Friday, November 16, 2012 - Volume 3, Number 20 © Copyright 2012, The Ultrapolis Project.  All Rights Reserved. The Next Four Obama Years Part I One Last Look Back, One Small Preview So, it all came to pass as we had long said. The president’s first two years would be difficult, discouraging liberal allies and emboldening the right. Both the left and the right would misread the significance of the 2010 elections (it was not an electorate shift to the right). The Republican Party would fail to grasp the underlying causes for the 2010 vote and the public’s true sentiment, and was thus doomed to lose. A Romney candidacy would be the most formidable against Obama, but would still fail in the end as the Republican voters declined to strongly coalesce around their chosen candidate (A Pew Poll released November 4 found that President Barak Obama had more “strong” supporters than former Governor Mitt Romney). A Word to Reflect on Our Service To You Before we get to our main business, we’d like to take this opportunity to ask you to reflect on the service we have been making available to you for the last nearly three years thru the UWFR (and before that in the occasional personal emailed commentary). We take pride in having delivered forecasts up to two years in advance that turned out as accurate as ours has been in describing future developments or thinking. To borrow from a popular political phrase: where nothing is put in writing where others can check back, success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. We have a record you can look back on; and we hope you have found value in it, and will continue to do so in the future. (This paragraph revised Nov-28-12). In truth, with all the polls apparently turning to Romney the last two weeks before election day (during days early votes were being cast); with all the conservative and some not so conservative commentators predicting not just a Romney win, but one by a big margin; with none but liberals and other Obama supporters predicting an Obama re-election as we saw the sweat of worry dripping all over their words; and with previous Obama supporters telling us they were all switching to Governor Romney, here at UWFR we began to get cold feet as we prepared to make our final forecast. Would we have to reverse ourselves after all? We did not use computer models or algorithms based on the very latest polls (obviously). Instead we reviewed the case we made over the last two years since we began to predict an Obama re-election, and asked ourselves if the reasons we outlined were true. We also asked these new prospective Romney supporters their reasons for switching to Romney. In the, literally, final analysis (and not an off-the-cuff spurt on a minute by minute blog), we concluded that the reasons we had laid out since October 2010 would hold water in the voting booth, and the reasons our interviewees gave us for switching would not. We set aside our preference for a Romney win, considered how much we value whatever trust you place in our judgment, and hit “send.” Continued next column >	U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama >Continued from previous column Algorithms & Demographics No Cure What about the demographics pundits have talked about so much in the aftermath of history? What about the computer models using polling data to assess voter sentiment? The New York Times’ Nate Silver’s famous predictive models could not have told a leader what to do two years before election day to win the people’s trust. And a leader that leads purely by demographics is not a leader at all, but an oily panderer that even the dull will see through. Our First Preview: Obama No ‘Jimmy’ Here is our first forecast for the next four years: If the Republican Party is able to intellectually pull itself back together and stop its anti-intellectual and reactionary rejection of tempered and nuanced capitalism, it has a strong chance for recovery, and remaining a strong loyal opposition to the Democratic Party, which will inevitably grow fat and sloppy. But if the Grand Old Party simply focuses on the demographics, and changes its core values accordingly into an unprincipled appeal for the votes of the new Americans; or alternatively, if it doubles down on the conservative talk show recipes, it will ultimately cast itself into oblivion. The party of Lincoln will just continue to fade until it disappears, never to be heard from again. As for what President Barak Obama has in store for us in the United States, and for the world, we will outline that in our next installment. For now, we will sum it up so: President Obama is no Jimmy Carter. True, Mr. Obama is often too slow, methodical and tentative in hot situations, a complaint we and others have made before. But that should not be confused with trepidation on his part. The president, when settled on a path, will have his way and give no quarter to any and all who oppose him. And yet, ironically, in some ways the Republicans will become his new best friends (but he not theirs). Details to come. Our forecast record cannot be beat. One can follow the herd chasing the latest hyperbolic, melodramatic, and soon-forgettable micro-trend on Facebook and Twitter, or one can be wisely and judiciously in front of it with UWFR. Comments may be directed to contactproject@ultrapolisproject.com, or if you receive the newsletter email, also via a reply to the email address from which you receive it.
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