Heading Into the Final Weekend…

Seven observations as we hit the pre-election weekend, on the other side of which looms … madness?

[1] A clear difference. You can spin the year’s battles over voter ID, early voting and voting rights in general in numerous ways, and we can expect plenty of litigation on this after the election. There is an inescapable truth, however, that overlays the entire matter: The country has one political party trying to make it possible for more people to vote, and one party doing all it can to see to it that fewer people vote.

[2] Still no reason to freak out. Last weekend I counseled Obamaphiles to keep their freakout impulses in check because “polls in the aggregate are actually painting a quite consistent picture, one that favors Obama in almost all the important battlegrounds.” Well now, a week later, nothing significant has changed on the polling front, except perhaps some slight movement in Obama’s direction (but slight). Core observations from polling remain: In Ohio, of the 25 polls going back to October 7, Obama has led in 19 of them, Romney in 2, and 4 have shown a tie; Romney has led in just one of the most recent 10 polls there. In New Hampshire Obama has led in all five polls completed since the final debate. In Wisconsin Romney hasn’t led in a poll since mid-August. The story in Iowa is a bit less convincing, and clearly Virginia and Colorado are dodgy, but Obama’s path to 270 remains reasonably unhampered.

[3] Reality is overrated. Mitt Romney’s quick response to this morning’s generally upbeat November jobs report was to call it “a sad reminder that the economy is at a virtual standstill.” It’s predictable that he would try to spin it toward the GOP narrative of a persistently weak economy and failed Obama presidency. But what’s fascinating (in a stupefying sort of way) is that by issuing such an emphatic and unqualified denunciation, Romney reveals himself yet again — one more time before the election, with feeling! — to be the man who will say anything no matter how obviously divorced from the reality staring him and his followers in the face. Romney’s campaign spent the better part of last week fending off collective astonishment at his truth-defying assertions regarding Jeep production in Ohio and China. Now will his surrogates have to spend the final weekend of the campaign walking back an absurdly categorical dismissal of economic recovery? I’m not sure anyone has summed up the Romney campaign as efficiently as The Economist did today in its Obama endorsement: “There are a lot of Romneys and they have committed themselves to a lot of dangerous things.”

[4] Polling may never be the same. The endgame in this year’s election cycle is somewhat remarkable for the stark differences in interpretation of what the polls mean. Naturally it’s in the interest of the side doing less well in the polls to harp on methodology as a way to craft an impending victory narrative, so some of this is mere ritual. But reports indicate it’s not just the spin that diverges across party lines; there are also said to be meaningful differences between the parties’ internal polls. Between expansions of early voting and the challenges of polling in the age of disappearing landlines, the whole science of building likely voter models is being fundamentally tested. Reid Wilson at NJ Hotline sums it up:

Regardless of the cause, strategists on both sides acknowledge the difference in their internal polling. Republicans believe Democrats are counting far too much on low-propensity voters and a booming minority turnout that isn’t going to materialize on Election Day. Democrats believe Republicans are hopelessly reliant on an electorate that looks far more like their party than the nation as a whole. The day after Election Day, somebody’s pollsters are going to be proven seriously wrong.

There is, in particular, a fascinating debate (fascinating for the wonkiest of pollgazers, anyway) about what to make of “independents” and how they break in polls. In several surveys Romney whups Obama but good among independents, and this leads some on the right to insist that there’s no way the dude can be winning independents but losing the race. The reply from the left is that independents are just “people who used to be Republicans,” folks disaffected by the rise of the Tea Party who now tell pollsters they are independent, so of course they break red. The retort from the right is that if this were the explanation then over longer periods of time we should see an inverse relationship between party ID and independent support: “you’d expect to see Republicans doing better with independents when GOP turnout is low, and Democrats doing better with independents when Democratic turnout is low.” We’ll have a much better idea next Wednesday which theory has legs.

