Mitt Romney

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I am going to be away for a few days – no blogs on the Democratic convention – but I wanted to leave you with this in case you missed it.

kstreet607's avatarThe Fifth Column

 

It’s a slow news day, so when I ran across this article by the much respected Juan Cole…it was a no-brainer.  I had to share it.

Juan Cole – Informed Comment

You can’t see me, but I’m talking to Clint Eastwood sitting spectrally in an empty chair, and I am replying to his confused rant.

1. Mr. Eastwood, you called the failure to close the Guantanamo Bay penitentiary a broken promise. President Obama was prevented from closing Guantanamo by the Republicans in Congress, which refused to allocate the funds necessary to end it. Do you remember this this Washington Post headline, “House acts to block closing of Guantanamo”?

2. Mr. Eastwood you called “stupid” the idea of trying terrorists who attacked New York in a civilian courtroom in New York. But what would have better vindicated the strengths of America’s rule of law, the thing about…

View original post 639 more words

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The National Debt and the GDP

Being a little behind in reading my email, I just saw this from Ezra Klein.  He suggests you keep this in mind while you watch the Republicans try to push the debt onto the President and the Democrats.

Notice that you can barely see TARP.  It is that dark blue streak that is separating the other two blue parts of the graph.  Even the stimulus is pretty small.

The deficit is pretty easy to understand when you look at it in a graph.  If you reduced the Bush tax cuts for income over &250,000 and worked on the costs of the wars – and didn’t start any new ones – you can really begin to reduce the debt.  Maybe the huge number of people who think the tax breaks for the wealthy should be eliminated understand this better than Mitt and Paul and the rest of their gang.  Certainly they understand this better than Grover Nordquist.

So when you are watching the Republicans in Tampa, remember this chart and thank Ezra Klein.

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The Republicans and Disfunction

I’m reading It’s even Worse than it Looks: How the american Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of extremism by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein.  And yes, it is depressing especially when I’m reading it while also looking at the Republican Platform which has been described by Think Progress as the “most conservative in modern history.”  OK so maybe Think Progress is on the left but they have a pretty good summary.  Here are just a few subheading from the summary.

NO ABORTION IN CASES OF RAPE OR INCEST

NO LEGAL RECOGNITION OF SAME-SEX COUPLES

REPLICATE ARIZONA-STYLE IMMIGRATION LAWS.

NO WOMEN IN COMBAT

NO NEW TAXES, EXCEPT FOR WAR.

The New York Times said this in an editorial last Tuesday

Over the years, the major parties’ election-year platforms have been regarded as Kabuki theater scripts for convention week. The presidential candidates blithely ignored them or openly dismissed the most extreme planks with a knowing wink as merely a gesture to pacify the noisiest activists in the party.

That cannot be said of the draft of the Republican platform circulating ahead of the convention in Tampa, Fla. The Republican Party has moved so far to the right that the extreme is now the mainstream. The mean-spirited and intolerant platform represents the face of Republican politics in 2012. And unless he makes changes, it is the current face of the shape-shifting Mitt Romney.

The draft document is more aggressive in its opposition to women’s reproductive rights and to gay rights than any in memory. It accuses President Obama and the federal judiciary of “an assault on the foundations of our society,” and calls for constitutional amendments banning both same-sex marriage and abortion.

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In passages on abortion, the draft platform puts the party on the most extreme fringes of American opinion. It calls for a “human life amendment” and for legislation “to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.” That would erase any right women have to make decisions about their health and their bodies. There are no exceptions for victims of rape or incest, and such laws could threaten even birth control.

The draft demands that the government “not fund or subsidize health care which includes abortion coverage,” which could bar abortion coverage on federally subsidized health-insurance exchanges, for example.

The platform praises states with “informed consent” laws that require women to undergo medically unnecessary tests before having abortions, and “mandatory waiting periods.” Those are among the most patronizing forms of anti-abortion legislation. They presume that a woman is not capable of making a considered decision about abortion before she goes to a doctor. The draft platform also espouses the most extreme Republican views on taxation, national security, military spending and other issues.

