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This article is about the importance of voting and how voting for a third party candidate or no candidate at all will solve no problems. Just because a candidate does not always persent the best ideas the whole picture has to be viewed. In the case of Obama-Romney many people say that Obama has not had a "good" term and will therefore not vote for him, but my feelings towards that is Romney is not going to do any better and no third party candidate will have a chance to win. The author brings up the point that even if you are in a state that will surely vote one way that you should still cast your vote. Being in California for most of us what is the incentive to vote if we know the state is going blue? I think that in this system with the electoral college it is hard for me to see the point in voting if my vote will not really count that much. Just wondering thoughts on this topic of voting.

This article is pretty interesting. I think that the "third-party debate" is an interesting one, and I don't know exactly where I stand on it. On one hand, I really do think that the two-party system and the electoral college, together, hurt the purity of the American democratic policy. On the other hand, in an election like this, I think it would be irresponsible to vote for a third-party candidate as a liberal. Romney could win, and every vote that goes to a green-party candidate is a vote taken away from Obama. It really is a bad situation for voters, but that's just how it is.

This is a little unrelated, but I see the best bet at third party happening in America is the formation of a new party for the Tea Party. The Tea Party is very different than the mainstream Republican party. Michelle Bachman is in a whole other universe than Mitt Romney politically. If Mitt Romney loses the election, I really think the Republican party has some serious thinking to do about how they want to shape their party. It is completely unhelpful to the democratic process to have people like Michelle Bachman and Mitt Romney in the same party. Michelle Bachman has basically absurd views, stating things like the number 2 to Hillary Clinton is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Mitt Romney is much more reasonable. I don't know how if this will actually happen, but I could definitely see a Tea Party forming as their own party.

I think this video is interesting because it demonstrates not only Romney's hope that he can move past the negative press that the video Mother Jones released brought to his campaign, but also how he will try to pose the statements in a way that will benefit his campaign. Trying to avoid talking about the comments would make him seem weak and I can understand why Romney would want to face them head on so as to prevent even more anger (I don't think he has actually been that successful in doing this). Romney discusses his comments as opinions he has always held and while he originally states that he was referring mostly to the campaign and voters, at the end of the video he mentions that he carries this opinion "day in and day out" and it is "the course of America" that he is concerned with. Discussing the negative comments only in the light of the race would seem like a smarter idea, so I wonder why Romney would even end with this comment? Another perplexing part of this video is how Romney starts off by saying he knows there are some voters he simply will not get, about half of the nation, but then goes on to say that he will do whatever he can to get as many votes as possible. Obviously I understand the desire to collect as many votes as he can, but he is more aware than anyone that there are some Americans who simply will not vote for him, especially after the comments he made about the country's dependents. Though this is a pretty clear dichotomy, it is interesting to see how Romney so blatantly speaks of it and how the faulty logic comes right out of the governor struggling to get his opinion across during the interview. This reactionary type of response is also seen when interviewer tries to steer Romney towards a specific issue and Romney bounces back to classic conservative rhetoric.

Yeah, I think the 47% comment really sealed the deal on Obama winning the election. The Republican's attempt to humanize Mitt Romney at the convention was destroyed by the release of this video. The comments are clearly offensive, and like John said, there is no way that Romney can look good when talking about these comments. It completely fulfills the stereotype that lots of Americans have about Mitt Romney being out of touch and disingenuous when he talks about helping the middle class.

Yeah he's definitely scrambling to recover from that comment. I don't have much to say, but check out this ad from the Obama campaign: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=B9xCCaseop4. Pretty harsh. Romney's had a bad couple weeks.

This editorial written by Danielle Pletka, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute criticizes Romney's foreign policy speech on Monday October 8th for offering little in the way of either vision or specifics to separate himself from Obama. Plettka writes that Romney, "sensed an opening" in foreign policy after the Obama administration appeared to bungle the September 11 Libyan attack. She says that Romney needs to show voters that "he's not simply George Bush retread" itching to declare war on Iran and Syria. It is interesting that this conservative thinks that no Republicans have made a case that they will actually do anything differently than Obama. She suggests that Romney help voters connect American global power with prosperity, its dominance of the world's important waterways with flourishing trade and the exporting of democratic ideals with more open "nourished markets. She refers to the importance of the US's "benign" influence since WWII. Look up benign..it doesn't mean the war, death and violence we seen in Iraq and Afghanistan . What she means is that the U.S. has never interfered for 'malevolent" reasons. It's hard to imagine how the US would be perceived as benign in all of the military intervention.

