Dullest campaign ever - David Brooks (NY Times)

This is an excerpt of today's Brooks column about how this Presidential campaign is just a retread of every campaign we've seen for more than a generation:

"Since then, I’ve come up with a number of reasons for why [the campaign] is so dull. First, intellectual stagnation. This race is the latest iteration of the same debate we’ve been having since 1964. Mitt Romney is calling President Obama a big-government liberal who wants to crush business. Obama is calling Romney a corporate tool who wants to take away grandma’s health care.

"American politics went through tremendous changes between 1900 and 1936, and then again between 1940 and 1976. But our big government/small government debate is back where it was a generation ago. Candidates don’t even have to rehearse the arguments anymore; they just find the gaffes that will help them pin their opponent to the standard bogymen clichés."

Read the entire column here.

The tiny fraction of Americans who will decide the 2012 election

This was part of an interesting post by Ezra Klein on July 18, 2012 ...

[Paul Begala says] We can almost guarantee that 48 percent of each state’s voters will go for Obama, and another 48 percent will decide for Romney. And so the whole shootin’ match comes down to around 4 percent of the voters in six states.

I did the math so you won’t have to. Four percent of the presidential vote in Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado is 916,643 people. That’s it. The American president will be selected by fewer than half the number of people who paid to get into a Houston Astros home game last year — and my beloved Astros sucked last year; they were the worst team in baseball.

Read the entire post here.