Over all, it is farther out on the party’s fringe than Mr. Romney ventured in the primaries, when he repudiated a career’s worth of centrist views on issues like abortion and gay marriage. But the planks hew closely to the views of his running mate, Paul Ryan, and the powerful right-wing. Mr. Romney has a chance to move back in the direction of the center by amending this extremist platform. It will be interesting to see if he seizes it.

Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia might not have gotten the Vice Presidential nod, but he delivered the platform.  He should be proud.

Mann and Ornstein have a long quote from a former Republican Congressional staff, Mike Lofgren, who wrote in 2011 why he was leaving after almost thirty years [pages 54-55] Part of that quote reads

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.

Later Lofgren writes

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster.  Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic.  As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

The platform is the Ryan agenda no matter how much he tries to say that it is Romney who is running for President.  Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan and no one can convince me he didn’t know what Ryan’s positions were or what legislation he had sponsored.  The Republicans like to say they are for smaller, less intrusive government, but the platform seems pretty intrusive to me.  If they have their way, they will be imposing their views on the rest of us.

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Akin, Ryan, Romney and Women’s Healthcare

I was cooking dinner and listening to a rerun of Tom Ashbrook’s On Point when I heard Mary Kate Cary say that she agreed with the President that rape was rape, but did not agree with him that male legislators were making health care decisions for women and that they should just let women decide for themselves.  The President’s exact words from a report from CBS News

“Rape is rape,” Mr. Obama told reporters at the daily White House briefing Monday. “And the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we’re talking about doesn’t make sense to the American people and certainly doesn’t make sense to me.”

Mr. Obama added that Akin’s remarks underscore “why we shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making health care decisions on behalf of women.”

The president acknowledged that his GOP rival Mitt Romney and other Republicans have distanced themselves from Akin’s statements. However, he said, “The underlying notion that we should be making decisions on behalf of women for their health care decisions, or qualifying ‘forcible rape’ versus ‘non-forcible rape’ — those are broader issues….between me and the other party.”

Mary Kate Cary, a former speech writer for President George H. W. Bush, went on to confuse the fact that women probably do make more decisions about health care treatment than men since they are still most likely to take the children to the doctor, with the male legislators setting boundaries on what kind of treatment women can actually choose.  (Thanks to my husband for helping me clarify that.)

So what does all this mean?  It means that Todd Akin, Paul Ryan and the Republican platform are imposing their religious ideas on everyone and removing choice.  And here I thought that they were the party of small government!  What with banning abortion in all situations and/or requiring vaginal ultrasounds before an abortion, I think they are actually intruding in health care decisions.  At the same time, none of them cares about what happens to the child after this forced birth because there will be no available safety net for her or for her mother under the Ryan/Romney cuts to the safety net in the budget combined with the proposed repeal of the Affordable Care Act.  There will also be no way for women to prevent pregnancies as there will be no contraception available under the ACA and no funding for Planned Parenthood.

Todd Akin and all his pals who don’t believe that a woman can get pregnant during rape, make that forcible rape, may be on the extreme edge of an extreme edge but they do represent the majority view of the Republican party.  This from the New York Times this morning

As an orator, Representative Todd Akin of Missouri may stand out for his clumsiness. But as a legislator, Mr. Akin has a record on abortion that is largely indistinguishable from those of most of his Republican House colleagues, who have viewed restricting abortion rights as one of their top priorities.

It is an agenda that has enjoyed the support of House leaders, including Speaker John A. Boehner and Representative Eric Cantor, the majority leader, who has called anti-abortion measures “obviously very important in terms of the priorities we set out initially in our pledge to America.” It became inextricably linked to the near-shutdown of the federal government last year when an agreement to keep the government open was reached only after it was linked to a measure restricting abortion in the District of Columbia.

Even as Congressional Republicans, including Mr. Boehner, denounced Mr. Akin’s remark that victims of “legitimate rape” were able to somehow prevent pregnancy, an agenda to roll back abortion is one that House Republicans have largely moved in step with.

In an anti-abortion measure once sponsored by Mr. Akin, Mr. Ryan and scores of other Republican lawmakers, an exemption was made for victims of “forcible” rape, though that word was later removed.

On Tuesday, Republicans approved platform language for next week’s nominating convention that calls for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion with no explicit exceptions for cases of rape or incest. That is a view more restrictive than Mr. Romney’s, who has said that he supports exceptions to allow abortions in cases of rape.

