Bloomberg Businessweek reports that Mitt Romney merchandise was difficult for retailers to sell before the election--and, presumably, would be practically impossible to sell now; T-shirts generally  do not appreciate in value. Merchandise recyclers either effectively pulp the shirts for their fibers or re-sell them at cut rates overseas, as they would, too, with T-shirts indicating that the New England Patriots were the 2012 Super Bowl Champions.

A possible sign for 2016 or for T-shirt collectors looking for something that might appreciate in value: one T-shirt marketer noted that Paul Ryan t-shirts sold very well.

And on eBay, a "Nobama" t-shirt has a suggested starting bid of $12.99 and a "Mitt Romney: True Strength for America's Future" shirt a base of $9.99--and as this is written, no one has bid on either.

UPDATE: This is how the Empire State Building appeared last night after CNN called the election for Barack Obama (since 2000, the Democrats have traditionally been "blue"). 

CNN has announced via press release that they'll be lighting the Empire State Building tonight to honor the winner of the Presidential election.

If the network calls Mitt Romney as the winner, the tower will blaze red; if President Obama is re-elected, blue will light the night. Until that point, the building will be lit in red, white, and blue stripes along its facade and half-red and half-blue atop its mast.

Given the closeness of this election, though, we may not see either light tonight; we just hope the winner is declared before November 13, so that CNN doesn't step on the toes of the planned green, white, and red lights in honor of the Radio City Christmas show.

Illustration by Zina Saunders.

Barack Obama won a second term as president. But the biggest political player of the election cycle, it’s fair to say, was Hurricane Sandy, an 85 m.p.h. deus ex machina that provided a boost to Mr. Obama and gave Mitt Romney a steep hurdle to overcome as he headed into the home stretch. Karl Rove said so much himself on Friday, even as hard-hit communities were still without power.

“If you hadn’t had the storm, there would have been more of a chance for the Romney campaign to talk about the deficit, the debt, the economy,” he pointed out to The Washington Post. “When you have attention drawn away to somewhere else, to something else, it is not to his advantage.”

He would say that, of course. He had to say something, after all, to preemptively soften the blow for disappointed donors who had funded his months-long anti-Obama ad blitz to the tune of some $171.5 million. We thought it was in the bag, guys, but who can predict a hurricane?

Mr. Rove knows the game. He saw firsthand how an unexpected calamity can thoroughly alter the political landscape as well as the physical one. The 9/11 attacks offered President George W. Bush opportunities for optics both bad (My Pet Goat) and good (the Megaphone Moment). Years later, FEMA’s tragically failed response to Hurricane Katrina and Mr. Bush’s ill-conceived support for Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown seriously damaged his presidency. (Just in case we needed a reminder of that disaster, Mr. Brown appeared in the Globe and Mail just two days after Sandy hit, urging New Yorkers to “just chill.”)

Crass as it is to point out, when the dust settles, Sandy will have left more in her wake than 100 deaths and untold billions in damage. The storm also upended the political field, offering elected officials and hopefuls alike a sudden array of unexpected risks and opportunities, scrambling the ideological calculus, reconfiguring alliances and laying bare much of the established rhetoric (particularly as it pertains to climate change and the proper role of government). President Obama was offered a gimme—the chance to act as comforter-in-chief and to demonstrate the beneficence of the federal government, while Mitt Romney was relegated to the sidelines, at least when he wasn’t being asked about his past suggestion that we eliminate FEMA altogether.

Meanwhile, Governors Cuomo and Christie, both widely regarded as potential presidential candidates for 2016, were able to demonstrate their ability to lead in a crisis, and Mayor Bloomberg got to erase any lingering memories of his Bermuda sojourn during the so-called “Snowpocalypse” of 2010.If only it weren’t for that marathon misstep—advocated, someone made sure to inform The New York Times, by his predecessor Rudolph Giuliani—he’d have turned in a pitch-perfect performance himself.

All of them were working on instinct. On the national level, many years of careful preparation and billions spent on focus groups, push polls, talking points and microtargeting were suddenly gone with the wind. Even with the lights flickering, the optics became high-def: everyone went off-message—they had to—and suddenly what mattered was the human touch, bluster and reflexes.

And, of course, leadership. That thing people elect them for in the first place.

Sometimes it takes a perfect storm to blow away all that hot air.

AROUND THE TIME MR. ROVE was evaluating the hurricane’s impact on the presidential race, Newark Mayor Cory Booker was hosting more than a dozen of his storm-tossed constituents at his home in the Upper Clinton Hill neighborhood. This was retail politics taken to an extreme: after sending out an invitation via Twitter, Mr. Booker opened his home to anyone who needed a crash pad, then brought in heaping trays of chicken, fish, macaroni and cheese, potato salad, corn bread and candied yams from a local restaurant. Families snuggled up wherever they could, and exhausted local children zoned out in front of a DVD of Happy Feet, ate Halloween candy and molded animals out of Play-Doh.

If they’d had enough of the stuff, they might have sculpted a giant bust of the mayor and slapped it up on Mount Rushmore. He’d earned it.

“It meant—I can’t even explain,” Alice Bell, one of the neighbors who took refuge in Mr. Booker’s home, told The Observer, her voice cracking with emotion. “I mean, we were—I’m still overwhelmed that he would reach out to us like that.”

Mr. Booker has long enjoyed a reputation as a “supermayor” for his hands-on style. (Remember the time he rushed into a burning building to save a woman from a house fire? His constituents do.)

But while Mr. Booker, who oversees a city of under 300,000 citizens, is a master of the personal touch—and of Twitter—that option is less realistic for state and federal politicians and mayors like Michael Bloomberg, whose constituents number in the millions. (Though, had he opened his Upper East Side townhouse, which is valued at over $30 million, it would have been quite a story.)

