Nate Silver Swears It's Gonna Be an Upset... Live-Blogging the Midterms

Live-bloggy blog.... La La La...

(We're starting at 7pm)

Friday Follies: We Both Reached for the Gun Edition

So what are people saying about guns, now that some time has passed since Sandy Hook Elementary's tragedy?  The Obama Administration seems to be coming down to proposals on universal background checks (which like 85% of people support and a whole lot of people think is already the law - it's not, there are gun-show and internet loopholes) and banning high-capacity magazines, but abandoning the assault weapons ban.  If you disagree with that, the time to let people know is now.  Here's what people have been talking about, about guns...


The Scary:

• Conspiracy Brother Alex Jones (he gets uber-scary starting at the 2-minute mark) - 

                                                          

My Blue Heaven

It was a very good night for we YBGP ladies.

It's so hard to pick the best memes, there are so many.  But since both Mandi and I are spent this morning from a loooong live-blog day, memes it is.  And hopefully they will capture a bit of the feeling.


1. Yay.

Empathy and Politics: See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me

I've been thinking a lot about empathy lately.

The subtext of this campaign seems - to me - to be about empathy, in two ways.


1. Empathy and Likability.

Yes, empathy is often considered a girly emotion (in a dismissive way), but I'm going to posit that what pollsters are testing when they talk about "likability" is actually largely a measure of a candidate's actual or perceived ability to empathize with other people.


Take Bubba.

Classic, textbook empath.  He "feels your pain."  He could read a phone book and sound interesting because he would stop and tell you stories about the people and businesses as he read their names and addresses.   

Scandals that would fell other politicians barely leave a dent on Bubba.  People get mad at him for his policies or actions, he says stupid things on occasion, but in the end he pulls out a speech or an interview and most people remember why they like him.  He understands people.  He understands how to explain complex policies to people, he understands what people are thinking.  He's empathic. 

(Grammatical note: I'm using "empathic" differently than "empathetic," because of the extra meaning of empathic to describe a person who "is very in tune with the feelings of others," rather than "of or related to empathy" - for which I'll use "empathetic.")

And that quality leads to large likability numbers, which rebound after an appropriate time whenever he faces criticism.

Arithmetic and Reagan vs. Clinton

Bill Clinton gave an amazing speech tonight.  He killed it.  He slaughtered it.  He had many of us ready to charge up San Juan Hill.

Convention Speeches: 9 Good, 1 Bad, and 1 Ugly

 

There is an art to a good convention speech.  The best of them live for years after the convention, cemented in the political memory as an encapsulation of a moment in time.  They create catchphrases that become the rallying cry or the main narrative line for the fall campaigns that follow.  And even when the campaign fails, a good convention speech lives on.  So here I give you 9 good convention speeches, and a couple of very bad ones.

Bubba Explains It All: Tea Party Edition

A cogent little summary from Bubba:  

“The Republican position that tends to prevail in these primaries as expressed by the gentleman who beat Sen. Lugar, who says, ‘I’m just against compromise, we need to stop it, it’s weak, it’s foolish, our views are irreconcilable, we have to force the American people to choose which one of us is right’ — if that prevails, we’re toast,” Clinton said. “We’ll look like a bush league country.”...   

“[Voters] go around telling everybody how sorry these politicians are but they voted for all of them,” Clinton said to laughter from the audience. “All they’re doing is what they’ve promised to do … it’s not like they didn’t tell everybody what they were going to do.”  
[Emphasis mine]

He excels at cogent little summaries of political situations.