TPM has the photo I have been looking forward to all day. Body language bits: The President looks relaxed and energetic. Head forward, as always, with his Gary Cooper frame. Romney looks stiff and still tired. You can see it in the close-up on TPM. Romney has always had a bit of stiffness, a lack of fluidity, and I have come to associate this with a man that is playing a role, as opposed to someone who is improvising, rolling with the punches. When you have a role to play, things can go wrong, scripts and plans can get off track. You can start to look like a marionette. When you are just improvising, there is no possible wrong thing that can happen, and no plan to keep on track. The subdued red, white, and blue tie was a nice touch. A small lesson: the person who crosses his arm over his body in a photo is generally perceived to be the weak one; they are seen as conscious of their vulnerability, and guarded. That’s a big reason that Romney looks so defeated here. Be sure to be the one to reach across the open space, and not your body.
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TPM has the photo I have been looking forward to all day.

Body language bits:

The President looks relaxed and energetic. Head forward, as always, with his Gary Cooper frame.

Romney looks stiff and still tired. You can see it in the close-up on TPM. Romney has always had a bit of stiffness, a lack of fluidity, and I have come to associate this with a man that is playing a role, as opposed to someone who is improvising, rolling with the punches.

When you have a role to play, things can go wrong, scripts and plans can get off track. You can start to look like a marionette. When you are just improvising, there is no possible wrong thing that can happen, and no plan to keep on track.

The subdued red, white, and blue tie was a nice touch.

A small lesson: the person who crosses his arm over his body in a photo is generally perceived to be the weak one; they are seen as conscious of their vulnerability, and guarded. That’s a big reason that Romney looks so defeated here. Be sure to be the one to reach across the open space, and not your body.

Left behind

Well, except for this one. How will we be able to tell if the Republicans have learned a hard lesson and are ready to move onto the priorities of today, as opposed to the issues of 1968? They’ll start talking about ‘why’ they lost the election, as opposed to ‘how’ they lost the election. The questions lead you to different answers and solutions.

For example: “How did we lose the election?” Answer: “By focusing exclusively on older white male turnout.” “How do we fix that?” “By focusing on other people and getting them to turnout.” “How do we change that?” “Maybe elect Rubio? We need Hispanics and I hear he is brown. Should be fine, right? We just need a brown Republican.”

You can see the problem with this. It’s pandering, treating a group of people like a cell in a spreadsheet. It essentially says, “You’re brown, he’s brown, vote for us.” See also, Michael Steele.

How about the why questions?

“Why did we lose the election?” Answer: “By focusing exclusively on older white male turnout.” “Why did we do that?” “Because it is easy and has worked for us in the past.” Or, “Because our picture of the world, our narrative, told us that it would lead us to certain victory.”

Now you’ve gotten out of that plug-and-play, spreadsheet thinking. You know the answer will be a hard one. And you know it won’t be the things you’ve tried in the past. And now you know that there is something wrong with the way you see the world.

Here is a hint, guys. When you are openly hostile to women, gays, minorities, the poor, the 47%, and the irreligious, you have just made yourself hostile to the majority of America. Wake up.

Protest too much

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/11/linda-mcmahon-vote-for-obama.php

Actually, the biggest indicator of an impending Obama victory are the strories that his opposition are currently telling to explain his victory:

  • That Hurricane Sandy killed Mitt’s momentum, or,
  • that rampant voter fraud will steal the election, or,
  • that Governor Christie put Obama over the top with his praise, or,
  • that when Obama win, he won’t have a mandate becuase he didn’t win over a majority of whites, and
  • so on.

There will be others.But the point is to be ready for the moment when it happens — conservatives will naturally look to their leaders for an explanation. And they’d better have a convincing one, or there will be hell to pay.

The end

We have entered that weird limnal state in political elections — where anything seems possible, and the news media has nothing to report on for a good two or three cycles.

First, a final prediction (I made some long range predictions some time ago — I’ll revisit them soon): Obama is going to be president by the end of the day tomorrow. Much of this is gut, but also a pretty simple entropy calculation. Simply: how many different paths to victory does a candidate have? If you give Romney FL and NC, then Obama has 66 paths, as opposed to Romney’s 58.

You can check my math here, at the NYT Politics section.

