Thursday Open Thread: President Obama’s Election Night Victory

Chuck D ‏@MrChuckD

Heard ppl killin StaceyDash on her Romney choice,sayin she was ranting.Her points were clear no rant,ppl should learn how to READ carefully

Interesting, I’ve yet to read what she has written, only excerpts here. Sounded to me like somethng is seriously wrong with her, but maybe I need to read the whole thing. Good Morining folks.

Barack Obama And The Death Of Normal

America is different now, more so with every election cycle. Ronald Reagan won his mandate in an America in which 89 percent of the voters were white. That number is down to 72 percent and falling. Fifty thousand new Latino citizens achieve the voting age every month. America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can comfortably walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions. The America in which it was otherwise is dying, thank god, and those who relied on entitlement and division to command power will either be obliged to accept the changes, or retreat to the gated communities from which they wish to wax nostalgic and brood on political irrelevance.

You want to lead in America? Find a way to be entirely utilitarian — to address the most problems on behalf of the most possible citizens. That works. That matters. Last night, it mattered just enough to overcome the calcified political calculations of men who think that 47 percent will vote against them because they are victims, or that 53 percent are with them because the rest of us vote only from self-interest and without regard for the republic as a whole. It was a closer contest than common sense and the spirit of a truly great nation should dictate. But unless these white guys who have peddled “normal” for so long — normal as in racial majority, normal as in religious majority, normal as in sexual orientation — unless they have a hard moment of self-reflection and self-awareness, well, it will not be this close again.

……………………………………………

Hard times are still to come for all of us. Rear guard actions will be fought at every political crossroad. But make no mistake: Change is a motherfucker when you run from it. And right now, the conservative movement in America is fleeing from dramatic change that is certain and immutable. A man of color is president for the second time, and this happened despite a struggling economic climate and a national spirit of general discontent. He has been returned to office over the specific objections of the mass of white men. He has instead been re-elected by women, by people of color, by homosexuals, by people of varying religions or no religion whatsoever. Behold the New Jerusalem. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a white man, of course. There’s nothing wrong with being anything. That’s the point.
This election marks a moment in which the racial and social hierarchy of America is upended forever. No longer will it mean more politically to be a white male than to be anything else.

http://davidsimon.com/inevitabilities-and-barack-obama/

U.S. trade gap narrows in September on exports
By Steve Goldstein

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The U.S. trade deficit narrowed in September to $41.5 billion after exports rose more quickly than imports, the Commerce Department said Thursday. Economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast a $45.1 billion deficit. August’s trade gap was revised to $43.8 billion.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-trade-gap-narrows-in-september-on-exports-2012-11-08?link=MW_home_latest_news

Biden to appear on ‘Parks and Recreaction’

Vice President Biden is ready for his close-up.

Biden, re-elected Tuesday, makes a cameo appearance on the Nov. 15 episode of NBC’s Parks and Recreation, a spot filmed back July.

Entertainment Weekly reports that Biden’s scene “occurs at the beginning of the episode, in which former Congressional campaign manager Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) takes fiancee/City Councilwoman Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler), to the White House to meet America’s No. 2, who has long been her No. 1 crush. (As Leslie once noted, her ideal man has ‘the brains of George Clooney and the body of Joe Biden.’)”

MORE: http://www.usatoday.com/story/theoval/2012/11/08/biden-parks-and-recreation/1691421/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&dlvrit=825998

Evolution is a thing
By Will Femia
Thu Nov 8, 2012 1:00 AM EST

Ohio really did go to the president last night.

And he really did win.
And he really was born in Hawaii.
And he really is -legitimately- President of the United States.
Again.

And the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make-up a fake unemployment rate last month.
And the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence
That cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy.

And the polls were not skewed to over-sample Democrats.
And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election
To make conservatives feel bad.
He was doing math.

And climate change is real.
And rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes.
And evolution is a thing.
And Benghazi was an attack on us.
It was not a scandal by us.

And no one is taking away anyone’s guns.
And taxes haven’t gone up.
And the deficit is dropping, actually.
And Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction.

And the moon landing was real.
And FEMA isn’t building concentration camps.
And UN election observers aren’t taking over Texas.
And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry
And the financial services industry
Are not the same thing as communism.

