Predictions

Non-Verbal Impressions of the 2nd Presidential Debate

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Presidential debates are public demonstrations of leadership ability, not policy, and are THE place where the arguable majority of voters who rely on “non-verbal intelligence” decide who to vote for. The more PRESIDENTIAL a candidate looks, the better he does. If you want to understand what “non-verbal intelligence” voters responds to in a debate, watch it with the sound off and take notes.

The following are my impressions from doing just that.

1. Obama did better, Romney scored points, Crowley cut off both Romney’s Fast and Furious and Benghazi responses. Crowley gave the impression she was a debate participant supporting Obama, rather than a moderator. This diminished Obama, in terms of the non-verbals, by making him seem less PRESIDENTIAL.

2. There were several Bush-Gore 2000 like moments of confrontation between Romney and Obama.

3. Romney’s non-verbals were more polished, non-threatening, and he had a consistent standing physical stance the pick up artist community calls “measured vulnerability” used by those affecting relaxed Alpha male dominance with women. (The stance is when your body is at a slight angle to those you are speaking too, your legs are apart and feet at an angle.)

4. Obama had a stance that was more squared up with those he was speaking with. Obama also used a lot of pointing gestures early, like a professor trying to affect physical dominance with a student. He then changed his non microphone hand to a loose fist, and using a full chopping motion rather than pointing later.

5. Romney kept his non-microphone hand flat, moved it side to side or above his head and down when the ABC text crawl line mentioned “deficit” or “taxes”. Romney seldom used pointing. When he did it was at the ground or himself.

6. The “split-cam” was not good for Obama (on ABC) due to a head up, nostrils visible, sitting stance. It was sometimes bad for Romney, who occasionally had a constipated look watching Obama. There were other camera angle shots that were more flattering to Obama, but a couple of times that ABC flashed them, Romney was in the foreground fouling the shot of Obama. The number of times ABC went to the bad camera angle on Obama had me thinking Romney was playing to camera angles by positioning himself where that was the only “good” shot of Obama. Later in the debate ABC went to downward camera angles on both Obama and Romney.

I see no real change in the pre-second debate momentum of the race. Democrats will claim Obama won and people who don’t like Obama will still dislike him.

The fact that Romney spoke forcefully about jobs, energy prices and the economy are much less important that the fact he looked PRESIDENTIAL.

Looking PRESIDENTIAL means Romney gives people who don’t like the economy permission to vote Obama out. The preference cascade that Romney kicked off with the first debate — by establishing that he is a man who can take command — will accelerate.

We have a Romney electoral college rout of Obama in the making.

The Romney tax cut.

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Today, the Sunday morning TV shows on politics demonstrated the response of the Obama campaign to Romney’s debate win last week. Paul Krugman, who looks more and more like a political cheerleader and less like an economist, led the charge. The topic was the “five trillion dollar tax cut.”

The Obama campaign is already backing away from this claim, but let’s consider it.

This “five trillion dollar tax cut” figure is arrived at by taking his statement that he will cut rates by 20% and limit deductions. Multiple the total tax revenue per year by 20% and you get five trillion. This same reform was done in 1986 and the result was a 15 year economic boom. The results are discussed here.

Twenty years ago today (2006), President Ronald Reagan signed into law the broadest revision of the federal income tax in history. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 — the biggest and most controversial legislative story of its time — had lawmakers, lobbyists and journalists in Washington in an uproar for two years. Despite nearly dying several times, the measure eventually passed, producing a simpler code with fewer tax breaks and significantly lower rates. The changes affected every family and business in the nation.

Of course the Congress undid it over the ensuing years. We all expected that. What about Romney’s plan ?

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Paul Rahe’s Landslide vs. “Don’t get cocky”

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Glenn Reynolds links to Paul Rahe’s prediction that we’re about to see a 1980-type electoral landslide for Romney.

I want Rahe to be right but the bookmakers’ odds give me pause.

Intrade.com has Obama at 60% odds to be reelected. Other bookmakers are in the same ballpark.

