Group items tagged

This is a nice bit of Romney retrospect, investigating what I looked at as his greatest asset during the race: his past as a successful businessman. In an election where the economy is inarguably the most important issue to voters, I saw his business savvy as something that would resonate with a lot of people. These authors are suggesting reasons why business success does not always translate well to politics. A convincing one, brought up early on in the piece, is the idea that CEO's and "money men" are required to interact with people below them in their respective hierarchy in a fundamentally different way. Namely, businessmen are not as used to people telling them what they don't want to hear. Another Romney-specific point a commenter raises is that Romney is not a businessman in the same way as a manufacturing CEO or someone like that: he is a "deal-maker," less involved in leading a company than striking enormous deals with other men like himself. The idea that a country is a business, and should be run by a businessman, seems like an easy train of thought to arrive to when our economy still struggling from a recession. This article brings up some interesting contradictions to this part of the Romney campaign. While I looked at his experience (not counting his superwealth) as an asset to a man promising to fix the economy, the article pointed to ways that this can actually hurt him. An interesting one has to do with the basic dynamics of the election: where a businessman needs to sell a good product, a president has to address people and communities as the things that need to be "fixed." This is where elections become personal, and where I saw Romney struggling to connect. This kind of thinking led to the infamous 47% comment: in the eyes of a businessman, discounting a part of a company implies nothing personal. To the rest of America, he was talking about friends and neighbors. This is where I believe he failed: running a country is fundamen

I get so worked up when super-wealthy people act like they are somehow being persecuted when the Democrats asked them to "pay their fair share." I think this op-ed piece does a great job of explaining the frustration with the current socioeconomic divide. The author writes that "It is no accident that in America today the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time since the Gilded Age." Although we can sit around and pretend that people "need to learn" from the rich. In reality, a of government policies are making it much harder to go from poor to rich, or even middle class. As the author describes the holes in the current American system, "Exhibit A is the bipartisan, $700 billion rescue of Wall Street in 2008. Exhibit B is the crony recovery. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that 93 percent of the income gains from the 2009-10 recovery went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. The top 0.01 percent captured 37 percent of these additional earnings, gaining an average of $4.2 million per household." This article doesn't blame Romney or Obama, it just explains why people are starting to have problems with the idea of the "1%." I personally don't think the outcry is against the actual members of the 1%, but rather agains the policies that it make socioeconomic inequality greater.

I think that what Mr. Potepan said in the talk really applies here. The idea is that when money is mobile, the economy is flourishing, but once the money gets locked up in the super-rich's bank accounts it doesn't help anyone because it's not being invested. It's always interesting to see historical examples of theories like these, and the thing about Venice seems like it illustrates Mr. Potepan's point well.

I agree with Cody that the point of the article is that successful states are those that give everyone access to economic opportunity and that inclusiveness as opposed to exclusiveness makes for a more prosperous country. The "book of gold" is a powerful image for the special access and privilege the elite had in Venice that continues today in access to better education tax breaks, etc. That access is something people don't want to give up. The African-American president at Brown who didn't want to give up legacy at admissions, since she had a granddaughter shows how once you have privilege, you don't want to let it go.

This article in The Economist does a good job of summing up where Obama had the edge over Romney. It was clear, as we've talked about, that his message resonated most with young women, minorities, the educated, and the young. He won female voters by eleven points, which was more than enough to beat Romney's seven point advantage among men, especially because women make up more of the population than men. I thought it was also interesting to learn that Obama enjoyed a lead of 13% among voters who had post-graduate degrees. The article does imply that Obama past legislation in order to reach certain groups. Their examples include the Lilly Ledbetter Act to reach women, the Dream Act for Latinos. They also acuse Obama's campaign for being unnecessarily negative about Romney's business background implying that he only cared about the rich. I didn't know that Obama's campaign opened three times as many field offices as Romney. Though it is disillusioning to consider all the things a good man like Obama must do to get elected, it's obvious his campaign was smart, and up to date. The graphs of who voted for each candidate are worth taking a look at. It's particularly interesting to me that Romney won the votes of people whose annual income in under $50,000 and Obama won with those making over $50,000.

I was really interested by the section of the Conrad reading that dealt with campaign funding. This article details Karl Rove, one of the biggest names in political finance who has masterminded the Republican switch from "hard" (personal donations) to "soft" ("social welfare") funding. Many think of him as the man who kept Bush Jr. afloat for two terms, and now Romney has him in charge of funneling donations from massively wealthy, anonymous Republicans into a "social welfare organization" (to be spent on anti-Obama ads). Groups likes these on either side are part of what Rove refers to as the "unlimited-outside-money boom." While Republicans are not the only guilty party, I find it really disturbing that groups like American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS can be legally separate from the Romney campaign itself. This loophole encourages aggressive ads and a totally out-of-control budget - more than a billion dollars - during the campaigning. The advertising machine developed by the Romney campaign has twice the budget of Obama's: if he can't keep up, how could any less mainstream candidate even hope to? This article makes a really strong case for limiting spending. Rove makes a point about keeping the parties themselves stronger, but it was not enough to sell the idea to me. The grimmest part is the story of one-upping Rove gives: he created Crossroads as a response to Obama's doubling of the Republican budget in the last race, pointing out that this cycle could continue.

I found this really interesting, especially being in the campaign finance small group for the presentation. The article does a good job describing the confusing nuances of 501s and 527s (superpacs and social welfare groups), but what I found the most interesting was the discussion of Obama's vilification of the Citizens United decision. The decision definitely hurt the Democratic party and gave the Republicans an advantage in the world of campaign finance, and this article seems to accuse Obama of deliberately misrepresenting the decision to make it seem worse than it was.

The part that stuck out to me in this article was when Rove tried to act as if unions and corporations should have the same rights. Unions represent large groups of people working for companies (i.e. the United Auto Workers). The people in these unions are generally blue-collar, working class people. Corporations on the other hand are all about making money. To me, it seems much more fair for unions to be able to run politically driven ads than corporations, but I'm not sure how that would work legally.

This article stood out to me because of how badly Romney attacks the Obama campaign. Romney takes a shot at the president by saying, "If you felt that excitement when you voted for Barack Obama, shouldn't you feel that way now that he's President Obama?" I enjoyed the article because it shows that Romney has a plan that he thinks will genuinely work, but I dislike like fact he was not giving the Obama administration credit for anything positive. Romney briefly gives Obama credit for giving Seal Team 6 the order to take out Bin Laden, but then blames him for making every American less safe because of his failure to secure Iran's nuclear threat.

I enjoyed reading this article because it shows that Romney is doing something I have wanted him to do for a long time, which is humanize himself. This election is going to be won by speeches and connection with voters. President Obama is, by far, one of the best speakers I have ever heard and that is why he gets a lot of his votes. While I am slightly upset that Romney attacked Obama in such a harsh manner, I don't get the sense that that was it's main purpose. The way I see that speech is that it was an attempt to reason with and connect to voters in a way Romney has not done before. I posted before about the importance of connection and I still believe that it is charisma and connections that will provide an edge in this election and I am happy to see Romney is starting to realize that.

Cameron, I really don't see Romney winning on his ability to connect on a human level with the electorate. Obama will beat Romney on likability right up until election day and that will not change. I don't think that Romney going down the route of telling his life story help him that much either. Much of what was said about him was an attempt to make it look like he is a normal, which he frankly is not; he won't even release his tax statements. Romney will win on coming across as someone that is ready to take on the economic problems not on who is more likable.