We all like President Obama, because he is, after all, as good a president as we could get. But he isn’t as good a president as we deserve. And I say that knowing full well that as a society, we don’t deserve very much. By industrial nation norms, we are distinctly on the bad side of average. But you know something: better politicians would make us better. And you know what stops us from having better politicians? Bad journalism: the kind of journalism that defines what the Democrats and Republicans think as the Overton Window—regardless of how rightward both parties drift; the kind of journalism that delivers no penalty for the worst lies and demagoguery; the kind of journalism that sees its product as commodity instead of truth.

This isn’t to say there isn’t a lot of good journalism. It just means that it is mostly done in the shadows. ProPublica published a great article today by Dafna Linzer, Obama Has Granted Clemency More Rarely Than Any Modern President. This is the kind of thing that drives me crazy! Liberals will defend the President, “He can’t do anything else: he’s black!” Or, “He used to smoke pot!” Or “He admitted to using cocaine!” My response: those facts just make him an even bigger asshole.

Cannabis is a Schedule 1 narcotic. If he had been arrested by federal agents, he would have spent years in jail. There would have been no Harvard Law School. There would have been no presidency of the Law Review. And there such as shit would have been no President of the United States of America! He must know this. You would think it would make him a little more understanding. A little more empathic. A little less of a total dick.

How big a dick is he? In the last roughly 4 years, President Obama has pardoned 22 people. He has declined 1,019 other cases. That’s 1 out 50. How does it compare to other presidents? Ronald Reason: 1-3; Bush Sr: 1-16; Clinton: 1-8; Bush Jr: 1-33. Note: the cocaine sniffers are by far the worst.

But hey, maybe those asking for pardons are just worse than they used to be: terrorists and such. Not so much. Dafna Linzer:

I’m not suggesting that Romney would be better. But my feeling is that any president would be a hell of a lot better if the media were more interested in stories like this.

Chase Whiteside of New Left Media is an amazing young documentary filmmaker. I came upon the video below over at Hullabaloo: Ohio Romney Rally—Interviews with Supporters. It is just amazing. I know there are ignorant fools of all political stripes. But Whiteside is hardly asking “gotcha” questions. I can forgive the guy who thinks that Buddhists are trying to push their religion on us all. And I can forgive the people that don’t seem to have a clue what Mitt Romney’s policies are. (This is most of them.) But the anger and hatred that comes through with some of them is palpable.

One woman really struck me. She leveled a criticism of Obama that we are all very familiar with: Obama said he would unite the country but instead he has divided it. Even without knowing all the facts, this is the kind of claim—regardless of which side it comes from—that embarrasses me. It is too pat. There is no way that this is the whole story, even if the criticism is basically valid. Of course, the criticism is not valid.

It doesn’t take much digging to find that the claim is at best unfair. Let’s just look at the most obvious example: healthcare reform. Obama did not want an individual mandate. That was a Republican idea—you know, the whole libertarian canard of “rights and responsibilities.” But the President compromised and gave the Republicans their individual mandate. Then the President wanted a public option that people could buy instead of private insurance. (Note: there is no reason to be against the public option except that you want to protect the private insurance industry.) Again the President compromised. The Republicans had gotten the bill they had for years said they wanted. The result: not one Republican in the House or Senate voted for the ACA. Not one!

After that, how can anyone possibly blame President Obama for not being a uniter? He clearly made a major good faith effort to work with Republicans. The only criticism you can make against him is that he was naive. He should have known that the Republicans would do everything possible to block him and he should have gone in and tried to coerce the Republicans. I agree with that take on the President. But that is not what people mean when they claim that he should have united Washington.

What these people seem to believe—in part because this is one of Romney’s main talking points—is that Obama came into office with all of these socialist ideas that he tried to cram down the throats of the Republicans. This is manifestly not true. I cannot see such thinking as anything but willful ignorance. The people want to believe it because it gives them an excuse for supporting Mitt Romney. And as you can see in Chase Whiteside’s video: they don’t have any actual reasons for supporting him.