[5] Partisan gridlock will always be the same. The Romney/Ryan closing argument is rooted in part on assertions that they can succeed at bipartisanship where Obama has failed:

Romney: “You know that if the president is reelected he will still be unable to work with the people in Congress. I mean, he has ignored them. He has attacked them. He has blamed them. I won’t just represent one party, I’ll represent one nation.”

Ryan: “Republicans and Democrats can come together to solve this country’s problems. And we have a proven record for actually doing that. Mitt Romney did that that as governor, and I have been doing that in the House.”

It’s fair to say that Obama has at times shown he isn’t all that good at this aspect of the job. But the claim that Romney pulled it off in Massachusetts hardly passes the smell test since he got things done with a Democratic legislature when he was willing to act like a moderate Democrat; the rest of the time he was vetoing hundreds of bills. And seriously, folks, a claim by a current House GOP leader that “I have been doing that”? In what universe can the current House Republican caucus be said to have acted in a bipartisan fashion? However it goes next Wednesday, we will still have dysfunctionally divided government.

[6] It never ends. Ready to take a break from electoral politics after next Tuesday? Fuhgetaboutit. It looks more likely than not that Dems will hold their Senate majority, but as Shane Goldmacher writes at National Journal, the landscape for Dems in Senate races in 2014 is even more treacherous. Democrats will again be defending more seats than Republicans (20-13), with incumbents in Arkansas, Louisiana, and North Carolina inherently vulnerable to conservative challenges. Factor in some possible Dem retirements in North Dakota and West Virginia. Yikes.

[7] Is this a great electoral system or what? Recounts and lawsuits aside, by this time next week we will know who is the next leader of the free world, by which of course I mean the President of the United Counties of Ohio. However this turns out, even if the candidate I prefer wins the Electoral College and loses the popular vote, the fact remains: In a contest to name the worst idea hatched by western civilization, it’s a dead heat between the Electoral College and mayonnaise.

A version of this post appears on the Nashville Scene‘s Pith in the Wind blog.

Pre-Election Freakout Prophylaxis

Mittmentum getting you down? Worried sick that the election is slipping away? Stockpiling water and batteries for the coming apocalypse one might affectionately label a “Romney-Ryan administration”? I have the remedy, and it comes from those dastardly polls.

The campaign endgame began with the conclusion of the final presidential debate last Tuesday, and since then both sides have felt compelled to frame a piece of their closing argument as “we’re winning” — partly as a GOTV turnout strategy and partly as media narrative management strategy. With so many polls now released daily it is somewhat possible for each side to cherry-pick some data to build an impending victory spin.

But get a grip, Obamaphiles: The fact is polls in the aggregate are actually painting a quite consistent picture, one that favors Obama in almost all the important battlegrounds. The picture looks like this: In every key state starting in mid-August (pre-conventions), Obama built a lead, a working margin that was whittled down in the wake of the first debate on Oct. 3 to a substantially smaller lead. And here’s the essential part: Since the few days immediately following that first debate (roughly the period Oct. 4-9), the race has been stable … a smaller but consistent Obama lead, with the raw numbers for Obama and for Romney creeping up in tandem as undecideds break.

You can see this dynamic in every state that matters: Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, Colorado, Virginia, New Hampshire.

In this chart I have grabbed a piece of the Huffington Post Pollster battleground state poll aggregations for each of these six states. Each state’s chart begins at Aug. 20 and ends at Oct. 26.

See the pattern? Kind of unmistakable. Debate #1 gave Romney back most of the terrain he lost during his bad post-convention stretch, but it gave it back to him quickly, and the race in these battlegrounds has been pretty stable ever since. Yes, the national polls took longer to settle down and they currently show a popular vote race that is excruciatingly close — essentially tied and perhaps even a slight Romney lead.