Ryan center and Akin to the right in a photograph by J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

So Democrats can now keep tying Paul Ryan, Todd Akin and the Republican Platform together while Mitt, as usual, tries to dance away from taking a position.  After all as Republican Party Chair, Reince Priebus said “this is the platform of the Republican Party, it is not the platform of Mitt Romney.”  I titled this “Akin, Ryan, Romney and Women’s Health Care” but if they have their way, women won’t have health care.  There is already a large gender gap.  We can enjoy watching it get bigger.

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Why Obama may lose

OK. I’ve been a little out of sorts the last few days election=wise.  I’ve been spending a little time working in one of Elizabeth Warren’s field offices making voter ID calls and doing data entry.  It is going to be a close race with Scott Brown and every vote is going to count.  And then I saw this in yesterday’s New York Times as part of Charles M. Blow’s column.

If you know any of these people tell them to register and/or to vote.  There is still time.  If even some of them vote, it will make a difference and if all of them do, it will be a landslide re-election for President Obama.

This is one of the reasons why Patrick McDonnell and Mutts have captured my mood perfectly

August 16th 2012 - Mutts

[From August 16th.]

Let’s get out there, find those voters and get them to the polls.  Then maybe Crabby won’t have to be quite so crabby!

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Joe Speaks

Yesterday Vice President Joe Biden got carried away and maybe used an unfortunate turn of phrase, but, as usual Joe spoke honestly and told the truth.  And how do I know he told the truth?  Just look at Mitt Romney’s reaction.

So what did Joe actually say?  According to the Washington Post

Campaigning in southern Virginia on Tuesday, Vice President Biden told an audience that Mitt Romney’s approach to regulating the financial industry will “put y’all back in chains,” a remark that triggered a flurry of Republican criticism, including a sharp rebuke from the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.

“Look at their budget and what they’re proposing,” Biden said. “Romney wants to let the – he said in the first hundred days, he is going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street. They are going to put y’all back in chains.”

This set off a firestorm.  Joe walked back the remark a little, but basically stood by what he said.   Mitt Romney went a little nuts.  (and, according to the Daily Kos, a scripted nuts since Mitt used a teleprompter).  The New York Times put it this way

Standing in front of a stately town hall here in central Ohio, under a giant banner that read “Victory in Ohio,” Mr. Romney called Mr. Biden’s claim “another outrageous charge.”

“This is what an angry and desperate presidency looks like,” he said.

In a personal dig that he wrote at the last minute Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Romney told the president to “take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago and let us get about rebuilding and reuniting America.”

The Times also reported that the White House stood by the Biden remarks.

Republican U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney is seen in a tele prompter reflection waiting to speak to supporters at the Chillicothe Victory rally in Chillicothe, Ohio August 14, 2012.    REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton (UNITED STATES)

Republican U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney is seen in a tele prompter reflection waiting to speak to supporters at the Chillicothe
Victory rally in Chillicothe, Ohio August 14, 2012.  Photograph by Shannon Stapleton.
 
So what are we to make of all this?  The campaign is going to get very ugly.  I think the Democrats are right to let Joe Biden be the attack dog and hopefully let President Obama be above the fray. But on a fundamental level, Joe Biden is right.  The impact of the Republican proposals is on the poor even more that on the middle class.  And the poor are still to a great extent people of color who understood what Joe was saying. 
 
 

So much for the selection of Paul Ryan as the veep nominee as the end of the petty bickering and the start of the campaign of “big ideas.” Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul claims that “President Obama’s campaign keeps sinking lower.” What was the offense? Vice President Biden said the word “chains.”

In tone and bite, Biden is to the Obama campaign what John Sununu is to the Romney campaign. Only the vice president is polished and likeable. Biden was speaking at a Virginia rally that the Associated Press reports “included hundreds of black people,” and he warned the assembled that Romney wanted to do away with the post-2008 regulations on Wall Street. “Unchain Wall Street,” Biden said. “They’re going to put y’all back in chains.” Yeah, that was wince-worthy. It shall join all the others on the Biden blooper reel. But the high dudgeon of the Romney campaign is rather precious.

