Sandy

No media.  No politics.  No browsing.

Be safe out there and I will see you all when this is over.

These are a few of my favorite memes....

The most famous is the 47% video and all its glory, but there are a few that deserve a mention all on their own.


The WalMart Moms will decide this vote.

Math.  Arithmetic and more math.

Romney has to look presidential.  Which, I guess isn't the same as being qualified.

Too close to call.

Romnesia.

Binders full of women.

Race, Rape and Rage

Stop!  Don't read this post!

Not yet anyway.  Not until you know that I am a feminist, a liberal, and pro-choice.  There. Now you know my biases, I want to talk about something that is making me out of my mind as I try to follow the way the media is talking about the presidential election.  The language used on of the topics of race, rape and the female vote.

Let's start easy, shall we?

There seems to be a rash of media outlets talking about race as a factor in this election.  I am not a fool; I understand racism is alive and well and living in the collective American basement eating Frito's and watching stolen cable. Having said that, the tenor of what is said seems more overt than I ever recall in my lifetime.  Let's start with the idea that there are white men, and then there is everyone else.  Here's what we find at the Washington Post:

Obama has a deficit of 23 percentage points, trailing Republican Mitt Romney 60 percent to 37 percent among whites, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News national tracking poll. That presents a significant hurdle for the president — and suggests that he will need to achieve even larger margins of victory among women and minorities, two important parts of the Democratic base, to win reelection.

Read that carefully please.  Obama has a deficit of 23 percentage points among whites, so he will have to have a larger showing among women and minorities.  The words that the don't use are just as important as the ones that they do use.  Here, they've made a distinction between "white" and "women and minorities," glossing over the overlap, glossing over white women.  They are other.  What the article doesn't fully say, but means completely, is that Obama has an issue with the white men's approval.  It's insidious, and it's important.

LZ Granderson says both sides have a race problem.  While Obama is not polling well with white men, it would seem that Romney is having similar issues with minorities.

Mitt Romney may very well become the next president. But the polls suggest if he does, he will have little minority support. In a country that is growing browner by the decade, Republicans relying solely on white people to win elections is not a sustainable strategy.

NBCNews talks about which demographic will be more important.  Their questions are about white men vs. all Latinos.  Again, lumping and separating at the same time.  If you read the "why" behind the minority support for Obama, it falls into a "Romney doesn't understand us" vagueness that is also detrimental. The theme seems to be that the only reason a minority would vote for Obama is the fact of his own minority status.  Or, maybe it's just John Sununu, one of Romney's top advisors throwing that knife around.  

With all of the talk about white men, what happens to the other 52% of the population? CNN has this pretty interesting article where they talk about how women's issues seem to be driving the narrative for this election a little more than in the past.  They try to break it down to just the numbers.  They say, for example, that 65.7% of eligible women voters actually voted in 2008.  They also explain that a larger percent of eligible women voted in the the last 8 elections than their male counterparts.  That probably means someone should pay attention.

Well, the Republicans say they are paying attention, but it seems that it is impossible for there to be a gathering of 20 or more of them without some powerful guy mentioning rape. There are plenty of other issues that could just as easily be construed as women' s issues, but choice seems to captivate this election year.  The twist on the old faithful choice issue is adding an element that no one had previously thought was up for debate: the definition of rape.  It started in Missouri, with Senator Akin offering up his opinion that if there is a legitimate rape, pregnancy can't happen.  Senator Akin may not have realized it at the time, but "legitimate rape," and its cousin "forcible rape," are now a part of how public policy is created on a state level.  Again, how people talk about this stuff is insidious.

In New Mexico, the Children, Youth and Families Department mandates that a woman file a child support claim before receiving state assistance.  At this time, the CYFD is considering an amendment that would waive that requirement for victims of "forcible rape."  What that means is that when seeking assistance, a woman would have to prove that she was raped in order to be qualified for the exemption.  Like the race language, this is a slow, insidious move to normalize this language in a state where Obama is actually likely to win the popular vote.  I wish I could say that New Mexico is an outlier on this issue but, sadly, Pennsylvania is looking at a bill right now that would require a woman to prove that she was raped in order to keep her state assistance if she becomes pregnant while on assistance.  

"Forcible" and "legitimate" labels are finding their way into the dominant discourse because, in part, of the role rape plays in the conversation about abortion.  Even there, the insults don't stop.  Without any particular regard to what it might mean to hear a promenint public figure say so, Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said that he believes rapes resulting in pregnancy are "something that God intends to happen."  He said this because he is against abortion for cases of rape or incest, despite the fact that having that child means a lifetime of the kinds of issues that are happening in New Mexico and Pennsylvania.  There are also no protections in place, in many states, concerning the parental rights of the rapist.

