We begin with the three words everyone writing about the election must say: Nobody knows anything. Everyone’s guessing. I spent Sunday morning in Washington with journalists and political hands, one of whom said she feels it’s Obama, the rest of whom said they don’t know. I think it’s Romney. I think he’s stealing in “like a thief with good tools,” in Walker Percy’s old words. While everyone is looking at the polls and the storm, Romney’s slipping into the presidency. He’s quietly rising, and he’s been rising for a while.
Obama
and the storm, it was like a wave that lifted him and then moved on, leaving
him where he’d been. Parts of Jersey and New York are a cold Katrina. The exact
dimensions of the disaster will become clearer when the election is over. One
word: infrastructure. Officials knew the storm was coming and everyone knew it
would be bad, but the people of the tristate area were not aware, until now,
just how vulnerable to deep damage their physical system was. The people in
charge of that system are the politicians. Mayor Bloomberg wanted to have the
Marathon, to show New York’s spirit. In Staten Island last week they were
bitterly calling it “the race through the ruins.” There is a disconnect.
But
to the election. Who knows what to make of the weighting of the polls and the
assumptions as to who will vote? Who knows the depth and breadth of each
party’s turnout efforts? Among the wisest words spoken this cycle were by John
Dickerson of CBS News and Slate, who said, in a conversation the night before
the last presidential debate, that he thought maybe the American people were
quietly cooking something up, something we don’t know about.
I
think they are and I think it’s this: a Romney win.
Romney’s
crowds are building—28,000 in Morrisville, Pa., last night; 30,000 in West
Chester, Ohio, Friday. It isn’t only a triumph of advance planning:
People came, they got through security and waited for hours in the
cold. His rallies look like rallies now, not enactments. In some new way he’s
caught his stride. He looks happy and grateful. His closing speech has been
positive, future-looking, sweetly patriotic. His closing ads are sharp—the one
about what’s going on at the rallies is moving.
All
the vibrations are right. A person who is helping him who is not a longtime
Romneyite told me, yesterday: “I joined because I was anti Obama—I’m a patriot,
I’ll join up. But now I am pro-Romney.” Why? “I’ve spent time with him and I
care about him and admire him. He’s a genuinely good man.” Looking at the
crowds on TV, hearing them chant “Three more days” and “Two more days”—it feels
like a lot of Republicans have gone from anti-Obama to pro-Romney.
Something
old is roaring back. One of the Romney campaign’s surrogates, who appeared at a
rally with him the other night, spoke of the intensity and joy of the crowd. “I
worked the rope line, people wouldn’t let go of my hand.” It startled him. A
former political figure who’s been in Ohio told me this morning something is moving
with evangelicals, other church-going Protestants and religious Catholics. He
said what’s happening with them is quiet, unreported and spreading: They really
want Romney now, they’ll go out and vote, the election has taken on a new
importance to them.
There
is no denying the Republicans have the passion now, the enthusiasm. The
Democrats do not. Independents are breaking for Romney. And there’s the thing
about the yard signs. In Florida a few weeks ago I saw Romney signs, not Obama
ones. From Ohio I hear the same. From
tony Northwest Washington, D.C., I hear the same.
Things turned out differently than Peggy expected, of course, and a few days after the election she wrote a short "mea culpa":
President Obama did not lose, he won. It was not all that close. There was enthusiasm on his side. Mitt Romney's assumed base did not fully emerge, or rather emerged as smaller than it used to be. He appears to have received fewer votes than John McCain. The last rallies of his campaign neither signaled nor reflected a Republican resurgence. Mr Romney's air of peaceful dynamism was the product of a false optimism that, in the closing days, buoyed some conservatives and swept some Republicans. While GOP voters were proud to assert their support with lawn signs, Democratic professionals were quietly organizing, data mining and turning out the vote. Their effort was a bit of a masterpiece; it will likely change national politics forever. Mr. Obama was perhaps not joyless but dogged, determined, and tired.
Like Peggy, Eric Trump will almost certainly soon learn that lawn signs really aren't the best predictor of victory. For the record, my belief is that Donald Trump is going to go down in ignominious historic defeat. It can't happen soon enough.
Days until Election Day: 16
