facebook page and got this rant back from John Papola.

Why should the corrupt crony thugs in DC prevent Americans from trading with other people just because of some stupid line on a map. The “globalization gospel” is called “freedom” and “free exchange” and its the roots of western civilization. Are you seriously proposing mercantilism? The 17th century called. It wants it’s defunct doctrines back.

But my response to John is that his vision of freedom in America is a mirage. In the U.S. those with power use it to insulate themselves from competitive forces by winning favorable tax treatment and other forms of what economists call “rent seeking.” I reject the notion that all of these changes that make it so hard to find jobs for people without college educations, are just the inevitable forces of technological change. Globalization was a choice on the part of capital to weaken the bargaining power of workers by using outsourcing. As the auto “insourcing” model proves, there is no inherent reason why U.S. workers can’t be just as productive as Asian workers. Because the Reagan administration (and every one to follow) made it easy for companies to close down factories and move jobs offshore, the rent seekers triumphed.

The irony of course is that I know John Papola hates rent seeking crony capitalism as much as I do. For a liberal like myself, it is anguishing that both Clinton and Obama have been just as obsequious to the wishes of Wall Street as Reagan, Bush 1 and 2. What we need is a new reform politics that will combine elements of market choice (such as our discussion on school vouchers) with a simple set of regulations that bring the extraordinary power of capital to heel. We will still need a smart government to build the roads, run the police and fire departments and provide a social safety net. My guess is that the Democrats are less in the bag to the 1% than the Republicans and so they are better positioned to be the messengers of reform. As I have said before, cashiering Tim Geithner and hiring Joe Stiglitz would be a good start for Obama’s second term.

Looking Better

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I have to say this was a good day for the President. Not only was his health care plan declared constitutional, but also some signs of a true long lasting economic recovery are beginning to fall into place.

First to the Affordable Care Act. I think Roberts’ vote was the true mark of a great Chief Justice. He saw that his court was deeply in danger of becoming totally politicized and a tool of the Republican Party. I think he truly believe Congress has the power to tax and since Obama had made that as a back up argument to the Commerce Clause, he seized on it. Beyond that, I think it secures Obama’s place in history besides FDR (Social Security) and LBJ (Medicare).

Beyond healthcare I was struck by two articles in this morning’s paper. The first was on housing.

But roughly six years after the housing market began its longest and deepest slide since the Great Depression, a growing number of experts and people who actually put money into housing believe the end has come.The trend is clear in the data. The widely respected S.&P./Case-Shiller index reported earlier this week that sales prices for existing homes rose in April for the first time this year. Several other measures, including a seasonally adjusted version of the index, show that price increases began in February. The pace of housing construction has increased. And the National Association of Realtorssaid Wednesday that pending home sales climbed to the highest level since the end of a federal tax credit for first-time buyers in September 2010.

It may be anecdotal, but you certainly feel in LA that the market has turned around. This would be a critical part of a sustained recovery. Continue reading →

Bring it On

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Cory Booker revealed the real stakes for the November Election. Faced with having to raise most of the money for his next campaign (maybe Governor?), Cory chose to suck up to Wall Street on Meet The Press and trash Obama. Booker’s remarks defending Bain Capital forced Obama to reiterate why Savage Capital is an issue in this election.

In the spotlight of the world stage, President Barack Obama on Monday unapologetically defended his campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s record at the private equity firm Bain Capital and vowed to keep up the onslaught all the way to November.

“This issue is not a distraction,” Obama defiantly declared at a press conference wrapping up a NATO summit in his hometown of Chicago. “This is what this campaign is going to be about.”

“If your main argument for how to grow the economy is ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,’ then you’re missing what this job is about,” the president said, evidently relishing the opportunity to knock Romney.

“It doesn’t mean you weren’t good at private equity, but that’s not what my job is as president. My job is to take into account everybody, not just some. My job is to make sure that the country is growing not just now, but ten years from now and 20 years from now,” he said.

To my mind this is a bit of a gift, even though Booker clearly was looking out for his own reelection not Obama’s. Bain is just exhibit one in the argument against the Leveraged Buy Out Business. Financed by ex-con Mike Milken in the 1980′s, Mitt was just a piker compared to Henry Kravis or Steve Schwartzman. He was B League. The whole industry of leverage is a plague upon our society.Before Mitt Romney and Miker Milken, debt to equity ratios were rational. After them, the use of junk bond debt exploded and we never looked back until the whole House of Cards collapsed in 2008.  Now we are considering electing this man, Romney, the Leverage Buy out guy, President?

