President Obama’s swearing in or Florida finally getting the results of November 6 election?
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-florida-20121108,0,5169368.story
Sometimes I weep for my state.
Seriously, though, the situation could have been a lot worse. Imagine if the election hinged on Florida’s results!
Good to see so many people in these parts participating in voting, though there have been controversies.
What else is new…for Florida?
The early voting hours were cut down despite the fact that there were long lines of people willing, able, and patient enough to brave the lines.
As for me, for the first time I applied for an absentee ballot for myself and my wife. Mine arrived in time to be sent out for this election. My wife’s? Still waiting for it. A website for absentee ballot information lists her ballot as being sent to our (correct!) address on Halloween, October 31st…needless to say, it should have arrived by now. Perhaps it got lost in the mail or perhaps it was delivered to another household by accident. Regardless, my intrepid wife will have to brave lines later in the evening when she gets out of work…unless the absentee ballot arrives today and we can simply deliver it to a place that accepts absentee ballots.
My prediction? I’ll have to go with the majority of pundits and say President Obama gets re-elected. A couple of months ago I made a similar prediction and felt on far firmer ground at that time. Today, the margins are smaller and Romney has certainly made some inroads (though he seemed to have primarily been helped by Obama’s non-appearance at the first presidential debate).
We’ll see soon enough…
Don’t know if everyone out there in the United States is aware of this, but I heard a rumor that sometime next week we’re going to have a Presidential election.
Here in Florida, a “swing state”, that means a deluge of calls originating from strange numbers (thank you, caller ID…soooo much easier to ignore these annoying robo-calls!).
Now, not to get too political, but I made my decision a while back and find it hard to believe that many polls shows the race as “tight” as it is. Sorry, but there is simply no way in the world I can support a candidate who switches core philosophies depending on what he thinks his audience at that moment wants to hear. Voting for Mitt Romney, thus, is like voting for the unknown. Which Mitt Romney will you get? That’s not to say, however, that I’m completely enamored of Barack Obama, but at least he’s managed to (slowly, granted) bring this country out of the outright disaster left behind by his predecessor, who I consider the worst President to have graced the White House in my lifetime.
But enough of my politics.
The question on many people’s mind is: Who’s going to win?
While you can look in on any number of predictions (I happen to like the mathematical geekiness offered at fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/), Cracked.com offers the following 6 Bizarre Factors That Predict Every Presidential Election:
http://www.cracked.com/article_20139_6-bizarre-factors-that-predict-every-presidential-election.html
Fascinating article by Michael Tomansky at The Daily Beast concerning the upcoming Presidential election…and the possibility it might be an Obama landslide:
I tend to agree with Mr. Tomansky, though I would hardly consider myself a political junkie (my wife might argue otherwise).
Having watched the political shows here and there, I’ve been struck by how incredibly weak a candidate Mitt Romney is. He may be a nice guy, he may be an intelligent man, but as a candidate he’s stiff and prone to saying silly things. And when not saying such silly things, he has been caught contradicting or denouncing what should be his core beliefs. This is a man, after all, who was once pro-choice and valued Planned Parenthood. Now he’s anti-abortion and threatens to “defund” Planned Parenthood. In the past he was a proponent of gun control but now he’s a 2nd amendment purist. And then there’s what’s perhaps the biggest inconsistency: As Governor of Massachusetts he pushed through the state’s health care act, which was essentially copied with “Obamacare”. Now, as a Republican candidate, he can’t say enough bad things about this system.
And I haven’t even gotten into issues of what taxes he paid and his stubborn belief that he should not release his IRS records. Finally, there’s one more little thing: One gets the feeling that hard core Republicans simply don’t trust him.
Yes, President Obama has issues to deal with, primary of which is the still fragile economy. Having said that, unless President Obama stumbles really badly and does something colossally dumb, I just can’t see him losing to Mitt Romney.
Then again, we’re still a ways from the election and there’s plenty of time for things to change. I doubt it, but we’ll see…