Mr. Booker’s response—apolitical as it seemed—was brilliant politics. “The best thing that a politician can do is keep away from politics and go volunteer, help out in giving out meals to the area, console the people that have been devastated and, in effect, give everyone a huge hug,” said political consultant George Arzt. “Don’t get in the way of first responders. You’re there as reassurance for people and inspiration.”

Mr. Christie, for his part, was so eager to avoid politics he wound up stumbling right into them. “If you think right now I give a damn about presidential politics, then you don’t know me,” he told Steve Doocy when asked about his extraordinarily warm embrace of Mr. Obama, prompting The New York Post to suggest that he make sure to reiterate his endorsement of Mr. Romney “or the Republican party will never forgive him.”

That said, given the widespread praise that has greeted Mr. Christie’s handling of the disaster, they might just have to.

WHILE THERE IS NO REAL POLITICAL playbook when it comes to handling disasters, politicians have been working on it for millennia now. Emperor Titus’s quick response to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius—and the massive fire that consumed much of Rome the following year—earned him approving shout-outs from the ancient press corps.

“In these many great calamities he showed not merely the concern of an emperor, but even a father’s surpassing love, now offering consolation in edicts, and now lending aid so far as his means allowed,” wrote the historian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus.

Even unelected monarchs can be dethroned when they whiff on a major catastrophe. Emperor Haile Selassie I’s perceived mismanagement of the Wollo famine led to his overthow in 1974 in a Marxist military coup.

Former Chicago Mayor Michael Bilandic saw his hopes for re-election buried along with his city after what was considered a lackluster response to a blizzard. “In the end, God sent us 100 inches of snow in sub-zero weather, and I happened to lose and election because of it,” he would later reflect.

Mr. Bush’s job approval rating plummeted in September 2005, after his administration’s widely criticized response to Katrina—which included the misbegotten Air Force One flyover that led to one of the most damaging photo ops in history. The outcry was perhaps best summed up by rapper Kanye West, who proclaimed during a telethon that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Five years later, in his memoir, Decision Points, Mr. Bush described the post-Katrina criticism from Mr. West and others as an “all time low” in his presidency.

“Emergency and disaster response is one of the most fundamental functions of government at every level,” noted Michael Tobman, a Brooklyn-based political consultant. “If it is bungled, as the Bush administration did with Katrina, it is never forgotten and never overlooked.”

NO DOUBT AWARE OF THE EXPERIENCES of his predecessors, on Monday, as the storm approached, Mr. Obama cancelled a planned campaign rally in the crucial battleground state of Florida and flew back to Washington. Even when the campaign resumed after a three-day pause, Mr. Obama’s traveling campaign press secretary made sure the public knew it was of secondary concern.

“I’ve spent the last two days with him ... in between every single event, he basically walks off the stage, gets on a phone call with governors or mayors or first responders—he’s on calls in the car, he’s on calls in the plane,” Jennifer Psaki said.

Contrary to the imaginings of some right-wing conspiracy theorists, Mr. Obama didn’t engineer the storm to juice his candidacy, but he handled it magnificently, leading to a windfall of unexpected praise from one of his chief detractors, Mr. Christie. The hurricane also brought a late-breaking endorsement of the president by Mayor Bloomberg, who had previously refrained from backing either of the candidates.

“The devastation that Hurricane Sandy brought to New York City and much of the Northeast—in lost lives, lost homes and lost business—brought the stakes of Tuesday’s presidential election into sharp relief,” Mayor Bloomberg wrote in an op-ed on, where else, Bloomberg View.

Along with kind words from his political colleagues, President Obama also experienced something of a storm surge in public opinion polls. Mr. Romney, on the other hand, found himself politically high and dry. Like Mr. Obama’s team, Mr. Romney’s campaign made the decision to cancel several of his planned events as Sandy bore down on the East Coast Monday afternoon.

Meanwhile, he and his aides hastily converted a planned Ohio “victory rally” into a “storm relief event.” According to a report in BuzzFeed, the Romney campaign hastily purchased $5,000 worth of supplies for the recovery effort to serve as props for supporters to “donate” at the event. The faux donations and blatantly political elements of the “storm relief event,” including a promotional video and “victory rally” badges handed out to reporters, led to a deluge of bad press.

INITIALLY, MAYOR BLOOMBERG’S handling of the storm was deemed exemplary. He ordered an evacuation of the city’s low-lying areas and opened city shelters while aggressively sounding the alarm before the floodwaters rolled in. Later, his low-key if businesslike demeanor in a series of press conferences (enlivened by his intriguingly effusive ASL interpreter) was almost soothing in its professorial tranquility.

Calm in a storm can only take you so far, though, as Mr. Bloomberg discovered in subsequent days. Fuel shortages, looting and continued power outages led to angry residents and harsh headlines. Those emotions faded as the city’s infrastructure returned and lights started to flicker on, but Mr. Bloomberg’s convincing performance of nonchalance may have turned prematurely into the real thing: as part of his effort to maintain a sense of normalcy, he vowed to continue with the planned New York City Marathon. The decision provoked the outrage of politicians in the hard-hit outerboroughs as well as the city’s tabloids. “Like hell,” scoffed The New York Post, adding, “Mayor Mike’s trademark Manhattan myopia is back.”

The anti-marathon backlash reached such a fever pitch that, by Friday evening, a person claiming to be an employee of the race’s host, New York Road Runners, sent a blistering, if anonymous, letter to the media calling for the marathon’s cancellation.

“I feel bad writing this,” the person wrote. “I have seen friends and coworkers work incredibly hard this year and in years past to put this event together ... But for me, that is all gone ... As an employee of New York Road Runners, a New Yorker, a runner, and a person I firmly believe that holding this race is wrong.”

Eventually, Mr. Bloomberg succumbed to the pressure and cancelled the marathon. It was a rare walk-back for a mayor who rarely suffers from self-doubt—and another sign that even the most skilled politician sometimes misreads the mood in times of crisis.