This article shows pretty well a lot of what we've seen of Romney. It seems like his campaign is just based on criticizing Obama, and since there's an opening in the foreign policy area he's moved away from the economy. He's looking for criticisms to make without offering substantive policy proposals, and I think that's because Obama's policies are basically centrist policies. It's a weird situation that Obama, as a moderate, has this unique ability to inspire so much vitriol among the conservative right, and Romney's trying to capitalize.

I'm in the foreign policy group for the issues project at school, and I can tell you with certainty that the differences between Obama and Romney in terms of foreign policy are very small. It is more of a philosophical difference. In reality, the troops will leave Afghanistan in 2014, we will most likely not send troops to Syria or Iran, and we will continue to support Israel, regardless of who is president. Romney is really just trying to create a contrast between his foreign policy and Obama's, but there aren't any major differences, so he has latched onto this whole Libya thing.

This article addresses the effect of George Bush's legacy on the current election and how it was reflected in the conventions. Clinton, in his speech at the DNC, compared the net job creation of the two parties. This article says that ultimately, not just this sentence but Clinton's entire speech came down to that point: evoking the successes of the Democrats while reminding voters of the many failures of George W. Bush. Clinton's presence, the article says, turned the race into Obama and Clinton vs. Romney and Bush. The article cites some interesting historical examples of presidents who were able to win despite the temporary unpopularity of their parties at the time, and how those candidates distanced themselves from the failed policies with concrete, factual differences in their philosophies. Romney, the article says, has failed to do so.

Great post. I really enjoyed reading this article because I do believe that the legacy of the last elected party plays a major role in future elections. If a president from a particular party succeeds in his own term, his political party gains more credibility because people will connect a president's success with his party. For example(hypothetically speaking), If a democratic president successfully relieves the U.S from economic depression, in the future if depression occurs people would begin to think a democrat is the right candidate to fix the problem.

I agree that the Republican's avoidance of anything too heavily Bush-related is not working in their favor, and like this article notes, whenever a political sensitivity makes a candidate vulnerable, ignoring it is certainly not the best course of action. But this article also shows how Romney is just not well-suited to actually addressing the past failures of Republicans, both because of the early failures in his campaign to sell himself as the type of economically-focused candidate voters want and his unclear values and opinions, and makes it clear that the Republican who will erase the legacy of Bush will not be Romney.

This article is pretty long and gets technical in parts, but I really like it because it gets at the heart of an issue I have with both debates. Each candidate, VP included, throws around "studies" with impunity. Each one has multiple testimonies to back up his point. The main point from the article that stuck with me is that any blogger or op-ed author can call his analyses a "study," and the candidate can cite these less-than-credible sources without much distinction. The author reaches the conclusion that Romney's plan does not simply need to reach a net zero, but instead needs to generate a massive surplus to work. If the numbers are possibly these for the first scenario, the author argues, they definitely are not for the second. In the second half, the piece basically tears apart the six studies citied by the Romney campaign to support the tax plan as not affecting the middle class. I like this piece because, with Romney and Obama often referencing the "arithmetic" behind the truth and urging each other to "do the math," I see this article as actually following through. The author does just that: he uses pretty objective figures to poke holes in the Romney tax plan, suggesting that the "alternatives" Romney would be to tax the middle class or grow the federal deficit. I honestly didn't understand the tax jargon entirely, but the points the author brings up about the six cited studies are compelling to me. The holes he pokes in them highlight two main ideas for me. One, with all the desire for facts that I feel during debates and speeches, it's important to remember that these statistics and values are often conflicting, loaded, or contested. The way he tears down studies is fascinating to me not because they are blatant lies, but because they are often misrepresenting totally true information. The second point I took away from it, which will color my view of the next debate, is the incredibly difficult position the candidates are in with regard to the studies.

The Obama Campaign finally responds to the attacks made by Romney about his inability to "keep America safe". This post is important because Romney attacks Obama's National Security during his term in office, claiming Obama did not do a good job of keeping Americans safe.

The comment that the author cites from adviser Michèle Flournoy, that Romney has "no credibility since he's been both for and against our Libya policy," seems like a strong tactic for Obama to be using. This can't be the only aspect of Romney's foreign policy stances that the President could target as not very resolute. The other thing I can't help but think about whenever foreign policy is brought up during the debates is the unequal position the two candidates are in. The claim that you cite Romney making, that Obama has failed to "keep America safe," is an impossible claim for Obama to make about Romney. He has had no substantial hand in foreign policy as governor of Massachusetts. His foreign policy record is made up of things he has said, while Obama's is made up of things he has done and real circumstances he has led the country in. He has much more to criticize by default. In this way, I don't see accusations by Romney or defenses by Obama as that informative during debates and campaigning.