Listen.

http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/

The Greatness of Barack Obama Is Our Great Project

By Charles P. Pierce

at 3:07AM

There is a story that they tell in Georgia politics about the first time that Barack Obama was inaugurated as this most improbable president of the United States. Shortly before the ceremony, they say, he met with John Lewis, the congressman and American hero who was nearly beaten to death on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama as he marched to demand the right simply to vote. The two huddled in the corner and the president-elect wrote something on Lewis’s inaugural program. He walked away, and Lewis showed the program to the friends who had come with him.

“Because of you,” it said. “Barack Obama.”

Part of what drives people crazy about him — and if you wanted to see crazy, you should have seen the fugue state that overcame the Fox election all-stars last night, because I’ve seen jollier police lineups — is that he so clearly understands his own genuine historical stature, and that he wears it so easily, and that he uses it so deftly. It is not obvious. He does not use it brutally or obviously. It is just… there with him, a long and deep reservoir of violence and sorrow and tragedy and triumph out of which comes almost everything he does. He came into this office a figure of history, unlike anyone who’s become president since George Washington. The simple event of him remains a great gravitational force in our politics. It changes the other parts of our politics in their customary orbits. It happens so easily and so in the manner of an immutable physical law that you hardly notice that it has happened until you realize that what you thought you knew about the country and its people had been shifted by degrees until it is in a completely different place.

Change, he talks about.

Change is the force around him when he walks into the room.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/barack-obama-2012-14524219#ixzz2BdnFPo2e

“The Nerdiest Election In The History Of The American Republic”

That’s what Ackerman calls it. Sasha Issenberg explains why the Democrats’ data operation excelled:

If Republicans brought consumer data into politics during Bush’s re-election, Democrats are mastering the techniques that give campaigns the ability to understand what actually moves voters. As a result, Democrats are beginning to engage a wider set of questions about what exactly a campaign is capable of accomplishing in an election year: not just how to modify nonvoters’ behavior to get them to the polls, but what exactly can change someone’s mind outside of the artificial confines of a focus group.

Michael Scherer has more details:

Rather than rely on outside media consultants to decide where ads should run, Messina based his purchases on the massive internal data sets. “We were able to put our target voters through some really complicated modeling, to say, O.K., if Miami-Dade women under 35 are the targets, [here is] how to reach them,” said one official. As a result, the campaign bought ads to air during unconventional programming, like Sons of Anarchy, The Walking Dead and Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt. 23, skirting the traditional route of buying ads next to local news programming. How much more efficient was the Obama campaign of 2012 than 2008 at ad buying? Chicago has a number for that: “On TV we were able to buy 14% more efficiently … to make sure we were talking to our persuadable voters,” the same official said.

The numbers also led the campaign to escort their man down roads not usually taken in the late stages of a presidential campaign. In August, Obama decided to answer questions on the social news website Reddit, which many of the President’s senior aides did not know about. “Why did we put Barack Obama on Reddit?” an official asked rhetorically. “Because a whole bunch of our turnout targets were on Reddit.”

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/

Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win
By Michael Scherer
Nov. 07, 2012

In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obama’s campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49. The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney — and Obama.

So as they did with all the other data collected, stored and analyzed in the two-year drive for re-election, Obama’s top campaign aides decided to put this insight to use. They sought out an East Coast celebrity who had similar appeal among the same demographic, aiming to replicate the millions of dollars produced by the Clooney contest. “We were blessed with an overflowing menu of options, but we chose Sarah Jessica Parker,” explains a senior campaign adviser. And so the next Dinner with Barack contest was born: a chance to eat at Parker’s West Village brownstone.

For the general public, there was no way to know that the idea for the Parker contest had come from a data-mining discovery about some supporters: affection for contests, small dinners and celebrity. But from the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means. “We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign,” he said after taking the job. He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official “chief scientist” for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions.

Exactly what that team of dozens of data crunchers was doing, however, was a closely held secret. “They are our nuclear codes,” campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt would say when asked about the efforts. Around the office, data-mining experiments were given mysterious code names such as Narwhal and Dreamcatcher. The team even worked at a remove from the rest of the campaign staff, setting up shop in a windowless room at the north end of the vast headquarters office. The “scientists” created regular briefings on their work for the President and top aides in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, but public details were in short supply as the campaign guarded what it believed to be its biggest institutional advantage over Mitt Romney’s campaign: its data.

Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/#ixzz2BdpO5lGD

I have to say, the media has been truly criminal in this country. And if they reported facts instead of reactions and the “acting” that politicos do, PBO probably could have shaved off even more of Romney’s white electorate.