Meanwhile, though most of the media attention was focused on New York City and New Jersey, Gov. Andrew Cuomo played a central role in the response efforts—and stayed in front of the cameras. Having savaged his predecessor, George Pataki, for his seemingly lackadaisical response to the 9/11 attacks—“Pataki stood behind the leader,” he said at the time. “He held the leader’s coat ... Cream rises to the top, and Rudy Giuliani rose to the top”—Mr. Cuomo seized control of the response.  The storm saw the typically media-shy governor sitting down for interviews with several national television news hosts including Anderson Cooper, Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer and Rachel Maddow. On the topic of the state’s crisis-response efforts, Mr. Cuomo couldn’t help but sound, well, presidential. And he received national attention when, sitting across from Ms. Sawyer, he boldly addressed the elephant in the room—if not quite by name.

“I think Al Gore is right,” Mr. Cuomo said, raising the specter of climate change. “We have a ‘one hundred year flood’ every two years now! I think, at this point, it is undeniable that we have a higher frequency of these extreme weather situations. We’re going to have to deal with it.”

And where the mayor tended to shrug his shoulders at certain problems he described as beyond his control, Mr. Cuomo displayed a touch of aggression. After utility companies suggested it might take 10 days or more to restore electricity in some areas, he dashed off a letter to their CEOs threatening to revoke their licenses to do business in his state—then released it to the media.

“This is not just about effort,” he said at a press conference announcing the move. “This is about getting the job done.”

Political prognostication is a more inexact science than even meteorology. But it seems altogether possible we will be seeing that clip again a few years down the road, if Mr. Cuomo takes on Mr. Christie in 2016, Mr. Bloomberg endorses someone or other, and Mr. Booker solves the global warming crisis, reversing time itself by racing around the earth’s axis backward, really, really fast.

hwalker@observer.com

ccampbell@observer.com

This story has been updated to reflect the result of the presidential election.  

Who pays for street closures when Obama visits?

In the remaining hours of election day, as waves of patriotic feeling and democratic pride wash over the city, it's easy to forget what a headache this whole affair has been. The endless TV ads, the increasingly desperate campaign emails, the traffic-snarling fundraising visits.

But whichever candidate emerges victorious tonight, in the days and weeks to come, we will all have to contend with that post-election hangover, in which we acknowledge the colossal amount of time, energy and money—so much money!—the democratic process has cost this season.

As a favorite stop on both candidates' fundraising circuits, New York pays a particularly high price—millions of dollars in police overtime to supplement the Secret Service—for the privilege of throwing money at the candidates during each election.

Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney waste any time trying to win votes here, of course (unlike coy Ohio, city and state wears their hearts on its sleeve), but they do love to visit the deep-pocketed donors lining either side of Central Park.

New York is home to the top two fund-raising ZIP codes for both Mr. Obama (the Upper West Side ZIP code 10024) and Mitt Romney (the Upper East Side's 10021), according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. But not all the money disappearing from New Yorkers' pockets is going to campaign coffers; a lot of it is going to NYPD overtime, a cost for which cities are, as a general rule, not reimbursed.

Between August 2011 and June 2012, the city spent $4.75 million on presidential visits, according to figures provided by the NYC Independent Budget Office. The NYPD did not respond to a request for information on police overtime costs for candidate visits.

The IBO only tracks the cost of presidential visits and does not have figures for the other party candidate, although such visits are generally somewhat less expensive because mere candidates do not require as much security as a sitting president. Still, Mr. Romney has not neglected New York's wealthy donors or their fundraising fetes. And he also travels with a detail of street-closing Secret Service agents.

The most expensive month for the city during that span was  September 2011, when the president visited for three days to attend the UN General Assembly and headline several fundraising events. The overtime costs ran to $1.27 million, according to the IBO. The least expensive was in January 2012, when Mr. Obama ducked into the city for a quick bout of fundraising, running up $308,118 in police overtime costs.

For the most part, New Yorkers' complaints about fundraising visits have focused on traffic jams, but other cities and towns have tried (to no avail) to get the candidates' campaigns to foot the bills for visits. After Obama and Romney hit up the rich folks in Newport Beach several times this year, the city sent each of their campaigns invoices for the police overtime; it viewed the visits are private events.

"Had this been a 'business' trip—if the president came to Newport Beach to talk about one of his policies with our residents—the city would not have sent an invoice," city manager Dave Kiff told The Los Angeles Times.

The city tried to recoup $35,000 from the Obama campaign, but the Secret Service insisted that it never reimburses localities for the cost of campaign security. If a city can't afford the expense, it should ask for help ahead of time from the state police, the Secret Service told the paper.

Nor was it the first time a municipality revolted over the expense of election-related attentions. Cleveland, exhausted by the endless visits it received as a swing-state metropolis in 2004, billed President Bush and John Kerry more than $270,000 for the security it provided during nine campaign visits. But as USA Today reported at the time, neither campaign was much inclined to pay for the police, planning, ambulances and garbage pick-up that the visits required, although  Dubuque, Iowa was able to get $1,300 from the Bush campaign and $3,000 from the Kerry Campaign that year. Which might sound encouraging if not for the fact that the city asked for $18,400 to cover its  expenses during three visits.

In a city as densely packed as New York, every visit is significantly more complicated and expensive than it is in other locales.  A fact that Mayor Bloomberg is not unaware of. After all, even as he endorsed Obama for president, he asked the president not to visit in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. It would have been great to see the president, but his motorcade? And you thought the marathon was bad.

kvelsey@observer.com

Photo illustration: Ed Johnson

“... you have no sense of responsibility toward anyone or anything. And that is a tragedy in a man and a disaster in a president.” —Gore Vidal, The Best Man

I never much cared for Gore Vidal, and I don’t like quoting him. He was an anti-Semite and a cynic whose sniggering contrarianism extended to expressing sympathy for Timothy McVeigh, the butcher of Oklahoma City. I find his popularity among so many people on the left today appalling. (His books are perfectly fine. There just aren’t any people in them, save for himself.)

