[Posted by Karl]

Although Rick Perry currently remains in the lead in the RCP average for the GOP nomination, Nate Silver* is far from the only person noting that the prime beneficiary of Perry’s current slump is Herman Cain, not Mitt Romney.  It appears the political discussion will continue to move back to a Romney vs Not Romney theme, although Silver adds the appropriate caveats:

Mr. Romney has emerged — or re-emerged — as the favorite; I’d give him roughly even odds of winning the nomination. But it’s unlikely to be a smooth and linear path, and the alternate hypothesis that Republican voters are determined to pick someone more conservative than him has some support in this data.

That’s not to paper over the problems of Mr. Perry, who entered the race in a strong strategic position and has failed to make much of it. It’s possible, moreover, that the fallout of the Sept. 22 debate is not yet fully realized in the surveys; Mr. Perry performed somewhat worse in the Fox News and YouGov polls than in the CNN poll, which postdated it by a couple of days.

In general, however, I’d caution against using terms like “momentum” when discussing the nomination race (or polling results under most other circumstances). We’ll be publishing a separate article on this shortly, but there’s not much evidence of serial correlation in polling data: candidates who decline from one period to the next are just as likely to rebound as to see their numbers continue falling.

That finding does not surprise me.  As I noted previously, if Romney re-emerges as front-runner, there will be a renewed focus by his rivals and the media on Romney’s weaknesses as a candidate.  Moreover, if Cain competes seriously with Perry in the Not Romney category, Cain also will get more scrutiny. (more…)

Allahpundit:

It’s a comfort to know that we’re now just nine months away from our super-president, Anthony Kennedy, telling us whether this thing is illegal or not.

My bold prediction: Kennedy votes in favor of ObamaCare. New York Times editorial board praises him. There is much rejoicing.

[Posted by Karl]

Sometimes, the news is stranger than satire:

New Jersey governor Chris Christie finally broke his silence since rumors of a presidential run returned out of nowhere this weekend, speaking at the Reagan Library in California. Making the core of his speech the virtues of “leadership and compromise,” Christie delivered a speech demanding President Obama accomplish more, because “his failure is our failure, too.” It is not a garden variety gubernatorial speech, but it’s not exactly a campaign speech– striking square in Sarah Palin Iowa territory. His answer to the question? Christie directed everyone to a Politico compilation of him saying “no” repeatedly.

Of course, the establishment media ignored the speech itself and Christie’s answer to The Big Question.  Rather they focused on a later “question,” in which a woman begged him to reconsider running for president, for her children and grandchildren, followed by a standing ovation.  Christie — not wanting to be a jerk — replied that he heard what she said and that it touches him, but it was not a reason for him to run.  This answer, in the minds of the media, is transformed into Christie leaving the door open, despite him telling people to watch a video of him telling the media “No” in every conceivable way, again and again.  Ironically, this is being pushed by “journalists” at the Politico — Ben Smith, Maggie Haberman, and Juana Summers — despite the fact Politico hosts the “No” video to which Christie referred. The WaPo also has its offenders, including Chris Cillizza and of course Jennifer Rubin, who is already writing Christie’s announcement speech, probably in a cubicle plastered with pictures of the governor, clipped from various magazines along with construction paper hearts. To quote Karen Hanretty, “Only in DC could a man say he’d rather kill himself than run for potus and everyone would say, ‘sounds like he left the door open.’ ”

The Christie videos can all be found at the first link in this post, but the Christie story can really be summed up in 32 seconds (language warning):

–Karl

[Posted by Karl]

The rightosphere is buzzing about the claim made by Detroit News columnist Daniel Howes:

As part of a [Ford] campaign featuring “real people” explaining their decision to buy the Blue Oval, a guy named “Chris” says he “wasn’t going to buy another car that was bailed out by our government,” according the text of the ad, launched in early September.

“I was going to buy from a manufacturer that’s standing on their own: win, lose, or draw. That’s what America is about is taking the chance to succeed and understanding when you fail that you gotta’ pick yourself up and go back to work.”

That’s what some of America is about, evidently. Because Ford pulled the ad after individuals inside the White House questioned whether the copy was publicly denigrating the controversial bailout policy CEO Alan Mulally repeatedly supported in the dark days of late 2008, in early ’09 and again when the ad flap arose.

