Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney & The Future of elections in Amarica

Dan Balz, “Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney & The Future of Elections in America” Viking, 2013, 354 pps  

This book is mostly about the Republican side of the battle for the 2012 nomination for the presidency and how a candidate, Romney, with no natural base in the Republican party, was nominated; in my opinion, clearly a result of no other nationally viable choices.  The Republican primaries are increasingly controlled by fringe groups.  They did everything they could to avoid nominating Romney;  Herman Cain, Donald Trump, and Newt Gingrich are just some of the wildest examples.  Of course New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie was and is someone I could support, but he refused to be a candidate.  I certainly wonder how the Republican party can survive, controlled by fringe groups that are so far from, what I can only hope are, the majority’s beliefs; a party of Ted Cruz’s.  The Republican’s 2011 capture of the House, as a result of the 2010 elections, introduced eighty-seven House Republicans and effectively became a branch of the uncompromising Tea Party.  The nomination contest also highlighted the degree to which the Republican conservative base is  pushing the party beyond the mainstream.

My Notes:

Pg. 35: In 2010 the Democrats absorbed the worst midterm election defeat in more than half a century.  They lost sixty-three seats in the House, the biggest midterm loss by a party since 1938.  They lost six seats in the Senate—a number that easily could have been worse were it not for the deeply flawed GOP candidacies of Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell, Nevada’s Sharron Angle, and Colorado’s Ken Buck.  All three were products of the Tea Party movement. 

Pg. 44:  Ryan’s 2012 budget proposal sought to reduce deficits by $4 trillion over ten years, but it was politically toxic.  He advocated deep cuts in domestic spending and in income tax rates for individuals and corporations.  He proposed turning Medicaid into a block grant for the states.  Most controversial was his recommendation that Medicare undergo dramatic restructuring.  For younger workers, Ryan wanted the government to offer payments to individuals, who then would purchase insurance on the open market.  Democrats saw the controversial budget as the vehicle that could help them win back the House in 2012.

Pg. 61:  In the aftermath of the debt ceiling negotiations in 2011, Standard & Poor’s lowered the country’s credit rating for the first time ever.  Their decision was based less on economic conditions than on the broken politics of Washington. 

Pg. 242:  In 2012 America reached a long expected tipping point.  Minority births outnumbered those of whites for the first time since the founding of the nation.  Minorities—blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and others—accounted for 50.4 percent of all births in the country over the previous year.  America of the twenty-first century population grew by 27.3 million during the decade, but whites accounted for just 2.3 million of the total, or 8 percent.  Whites still maintained the majority of the population—64 percent—and would for many more years to come. 

Pg. 256:  The Supreme Court ruled by a five-to-four vote that the Affordable care Act was constitutional.  The Court held that, contrary to what the Obama administration had long argued, the individual mandate was a tax and was thus constitutional under Congress’s taxing power. 

Pg. 293:  During a $50,000 per person fund raiser, Romney was captured on a hidden video camera responding to a question, “For the last three years, all everybody’s been told, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.’  How are you going to …convince everybody you’ve got to take care of yourself?”  Romney replied, “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.   Alright, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.  That’s an entitlement.  And the government should give it to them.  And they will vote for this president no matter what. … These are people who pay no income tax.  Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax.  So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect.  And he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich.  I mean, that’s what they sell every four years.  And so my job is not to worry about those people.  I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.  What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like. “

Pg. 332:  The president won the popular vote by 51 to 47 percent.  In the Electoral College, Obama won twenty-six states plus the District of Columbia for 332 electoral votes.  Romney won twenty-four states and 206 electoral votes.  So, Obama won reelection despite winning just 39 percent of the white vote by winning 80 percent of the votes of nonwhites.  On election day 2012, whites made up just 72 percent of the electorate, and this evolution will continue into the future.