If Obama simply wins Ohio, his score improves to 244:11. Conversely, if Romney takes Ohio, then the score is 187:65. Obama still has nearly three times the path to victory.

And remember, at this point, Obama is more likely to win FL and NC than Romney is to win VA. And as my father has said,

“If you’re a Republican and you can’t win the home of the Confederacy, then you can’t win shit.”

Sage advice.

Horseman

The body language was straight forward: Romney was as polished as he was aggressive, and the President seemed tired. Romney apparently spent hours working on his smile and posture. If anything, it was over polished, and it was one part of what made a difference.

Romney’s debate strategy delivered.

It’s called “Shotgunning”, or the “Gish Gallop”. That is, loading up a magazine of claims, more than your opponent can respond to, and blasting him with it in a short amount of time. Romney’s magazine contained numerous … unsupported assertions. The idea is to manufacture the appearance of winning by making your opponent look like he doesn’t know what he is doing and is incapable of mustering answers. E.g.: that he shouldn’t be here in the first place. This isn’t about substance. It is doing things to be seen doing things; it’s bullshit.

And it worked.

The best thing you can do if you are being overrun, is to point out your opponent’s strategy, and then decide what points you want to respond to. “Well, since my opponent is trying to bury me under a mountain of half-truths, you’ll excuse me if I only respond to the relevant points.” This puts the galloper in a rough spot - he can break off his charge and demand that you answer his points, which demonstrates weakness, or he can gallop on and disrespect the audience.

You can often divide these sorts of appeals into appeals of the heart and appeals to the head. Roughly speaking, when you opponent leads with one, you should emphasize the other. What we saw on Wednesday night from both men were almost exclusively appeals to the head - I was swimming in a soup of numbers just 20 minutes in. The President could have switched the battleground to emotional appeals. Personal stories, ”I met a woman in Spokane with two …”, things with people attached to them.

This implies, “You know what? I know my opponent thinks that his ideas are important - but lets talk about what is really important.” It does not matter if you switch from head to heart, or heart to head: the switch is what matters.

That isn’t, however, Obama’s forte. He is a wonk, as is Mitt Romney. Most politicians are big nerds. Clinton is really the only politician that mastered both arguments from the head and the heart.

So, Romney won this debate. He out-wonked the wonk, and looked great doing it.

It isn’t going to do him a lot of good. There are two more debates coming, and we didn’t learn much about Romney at this debate, other than he likes to change who he is. I’d guess that most of his movement in the polls has been Republicans coming back into the fold.

If the question is: who are these men? (And that was really the only question moderator Leher bothered to ask). We know that the President had a bad night, but we know him well enough to know that wasn’t him at the top of his game. This would have been a real disaster if Obama lacked a four year track record. Today, it simply sucks. And we now know that Romney is a mercurial character who is, somehow, able to come off polished but without revealing who he really is.

That isn’t going to be enough to get him to the oval office. Americans will forgive a weak performance in a man they know well. See also George W. Bush. We need to know the authentic man.

The bottom line: this is the best Romney has done yet, and he is still losing.

What to look for tonight

The Internet is awash with articles about what to look for in tonight’s presidential debates. Will Romney try to land some zingers? Will he appear moe empathetic? Will the president get knocked back on his heels?

They’re all wrong. Because they’re telling you what to listen for, not look for.

Take a look at the body language — your brain will be doing this for you anyhow. A quick class:

Don’t look for single gestures, like crossed arms = defensive. People get cold, you know. Gestures come in groups.

Don’t look for meaning — that’s high brain stuff. This is all lower brain lizard stuff. Assign yourself a simple question like, “Is he being defensive?” And stick with it. This will prevent you from looking for evidence support a theory.

Turn the sound off. Then their words will not distract you.

Both of these men are thinkers - they lead with the head, not the crotch — and I’ve learned that thinkers have a hard time with body language. Rey typically work to conceal it, not use it. This can lead to interesting reveals.

An amazing judo throw

They say that bill Clinton was the first black president. It may be that Obama is the first Asian president. Allow me to explain. I’ll start with what Romney did.