It’s possible that these market odds are overly influenced by inaccurate polls. The odds certainly respond to polling data. However, the bookies have a very good record of predicting election results.

On Intrade, before November 2004, Bush’s odds only went as low as 50% a couple of times and always bounced from there. Obama’s odds are behaving like that now. If Obama’s numbers sink below 50% and stay there I’ll feel a lot better. As of now there is much reason to worry.

If the USA today were the USA of 1980 I would agree with Rahe. I remember the run up to the 1980 election and the conventional wisdom that Carter would win. At the time I was afraid that he would. I asked a wise older friend of mine, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, what he thought would happen. “Reagan will win in a landslide”, he said. My friend was reasoning as Rahe is. And of course Reagan did win. But much has changed since then. A larger proportion of the US voting population is poorly educated and a larger proportion is dependent on government. Rush Limbaugh has been arguing that increasing dependence on government insulates an ever larger fraction of the electorate from the consequences of Obama’s poor economic policies. Consequently, the argument goes, Romney cannot afford to run on Obama’s economic failures alone and may have difficulty winning in any case. This seems plausible.

“Don’t get cocky” is good advice. So is, “Be very afraid”. Let’s hope the market odds shift to support Rahe’s prediction.

End Game In Syria

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Each of the countries in the “Arab Spring” fell differently. Tunisia fell quite quickly, as the army stayed neutral and the government fled. Egypt held out longer, with the government deploying security forces, but the army stayed mostly neutral and in the end the government collapsed and Mubarek is on trial.

Libya was quite different – Gaddafi, the madman, employed every trick of his arsenal (including anti-aircraft weapons on unarmed demonstrators) before NATO intervened, allowing the rebels to fight back and eventually take back all the territory, including his home city of Sirte, which was pretty much leveled. While some parts of the country (Misrata and near the border with Algeria) suffered terribly, most of Tripoli in the west and Benghazi in the east were relatively unscathed. We all know Gaddafi’s fate, to die with a knife in his rear end.

Russia and China learned from Libya, and have blocked all UN attempts to seriously end the strife. Those that pine for the “non-aligned” world and a “post-America” world order have it right on display – since the Russians and China have to be able to use disproportionate and overwhelming force on their own people should they demand real democracy, the new world order is “you can commit any atrocity as long as it stays within your own country”.

Assad is a REAL madman, up there with the likes of the dictators of yore. He employs the most brutal of tactics, which consist of destroying entire areas with massive artillery and helicopter gunships if they are held by the FSA, regardless of civilian deaths. He has a brutal militia of the scum of the earth called Shabbiha that come in afterwards, raping and killing all (men, women, and children) in the bombarded areas ensuring that they are a desolate shell and the local population is either dead or fled. While we watch the Olympics an INSANE orgy of violence is occurring in Aleppo.

Amid intensifying shelling and heavy weapon fire in Syria’s most populated city, a U.N. official — citing the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent — said that about 200,000 people have fled Aleppo over the past two days.

Assad is basically willing to BURN HIS OWN COUNTRY TO THE GROUND in order to save himself. He is also likely carving out a “pure” ethnic enclave along the western coast where his Alawite people can make a final stand, or carve out a “rump state” where they can survive.

Remember that before the Arab Spring started, “official” observers felt that there were no pending revolutions coming in the middle east, especially since Iran was able to put down their protestors successfully. Instead, much of the region rose in revolt.

These same observers also don’t think that the next step is likely to occur – the disintegration of countries. Syria is unlikely to remain one country, in my opinion, when this is done, unless everyone bands to push the Alawites into the sea (possible). There is no “glue” that holds together a people after this savagery, unless they have the willingness to work together. In Libya it appears that through elections the country will hold together (for the optimistic) even though their frontiers are pretty much wide open – but Syria and then likely soon Lebanon and possibly Iraq will fall apart at the seams. Don’t forget that much of Saudi Arabia’s oil is held in a region of their religious minorities, and Turkey is not far away from a possible spark with the Kurds in their long-running war. Also the Palestinian question is likely to erupt in Jordan and elsewhere – while they were the darlings of the “statist” world because Israel made a convenient scapegoat, today they are likely to be an annoying burden to countries trying to fix their own issues.