Tonight, Nate Silver’s model has again increased President Obama’s chances to winning the electoral college to 81.4%. He predicts that he will also win the popular vote 50.5% to 48.4%. Perhaps most striking, he predicts that Obama has roughly a 38% chance of winning 332 electoral votes or more. A win of 332 electoral votes would mean that Obama won Florida, which is looking more and more likely, but hardly likely in an absolute sense. A win 347 electoral votes would mean that Obama almost won North Carolina. This is far less likely.

Here is The Young Turks on conservative denial about Nate Silver and his model:

Mustang Bobby over at Bark Bark Woof Woof has a fun snarky article about George Will’s attempt to speak for the beau monde in all his bow tied crustiness—you know that Barack Obama is just a working class kid?! Of course, George Will is only part of the privileged class because of all the money he’s made as an apologist for it. He comes from a middle class family in Illinois.

Although David Brooks does not put on quite the airs of George Will, this is only because he is one more generation removed from the inventor of snob conservatism: William F. Buckley. Dean Baker tells us that David Brooks Is Upset that President Obama Hasn’t Inflicted More Pain on the Middle Class. Brooks calls for the President to “shift government resources from the affluent elderly to struggling young families and future growth.” But Baker notes:

Both Brooks and Will are a credit to their kind—but I’m not talking about blue blood.

The truth is that they are both excellent examples of conservative affirmative action. This is where the intelligence, knowledge, and cleverness requirements of pundits are lowered (or removed) so that shows can have a “conservative voice.” Think: S. E. Cupp on any MSNBC show.

There is also liberal anti-affirmative action. This is where Fox News finds the most useless and anemic liberal to offer fake balance. These “liberals” are normally played by moderates, but also very often conservatives. Think: Juan Williams on any Fox News program.

Let’s all be grateful for conservative affirmative action! If it weren’t for these programs, George Will might be on the street offering baseball analogies for spare change. And that’d just be sad—bow tie or no.

The following video is a collection of outtakes from You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx. There is one bit where a woman is telling Groucho that he should come to their Almond festival or some such. She mentions that Dick Lane will be there. Groucho replies, “Well, if you have Dick Lane, I don’t think you need me.” You don’t have to know who Dick Lane is to get the joke—the fact that you’ve likely never heard of him is enough. I’ll bet Groucho didn’t know who he was either. But for the record, Dick Lane was a local Los Angeles TV announcer, most notable for his work for wrestling and roller derby.

We haven’t heard much from Paul Krugman recently. According to his sporadic blogging, he and his wife (Robin Wells) have been trapped in their house by a downed power line. He has apparently been blogging from his phone. Tonight came his first column since Hurricane Sandy hit. And it shows that he’s been in a bit of a media blackout because he’s writing about last Saturday’s Des Moines Register endorsement of Mitt Romney.

I’ve already written about the huge economics mistakes in the editorial. Krugman doesn’t touch this issue—probably because Dean Baker has already given it the business. Instead, he attacks the endorsement as an example of Romney supporters giving power to The Blackmail Caucus.

Pretty much all of the Romney endorsements that I’ve read have been the same: elect Romney because the Republicans in Congress will behave if a Republican is in the White House. There is, of course, much to say for that view. As I’ve noted before: if McCain had been President these last 4 years, we would likely have more liberal healthcare reform and some kind of cap and trade legislation.

Krugman argues that it is wrong to vote for this reason because it is the same as negotiating with terrorists:

I think there is an even better reason not to vote for Romney: he isn’t McCain of 2008. The legislation that Romney would get through Congress would be terrible. We not only wouldn’t get a better healthcare law, we would get a worse one: he will likely kill or gut Obamacare. We not only wouldn’t get global warming legislation, Romney would greatly increase fossil fuel drilling and likely lower fuel efficiency standards. I could go on. But the bottom line is that being more effective is a bad thing when your policies are as pernicious as Romney’s.