This is the campaign that seemed perfectly fine with Sununu saying he wished the president “would learn to be an American.”

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This is the campaign that has been mute in the face of Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) hyperbolic assertion that Obama would “rather you be his slave.”

This is the campaign that is allowing Newt Gingrich to host “Newt University” at the Tampa convention this month. The former House speaker is fond of calling Obama a “food stamp president.”A wicked phrase that has more racial baggage than a klansman’s El Camino.

This is the campaign of the candidate who uttered the equally racially fraught “if they want more stuff from government … more free stuff” when talking to supporters in Montana about what he told the NAACP about his desire to repeal Obamacare.

Let’s all be honest.  This is a campaign about race.  There is a black man in the White House.  The Republican’s are fighting a last ditch battle to maintain a white majority in the United States electorate.  We see this in the allegations of voter fraud and the purging of voter rolls.  We see this in the audiences that surround Mitt and Paul Ryan.  Yes, this is an election about economic policy and jobs, but the subtext is always race.

 
 
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Paul Ryan’s Proposals in a Nutshell

The Boston Globe columnist, Scott Lehigh wrote what I think is one of the best summaries of Paul Ryan’s budget proposal compared to President Obama’s proposals.  And whether Mitt Romney likes it or not, he is tied to the Ryan budget which he once described as “marvelous”.

Lehigh describes the Ryan budget this way

There will be a fierce fight to frame the argument, but Romney and Ryan will have a tougher challenge persuading the relatively small percentage of undecided voters. With Ryan as his running mate, Romney will no longer be able to hide behind strategic ambiguity about his budget and tax cut plans. To date, a lack of key details has made those proposals hard to analyze, which has obviously been intentional. Nor does the Republicans’ presumptive nominee want to be pinned to the details of Ryan’s Medicare plan, which would shift thousands in health care costs onto the backs of future generations of seniors; one of the talking points the campaign distributed to help Republicans discuss Ryan’s selection is that, as president, Romney will have his own Medicare proposal. But absent necessary details about Romney’s proposal, Ryan’s plan will and should stand as a fair campaign proxy.

Second, the reality is that you simply can’t accomplish what Romney and Ryan hope to — that is, a large, new across-the-board tax cut while tackling the long-term federal budget deficit — without hitting both middle-class and moderate earners. A recent analysis by the nonpartisan, well-regarded Tax Policy Center illustrated that very point. It showed that Romney’s vague assertion that he could pay for his new tax cut by closing loopholes and deductions, but without targeting those important to the middle class, was undoable. If Romney hews to his resolution to pay for his tax cut through loophole closings, the elimination of deductions would be so extensive that the average middle class family would see a tax hike, according to the center’s analysis.

Of course we already know that Romney considers the Tax Policy Center to be a Democratic front.  The difference in approaches?

Now, with the baby boomers retiring and increasingly drawing on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, the nation faces a large gap between future spending commitments and future revenues. But though tax cuts helped create the problem, Romney and Ryan insist it must all be solved through spending cuts. That flies in the face of several recent bipartisan deficit commissions, which have said that policy makers should rely on both spending cuts and new revenues.

President Obama, by contrast, wants tax breaks for upper earners to expire, which would mean more revenue, and thus lighter cuts in future spending. Because Obama wants to keeps the tax breaks for families making less than $250,000, substantial spending cuts will still be required, including reductions in entitlements. Obama has left many of those details for the future. But that failing is less egregious than Romney’s. Obama, after all, would recapture $750 billion or more (over 10 years) by ending the Bush tax cuts. And the president isn’t proposing a large new tax cut.

We can only hope that the Democrats can define Paul Ryan as successfully as they were able to define Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romney will no longer be able to hide behind strategic ambiguity about his budget and tax cut plans with Paul Ryan as his running mate.

Photograph by SHANNON STAPLETON/REUTERS

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Romney’s empathy or the lack thereof

I’ve been following closely the stories on the bullying incident at Cranbrook.  I was, like many, horrified at the incident.  But I was more horrified by the fact that no one at Cranbrook thought it necessary to discipline the young men involved.  And I was most horrified by Mitt Romney’s nervous giggle when asked about the incident.  I’ve been groping for an explanation of why he doesn’t remember what happened when the others involved remember it clearly.  Then I read this very interesting article in the Boston Globe this morning.  The story quoted a gentleman named Don Gorton.