As we have all heard numerous times, in the rants of the left, that the borders left by the “colonialists” were arbitrary. I believe now these sorts of brutal civil wars like the ones in Syria are going to finish off those borders for once and for all. This won’t be a simple, fair or bloodless process, as Syria is showing us, but it is likely to be final, as final as the eviction of the Westerners in Egypt was in the 1950s. Resources (oil, water) will be paramount, and it will be a brutal struggle, determined primarily by violence and forces on the ground, with resettlement or death a frequent occurrence.

The Improper Individual Mandate

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Liberals who are pessimistic about the prospects in the Supreme Court this week for the Affordable (or is it Abominable?) Care Act, known as “ACA,” have been preparing the ground by publicizing surveys measuring the unpopularity of the Court. Liberals who are optimistic, such as former speaker Nancy Pelosi, predict that ACA will be upheld 6-3.

The 6-3 breakdown comes from the result in Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1 (2005), in which the Supreme Court held that prohibiting the cultivation of marijuana for personal medicinal use was within Congress’s powers under the Interstate Commerce Clause. To the dismay of many conservatives, Justice Antonin Scalia concurred with the majority. His concurring opinion shows how to apply the Commerce Clause to something as far from interstate commerce as ACA’s individual mandate.

And the individual mandate is very far from interstate commerce. An individual is not engaging in interstate commerce merely by refraining from buying health insurance. He is not engaging in commerce. He is not engaging in anything. That puts the individual mandate beyond Congress’s commerce power but not necessarily beyond Congress’s powers.

The Supreme Court has said that Congress has the power to regulate the channels and instrumentalities of interstate commerce as well as activities that substantially affect interstate commerce. Justice Scalia said in his concurring opinion in Raich that the power to regulate activities that substantially affect interstate commerce does not come from the Commerce Clause alone but from the Commerce Clause plus the Necessary and Proper Clause. The Necessary and Proper Clause has extended the Commerce Clause pretty far. Scalia wrote that “Congress may regulate even noneconomic local activity if that regulation is a necessary part of a more general regulation of interstate commerce.”

As disturbingly vast as that power might be, the Supreme Court would have to extend it even further to reach non-economic local inactivity. That extension may or may not be “necessary” to make ACA effective, but is it “proper”? At oral argument Justice Scalia posed that question to Solicitor General Donald Verrilli:

Necessary does not mean essential, just reasonably adapted. But in addition to being necessary, it has to be proper. And we’ve held in two cases that something that was reasonably adapted was not proper, because it violated the sovereignty of the states, which was implicit in the constitutional structure. The argument here is that this also is — may be necessary, but it’s not proper, because it violates an equally evident principle in the Constitution, which is that the federal government is not supposed to be a government that has all powers; that it’s supposed to be a government of limited powers. And that’s what all this questioning has been about. What — what is left? If the government can do this, what — what else can it not do?

The solicitor general (who didn’t do such a bad job overall) replied that the individual mandate does not invade the sphere of state government but, despite several follow-up questions, did not answer the question of whether the individual mandate improperly invades the sphere of individuals. Justice Kennedy pressed further, saying that “to tell the individual citizen that it must act . . . changes the relationship of the federal government to the individual in a very fundamental way.” General Verilli replied that the individual mandate is predicated on the individual’s unavoidable participation in the health care market.

That appeared to be enough for Justice Breyer, who in the course of rambling questions in search of a defense of the act, asked whether one enters the health care market simply by being born. Four justices seemed to find such a limitless premise for federal regulatory power troubling. They, along with Justice Thomas, may also find it improper.

Should that happen, leftists, with their newfound conviction that judicial review is anti-majoritarian, will switch into their outraged and indignant mode. How dare the Court strike down an act because it isn’t proper after Obama and the Congress decided that it was?

The answer will be that the Court is merely giving meaning to the outermost boundary of congressional power. What hangs in the balance this week is whether the powers of Congress are in theory limited but in practice infinite.