Howes may be wrong about direct causality.  FoMoCo says the campaign continues to run, although the specific ad was taken “out of rotation after 4 weeks which is consistent with the typical lifecycle for the campaign.”  And contrary to some claims on Twitter, even that ad remains on Ford’s YouTube channel.

However, that does not mean that the Obama Administration did not gripe to Ford about the ad.  The widely-mocked AttackWatch has been eager to defend the bailout of GM and Chrysler.  Moreover, touting these bailouts is a key to Obama’s effort to hold onto the Great Lakes region in 2012.  Ford pointing out that it is easily outperforming GM and Chrysler is not helpful to Obama.  Neither is pointing out that the bailout saved nowhere near the million jobs claimed.  Indeed, it is likely that a regular bankruptcy would have yielded about the same number of continuing jobs as the taxpayer-funded bankruptcy.  The only difference is that Obama intervened to bail out his union support at the UAW, rather than the companies’ creditors.  With a economy mired in malaise overall, Obama does not need Ford reminding people that taxpayers were put on the hook to boost his re-election effort.

—

Update: FWIW, it looks like Howe says a Ford VP confirms his claim.

Update 2: Scott Monty, head of social media for FoMoCo: “We did not pull the ad under pressure.”

Update 3: WH flack Dan Pfieffer denies they pressured Ford… which isn’t a denial of complaints.

–Karl

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Via the LA Times Top of the Ticket we learn that Obama had a bit of a slip of the tongue during the CBC banquet.  He was supposed to say:

If asking a billionaire to pay the same tax rate as a janitor makes me a warrior for the working class, I wear that with a badge of honor. I have no problem with that.

Except he actually said…

If asking a billionaire to pay the same tax rate as Jew– as a janitor makes me a warrior for the working class, I wear that with a badge of honor. I have no problem with that.

Go ahead, watch the video and listen for yourself.  The Top of the Ticket’s Andrew Malcolm says he was confusing Jews with Janitors, and maybe so…  but I tend to think that when he was discussing billionaires he couldn’t get the word Jew out of his mind.

Yeah, I am beginning to think he has a prejudice problem.  There, I said it.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

UPDATE BY PATTERICO: I’m happy to take a shot at Obama when I can do so fairly, but to me it seems clear that he meant to read “Junior” and then recognized the word on his little TeleCrutch.

But still I think he has a spending problem. There, I said it.

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

So recently there has been this book “The Rogue” by her stalker biographer Joe McGinniss that alleged, among other things, that Palin had an affair with Glenn Rice.  Several people wondered why Palin wasn’t suing, and we lawyers have patiently explained that she not only has to prove that the claims are false, but that there was legal malice involved (defined slightly differently than normal malice), which is very, very difficult.  So a failure to sue is not the same as an admission and truthfully it risks giving a false sense of veracity.  The jury could find that the story was false, but not maliciously published, and the media might very well spin it as vindication for McGinniss.

Which is why it is interesting that she is right now threatening to sue…

Sarah Palin’s family attorney John Tiemessen has written a letter to Maya Mavjee, the publisher of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, that Palin may sue her, the company, and the book’s author Joe McGinniss “for knowingly publishing false statements” in his book released last week, “The Rogue,” ABC News has learned.

The book was widely panned by critics for using unnamed sources to criticize Palin and her family. Tiemessen cites an email they have access to in which McGinniss writes that attorneys from Crown Publishing told him “nothing I can cite other than my own reporting rises above the level of tawdry gossip. The proof is always just around the corner, but that is a corner nobody has been able to turn” and that McGinniss “ran out of time” to sufficiently source the book.

You can read the whole letter for yourself, here.  As for the email referred to in the lettter, apparently it is the one Breitbart published at his site Big Government.  Which proves again that Breitbart is the man…

…with the master plan.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

[Posted by Karl]

Aides to New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie say he hasn’t budged from his months-long insistence that he won’t enter the presidential fray. Nothing has changed in Christie’s thinking. However, Christie’s potential candidacy has been an increasingly fevered fantasy of a certain cadre of some media and business elites — mostly based in New York, with a smattering of California technology and entertainment players — since last summer.  These elites do not take no for an answer. Now, relying on an unusual source, they have reason to hope Christie will change his mind.