No. Bring on the populist battle we have been waiting for. The 1% vs the 99%.

Jamie Dimon’s Gift to Obama

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The biggest political problem Obama has with both the Progressives and the Libertarians is that he pussied out on the Wall Street Bailout. No one went to jail, unlike the Savings and Loan Crisis of the 1980′s. We paid out the banks 100 cents on the dollar for billions of essentially worthless Credit Default Swaps and other forms of insurance written with no collateral behind it.

This week, Jamie Dimon gave Obama a do over. Obama needs to spend the next six months in a populist crusade to enact the Volker Rule is it’s strictest form. A form that would have banned the obviously phony “hedge” that JP Morgan is now going to loose $3 Billion on.

“The timing, prices and particular choice of index that people are saying that J. P. Morgan used seems to support the view that there was more to the trade than just a hedge,” said James Parascandola, a veteran credit-default-swaps trader formerly with MF Global Holdings Ltd. and Barclays PLC.

Already, Republicans like accused inside trader, Representative Spencer Bachus, the most powerful Republican on finance, are coming to Jamie Dimon’s defense.

“Even with this loss, I believe they’re one of the most profitable financial institutions in the country,” Mr. Bachus said at a House hearing on Wednesday morning. “There is no risk from this loss to depositors or to taxpayers.…They remain a very profitable, viable institution.”

Never mind.

For Obama, this is a Teddy Roosevelt moment. Roosevelt gave a speech in Provincetown, Massachusetts right after the Panic of 1907, which eerily mimicks the crash of 2008. He called out “the malefactors of great wealth” and went on to say,

“. . . [these men] combine to bring about as much financial stress as possible, in order to discredit the policy of the government and thereby secure a reversal of that policy, so that they may enjoy unmolested the fruits of their own evil-doing. . . I regard this contest as one to determine who shall rule this free country—the people through their governmental agents, or a few ruthless and domineering men whose wealth makes them peculiarly formidable because they hide behind the breastworks of corporate organization.”

For Barack’s whole administration he has followed his Harvard instincts and stuck with The Establishment. Thats why Geithner and Summers were his economic team and Gates was his defense team. Now, like Teddy he has to risk being called a class traitor and cast off his establishment team in the hopes that he could fulfill Tom Paine’s promise of our Revolution, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

What is remarkable is that Obama essentially can fulfill this promise by doing nothing.

If he is able to defend the laws he already passed—the Affordable Care Act, the Women’s Equal Pay laws and the Sequester passed in the summer of 2011—we will have “begun anew”. Why?

Let’s start with the sequester.

Since 1955, Progressives have tried to cut the Military Budget, without success.But if nothing changes, starting in January the Defense Budget will take huge cuts.

For the Pentagon, that would mean about $50 billion a year in less defense spending from fiscal year 2013 to FY2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO baseline already assumes roughly $450 billion in reduced defense outlays, coming from provisions of the Budget Control Act.

Lindsay Graham, Mr. Defense Pork is outraged at the very thought of the cuts.

“I have heard from people after every engagement: ‘why do you need this military?’ only to have to ramp up, go to war without the equipment, send the (National) Guard off with a shell of a force. What happens if China gets bolder, Iran gets a nuclear weapon, (or) we have to go into Yemen?”

I’m sure if Mitt Romney becomes President, Lindsay won’t have to worry.

So what about Bernanke’s notion that the Sequester will drive us off a “Fiscal Cliff” ? Well due to the brilliant negotiating by Barney Frank in the conference committee, there are no cuts to Medicare or Social Security in the Sequester. So does the “fiscal cliff” arrive because we are cutting the military industrial complex? Highly doubtful. The weapons systems now being built are on very long cycles and it is doubtful this employment would slow down. So what happens when the Bush Tax Cuts expire (the other part of Bernanke’s fiscal cliff)? Quite frankly, very little. The rich are not going to stop buying $100 million paintings, just because their income tax rate went up 4%.

So this is all Barack has to do. Push through the Volker Rule and threaten to veto any change to the Budget Control Act of 2011 or the Affordable Care Act.  An America with a radically reduced military budget, a decent and fair universal health care system and a financial sector under control would be able to face the future unburdened with Neoconservative fantasies of being the world’s cop and with an economy not built around speculation but around production and services sold world wide.

Now all Barack has to do is get reelected.