Matt Taibbi is angry—at a lot of different people, but mostly the media. He’s been watching how they have reacted to the storm. Before, the main thing was that Big Government was baaad. Small government was the way to go. I’ve written about this: journalists are almost all in the upper or upper-middle classes. As a result, when it comes to economic issues, they are conservative. But more to the point: they are selfish. If it affects them, it matters; if it doesn’t, not so much.

That has been brilliantly on display this week. I’m not suggesting that Sandy isn’t a big deal (although few in the media were that interested in all the Haitians who died before it hit the east coast). But they are clearly a lot more interested because it has affected New York and Washington. Taibbi notes that Hurricane Sandy was all that was necessary to turn the mainstream media into Big Government lovers. And thus Obama lovers.

Except, of course, that of the two candidates, Obama has a far better claim to being the Small Government guy. He’s the guy who has slashed the deficit, year after year. And Romney is Joe Isuzu giving away $5 trillion in new tax cuts and $2 trillion in new military spending. But just look at the record: Democrats are the fiscal conservatives.

Taibbi sees it a little differently. He thinks the federal budget will go way up regardless of who is elected President. Under normal circumstances, I would agree with him. (But don’t misunderstand me: in general, federal spending going up is a good thing.) But with the Republican House, I think we will see more of the obstructionism that has defined the last four years.

But Taibbi knows who the true villains are in all of this: the rich Randians who depend upon government largess that the poor could only dream of:

That’s right. But a big part of the problem is that the government goes out of its way to make welfare for the rich invisible just as it goes out of its way to make welfare for the poor as humiliating as possible. I once thought about getting food stamps. There were over 50 pages of documents to get as much as $200 per month in food assistance. The TARP loans of billions of dollars? Two pages.

We’ve got to get the government off the backs of the banks! Matt Taibbi isn’t wrong to be angry.

And I thought the crying child would be the best thing of the day. How wrong I was! Here is the Unskewed Polls projection of the presidential race:

All you need to know here is that every state that Romney has even the slightest chance of winning is given to him. So even in Minnesota where Obama leads in every poll by 3 to 8 percentage points, Unskewed Polls, in their infinite wisdom calls the state for Romney. If this sounds familiar: it should.

If this election goes more or less as the polls suggest, it’s going to be fun to drop over to the Unskewed Polls website next Wednesday. On the other hand, if they turn out to be right, I’ll be too depressed to even think about what went wrong.

This comes to me via Richard K. Barry over at The Reaction in an article titled, I So Totally Relate. So do I my friend; so do I.

There have been a few tweets the last couple of days speculating that in the event of a Romney loss, the Republicans will offer a new narrative. Most recently, this comes from Ben Smith at BuzzFeed, “Top Republicans are already hinting that if Romney loses, his people will blame the storm for stalling his momentum.” It goes like this: After the first debate, Romney’s campaign went into high gear. They were charging the finish line. They had momentum. They were going to win! But… The Hurricane. It destroyed Romney’s chances.

I don’t suppose this matters. If Romney loses, it will not cause the Republicans to admit that maybe their policies really are toxic. I think there is an important 47% in this country, but they aren’t the people who pay no federal income taxes. Instead, they are the people who find modern Republican values so vile they won’t vote for them regardless. (The number for Democrats is much lower: more like 35%.) That isn’t a lot of turf to fight over.

Before the hurricane, the narrative was going to be that Romney was too liberal. As Ann Coulter said, “If we don’t run Chris Christie, Romney will be the nominee, and we’ll lose.” The tendency among revolutionary movements is to treat losses as opportunities to purify. So the new narrative at least isn’t explicitly calling for more conservatism.

Regardless of the narrative the Republicans pick, the only way we can get them to move to the center is by defeating them in 2014. They have stayed alive (and even thrived) on the carcass of a broken electorate that just doesn’t show up for these off-year elections. If everyone voted, the United States would be a very blue country. So we need to spend the next two years convincing people that they must vote. Our very lives depend upon it.