But the climactic lines above from his play, The Best Man—directed at his thinly veiled Nixon stand-in, “Joe Cantwell”—seem tailor-made for this year’s Republican presidential nominee.

There is no love lost here for Barack Obama. Over the last four years, I’ve probably written more harsh words about the president than the most perfervid Weekly Standard hack.

But for this country to elect Willard Mitt Romney and his sidekick, Kid Damien, would be for us to surrender every last remaining shred of our self-respect as free citizens in a functioning democracy.

Mr. Romney’s reversals since his days as governor of Massachusetts way back in 2006 have been well documented. In less than six years, beginning at the age of 60, he has gone from being pro-gay rights to wanting an anti-gay-marriage amendment enshrined in the Constitution; from an advocate of choice to a firm believer that abortion is murder; from an ecological watchdog to a man who thinks climate change is a punch line.

During his time on the road with the Republican party’s traveling Klown Kollege this spring, he not only renounced pretty much everything he actually did in public office, but also stood placidly by while audiences of the faithful booed a gay American soldier, and applauded the idea that a man without health insurance should be left to die on the streets. During a private fund-raiser with major party contributors around the same time, he famously opined that nearly half the American public was “victims and dependents.”

As the general election campaign kicked into gear, the lies and obfuscations came faster and thicker than ever.

For the record, Mr. Romney was never poor, not even in college, when he had to eat tuna fish. He was never even not rich.

As a young man, he backed our intervention in the war in Vietnam, and even demonstrated in favor of it. But he never served, using six years of deferments to finish his education instead and to proselytize for the Mormon Church in the south of France.

He never started “a small business,” in any generally recognized sense of the term, or made it into a going concern. What he did was start a leveraged buyout shop, capitalized at the get-go with $37 million in funds from his daddy’s friends—then made an even greater fortune buying up, reorganizing, and sometimes melting down and dissolving businesses other people started.

He refused to release most of his tax returns, perhaps because he didn’t want anyone to see how little he paid on them, perhaps because he was embarrassed that, while running for governor of Massachusetts, he claimed residency in Utah in order to save a small amount in state taxes.

When it came to the issues, he had no difficulty telling national debate audiences that he could balance the budget and make the deficit disappear while giving everyone massive tax cuts and doubling military spending. That he would retain all the most popular benefits of “Obamacare” while eliminating any of the taxes necessary to pay for them. That his plan to replace Medicare with a voucher program was not a voucher program. That our Navy is not as strong as it was in 1916, and that our Air Force is not what it was in 1947. That Mr. Obama is an Arab-appeasing weakling who has betrayed our allies in Israel and Poland, that our real enemy is still Russia, and that he will commence a trade war with China on Day One of his administration.

It has become the standard boilerplate to say that Mr. Romney, like all our presidential nominees, is “a good man.” But that’s not true either. I’m not talking about how he treats his wife or his sons, or whether he tips well in restaurants. In public life, which is all we know, and all we can truly know about him, his has been a thoroughly dishonorable record, devoid of any principle or consistency.

Some observers see in this changeability a wily pragmatism. What I see is democracy’s worst nightmare: a clever man willing at every turn to choose his own momentary advantage over the long-term needs of his country—at a time when those needs, when the choices we must make, are more critical than ever.

To win election, this infinitely malleable individual has put himself in the hands of a rigidly ideological party. He has surrounded himself with many of the most venal and fanatical people in American politics today: Karl Rove, Robert Bork, John Bolton, Ralph Reed. Not to mention a corrupt hatemonger like John Sununu, or his leading economics adviser, Glenn “Give It Your Best Shot” Hubbard, so deftly exposed peddling his intellectual integrity in the documentary Inside Job. Mr. Romney swore a solemn oath to Grover Norquist long before he ever swore one to the Constitution.

In order to appease these people and enhance his own immediate prospects, Mr. Romney appears willing to throw millions of the aged and the needy into poverty, blow an irreparable hole in the deficit, start a catastrophic war and recklessly accelerate the climatic shifts that are already changing our world. Whatever one thinks of Mr. Obama’s thin agenda—and I don’t feel it’s sufficient for the challenges facing us—it has to be said that Mr. Romney doesn’t even have a plan. What he has is the political equivalent of that old Times Square staple, a three-card monte game mounted on an old cardboard box, ready to be kicked into the gutter at the first sign that the jig is up, the cash of the bewildered suckers disappearing with the faceless grifter as he vanishes effortlessly back into the crowd.

Bloomberg. (Getty)

If you see Mayor Michael Bloomberg on the street on the No. 4 train in the next week or two, do offer him a cup of cocoa and an hour or two of your time, to listen. He is sad. Neither of the presidential candidates have had the courage, the will, the determination to stick it to their entire coalitions of supporters in exchange for the endorsement of the Mayor of New York City.

He gives each of them a checklist of competing priorities, and what do they do? They disagree with some of them. Mitt Romney will not endorse same-sex marriage; President Obama refuses to cease his domestic reconstruction of the Soviet Union. Neither will ban guns. What's a billionaire 22 times over left to do but throw change at people like Scott Brown and otherwise whine to the New York Times about how he can't get what he wants?

The fact that campaigns spend so much time calling upon the mayor at his 100-millionth-floor lair atop New York City, or inviting him to lunch at the White House, or golfing with him on the Vineyard, is bizarre, but wholly unsurprising. This, the prospect of a Michael Bloomberg endorsement, is the sort of thing—the pinnacle of things!—that wealthy donors, enbubbled advisors, and media dingbats would consider a "game-changer," pure electoral college jackpot. Remember how then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel used to spend more than 0% of his limited time lobbying for approval from David Brooks, a Bethesda newspaper columnist that no one—even David Brooks—ever listens to? The situation with Bloomberg is like that, exactly like that, especially in how the approval is never won.

