Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Elvin Lim
President Obama had a bad night. The key to succeeding in a presidential debate is recognizing that it is not a parliamentary debate. The rules, the moderator, and even the immediate audience (since they are not permitted to applaud) do not matter. Instead, candidates should bare their souls to the camera lenses. There, magic is made.
By Elvin Lim
The Obama campaign, by fortune or by wit, has peaked at the right moment. Early voting has already started in Virginia, and starts in Iowa and Ohio next week. This means that the polls telling a uniform story of an Obama surge in crucial swing states aren’t just snap-shots; they are predictive of how voters — about 35 percent of total voters — are actually starting to vote as we speak.
By Elvin Lim
Mitt Romney definitely did not count on foreign policy becoming a major issue two weeks after he chose budget hawk, Paul Ryan, to be his running mate, making his the weakest ticket on foreign policy for decades. What is even more perverse is that Romney himself chose to go off message.
By Elvin Lim
The Democrats are enjoying a little bump from their convention last week, but it had little to do with Barack Obama and a lot to do with Bill Clinton. The reason why Clinton’s speech worked was because he was specifically charged to address the substance of his speech to independents and older white males. He was very successful in making his speech appear reasonable, while delivering very partisan conclusions. As such, the speech was becomingly presidential.
By Elvin Lim
The Republicans’ convention bump for Mitt Romney appears to be muted. Why? There was a lot of bad luck. Holding the convention before the Labor Day weekend caused television viewership to go down by 30 percent, as did the competing and distracting news about Hurricane Isaac. The Clint Eastwood invisible chair wasn’t a disaster, but a wasted opportunity that Romney’s advisors should have vetted. V
By Elvin Lim
In our fast-paced world where candidates throw everything but the sink at television and Internet audiences to see what sticks, Mitt Romney made a particularly gutsy move last week by adopting Medicare in his fight against Obama and Obamacare. Together with the selection of Paul Ryan as VP candidate, this was a game change revealing that Team Romney is going straight for demographics in this home stretch of the campaign.
By Elvin Lim
Senator Edward Kennedy called healthcare reform the “the great unfinished business of our time.” Now it is finished. Every branch of the US government has had its say. The Supreme Court decision also marks the end of the Rehnquist era. No longer can we reliably predict that it would always send powers back to the states. Indeed, it said “No” to 26 states which had challenged the Affordable Care Act.
By Elvin Lim
How quickly fortunes change. For the first time this election season, the Republicans look poised not only to match Obama’s fundraising ability, but to beat him at it. There is certainly no way that Obama is going to enjoy the 3 to 1 advantage he had over McCain four years ago. All this is also to say, then, that for the first time this year, Mitt Romney could be the frontrunner in the presidential race.
By Elvin Lim
Barack Obama proved this week that his understanding of public opinion and how timing can be used to massage the media’s storyline is head-and-shoulders above any campaigner we have known in modern history. Mitt Romney cannot begin to overestimate the gap between what Obama enacts by intuition and what he himself can barely perform by imitation.
By Elvin Lim
With the airwaves ablaze with a new controversy about President Obama campaign ad, it may be worth thinking about why it is so difficult for many Americans, even some on the Left, to give Obama credit for anything. To proffer a tentative answer, I’m going to sketch the landscape of the comparison group: how other presidents have been vilified.
By Elvin Lim
The General Election campaign appears to be in full swing now that Mitt Romney is the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party. But this is really only true on the Republican side. Team Obama is obviously holding back.
By Elvin Lim
Democrats and the Obama administration have seriously if not fatally fumbled on the simple answer to a question Justice Scalia posed: “Could you define the market — everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli?”
By Elvin Lim
At this time four years ago, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were asking Democratic primary voters to consider the question, “who would be the better president?” This year, Republican candidates are asking their electorate to consider, “who would be worse?” This contrast explains why President Obama has so far resisted the considerable headwind against his re-election.
By Elvin Lim
Mitt Romney had an ok Tuesday night, no better or worse than the ones he’s had so far. But it is still a story because Romney needed his wins in Arizona and especially Michigan. No news is great news for a campaign’s whose raison d’être has consistently been “take whoever is the anti-Romney candidate down.”
By Elvin Lim
The Republican nomination race is still Mitt Romney’s to lose, but he is in trouble yet again, and his cloak of inevitability is fast disappearing.
By Elvin Lim
The Republican party has traditionally been the more conservative party not only in terms of values but also in terms of organization reform. Leaders tend to be slower than their Democratic counterparts in reforming the nomination process, and voters tend to be more deferential to the last cycle’s runner-up to the winner.