As the election approaches, each candidate is doing anything in his power to obtain more votes. In Colorado,Florida and Nevada the Latino voting population could possibly determine who wins the 2012 election. President Obama has a "leg up" on Romney with the Latino voters, but will Romney be able to do anything to make himself more appealing to Latino voters? If not, how devastating will the outcome be for his campaign?

They are chasing the latino votes, definitely. Their discussion of this in the last debate was interesting - Obama accused Romney of considering the Arizona immigration law as a "model for the country," which as far as I can tell just isn't true. Who knows with Romney, though - he certainly has been associating with the guy who designed that law. In response to John's point, I think the Romney campaign is kind of forced to stick to the economic aspects of gender discrimination and Hispanic issues. The fact is that the Republican party has a worse record on rights for minorities, so they're playing up their statement that the improved economy under Romney would help get rid of the gender/racial inequities in the country.

It's clear now that the Republicans have a serious problem with Latino support. I wonder how they will deal with this problem in the future. I think bipartisan immigration reform could be a big deal. I see that being the big issues in the next couple years. It seems like demographically, if the Republicans can't get any support from people of color, are going to have an issue as Latinos are the largest growing population in America.

This article stood out to me, because it is exactly why I see Romney's plans as a completely the opposite of what American needs: they aren't any different than George W. Bush's. Americans saw what happened under George W. Bush, and nobody wants to go back to that. This line in the piece really summed up why Romney is doing so poorly, "To win the kind of victory that conservatives seem to think they should be winning, the Republican Party needs two things: A domestic agenda that offers more to hard-pressed families than just generic conservative rhetoric about the genius of capitalism, and a foreign policy program that reflects the hard lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan." As a liberal, I would never vote for Mitt Romney, but I do understand that the economy is not where a lot of people wanted it to be after Obama's first term. The question is: can Romney do a better job? I see a lot of similarities between Romney's policies and George W. Bush's policies, so I think that the economy would do worse. If other Americans, like the author of this article, see the same similarities, I don't see how Romney can win in November.

I think it is interesting, and absurd, how the Republican Party has looked for things to blame on some of their failings on. That being said, I also think it is unfair that past President's records affect prospective candidates chances, on either side of the political spectrum. Just because Romney is in the same political party as Bush dos not mean he will do similar things(even though he probably will do some). I agree with Anna that Romney and Ryan need to separate from Bush to establish that they are not the same and will not have the same results. Regardless of their policies I believe that candidates should be evaluated on their merits, and while the past should be considered, and their merits alone. To me, that is what this article is really saying.

Cameron, I agree with your idea - that parties can shift, and individual candidates shouldn't be bound into the economic principles of their party - but until Romney provides substantive plans for the economy, all anyone is going to hear from his campaign is the same conservative "free market" rhetoric that they heard from the Bush campaign. What he needs to do is lay out a specific plan and note what he's learned from the economic failure under Bush and how that has shaped his plan.

This is about how Romney was caught off guard by the Obama victory. Romney was blindly optimistic and overlooked his opposition and the voters of America. They went into election day only really thinking about what they had found in research and did not really touch on the idea of worst case senario. There is defiantly no way someone can win a presidential campaign without thinking of every possibility and how to combat them. In the end his slight unpreparedness was a factor in his loss. 

It is pretty crazy that he took the election as a given, and I tend to agree with you that it is the wrong way to approach an election. In this article, I was particularly fascinated by the way that the author characterizes the Obama ground game as "conservative": especially with the polls behind him, I thought that Obama and his team seemed just as confident as Romney. Maybe this is the important distinction: like you're saying, Romney was "blindly optimistic" and really sincere about this optimism. While I think it's smart for both candidates to act like they're sure they will win, they should always act like it's a close race when running a campaign.

When Romney mentioned he would quickly do-away with PBS as President during his debate with Obama, he not only upset those who take advantage of this great resource, which directly benefits children, but also once again showed his ignorance of crucial facts. He pegged PBS as an unnecessary expense of the federal government and made it seem like getting rid of the organization would have a great "impact on the nation's debt," both of which are greatly inaccurate facts. This PBS statement discusses the oddity of Romney's comments well and explains clearly that there is no need for PBS to become a "political target."