How is Obama expected to reason with a man who, as he told the New York Times this weekend, believes Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren intends to "close the banks and get rid of corporate profits, and we’d all bring socialism back, or the U.S.S.R.?” Get rid of profits, add socialism, the U.S.S.R.—you know, some mix-and-match basket of those things. Of course, Mr. Obama is a touch to the right of Elizabeth Warren, so perhaps Mr. Bloomberg figures he'd compromise with a Democratic Senate for a more modest seizure of the means of production.

Even in the areas where Mr. Bloomberg agrees with the president—social issues—his stubborn side prevents him from offering credit. "Let’s get serious here," the mayor told the Times about Mr. Obama's announcement in support of same-sex marriage, "it was Joe Biden that forced that issue." This is how people who don't understand national politics think, despite their reputations as centrist political genius superhealers. While the White House has confessed that Vice President Joe Biden's words of support for same-sex marriage expedited Mr. Obama's planned rollout, there was, in fact, a planned rollout. Presidents don't change their platforms on major issues solely because the Veep runs his mouth on a teevee chat show. They do it because of ideological shifts within their coalitions.

Mr. Bloomberg doesn't like Mr. Obama because he's placed light restrictions on large banks that help New York City balance its budget when they inflate to ungodly proportions in fake-good times. That's his prerogative. What would it cost to procure the endorsement of this one man, who's most known nationally right now as the jerk who won't let hardworking folk purchase big-ass cups of soda pop? Too much, for very little.

Mr. Bloomberg sounds like a guy who really, really wants to endorse Mitt Romney, doesn't he? He likes that Mitt Romney is rich. He made a lot of money doing whatever in the financial sector—Mr. Bloomberg loves this. But Mr. Romney won't support gun control or action against climate change, because those are directly against what his coalition supports, so, yeah, no Bloomberg endorsement there, and who cares about this guy anyway?

The Mayor is, of course, welcome to not make an endorsement. But to whine about how neither candidate supports his full menu of policy preferences is insufferable. Not many voters out there are voting because their preferences are exactly in line with one candidate or the other. They prioritize, depending on what's most important to them at the time. It's part of being in a coalition.

As the Times notes, Mr. Bloomberg himself has made a "cleareyed assessment that he could not win" a presidential race. That's true, and it's not because he's short or Jewish or from New York City, as he likes to joke. It's because he's too egotistical to go about the business of national coalition-building, too stubborn to bother managing competing demands. His frustration now is that he can't get either of the candidates to squarely shoot their supporters in the eye—not with a real gun, mind you—which he views as statesmanship at its best. It's juvenile in its romanticism. Besides, of course, he’s always welcome to take a shot at the White House himself.

The trouble is, I’m not sure he really loves us—me and my sisters—back. Oh sure, we look pretty good about three months before an election. And yes, he’s put two women on the Supreme Court who will presumably help keep women’s basic rights intact for decades to come. But it really hurts to have to admit that, to him, women are tactical advantages, mere numbers and percentages in a demographic column. 

Don’t get me wrong. It’s absolutely imperative that women go out and vote for this man in droves. The alternative is unthinkable. But it is sad that we must support him not for what he has done, or even might do for us, but for what will surely happen without him.

Of course, the Democrats erupted with glee over Mitt Romney’s at the second presidential debate, dubbed “Ladies Night” by Salon. While we’re all LMAO’ing at Romney’s “binders full of women” comment, we forget that Mr. Obama could fit his women in a Trapper Keeper.

Not widely discussed in Democratic circles is that the President’s administration is a boys’ club, and that all-male basketball and golf games are the least of it. He has only appointed four women to significant positions: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett, along with Supreme Court justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. That gives him the same number of women in his cabinet as George W. Bush had, unless the White House counts Susan Rice, US Ambassador to the United Nations. What’s more, Mr. Obama’s “czar” appointments have been 90 percent male. Bush, needless to say, was not attacked for gender parity because the standard is so much lower for Republicans.

Mr. Obama has had ample opportunities to show American women some big love, but he hasn’t put a single woman in charge of the big four economic agencies, (even selecting the supercilious misogynist Larry Summers to advise on the economy the first two years). It’s not like there were not eminently more qualified women for these posts. He blew off Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she had been instrumental in pushing, appointing a man, Richard Cordray, instead. Warren was present at that announcement and gamely proffered her cheek for a kiss from the President, one that Vanity Fair writer Suzanna Andrews described as “A Judas kiss, some would say.”

The president has also been disappointing on pay equity. On debate night, Mr. Obama boasted that he signed the Lily Ledbetter Act, without saying a word about the much tougher Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill he has used for political points over the last four years, while allowing it to wither on the vine on the Hill.

Ledbetter merely extends the statutory period during which women can file suit over pay discrimination. But the Paycheck Fairness Act is far more sweeping. It would require employers to demonstrate that any salary differences between men and women doing the same work are not gender-related, prohibit employers from retaliating against employees who share salary information and require the Labor Department to increase its outreach to employers to help eliminate pay disparities.

In the summer of ‘08, needing to mollify women who had pinned their hopes on Hillary, Mr. Obama supported the Paycheck Fairness Act. In office, he let it languish, only pushing for it to get to the Senate floor in the summer before the 2010 midterm elections. When it finally got to consideration, Tea Partiers had taken over the Hill and it was DOA. The administration again pushed it forward last summer, in a show vote with no hope of success.

What’s more, gender pay equity doesn’t exist within the White House itself, where women make 18 percent less than their male counterparts. The median female salary in the Obama administration at $60,000 and the men’s at $71,000. The president’s explanation is that it’s not discrimination, but the government-mandated assignment of salaries by type of civil service job, which the administration must follow. This just proves the point that more women than men occupy lower-paying jobs in his administration.

In a recent Huffington Post op-ed, Amy Siskind of the national feminist group New Agenda gave Mr. Obama a C for his performance on the issue of equal pay. On the positive side, she rated him an A+ on Supreme Court appointments, and A on sexual violence, for legislation that pushes campuses to get tougher on sex crimes.