While some observers have expressed doubt that anyone could forget such a dramatic episode, one activist who has studied bullying said he believes Romney may, in fact, have no recollection.

Teenagers who bully others often don’t remember the incidents because they weren’t traumatic for them, said Don Gorton, chairman of the Anti-Violence Project of Massachusetts, a nonprofit group that seeks to reduce violence against gays and lesbians.

“Empathy is the critical variable,’’ Gorton said. “If they don’t feel their victims’ pain, the episode won’t stand out. It wasn’t a big deal for them.’’

Empathy.  That is what explains a great deal about Mitt Romney.  He lacks empathy.  People have been saying that he can’t relate to the common person and he has given many examples.  He likes to fire people.  A young person who can’t find a job should get his or her parents to give them a loan to start a business.  He supports the Ryan budget which raises the defense budget at the expense of the middle class and poor.  Plus he certainly was cruel to poor Seamus the dog.

 In the Massachusetts Governor’s Office

 

More from Gorton

Gorton, however, said he was offended that Romney described the episode as typical high school hijinks, even though an 18-year-old Romney was reportedly using scissors to cut Lauber’s hair as Lauber screamed for help.

“I wish he had said nothing,’’ Gorton said. “The fact is, high school pranks are whoopee cushions and wedgies. This was assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.’’

Gorton and other gay-rights activists in Massachusetts said the episode made them recall how Romney disbanded the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth and the Governor’s Task Force on Hate Crimes – two panels that sought to combat bullying and were created under a previous Republican governor.

“It is relevant to judge him for his record in office and he was lackluster, to put it kindly, in his efforts to fight bullying when he was governor,’’ said Gorton, who was cochairman of the Task Force on Hate Crimes when it was disbanded in 2003.

“It is relevant to judge him for his record in office and he was lackluster, to put it kindly, in his efforts to fight bullying when he was governor,’’ said Gorton, who was cochairman of the Task Force on Hate Crimes when it was disbanded in 2003.

Romney has said the groups were disbanded to save money.

I understand that some people are disappointed that President Obama has not brought about miraculous change.  But ask yourself this question:  Would you rather have a President with the courage to come out in favor of an idea, gay marriage, that, while growing in acceptance, is still viewed in horror by many or a President Romney who lacks any kind of empathy?  The answer for me is clear:  a President without empathy is a dangerous one.

 

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Can we take Mitt seriously?

Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, is difficult to peg.  I’m not sure that he is interested in governing based on his track record here in Massachusetts while Governor.  Romney spent large hunks of his time running for President and not showing much interest in the state.  He seems to understand capitalism as practiced by companies like Bain Capital, but is really uninterested in what goes on with ordinary middle class and the working poor.  He can’t seem to hit the right notes and for the left is all too often the butt of jokes.  Here are two.

04.11MITTHARVARD.gif

Dan Wasserman on Mitt and Harvard.

Then there is Calvin Trillin.

The Republican National Committee Selects a Campaign Slogan

Our slogan’s been chosen.
We think it’s a hit.
We’ll shout from the rafters,
“We settle for Mitt!”

There is the dog on the roof, the liking to fire people, etc. etc. etc. 

But he is going to be the nominee for the Republicans and we need to find out what we can take seriously.  Greg Sargent writing in the Washington Post’s Plum Line blog took at stab at it today.

A few days ago, Mitt Romney chatted with a bunch of firefighters, who told him about their struggles in the Obama economy. As Romney recalled it: “I asked the firefighters I was meeting with, about 15 or them, how many had had to take another job to make ends meet, and almost every one of them had.”

Of course, firefighters are public sector workers. And Romney has said that public sector workers are getting paid too much, not that they’re getting paid too little. As Jonathan Chait puts it:

Romney’s position is that these fine public servants are luxuriating in excessive pay, a fact that, unlike swelling income inequality, constitutes a major source of unfairness in American life. (“We will stop the unfairness of government workers getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve,” he said last week.)

