Doldrums, Mitt & The Stuff

The Romney for Plutocrat campaign is experiencing some low poll numbers and they tried to explain why:

Mitt Romney’s campaign is brushing off a series of polls that show President Barack Obama building a sizable lead nationally.

The reason: The polls don’t make sense, they say.

A Fox News poll released Thursday showed Mr. Obama leading 49% to 40%, while a CNN poll showed him up 52% to 45%. A Reuters/Ipsos survey also showed the president up by 7 percentage points also, this time 49% to 42%.

It represents a notable jump for Mr. Obama in the CNN and Fox polls, and put his lead outside the margin of error. It also appears to mirror a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released last month that showed Mr. Obama leading 49% to 43%.

Even Mr. Obama’s supporters concede the race is likely closer than those surveys suggest. And a Gallup weekly tracking poll, considered one of the standards in presidential polling, shows the race tied at 46% for each. On the flip side, the Rasmussen Reports daily tracking poll, which tends to favor Mr. Romney, showed the Republican up by 4 percentage points.

“You’d see it in Rasmussen and you’d see it in Gallup, and we’re not seeing it,” said a Romney adviser briefing reporters in Boston on the status of the race. Noting that it’s the “doldrums” of summer and that many voters are not fully tuned into the race, the adviser added, “You’ve got to have something precipitate that sort of sea change, and we haven’t.”

Like many others observing this campaign, I thought the low poll numbers had to do with the fact that Willard Mitt Romney sucks cosmically as a campaigner, lacks any core convictions and is a terrible human being. But this new explanation--doldrums--caught my attention and while I have been familiar with the word for as long as I can remember, I actually couldn't give you a succinct definition if you made me.

So I decided to look up what doldrums means. I went to the time-honored, unassailable source of accurate information, namely, Wikipedia. The fact that it can always be edited by almost anybody at anytime reassures me that it's always right.

So here's Wikipedia's definition of doldrums:

The doldrums is a colloquial expression derived from historical maritime usage for those parts of the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean affected by the Intertropical Convergence Zone, a low-pressure area around the equator where the prevailing winds are calm.

The low pressure is caused by the heat at the equator, which makes the air rise and travel north and south high in the atmosphere, until it subsides again in the horse latitudes.

Some of that air returns to the doldrums through the trade winds. This process can lead to light or variable winds and more severe weather, in the form of squalls, thunderstorms and hurricanes. The doldrums are also noted for calm periods when the winds disappear altogether, trapping sail-powered boats for periods of days or weeks.

When the winds are gone the sea actually has no swells, on a clear day the color of the sky is reflected in the water. At night the same effect, with no clouds or moon, gives one the effect of floating in space.[citation needed]

The term appears to have arisen in the 18th century (when cross-Equator sailing voyages became more common). It is derived from dold (an archaic term meaning "stupid") and -rum(s), a noun suffix found in such words as "tantrum".[1]

So there you have it.

To summarize, a low-pressure area around the Equator has caused Willard's poll numbers to tank precipitously according to Team Mitt. And possibly stupid rum may be involved.

Other folks have looked at the poll numbers showing the President rising and Mitt falling, and come up with a non-maritime explanation for this phenomenon.

He just doesn't have The Stuff

One senior adviser wants us to think the summer doldrums are the problem, whatever that means. Maybe – but we may well be seeing something more significant: people on the fence coming to see, since the July polls, that Romney just doesn’t have The Stuff.

First he’s telling Israelis they’re culturally better off than Palestinians, and roundly schooled, including by the author of the book he cited. Then he’s telling us Obama wants to let people stay on the dole open-endedly – with this revealed all this past week as a callow lie. And meanwhile, if you think about it, the days when anyone could even begin to take seriously that Romney’s business experience rendered him more fit to run our economy than Obama are long over. His work at Bain is now imprinted in the public consciousness as more a matter of dissolving businesses and making money than keeping things going. What’s left?

Combine this with his own base’s lack of enthusiasm – which is leading to their call for choosing Paul Ryan as VP. This would only make Romney’s prospects worse – a “severely conservative” man like Ryan is hardly someone to help sway people on the fence, the swing voters who will decide this thing, such as those Ryan’s budget plan would blithely throw under the bus as far as we can see at this point.

Candidates who sway those fence-sitters, who often aren’t terribly committed to policy detail, generally have a certain Element X, a whole greater than the sum of the parts, that Romney just doesn’t have, and can’t even fake, because of his hopelessly unfolksy speaking style (Reagan sounded almost Dylanesque in comparison). It’s easy to imagine a cartoonist drawing him with hollow eyes like Little Orphan Annie. One senses someone who just wants to be President “because,” without anything even resembling a vision thing.