But elsewhere, his grades were far more mixed. Ms. Siskind gave Mr. Obama a C on jobs, noting that the recession ended with a “he-covery” benefitting men disproportionately. Siskind cited a Pew Research Survey which found that women lost 218,000 from 2009 to May 2011, while men gained 768,000 jobs.

Ms. Siskind, for the record, also gave him a B- on reproductive rights. Democrats nationwide, including the president, have stood by, apparently helpless as right wingers in state legislatures across the country introduced more than a thousand pieces of anti-choice legislation in the two years since 2010, according to Planned Parenthood’s count. Many of these radical attacks are now becoming law, in places like Texas, which defunded Planned Parenthood clinics, with Virginia mandating ultrasounds before abortions, and Wisconsin requiring doctors to be present when women take abortion inducing drugs.

As far as women go, O looks a lot better from a distance than up close. Partly, this is due to the reflected glow of the First Lady, with her strong countenance and amazing biceps. You look at her and wonder, if he were sexist, would he be with this powerhouse? Would he have these beautiful daughters? But when it comes to "moving the needle on any women's issue (with the exception of the Lily Ledbetter stuff)," said a Washington lobbyist, "he is not really committed to it."

Even still, Democrats have assumed the right’s crazy war on reproductive choice delivers women to Obama and the rest of the ticket. This year, Obama’s people are banking on women deeply concerned about those issues swinging states like Virginia to his side. To some extent, they may be right: women voters in general have favored Mr. Obama by 13 percent on average, though that lead has diminished in recent weeks.  But pollsters say  reproductive rights issue don’t resonate as strongly with younger women who are accustomed to easy abortions and de facto access to the pill. No one under 55 can remember—or can even imagine—the era of the clothes-hanger.

The tragic fact is that sexism is woven into the fabric of in both parties, and at all levels of American politics, so tightly that we barely notice it. Women are not a minority, although often lumped in with minorities as another vastly under-represented “interest group.” We make up 51 percent of the population, but only 17 percent of the Congress and State legislatures.

Would it make a difference if more of us were in and around the Oval office? Probably.

Given that he is right on all the issues, this probably sounds like hair-splitting. Especially considering the alternatives: the anti-choice abortion and contraception policies of the the Romney-Ryan platform, the essence of forced child-bearing.

But isn’t it time for a White House where women really are on the inside, in the Oval and at the agencies that mean money, and a White House that is leading and proactive every day—not just when tactical politics requires it—on things like state legislatures across the nation sneaking up on basic women’s rights?

Meanwhile, when O wants us, on that carefully calibrated date around election time, we put on our lipstick and show up. The rest of the time, we wait by the phone, scarfing Haagen Dazs by the pint.

Romney. (Rainier Ehrhardt/Getty Images)

The crisis of leadership in American government is easily explained: thanks to a flawed presidential primary system that rewards strident rhetoric and hyper-partisanship, candidates tailor their messages to fringe elements in small, unrepresentative states. The result? A nasty, shallow and expensive process that rewards sound bites rather than solutions and gamesmanship instead of ideas. This year, however, we have witnessed a rare phenomenon in American politics. A candidate has emerged from the rough and tumble of the primaries with his dignity intact. The system has produced not a demagogue but a manager, a candidate whose experience is rooted in the pragmatism of the business world rather than the ideology of partisan politics.

That candidate is Mitt Romney.

Gov. Romney won the Republican Party’s nomination precisely because he is not an ideologue—and that is no small achievement. He persuaded enough Republican primary voters that the time has come to put aside dogma and inflexibility in favor of real-world solutions to the array of problems America faces at home and abroad.

Over the last few weeks, Mr. Romney has shown that he is a moderate to his core—he is a manager, and a listener, who believes he can restore the balance between the private and public sectors that has been a hallmark of the American economy.

The Observer endorses Mr. Romney’s candidacy and urges readers to support him. 

Four years ago, Barack Obama captured the imagination of many Americans with his thrilling message of change. Given the challenges confronting the president—two raging wars and an unprecedented global economic collapse—the desire for a quick fix was unrealistic.

America supported that candidate (as did this newspaper), but his presidency, so filled with promise and potential, has failed to deliver the change America needs.

True, Mr. Obama deserves credit for strong, decisive action that helped prevent a catastrophic economic meltdown on Wall Street. The financial services sector, the city’s most important industry, came very close to the unthinkable as once-unshakable entities—Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch—simply vanished. Mr. Obama’s policies helped to shore up the industry and, thus, the city.

At the same time, however, the president has evinced a distaste for that very same industry, and his rhetoric has begun to erode its foundation. Class warfare might be a successful strategy for cobbling together 270 electoral votes. But it’s not the way to unite a divided nation.

The president comes to town on a Monday, takes our money, shakes our hands and tells us how much he values the CEOs and innovators of New York. And then on Tuesday, he turns around and refers to business leaders as fat cat bankers whose success was created by the sweat of others. That’s not a friend. That’s not a leader. That’s a politician.

Mitt Romney stands out because—unlike so many candidates in the past—he understands how to build businesses, create efficiencies, make tough deals and carefully consider divergent viewpoints. America needs a strong leader, a practical leader. Mr. Romney knows full well that it would be a tragic mistake to simply assume that the United States will continue to be the world’s economic powerhouse simply because that’s what we’ve been for decades. America earned its global prominence because of the nation’s culture of work and individual freedom. That’s why immigrants came here and continue to come here—not because they seek a handout, but because they want a chance to work and to create and to innovate. In today’s competitive economy, the country needs competitors, not class-war crybabies.

Barack Obama, the candidate of change in 2008, was and will remain a significant figure in American history. His election four years ago truly was a milestone and, rightly, a cause for celebration.