Case in point: I have a friend, another military spouse. who lived across the street from me when I lived in Fort Lewis, WA. We’ve kept in touch through Facebook. She’s a Republican, from FL. She is one of those evangelicals who had a very hard time coming to terms with Mitt and Mormonism. She called a non-Christian secret cult and felt that Mitt was too secretiv. Whenever I would post hateful, racist rhetoric from the right wing, she hated that as well. She also posted some birther mess before as well. In the end I am confident she voted for Mitt. She had posted an app that said she agrees more with him.

So yesterday her status was this: Instead of a mormon, we’re stuck with the moron for 4 more years, woo frickin’ woo.

Others responded to her, with some pushback. Then she started going on about being forced to purchase government healthcare, blah, blah, blah.

So I replied: The funny thing is that the individual mandate that you dislike is actually a Republican idea. Back in the 1980s, the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think tank) pitched it to Congress and when Bill Clinton was in office in the 1990s and tried to pass healthcare, the Republicans presented a bill (with 20 co-sponsors) with the individual mandate as the alternative against his plan. Later, Mitt Romney later passed the healthcare law in MA that required the individual mandate. It is only now that the GOP hates the same ideals they advocated for years. That’s the hypocrisy of it all.

The only response she could come up with was she didn’t like that stuff that Mitt did in MA, and she doesn’t also agree with either party and she’s tired of all these politicians who sit in office for years and years.

It was the biggest cop-out…you see Republicans have been pushing for the individual mandate for 30 YEARS, and the one time a Democrat agrees to compromise with their ideology becomes something foreign. If you present many people with these facts they realize…damn, really…I’ve been that ignorant all this time.

This is what happens when a Romney supporter tries to diss the First Family: http://i1166.photobucket.com/albums/q615/sepiaobot/tweets_extremelibvsromneyfan_zps83e157f0.jpg

@Kennymack1971:
Big Picture stuff. RT @snkscoyote Obama Victory Could Spell End Of Conservative Supreme Court – Forbes http://onforb.es/VSeGwd

deaniac deserves a round of applause for years of consistent, brilliant analysis, and constantly calming people who were panicked by the professional left and netroots.

Vindication: Signed, Sealed, Delivered.

Last night, the President didn’t just win re-election, he won it by a good thumping – and if he wins Florida, as is increasingly looking the case – he will have beat all expectations, including that of Nate Silver’s – in the electoral college, winning 332 electoral votes. That, in an economy still recovering from the near-depression and in a political environment where the opposition party was determined to drag the country back down into recession just to deny President Obama a second term, is a landslide. If President Obama wins Florida, he will have won 332 electoral college votes compared to Romney’s 206 – a margin of more than 100 votes. That’s a landslide.

This piece isn’t about a big analysis. I will do that later. This one goes out to all of you – all of you who kept faith, who worked hard, who trusted this president, who stood by this president – not just this election but throughout his first term. Because last night wasn’t just victory. It was vindication. It was vindication not just for this campaign but for the policies and reforms for which you stood by the president’s side and fought hard against naysayers from both sides of the political extreme…

http://www.thepeoplesview.net/2012/11/vindication-signed-sealed-delivered.html#.UJuyMc4c_Cs.twitter

Picket Fence Apocalypse
By CHARLES M. BLOW

No, you cannot have your country back. America is moving forward.

That’s the message voters sent the Republican Party and its Tea Party wing Tuesday night when they re-elected President Obama and strengthened the Democrats’ control of the Senate.

No amount of outside money or voter suppression or fear mongering or lying — and there was a ton of each — was enough to blunt that message.

President Obama and his formidable campaign machine out-performed the Republicans, holding together a winning coalition that is the face of America’s tomorrow: young voters, urban voters, racially and ethnically diverse voters and women voters.

more here
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/07/picket-fence-apocalypse/?smid=tw-share

http://gawker.com/5958818/

Right before the President’s acceptance speech, he was waving to the supporters who were in front of him. In the above video, Sasha tapped him to make sure that he didn’t forget to wave to the supporters behind him too. We have a beautiful First Family full of sweethearts.

A fascinating look at the data crunchers behind the scenes in Chicago:

In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obama’s campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49. The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney — and Obama.