The Magic 8-Ball, manufactured by Mattel, contains a 20-sided die floating in a combination of alcohol and dissolved dark blue dye.  It is to be used for entertainment purposes only, says Mattel spokesman Matt Mason.  Yet some believe the device can foretell the future.

A well-placed Republican source who found the New Jersey Governor’s Office phone number on the Internet disclosed the early answers were not encouraging, but have shifted in recent days. “When I first shook the Magic 8-Ball, it kept coming up ‘Don’t Count On It’ and ‘My Sources Say No.’  But after 15 to 20 shakes, I got ‘Ask Again Later.’ So I kept trying, and got ‘Outlook Good.’ “ 

“I believe he is really considering it,” one fundraiser told Patterico (institutionally, by which I mean me).  At least one DC-based blogger is similarly confident: “I’ve had the candles burning continuously at the handmade Christie shrine in my back closet for at least a week now. Something has to happen.”

The sources contacting me for this exclusive stressed the importance of maintaining their anonymity. “The whole effort falls apart if we go public,” one source insisted. “It is simply impossible to create the image of pressure on Christie if the same four names turn up in story after story about him announcing next week that never come true.”

–Karl

No insane people whatsoever!!

Not bad for a first-timer, huh?

Not posted: a very attractive picture of her holding the Glock 9mm she used.

[Posted by Karl]

At Saturday night’s annual Congressional Black Caucus awards dinner, Pres. Obama delivered some of the soaring oratory which is his trademark:

“Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes,” he said, his voice rising as applause and cheers mounted. “Shake it off. Stop complainin’. Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’. We are going to press on. We have work to do.”

***

“The future rewards those who press on,” He said. “I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I’m going to press on.”

Let me be clear: The One has time to complain.  Beneath the applause, Obama’s self-pitying appeals to racial solidarity are intended to stifle  criticism inside the CBC (e.g., Reps, Maxine Waters and Emanuel Cleaver) and outside the caucus in the black community (e.g., Tavis Smiley and Cornel West).

Suppressing internal dissent is just one part of “Operation Vote,” the Obama’s campaign’s aggressive new program to expand support from minorities and other parts of the progressive base to eke out a narrow reelection in 2012.  Of course, Team Obama says they have not given up on wooing independents; they cannot afford to lose them by a large margin.  But William Galston (Third Way/New Dem) explains how poorly Obama and Democrats have done on with the political center:

In mid-2005, as disaffection with the Bush administration and the Republican Party was gathering momentum, the Pew Research Center asked American to place themselves and the political parties on a standard left-right ideological continuum. At that time, average voters saw themselves as just right of center and equidistant from the two political parties. Independents considered themselves twice as far away from the Republican Party as from the Democrats, presaging their sharp shift toward the Democrats in the 2006 mid-term election.

In August of this year, Pew posed a very similar question (note to survey wonks: Pew used a five-point scale, versus six in 2005), but the results were very different. Although average voters continue to see themselves as just right of center, they now place themselves twice as far away from the Democratic Party as from the Republicans. In addition, Independents now see themselves as significantly closer to the Republican Party, reversing their perceptions of six years ago.

There’s another difference as well. In 2005, Republicans’ and Democrats’ views of their own parties dovetailed with the perceptions of the electorate as a whole. Today, while voters as a whole agree with Republicans’ evaluation of their party as conservative, they disagree with Democrats, who on average see their party as moderate rather than liberal. So when Independents, who see themselves as modestly right of center, say that Democrats are too liberal, average Democrats can’t imagine what they’re talking about.

More epistemic closure and magical thinking of liberals for the establishment media to ignore. 

Operation Vote may be most interesting for raising the question of what Team Obama knows (or thinks it knows) that we don’t.  Recent dKos/SEIU polling showed a 77% re-elect number for Obama among African-Americans (lower than Dems overall), with 16% definitely voting against him.  But modern history strongly suggests even a lame Democrat will win 85-90% of the African-American vote. And the dKos/SEIU poll also shows 68% of African-Americans are very excited about voting in 2012– edging out conservatives and Tea Partiers as the most enthusiastic 2012 demographic (although the TP takes the title including “somewhat excited” voters).  Team Obama is acting like they can take nothing for granted.

–Karl