While we admire Mr. Obama, we believe he squandered an opportunity to bring positive change to Washington—and what change he did bring will burden future generations. We continue to rack up debt, buy services we cannot afford and allow unfunded liabilities to continue to grow. This has to end.

Rather than reimagining government’s role in society and the economy by embracing the courageous alternatives proposed by the Simpson-Bowles commission two years ago, Mr. Obama turned to neo-New Deal policies. Rather than building creative partnerships with the private sector, the president chose to demonize the successful. Rather than strengthen the nation’s relationship with Israel as the Arab world imploded, Mr. Obama treated Jerusalem as less a friend than a burden.

Mr. Romney, on the other hand, promises to bring a new and refreshing attitude to Washington, one that speaks to his experience as both a successful business leader and the governor of a state not known for its affection for Republicans.

As he surveys the nation’s stubbornly sluggish economy, Mr. Romney isn’t looking to point fingers, and he certainly isn’t looking to single out chief executives, entrepreneurs and high earners for demagogic attacks and punitive tax proposals. Critics have lampooned him as out of touch; in fact, it is Mr. Obama who has lost sight of the fact that American capitalism is the greatest anti-poverty program in human history.

For that reason, New Yorkers have a special reason to embrace Mr. Romney. He has made it clear that he sees successful, high-achieving and, yes, high-earning Americans as his partners, not his enemies. New Yorkers may still have a special place in their hearts for Mr. Obama’s undeniable place in American history. But it’s important to remember that the president’s anti-Wall Street rhetoric and his soak-the-rich tax proposals are aimed at many of us.

What’s more, the city actually has fared even worse than the rest of the country over the last four years. The city’s stubbornly high jobless rate of over 9.9 percent is higher than the national rate of 7.8 percent. The loss of Wall Street jobs and reigning in of pay has had a negative trickle-down effect on New York’s service industry businesses as well.

Romney’s Plan for Growth

Mr. Romney understands that Washington must work with corporate America, small businesses and individual entrepreneurs to recapture their trust and to ignite their imaginations. To that end, he proposed cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent, the world’s highest, to a more reasonable 25 percent. He also has proposed a permanent 20 percent reduction in marginal tax rates for individuals. Mr. Romney’s critics charge that this formula has been tried before to no avail. They have forgotten their history—tax cuts by Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Ronald Reagan helped fuel job creation, investment and prosperity.

At the macro level, Mr. Romney could not be more clear: Job creation—not what he memorably called “trickle-down government”—must be Washington’s priority. That position stands in remarkable contrast to Mr. Obama’s priorities when he took office, as he used his mandate to ram through Obamacare, the largest expansion of government since the Great Society.

But Mr. Romney knows that the key to job creation lies not in Washington, but on both Wall Street and Main Street, where the creativity of capitalism and the vision of risk-takers can chart a new course for millions who have seen their prospects dim over the last four years. Bill Clinton said that those who work hard and play by the rules should be assured of a bright future. But the last four years have seen millions of hard workers consigned to the unemployment line and some 46 million become dependent on food stamps—up from 31 million in 2008. Mr. Romney is caricatured as an unfeeling child of privilege, but it is hard to miss his outrage when he talks of the unemployed and underemployed people he has met during his campaign.

Mr. Romney also understands that government can no longer afford to spend trillions that it simply doesn’t have. Entitlement programs, including Medicare and Social Security, need to be reformed. Cultures of dependency—both at the individual and the corporate level—must be transformed. We saw that here in New York City in extreme form. The city of the late 1980s, where one in seven New Yorkers was on welfare, had essentially ceased to function. Both Rudy Giuliani and Bill Clinton applied common-sense solutions to get the city and the country off the mat, and the results are inarguable. The difference between the New York of the late 1980s and today is astonishing, although there still is work to be done.

America and the World

Credit where it is due: under President Obama, the world’s master terrorist met his demise at the business end of American weaponry.

Other than that undeniable achievement, Mr. Obama’s conduct of foreign policy and national security has been incoherent and ineffective, as the continuing and ever-changing saga of the terrorist murder of U.S. diplomats in Libya demonstrates.

But for so many New Yorkers, the most disconcerting failure of the Obama years has been the nation’s deteriorating relationship with Israel. He foolishly sought to create strategic separation between Washington and Jerusalem, believing that this would somehow impress the Arab world’s dictators and demagogues. Precisely why this would be in the national interest remains a mystery—in any case, the shift was a strategic disaster.

Israel rightly believes that Mr. Obama simply doesn’t comprehend the threats to its very existence. There is no reason to believe that the Obama administration will have Israel’s back if Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear facilities—a move that may be required to prevent the haters in Tehran from possessing and using weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. Obama appears to believe that peace will come to the Middle East simply by forcing Israel, the only true democracy in the region, to return to its pre-1967 borders without even the most basic concession from the Arabs. What kind of a friend would make such a demand?

Mr. Romney will not stand by idly while vicious anti-Semites in Egypt’s ruling Muslim Brotherhood threaten Israeli civilians. He will not bow to wishful thinking when terrorists hijack protest movements in the Arab world. And he will call out Israel’s critics in the West for their hypocrisy and utter disregard for the Jewish state’s security concerns.

Change to Move Forward

The United States simply cannot afford another four years of weak leadership. The genius of American capitalism and the moral authority of American foreign policy must be restored.

Mitt Romney has a plan to do both. He has the credentials to restore the economy and to defend American values in a hostile world. He has the skills to help create jobs and a brighter future for our country.

This election is a true turning point for the next generation. Mitt Romney is the change the nation needs. And he is the change New York needs.

editorial@observer.com

Photo illustration: Ed Johnson

What makes old people cynical is listening to the exact same lies being propagated year after year—and seeing them be just as effective as they ever were. I grew up during the Vietnam War, and I never thought I’d live to see the same hollow rationales, the same shameless appeals to patriotism trotted out to justify another such fiasco.