Years ago, Romney saw that all he had to do to win the Republican nomination was to correctly position himself and coast through. Everyone who was going to run was nuts, or simply lacked the big money resources and connection that Romney could draw on. So he positioned himself as the only one who could possibly win anyone in the middle. After carefully examining all of the other narrative-based candidates, Republican voters agreed that crazy-go-nuts wasn’t a viable strategy, even though it was what they really wanted.

And so, with very little fanfare, Mitt Romney won the Republican nomination. This is all very Wu Wei, in that All the work was done years ago and Romney simply had to show up to win the nomination.

Up to this point Romney has been running the same sort of flavorless, vanilla campaign got him through the early months. He has been coasting on the idea that the economy would drag the president out of the white house for him.* This was to be a referendum on the president, “has Obama done a good job”, and it was best to have narrative at all, to offer no vision, so that the total public focus was on the president. Why have a narrative, if the only one your party will allow is bat-shit crazy? Why have a narrative, if it only distracts from your strategy.

At the time, I argued that people don’t vote for a man without a story, or a story about America. I was both right and wrong.

Romney’s strategy hasn’t turned out well. I expected that the president would come through with a soaring narrative. He hasn’t, and for good reason: Republicans will never let him deliver on it in congress. So why have one? Why have a narrative, if it will only remind people of the things you haven’t accomplished.

Obama has essentially run on his record of quiet competence, letting his brand, and the Republican brand speak for themselves.

This is, essentially, Mitt Romney’s strategy. Except that Obama is well known, and well liked by the public. He is also a more capable politician.

So, Obama, by adopting Romney’s strategy, has made this a choice election. Since there is no narrative, there is no debate about the direction of the country. This has drive an intense curiosity about Romney, much to his detriment; his unwillingness to make himself the center of attention has allowed the process to paint him as an etch-a-sketch-y Mr. Burns villain.

So there it is. As much as I hate to admit it, the lack of narrative in this campaign is the driving, and deciding factor. Obama’s judo move of adopting his opponents strategy is currently blowing my mind!

*He even seems to have really thought that this was all he had to do. In the 47 second video, he claims that the economy will get better simply if he is elected, full stop. Of course, he knows that most models forecast about 6% growth over the next four years, meaning anyone will be able to claim the recovery.

Pants on fire

The real question to watch over the next 24 hours is whether that lying thing breaks through into its own issue, as something reporters who are afraid of getting smacked around by campaigns are actually willing or feel they need to discuss.

via Josh Marshall 

I’m hoping the markdown finally works on the above [Ed: it didn’t]. At a certain point, the lies become so big that either the media must become complicit, or they have to start challenging the candidates in the open. If Romney and Ryan start to fight back, well, that would be one hell of a story, wouldn’t it?

This is one of the reasons Christopher Christie drop his “Jersey Comeback” narrative; the awful unemployment numbers mean that the media will give him pushback at every single event. He decided that it wasn’t worth the fight. On the other side of things, I’ve seen a number of people wailing about the Big Lie aide of this. The old idea that,

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

That’s from the US government psychological profile of Hitler.

Think of social lies like this as sales pitches. You have to want to believe it. There has to be something in it for the listener.

Think on it: plenty of politicians were willing to tell lies to the German people in the 30s. Hollow promises made to get to power. Only the Nazis promised to return to the people their lost pride.

Similarly with our invasion of Iraq. We were smarting from an attack that was stupidly simple. Why had it happened? How? We couldn’t punish Saudi Arabia, home to bin Laden, 95% of the bombers, and all the funding. But we had to hit someone, and Saddam was an easy choice, so, “Fuck Saddam, we’re taking him out” said the President.

I don’t see the Romney and Ryan lies as being the sort of sales pitch Americans are looking for; it’s a big risk for their campaigns, and I doubt it will get them many votes past they base.

Do you ever get the feeling the Obama campaign wakes up every morning thinking, “What can we do today to goad the Romney campaign and the media to discuss something other than jobs?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/17/obama-campaign.html

… Whined David Frum.

Do you know why we have never, not once, had an election based on the ‘issues’? Because the voters do not primarily care about the issues. They care about the raw ability to lead — the need to have competent leadership is buried deep in our DNA. “will this man fight for me?” is the question.

And the best way for him to prove it is to wake up and punch the other guy in the face. Everyday.

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