I saw a really interesting survey - in this article. http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/romneys-attack-on-big-bird-sows-confusion-abroad-and-feeds-it-at-home/?smid=tw-share. It says, " The results of that survey, which asked respondents to estimate what share of the federal budget was spent on certain programs, found that just 27 percent of Americans knew that the money for PBS and NPR was less than 1 percent of government spending. Remarkably, 40 percent guessed that the share was between 1 and 5 percent and 30 percent said it was in excess of 5 percent - including 7 percent who said that more than half of the federal budget was spent on television and radio broadcasts." I just wanted to note this. It's interesting how programs like PBS are being used by the Republicans as an example of government excesses while they're actually a tiny percentage of the federal government, compared to, say, Social Security and Medicare/Medicare (60% taken together).

If we focus on something specific like Sesame Street, it is clear that cutting funding to these kind of programs would disproportionately affect poor people something I find that a lot of Mitt Romney's platforms do; I loved Obamas statement that Romney policies were "thinly veiled social Darwinism." Anyways, over the summer, I read Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. There was an entire chapter on the success of Sesame Street to actually get kid's to pay attention and retain the educational information that they are being presented with. Low income families don't have the same means as middle class or upper income families to provide intelectually stimulating material to their kids. Because of programs like Sesame Street, both a child in a low income family and a child in an upper-income family can watch the same educational programming on PBS. Low income children need this programming more! By the time low income children are in kindergarten, there is a ton of evidence that they are already so far behind upper-income children educationally that they just can't compete. With access to programs like Sesame Street, this achievement gap can start to become smaller. Will a high-income kid be affected by the loss of Sesame Street? Probably not. This attitude seems to correlate with a lot of the problems I have with Mitt Romney's platforms. On the surface level, they may seem like good ideas but they disproportionately affect low-income people.

Week 4. This opinion piece looks at the foreign policy credentials of both candidates, especially in light of the embassy storming in Libya and other similar incidents in the Middle this past week. The author paints this interval as weak for both Romney and Obama: Romney for his bizarre and inflammatory comments just after the murder of the ambassador and members of his staff, and Obama for not painting a clear picture of American intentions regarding the attack ("the only thing that can be said for Barack Obama's leadership this week is that he's not Mitt Romney"). He points to the increasing public unease about our presence in the Middle East as the perfect opportunity, a "teachable moment," for Obama to make his position clear. The author presents a conflicting message: as a foreign policy advisor, he would suggest this type of speech, but as a campaign advisor, he would warn against it. With all the talk of the Bush legacy in mind, I think this topic could be of huge advantage to both candidates (more so for Obama) if it were used properly. Obama has the chance to distance himself from the early-2000's surge that much of the public regards as a disaster, and distinguish the profile he plans on having in the region from bumbling foreign policy. I think the strides he has made in his first term toward ending our conflicts are pretty questionable. However, he seems in a prime position right now to ride out whatever he has accomplished for the next few months. Romney kind of made a fool of himself after the attacks, and Obama is not really capitalizing on this. It seems he's been doing good work on this front (the way he has been handling the protests in Egypt, according to the article, has been really skilled and professional) and he should flaunt it more. Similarly, a really strong statement of purpose in the Middle East might help Romney recover. The way he described foreign policy during the RNC does basically nothing to distinguish him from Bush for me. As

This is an article by a conservative columnist, Pat Buchanan, that my dad turned me on to. It addresses the fact that Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration allegedly knew about the attacks in Benghazi for a while and didn't take action. I do think that the administration mishandled it, and I think it's interesting to read the conservative perspective on the attacks. I think this is a direction that Romney's rhetoric is going to take in the coming weeks, especially during the foreign policy debate. I agree with what this writer says about many liberals wanting to absolve Obama and his administration from all blame for anything, especially at this stage in the election, and I think that reading articles from both sides of the argument will help form an objective understanding of the issue.