But here they are in this campaign, looking just as fresh and lively as ever.

To be sure, they have company. Near the end of the vice presidential debate last Thursday, the lies from Paul Ryan were coming so fast and furious—Obamacare will cause 20 million people to lose their health care! 7.4 million seniors will lose theirs! It contains 21 tax increases!—that I feared he was about to morph into some kind of iconic, fabled trickster figure, the Coyote perhaps, or the Lying Choirboy Scamp. Befuddled by the sheer quantity of falsehoods, the mainstream media predictably rolled over like an obedient Labrador and started debating facial expressions, leaving any number of reasonable questions unanswered.

For instance, left unexplained, so far, is how the ever-evolving Romney-Ryan economic plan now can possibly work, even on its own terms. Originally, the plan called for a massive tax cut for the very wealthiest Americans, the “job creators,” who could be counted on to invest the extra income and, well, create jobs. Now we are told that any such cut for the wealthy will be “revenue neutral,” thanks to all the loopholes they plan to close. But if that’s so, if the rich are not going to get a real tax cut … then where is all the extra investment income going to come from?

Or how is it that no one picked up on the old switcheroo involving just why it is that we need to attack Iran before it develops a nuclear weapon? For months now, we’ve been told that the mullahs in Tehran are so crazy they are liable to launch a suicidal nuclear attack on Israel or even the United States the moment they have such weapons.

Yet last Thursday, when moderator Martha Raddatz dared to ask the question no one else in the media seems capable of putting to a candidate—“let me ask you what’s worse … another war in the Middle East, or a nuclear-armed Iran?”—Mr. Ryan merely mentioned Iran’s hatred of Israel, repeatedly emphasizing a whole other argument for war:

“[I]f they get nuclear weapons, other people in the neighborhood will pursue their nuclear weapons as well.”

Say what?

Not 10 years after the neocon excuse for going to war with Iraq pirouetted effortlessly from rooting out “weapons of mass destruction” to building a model state to inspire the Islamic world, Mr. Ryan and his party are now talking up an exponentially bigger war … to maintain the regional balance of power?

Ms. Raddatz then failed to elicit any discussion of the fearsome costs of an invasion or even an air strike against Iran, despite asking directly, “Can the two of you be absolutely clear and specific to the American people [about] how effective would a military strike be?”

Crickets! Though at least Vice President Biden did blurt out, “The last thing we need now is another war.” Nothing on this Earth was going to compel Congressman Ryan to touch an actual fact or figure—just as nothing has compelled Gov. Romney to give us any hints about what a potential invasion of Iran is likely to cost in terms of blood and treasure.

Instead, the Republican strategy is once again to take a number of recent events and anxieties and wrap them together in a grand narrative of Democratic iniquity. To this end, the right’s spin machine has been working shamelessly to exploit the assassination of our ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans in Benghazi. They have done their level best to inflate this tragic incident into a classic non-scandal scandal, insisting that the conflicting initial reports about just what happened show that the Obama administration is somehow weak, or incompetent, or covering something up, or even anti-American.

These wild and often contradictory charges came fast and furious last Thursday from Rep. Ryan, who on at least three different occasions accused President Obama of apologizing or not standing up for “our values,” in the Middle East—thereby somehow empowering the mullahs to alter the laws of physics: “They’re spinning the centrifuges faster.” He went on to castigate Vice President Biden for failing to convince the Iraqis to let thousands of American troops remain in that wonderful country for years to come, while charging the administration with endangering the lives of thousands of American troops in Afghanistan and “los[ing] the gains we’ve gotten” there. Excusing his running mate’s own precipitous charges about Benghazi, he insisted that, “We should always stand up for peace, for democracy, for human rights.”

Standing up for peace, democracy and human rights might safely be described as a stunning policy reversal for the party that flayed Democrats who tried to do just that during the Cold War.

Much more alarming is hearing the same Big Lie of that era trotted out to justify still more endless and unwinnable wars. Ever since the end of World War II, it comes around every time we fail to bludgeon our way to victory: If only we had the will.

If only those un-American types in the Oval Office, or the Reds in the State Department, or those bums on the college campuses who don’t understand “our values” would just get out of the way. If only they would “unleash Chiang Kai-shek” from Taiwan. If only they would let Douglas MacArthur drop the “30 to 50 atomic bombs” like he wanted, to create a “cordon sanitaire” across the YaluRiver. If only they would let us invade Cuba, or stay the course in Vietnam, or in Afghanistan, no matter how corrupt and irascible the Karzai regime proves to be, or how many more young Americans are killed by the very Afghans they are trying to train, so that “we don’t lose the gains we’ve gotten” in that godforsaken rockpile. If only we can plunge into Iran!

Always and forever, it seems, there’s another mad scheme waiting—and suddenly this campaign has become about the next one, as much as it is about budget deals, or the economy. Here’s a good rule for a democracy: if we can’t discuss, fully and openly, just how a military adventure will work and what it will cost, we shouldn’t do it.

Our thoughts exactly. (Agenda Project/Action Fund)

Don't worry, it's SFW: The Agenda Project Action Fund—you know, that fun progressive policy organization behind those very popular Granny Off the Cliff and Romney Girl videos—is back with more YouTubes! This time, it is taking on Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan's pro-life agenda with a little something it calls "My Country, My Choice," but could be accurately described as a "big ol' tease."

http://youtu.be/XeY6gGQZ5_E

According to president Erica Payne:

"One of America’s two political parties has publicly stated its intention to strip women of their most basic freedom – the right to exercise dominion over their own bodies. There is no greater assault on freedom than the control of another’s physical being. The Republican Party’s official position is that they have the moral right – and should have the legal right – to physically control 51% of the population. Neanderthals believed that too. Now Neanderthals are extinct. Politicians who hold this view should be as well."

Unfortunately, we didn't really pay attention to what Ms. Payne was saying because we were watching the video frame by frame to see if there was a possible nip-slip.