Richard Mourdock was indorced by Mitt Romney.  VP hopeful, Paul Ryan co-authored a bill called the Sanctity of Human Life Act.  This isn't a tangental rant; this is relevant to choosing the next president of the United State of America - a man, by the way, who will likely fill at least one Supreme Court Justice position during his term. 

This is serious stuff.  

I am going to ask you to do a little experiment: use the search term "wooing women voters" in Google.  To woo.  Court.  Pursue.  This is the language that is used by both the Romney and Obama camps.  Women are being sought.  Wooing Latinos isn't a search term.  You can also skip "Courting minorities" in general.  Those statistics I mentioned earlier tell us that women have picked the president in the past 12 elections.  We're our own private Ohio, baby!  

And we should never forget that, no matter what they say.  

Funny Matters

I was doing my normal rounds this morning and found this beautiful thing on CNN.  The impact of satire on political elections.  Good stuff.

The Lynn Debate

This one's got my name written all over it.

Nope.  I am not above making the obvious joke.

Presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama faced off at Lynn University in Boca Raton, FL last night.  I wondered beforehand if anyone would bring up the fact that this was the site of the now infamous 47% video.  If it happened, I missed it.  In fact, by the time I tuned in, I was pretty convinced that Romney might have missed it, too. 

My immediate impression was that Obama won.  Actually, lots of news sources say that.  I can't particularly claim shock here.  Romney has long conceded that foreign policy isn't his strong suit.  In a very strange way, there seemed to be a growing idea from the viewership that there weren't huge differences between the two men on most of the major players and issues.  I got the distinct impression that even the candidates knew that, and took the opportunity to sneak back to domestic affairs whenever possible.  

Let's take a look at the highlight reel, shall we?

Romney Obfuscates

There seemed to be some talk about how out of sorts the Governor seemed to be during this debate.  Of course, there are those who say that this was a tactic, and that all Romney had to do was look presidential.  Some had very little idea what he was trying to say, but he said it a lot.  According to the Washington Post, the word "tumult" was a winner in the debate.

“Tumult”: By our count, Romney used the word five times to describe a situation happening in the world. Somewhere ”uproar”, “turmoil” and “hubbub” are grimacing.

Let's not forget "I love teachers."  

What about the strangest call for a map in the history of debates.  Syria does not offer Iran a route to the sea.  Iran has two coastlines.  And Syria doesn't share a boarder with Iran.  Turkey is in the way.  Is it odd that this had to be Fact Checked?

Honestly, this was not a good showing for Romney.  Unless it was.

My final thoughts?  Read this from CNN's "Gut Check" for Oct. 23rd.

NICHOLAS BURNS, FORMER STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL, ANALYZES THE DEBATE ON CNN’S STARTING POINT: “Governor Romney had been on the offensive over the last year, criticizing President Obama on Russia. Governor Romney said Russia was our Number One geopolitical foe. Last night, he backed off that statement. He’d been very critical about how President Obama ended the Iraq War and critical of the president's plans to bring the troops out (of Afghanistan) on a specific time line, 2014. And you saw none of that last night. In fact, Governor Romney appeared to leave a lot of his positions behind, and it does leave you with the question on what is his world view? What does he really believe?”

Obama Zings

Obama got some good ones in.  Or, maybe he came off as condescending.  Or, snarky.  Or, in my opinion, funny as hell.

Take this clip on the ever shrinking Navy.  Oh, I can't explain this one.  Just watch.  Bayonets and horses.  I kind of giggled myself stupid at this point.




But not as much giggling as for the Battleship comment.  And I cheered every time the President said that Romney was all over the map, and trying to airbrush his history. 

How about the "the 1980's called" joke?  In fact, there were two references to out-moded policies.

Despite of all of the zingers, or maybe because of them, I can't shake the feeling that even President Obama is tired of all of this now.  This is his last political debate.  He knows that.  If he wins, these will have been the moments that he gave a lift to his base by showing the "sketchy" side of Romney's policies.  If he loses his bid for a second term, President Obama will have gone down with a fight.  Only time will tell what the prevailing narrative will be.  And time is running out.  

13 days.

Math Anxiety

My older sister was a horrible babysitter when I was little.  She's 10 years older than I am, and was willing to let me watch anything I wanted to watch, as long as I let her talk on the phone in peace.  It's not a new story, but mine goes like this.  I was convinced that the critters from some scary movie that I watched were now living under my bed.  Or in my closet.  Or both; it was a small bedroom.  Periodically, the general terror of it would get to me and I would force myself to stand and take the 5 or so steps across the bedroom floor to (I thought) heroically throw open the closet door.  I was afraid to look, but not looking was worse.