I completely agree that there was some sort of intelligence gap in the State Department. Whether or not Obama/Biden knew is open for debate, but I'm not sure that is really important. In reality, both candidates have pretty similar foreign policy stances. I highly doubt the Romney Administration would handle embassy security any differently. We saw it in the VP debate. Biden would challenge Ryan to talk about actual differences in foreign policy and Ryan couldn't really find any. I'm really bothered by this statement, "And lest we forget, we invaded Afghanistan to eradicate al-Qaida after 9/11. Yet today, we read of al-Qaida in the Maghreb, al-Qaida in Iraq, al-Qaida in Pakistan, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and al-Qaida in Syria. And Ansar Dine, an al-Qaida affiliate, has taken over northern Mali, a slice of land the size of France." This is a huge exaggeration of Al-Qaida's current power. They are doing really poorly, not well. I think that it is just a political tactic to relate America somehow being unsafe to the attack in Libya.

Today Hilary Clinton tried to take responsibility for the lack of security in Libya. John and Cody are right about this being the beginning of the Republican attack on Obama's foreign policy. This morning I heard a Romney advisor talking about how little influence and control we have in the middle east in the face of rising terrorism. His examples and questions included many cited in Buchanan's editorial. Buchanan was an early advisor to Nixon and encouraged him to stand against abortion even though it was different than Nixon's original view. It seems like Buchanan is a lot like Carl Rove, finds a weakness and an opening and goes for it.

This article talks about conservative Super PACs working to unify their message to keep away from uncomfortable blunders that bring the entire party down, to avoid letting "their message [become] diluted," and to maintain Romney's full-throttle attack when the Governor is not in a position to do so himself. The subtle moves that keep Super PACs legal is demonstrated really well in this article, like how the different groups can talk to each other and follow the "themes being emphasized by Mitt Romney's campaign," but cannot "coordinate with Mr. Romney's strategists," which certainly seems like it would be a challenge, since the Romney campaign keeps switching its focus. One of the most interesting aspects of this article is the reference to the Super PACs making sure that they all use the same numbers and statistics when attacking President Obama. It's crazy that there is so much confusion about what seems like the simplest part of pro-Romney advertising, especially when some groups actually think that connecting Obama with "Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. and the minister's 'black liberation' theology" is a good idea. The paragraph about how these Super PACs' more cohesive vision will affect Obama's campaign is also really interesting and demonstrates a lot of what seems unfair about large-scale campaign finance issues, since Romney's vision and campaign can literally move beyond him and keep up their work without him or his funds.

What you highlighted from this article emphasizes how shady the distinction is between coordinating a message with a candidate and presenting one independently. From what this article says, along with the presentation in class about campaign finance, the difference between these two methods of supporting a campaign seems pretty arbitrary. This is especially true if, like you said, the groups that can't coordinate with Romney can coordinate with one another. This strategy is the part that scares me the most: Super PAC's are trying to avoid "diluting" their message, but they seem to be diluting the messages of the candidates as a collective. The need to present a cohesive message, like you mentioned, seems to explain why a lot of the criticism in these ads is so vague, simply attacking Obama "as a failed leader" rather than highlighting specific policies or mistakes. In a campaign like Romney's, where the key focus is often a bit of a moving target, sticking to general criticism like this seems like a winning tactic. I agree that the engineering of advertisements is unfair, especially given the cause and effect relationship of ad dollars and poll results that the author suggests.

I think that looking at the historical economical failures and successes of democratic and republican economic policies is a good way to come to a conclusion about which candidate would actually help the economy. The candidates themselves are just spewing rhetoric about tax cuts and the middle class, so this third party analysis of economic growth under Democrats vs. Republicans is really interesting. Check it out.

It is sometimes extremely hard for me to understand the argument for conservative economic philosophies, because while they might seem great paper, have NEVER worked. "Trickle down" economics tend to stagnate the economy, not help it. While I definitely read a lot of liberally biased news sources, I still find that unbiased analysis of economic policy points to liberal policies almost every time. Jonah, if a person is still undecided, I would say they are definitely not going to vote on social issues. If social issues were more important to them than the economy, they would absolutely have already decided who to cast their vote for. It is very clear where the candidates stand on social issues, but is much less clear to the average undecided voter who is "the best candidate to help the economy."

It's great to see the economic facts laid out in this way. I read an article earlier written by two economists who quantified the effect of tax increases on the wealthy and found that tax increases had little effect on job growth or the economy. Again, this article proves that "trickle down" economics isn't based on facts. I wonder why it is so compelling. Of course people would rather believe that independent investment would benefit the economy more than government investment. It's part of the American mythology. The only way to bust a myth is with facts like these.

