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Unsolicited advice to the Romney campaign: this is not the way to convince voters that your candidate isn't Thurston Howell III. I'm just sayin'....
Next up on the presidential campaign schedule: debate season!
While the overall split between the candidates hasn't changed a whole lot since last time, the dynamics of the race underlying the overall numbers has indeed shifted for both candidates. The news was slightly better for each candidate in some regards, and slightly worse in others. All around, Barack Obama is holding onto and improving on his post-convention bounce, and Mitt Romney continues to struggle to make any ground, while slightly strengthening his base.
Are Colorado voters going to pass Amendment 64 in November, which would legalize recreational (not just medicinal) marijuana use for all adults in the state? The bigger question, should this come to pass, is what is the federal government going to do about it?
The American public, over the past few weeks, seems to have gotten more optimistic about the future. These recent gains have been somewhat modest and still far below a majority of the public being optimistic, but if this trend continues for the next month or so it will likely help President Obama's chances of being re-elected.
Wouldn't it be amusingly ironic if Mitt Romney only managed to get 47 percent of the national popular vote for president? It would renew my faith that the universe has a sense of humor, that's for sure.
Think about it. At the heart of Mitt Romney's new argument is a complete disconnect with the core, unshakeable tenet of the Republican faith -- "lower taxes for all." What Mitt Romney is arguing, when stripped of heated rhetoric, is that it is a bad thing that 47 percent don't pay federal income taxes, and that it would be a good thing if those people actually did pay federal income taxes -- thus arguing for raising taxes on half of the country. There is no way to escape this -- you are either for raising taxes, or you are for lowering taxes. Mitt Romney is now, apparently, for raising taxes on tens of millions of people. He really can't have it both ways.
The last time we took a look at the electoral math was just before convention season was about to get underway. Since it's now been over a week since the end of the Democratic National Convention, the effects of both parties' conventions are beginning to show up in the state-level polling. The news for the Obama team is good, almost across the board, as Romney showed little or no "bounce" from his convention, while Obama gained a significant bump after the Democrats' big party.
The second item of note is that today marks the fifth "birthday" of this column series. September 14, 2007 saw the very first Friday Talking Points column ever (although the name and the column format wouldn't solidify for a few months). Since then, almost every Friday, we've been attempting to provide Democratic talking points for politicians to use to get their point across in a snappy and memorable fashion. How much success we've had doing so is open to interpretation, but we're still here doing it, which tends to indicate that Democrats still have a ways to go to match the Republican ability to keep "on script" during interviews. To put this another way, it's the old Democratic "herding cats" problem.
That being said, the pride I feel having been in attendance of the spectacle that was the Democratic National Convention is truly ineffable. I have never been more inspired to be a liberal than after the first night of the convention. Politics was put into perspective for me. Before, government was more theoretical and I could speak in an idealist liberal voice without considering the actual implication of the next president. Up until now an election has never directly impacted my life, just my parents' lives (which subsequently affected me). The decisions Americans make in 2012 will affect my ability to get a job and afford college. So everything materialized for me, and as Sandra Fluke illustrated, two distinctly different futures are in front of us. One future in which millionaires and billionaires will get tax cuts and women don't have the right to control their bodies and their health care, or a future in which jobs continue to be created and women can earn just as much as men for doing the same amount of work.