I am supposed to be writing about election polls.  This is my third attempt.  Every time I start, I remember me in my winter flannel 'jammas making exaggerated steps to the closet.

You see, it comes to this: I don't understand how polls work.  I mean, I understand the mechanics of how they work.  I know that the polling organization contacts a group of people and then tries to extrapolate the data based on age, race, gender and a bunch of other things.  I know that polls can be skewed in one direction or the next, based on those characteristics and the bias of the group running the polls.  Here's a nice overview.

It seems like following polls will only get you more confused about what is actually happening.  There's this poll that says the two presidential candidates are tied.  There is a margin for error that might mean that one of them is winning.  This one is a "poll of polls," and says they're tied.  This one is, famously, showing Romney as the winner.  It's exasperating!

What I don't understand is why we still care.  How does it still work for us, as a nation of people already overloaded with facts.  How is polling not just one big best guess based on a snapshot in time?  The results of any given poll seem to be so recursive as to no longer show anything meaningful; it's the reflection of the reflection of the reflection.

I've been reading a lot of Nate Silver.  Mr. Silver takes polling to another place altogether.  He has an uncanny ability to extrapolate the polls themselves.  As national poll data becomes available, Silver creates a weighted average of the data, and then makes a series of adjustments to the data based on things like bias of the poller, momentum and "likely voters vs. registered voter" information.  There's a great and complete explanation of Silver's method here, but I have to warn you: it made me feel like I didn't pay enough attention in my statistics class in college.

Even with all of the complexity of thought, all of the learned finessing, I am still not sure how it's not just something for us all to talk about, obsess over, and point to in disgust or relief.  Looking at this data, even if we know on some level the snow will melt and we'll have to rebuild the snowman, makes us feel like we can have control or understanding in a situation that is neither controllable or easily understood.  It shores us up for what comes next.

To put it another way, polls are ultimately our way of peeking into the closet.  Peeking gives us power. It's better to look and be wrong than to let your imagination run wild.  All we're missing are the 'jammas.

In A Bind

This is not going to be another thing on the internet that makes fun of Governor Romney's comment about "binders full of women."  The reason for that is that I don't think it's funny.  I think it is terrifying.

Let's start with the official word from the talking heads.   Here's the back story.  During Tuesday night's presidential debate, a woman from the town hall setting asked the two candidates what they would do to address inequality in the workplace, specifically women's pay inequity.  Governor Romney's answer was anecdotal.  He said that as governor of Massachusetts, he had some first hand experience with trying to find competent and capable women for his cabinet.  The longer he spoke, the deeper the hole got until he said that he went out to women's groups and asked for help.  They brought him Binders Full of Women!  And there, my friends, is what the birth of a meme looks like.  Before the debate had even ended, there was a Facebook page about women in binders.  There was a Twitter profile.  Comments were made in the review sections of binders sold on Amazon.  This exploded in a way that I think, took everyone by surprise.

Romney, of course, tripped all over himself to clarify his statements.  And then everywhere you looked, there was another article about how the binder story was putting Romney in yet another "foot-in-mouth" bind.  God love him, even VP hopeful Paul Ryan tried to help.  In a way that was not remotely helpful.  And then things got nasty.  The woman who asked the question, Katherine Fenton, has been under attack by Romney supporters.  She's been painted as a slut, a drunk and perhaps, worst of all, a feminist.  I won't link you to any of the actual articles where the worst of it lives; they don't deserve the traffic.


Apart from the very sad fact that a) the answer Governor Romney gave was a lie, or b) didn't actually answer the question, what really makes me scared about all of this is that the focus went to the naturally funny line from the story.  Binders full of women.  It's funny; I admit it.  But, listen to the full 2 minute answer and you will find something more troublesome.  Here.  Trust me.  Watch again.  Listen carefully AFTER the binder bit.

The part where he says that in his newly fixed economy, employers will be excited to hire people, even women!  And that would include flexible work schedules so that women could be home with their children.  Making dinner.  You know, where they belong.  He doesn't say that, specifically.  But you feel it.  He does say that without this flexibility, women would have opportunities that they would not otherwise have.  Right in the middle of this, he talks about women and poverty.  Doesn't he realize that women don't choose or skip job opportunities because they want to be home for dinner?  For most of us, even those who are blessed to be doing what we love, we work because we need to buy food, pay rents and mortgages.  The women in his poverty stats are not necessarily looking at corporate jobs where flex-time is an option, ever.  Many of them will be in low wage jobs that don't have any benefits at all.

The woman who asked the question is 24.  Obamacare made it so that she could still be on her parent's insurance, even though she also works as a pre-kindergarden teacher.  And for some reason, she's still undecided.