I chose this article, from The Economist. It's long, and pretty boring, but I think it addresses the issue of Obama's economic record from an (as far as I can tell) objective standpoint. Obama and Romney are making conflicting claims about the state of the American economy under Obama, both of them citing statistics, and, unsure of who to believe, I went in search of an article like this.      The article neither adulates nor lambastes Obama, which I think adds to its credibility. Interestingly, it seems to support Mitt Romney's characterization of Obama as a starry-eyed idealist, saying "Mr. Obama's personal priorities carried the day... Mr. Obama has always portrayed himself as a pragmatist, not an ideologue. In practice, though, he usually chooses bigger government over small."      The articles casts Obama as having arrived to the Oval office with unrealistic goals, but still having made progress despite not living up to those goals. These unrealized goals, though, can still be used against him by the Republicans to win disillusioned Obama voters over to the right.

The point Cody brought up about unrealized goals, but goals with progress, is one that I see being key to the arguments both sides are making. It's a good summary of what's at the heart of Obama's hope to "finish the job" and Romney's sad portrait of the last four years. I think the article really gets at the tough place he is in: are we supposed to criticize or praise Obama for doing basically everything a president should do, but not delivering what he promised? The way it talks about the mini-recession that occurred just because of the transition sort of sells me the claim that a lot of went wrong can't be pinned on him. Granted I don't know that much about economics, the decisions he made for sections of a tanking economy (stimulus, etc.) seemed level-headed, and seemed like they came from a pool of options limited to a "Democrat" choice and a "Republican" choice. Also, debt vs. deficit?

I thought it was interesting to read the description of Obama's unique position as a president influencing the US economy. Comparing him to FDR's response to the Depression shed new light on the difficulty of Obama's position and the complexity of his response. Being reminded that the months between FDR's victory and his inauguration were the worst months of the Depression put perspective on Obama's need to both quickly gain credibility and take some serious risks. It was interesting to read that The Economist felt that his stress tests were more effective because they were tougher and more transparent that those set up in Europe. In fact, the only clear criticism they make is that he didn't take the risk to spend a lot of money on the mortgage crisis. I would have thought a more conservative magazine, like The Economist, would think the government should have spent less. It is interesting to think that with all these complicated decisions, Obama's biggest mistake may have been that he promised too much. I think that might be right. Listening to him now, he seems to understand that. His speeches are less inspirational, but in may ways more realistic.

This article addresses the potential of Obama's second term. Andrew Sullivan is a great writer (you all should look at his blog) and in this piece he predicts that in the event of an Obama win, several things would happen. First, he says, the Republican party would (might) experience a kind of whiplash from its extreme radicalization and loss, becoming more moderate. This - the cooperation of the Republicans in the Senate - could allow Obama to become a bi-partisan hero, dealing with the deficit and immigration reform. Why he chose Reagan to compare to I don't really know, but it's an interesting read.

I like the idea in this article that you brought up Cody, about Obama becoming a widely supported bipartisan President if he wins again, but it is pretty debased throughout by the constant references to today's great polarization between left and right. While the great partisanship between states and people and politicians is mentioned about other ideas, it seems pretty dreamy to think Obama could sidestep this in terms of his own legacy. Though Obama may not be able to change how the right perceives him, I think the difference between Sullivan's prediction about Republicans becoming more centrist compared to earlier ideas we have discussed where Republicans just become further absorbed in their sparsely-supported and deeply conservative views is really interesting and I am fascinated to see how that plays out. I can see how another win for Obama would lead Republicans to reconsider their platform and targeted voting blocs, but also the idea of withdrawing into their misguided viewpoints in a protectionist-type way also makes sense.

Well, it looks like what Sullivan predicted is right. The Republicans did experience a "whiplash" for all of their super right wing policies. I heard an interesting statistic that if the Republicans hadn't been able to do so much redistricting for their house seats, demographically, they would have lost the majority in the house.

This is an article about the last week, and kind of the final stages of campaigning for the candidates. Really interesting to read about Romney's last-ditch efforts to take Pennsylvania. It's not got a lot of substance, but it's a good read and it gets me excited for the election.

I have to say that reading this after the election reinforces my dislike for the political posturing and game playing when so much is at stake in our country. As it often does, it sounds like two boys on a playground arguing about who is stronger than the other. When you think about the way they talk about money, huge amounts of money really, that they are willing to throw into commercials in Pennsylvania in the unrealistic hopes of getting a few votes.

I concur with what John and Anna wrote. The amount of money in American politics is obscene. It doesn't really benefit anybody. People in swing states get bombarded by ads. People who spend money on losing candidates have wasted their money. And, people who spend money on winning candidates expect something in return from the candidate.