So as they did with all the other data collected, stored and analyzed in the two-year drive for re-election, Obama’s top campaign aides decided to put this insight to use. They sought out an East Coast celebrity who had similar appeal among the same demographic, aiming to replicate the millions of dollars produced by the Clooney contest. “We were blessed with an overflowing menu of options, but we chose Sarah Jessica Parker,” explains a senior campaign adviser. And so the next Dinner with Barack contest was born: a chance to eat at Parker’s West Village brownstone.
[...]
For all the praise Obama’s team won in 2008 for its high-tech wizardry, its success masked a huge weakness: too many databases. Back then, volunteers making phone calls through the Obama website were working off lists that differed from the lists used by callers in the campaign office. Get-out-the-vote lists were never reconciled with fundraising lists. It was like the FBI and the CIA before 9/11: the two camps never shared data. “We analyzed very early that the problem in Democratic politics was you had databases all over the place,” said one of the officials. “None of them talked to each other.” So over the first 18 months, the campaign started over, creating a single massive system that could merge the information collected from pollsters, fundraisers, field workers and consumer databases as well as social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the swing states.

The new megafile didn’t just tell the campaign how to find voters and get their attention; it also allowed the number crunchers to run tests predicting which types of people would be persuaded by certain kinds of appeals. Call lists in field offices, for instance, didn’t just list names and numbers; they also ranked names in order of their persuadability, with the campaign’s most important priorities first. About 75% of the determining factors were basics like age, sex, race, neighborhood and voting record. Consumer data about voters helped round out the picture. “We could [predict] people who were going to give online. We could model people who were going to give through mail. We could model volunteers,” said one of the senior advisers about the predictive profiles built by the data. “In the end, modeling became something way bigger for us in ’12 than in ’08 because it made our time more efficient.”

Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/#ixzz2BeGlhFhW

America has never been about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That’s the principle we were founded on.

— President Barack Obama, November 7, 2012

http://www.whitehouse.gov/

So they had seriously convinced themselves that all the polls were wrong? The bubble is way thick.
____________________________

But Romney’s top aides, who only a couple of days ago were openly speculating about who would fill which jobs in a Romney administration, woke up Wednesday to face brutal recriminations.
Some top donors privately unloaded on Romney’s senior staff, describing it as a junior varsity operation that failed to adequately insulate and defend Romney through a summer of relentless attacks from the Obama campaign over his business career and personal wealth.

“Everybody feels like they were a bunch of well-meaning folks who were, to use a phrase that Governor Romney coined to describe his opponent, way in over their heads,” said one member of the campaign’s national finance committee, who requested anonymity to speak candidly.

“Romney World,” the fundraiser added, “will fade into the obscurity of a lot of losing campaigns.”

Stuart Stevens, who as Romney’s chief strategist was the recipient of some of the harshest blame, did not return requests for comment Wednesday. Nor did many of Romney’s other top advisers, who during Romney’s concession speech were visibly shell-shocked.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/life-after-defeat-for-mitt-romney-public-praise-private-questions/2012/11/07/4db3bc38-2916-11e2-96b6-8e6a7524553f_story.html

Better than 80/20 Latino Vote

By mistermix November 8th, 2012

Ho-lee shit:

“For the first time in US history, the Latino vote can plausibly claim to be nationally decisive,” Stanford University university professor Gary Segura, who conducted the study, told reporters.

According to Segura, the Latino vote provided Obama with 5.4 percent of his margin over Romney, well more than his overall lead in the popular vote. Had Romney managed even 35 percent of the Latino vote, he said, the results may have flipped nationally.

The effect was at least as dramatic in swing states, most notably in Colorado, which Obama won on Tuesday. There Latinos went for the president by an astounding 87-10 margin, an edge not far from the near-monolithic support he received from African American voters. In Ohio, with a smaller but still significant Latino population, Obama won by an 82-17 margin.

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/11/08/better-than-8020-latino-vote/

Good morning all!

I really hope Plouffe writes another book on the 2012 campaign.

Bigot Pat Buchanan weighs in with his deep thoughts lol:

Buchanan: ‘White America’ Died Last Night

Conservative political pundit Pat Buchanan stoked controversy today by claiming that Barack Obama’s reelection has ‘killed White America’.

…

But the former Nixon advisor was more explicit on the G. Gordon Liddy Show this morning. When asked for his reaction to Obama’s victory, Buchanan replied brazenly:

“White America died last night. Obama’s reelection killed it. Our 200 plus year history as a Western nation is over. We’re a Socialist Latin American country now. Venezuela without the oil.”

http://dailycurrant.com/2012/11/07/buchanan-white-america-dead/