After the 2008 campaign, a lot of people wondered why the Obama campaign / Obama For America seemed to fade away as opposed to continuing to engage the voters who had elected him. This seemed like a mistake, especially in 2010 when the Tea Party overran congressional town hall meetings across the country threatening the passage of the health care bill.
With lawmakers scheduled to return to work on Monday to begin intense discussions before a looming fiscal deadline, Mr. Obama’s aides are trying to harness the passions that returned him to the White House, hoping to pressure Republicans in Congress to accept tax increases on the wealthy. The president’s strategists are turning first to the millions of e-mail addresses assembled by the campaign and the White House.
Already, supporters are being asked to record YouTube videos of themselves talking about the importance of raising taxes on the rich. Aides said those videos would be shared on Facebook and Twitter and would be forwarded to centrist Democrats, as well as to mainstream Republicans, who they hope will break with their Tea Party colleagues.
[…]
In his first term, Mr. Obama’s yearlong battle over health care failed to inspire the millions of activists from his 2008 campaign to put pressure on Republican lawmakers.“We were stunned that it never showed up,” said a senior member of a pro-health-overhaul interest group, who asked for anonymity to avoid angering the White House. “They had this thing built, and we were waiting for them to turn it on, and it just never came.”
I don’t have it in me this week to do a full scale 2012 election compendium like I did in 2008, but just a few good links that cover the election well. Conventional wisdom heading into the campaign stated Dems would lose seats in the Senate and Obama, presiding over historically bad unemployment numbers and a weak economy, should be easier to defeat. That didn’t happen. The GOP primary season was a clown car and Mitt Romney barely made it through. After the party conventions, Obama took a commanding lead in the national and state polling. The first presidential debate, in which Romney was widely seen to have destroyed Obama, reversed national polling trends and tightened many state races. (“Did Obama Just Throw the Entire Election Away?”) This reversal was halted at around the time of the VP debate, and began to turn around shortly thereafter. It was at about this time the questioning of polls began (Unskewed!), and as election day got closer and closer, a backlash against Nate Silver began.
Lastly, it was a terrific night for LGBT rights as gay marriage was approved in Washington, Maine, and Maryland, and an anti-gay marriage ballot initiative was defeated in Minnesota. Wisconsin also elected the first openly gay senator.
Below are some more links worth looking at about the election.
Obama’s speech after winning the election.
Romney’s classy concession speech. In another classy move, they streamed Obama’s speech on the campaign website.
After Fox News projected Obama as the winner of Ohio, and thus the election, there was some amazing theater live as Karl Rove pushed back on the projection. Reports of Rove melting down or freaking out were overstated, but the weird part was Megyn Kelly leaving the anchor desk and walking through the studio to the office where projections were being made. In any case, Rove is in hot water himself for spending lots of money raised from rich dudes with little to show for it. Questions persisted about possible reasons for Rove’s outburst.
Was he acting as the man who oversaw the most expensive advertising assault on a sitting president in history, unable to face his own wounded pride? The fund-raiser who had persuaded wealthy conservatives to give hundreds of millions of dollars and now had a lot of explaining to do? Or the former political strategist for George W. Bush, who saw firsthand how a botched network call could alter the course of a presidential contest?
How many hours of Glenn Beck conspiracy theories did Fox News broadcast to its viewers? How many hours of transparently mindless Sean Hannity content is still broadcast daily? Why don’t Americans trust Republicans on foreign policy as they once did? In part because conservatism hasn’t grappled with the foreign-policy failures of George W. Bush. A conspiracy of silence surrounds the subject. Romney could neither run on the man’s record nor repudiate it. The most damaging Romney gaffe of the campaign, where he talked about how the 47 percent of Americans who pay no income taxes are a lost cause for Republicans? Either he was unaware that many of those people are Republican voters, or was pandering to GOP donors who are misinformed. Either way, bad information within the conservative movement was to blame.
Florida took two days to finalize their vote, and many Americans stood in long lines to vote. Here’s 5 ways this could be sped up, including the information Congress has broad powers to dictate how things should go. They just haven’t historically used those powers.
Towards the end of the interview, Obama sought to assure listeners that he was still confident, alluding to an internet meme that features him: “As some of these emails that go around with my picture on them say, I can’t quote the entire thing, but ‘I got this.’â€
Grandland has a bracket up now for figuring out the best Wire character. President Obama chose Omar, who I think has to be one of the favorites. McNulty as a #3 is a travesty, and Bubbles at #7 would have made some noise if he wasn’t up against Clay Davis in the first round. Stringer is probably the softest #1 in history.
The shrinking middle class needs to be convinced that there’s a point to all of this — other than banal hassles and meaningless toil and a death prolonged by for-profit hospitals, insurers and the medical/pharmaceutical industry — and Obama’s recess appointment today is intended to show these depressed, overworked people that he cares about their Sisyphean plight.