This is actually a policy flashpoint between the two parties. Public employment has cratered in recent years, with public sector jobs continuing to decline even as private sector jobs rebound, exerting a continued drag on the sluggish recovery. Obama’s position is that the federal government ought to provide aid to state governments to rehire some of the laid-off teachers, cops, and firefighters. Republicans oppose this. Romney seems to have forgotten that the firefighters he came face-to-face with are one category of Americans whose economic pain he’s supposed to be in favor of.

Steve Benen takes this further, adding that the episode and the attendant contradiction reveal the failure of Romney’s “transactional politics.” Romney is looking to take things away from public sector workers, students who rely on Pell Grants, those who rely on entitlements and government programs that might be cut, and the like:

His is an agenda of austerity, a sharp reduction in public investments, and hostility towards government activism in general. In a transactional sense, Romney has to hope most voters aren’t looking to make a traditional electoral trade, because he doesn’t intend to give them anything.

What we can take seriously is that Mitt doesn’t care about anyone who isn’t rich.  We can take seriously that he and today’s Republican Party want to take women back to the 1950’s and even further.  We need to wake up to the fact that today’s Republican Party offers the 99% nothing.  We need to take Mitt at his word and vote for him at our peril.

 

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Fear of polls

It doesn’t matter whether you support Romney or Obama.  When a new poll is released you start to parse it.  Who did the poll?  Are they a Democratic or Republican leaning pollster?  How is it different from the last poll you saw?  What do the pundits say?  Does the result make me happy or anxious? 

This morning RealClear Politics had these numbers:

Average:  Obama +3.2

Electoral College:  Obama 227   Romney 170  (270 needed to win)

Intrade:  Obama  60.4    Romeny 38.2  

Nate Silver, my poll guru, had some advice the other day.  If you are a political junkie, read the whole article, but here are some of the highlights for me.

1. Be patient. Many of the poll-watching habits you learned for the primaries you will need to unlearn for the general election.

In the primaries, it is often worth paying a tremendous amount of attention to how recently a poll was conducted. Because voter opinion shifts rapidly in primaries, a poll that is even two or three days old might have substantially less information value than one that was released today.

That just isn’t true in the general election, when there are fewer swing voters, the candidates are better known, and voter preferences are more rigid. Instead, polls have a much stronger tendency to revert to the mean, and what is perceived to be “momentum” is often just statistical noise. In October, it might be worth sweating just a little bit if there seems to be a two- or three-percentage point shift against your preferred candidate. Right now, it probably isn’t; a poll released on April 20 isn’t going to be much better in the long-run than one released on April 10.

2. Take the poll average. This ought to be obvious, but you should generally be looking for a trend to show up in several different polls from several different polling firms before you start to view it as newsworthy.

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5. Pay attention to likely voters versus registered voters. It is worth looking at whether the poll is conducted among registered voters, likely voters or all adults.

In the past eight presidential election cycles or so, the Republican candidate has done a net of about two percentage points better on average in likely voter polls than in registered voter polls.

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6. Keep paying attention to Mr. Obama’s approval ratings. In the early stages of general election campaigns, a president’s approval ratings have often been at least as accurate a guide to his eventual performance as the head-to-head numbers. Thus, for at least the next couple of months, I would pay as much attention to Mr. Obama’s approval ratings as his head-to-head polls against Mr. Romney.

It is probably slightly better to look at Mr. Obama’s net approval rating — his approval less his disapproval — than the approval rating alone.

…

11. Read the polls in the context of the news. Polls don’t just shift on their own; they change because people are reacting to changes in their circumstances and to different news events.

Political reporters have beats and deadlines and need to turn stories around every day. But most of the day-to-day squabbles that the campaigns have don’t matter to most voters. If there is a shift in the polls, it is much more likely to be real rather than illusory if it follows something like an Israeli air strike on Iran or a stock market crash than something like this or this.

The other caution is that even when major news events do shift the polls, they sometimes have a half-life with the effects fading over time. These events may produce long-term and permanent effects on how voters see the candidates, but they often overshoot the mark in the close term. Recent examples include the uptrend in Mr. Obama’s approval ratings after the death of Osama bin Laden or the downtrend following the debt ceiling negotiations, both of which persisted for some weeks but then faded.

My conclusion:  This is going to be  close election.  Closer than in my opinion it should be.