But it is also the case that Romney has not broken through in battleground states in a way that turns the Electoral College math in his favor. He still has a week to pull that off, and it’s hard to see how he manages it. (This may explain why Romney felt the need late last week to try to scare the bejesus out of Ohio voters by making shit up out of whole cloth about jobs moving to China.) So keep those freakout dials set low, Dems.

Methodological note: The Huffpost Pollster aggregation method, explained here and here, doesn’t merely average polls; it takes into account variations in sample sizes (giving more weight to better samples) as well as pollster house effects. By the way you see this same pattern in red-leaning battleground states (North Carolina and Florida) — a bump for Romney in the week following the first debate, and essentially a stable race since then.

A version of this post appears on the Nashville Scene‘s Pith in the Wind blog.

Debate Round 4: Horses, Bayonets, and Cheap Chinese Tires

The third and final presidential debate followed the same format as the first: six 15-minute segments each marked by and launched with a new question from the moderator. Unlike the meandering festival of time drift presided over by Jim Lehrer two weeks ago, Bob Schieffer ran this one with well-oiled precision, starting each segment right on time and quietly herding the candidates into exchanges that yielded roughly equal time. Schieffer’s followup questions were few but useful, and you never had the feeling that he had lost control or left the building. Clear win for the moderator.

And how did the other two guys do? In the spirit of the debate’s hexagonal structure, I’ll recap with snap (and perhaps occasionally snappy) judgments of each of the 15-minute block segments.

8:00 pm (pregame): Wolf Blitzer at CNN, just before throwing it over to the debate hall, sets the mood by telling viewers that “one misstatement could cause international ramifications.” Way to raise false hopes, WB. If no international incident comes out of this we’re going to be very disappointed.

8:00-8:15. First up was Libya, and with his first tepid answer it was quickly apparent that Mitt Romney came to play it safe, avoid conflict, show off memorized factoids (he mentioned Mali twice in the first ten minutes, for crying out loud), and generally focus on the “appear presidential” thing. Obama made it just as quickly obvious that he wasn’t playing the same game, telling Romney that “every time you’ve offered an opinion you’ve been wrong.” Romney shot back that “attacking me is not an agenda,” which quickly trended bigtime in the right wing Twittersphere, even if attacking him actually is a quite effective agenda, in a debate anyway. Obama wrapped up the segment lecturing Romney to “listen up, punk” (“Here’s one thing I’ve learned as Commander in Chief” was the exact phrase) on the need to be clear to allies and foes “about where you stand and what you mean.” Romney’s face: not happy. Advantage Obama.

8:15-8:30. Second segment was on Syria, and here we started to see just how prepared Romney was to reinvent himself on foreign policy to make his approach look more or less exactly like Obama’s. Obama tried to slam Romney with the charge that “he doesn’t have different ideas,” but it comes off inevitably as a pretty benign critique when the worst thing you can say about your opponent is that he agrees with you. Obama is vulnerable on Syria, given how hard it is to defend a pretty minimalist policy in the face of atrocity, although Romney didn’t capitalize. For the segment, slight advantage Romney despite some rambling, if only because he seemed able to articulate Obama’s position on Syria at least as well as Obama did.

8:30-8:45. This was the domestic issues part of the foreign policy debate, disguised as a question about America’s role in the world. It turns out America’s role in the world is to argue about its own unemployment rate and energy policy. Obama landed punches connecting Romney’s “wrong and reckless policies” at home and abroad directly to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Romney responded with his economic stump speech (five-point plan, 12 million jobs, etc.), and somehow the exchange devolved into an exchange on education policy in Massachusetts. Granted, many Romney supporters do see things that happen in Massachusetts as foreign policy, but it still felt like we had strayed just a wee bit. Schieffer pulled the train back on the track with a followup asking Romney where he’ll find the money for more military spending. This led Romney into his “smallest Navy since 1917” schtick, onto which Obama pounced with his observation that Romney needs to learn more about changing times because “we also have fewer horses and bayonets.” Did you have “bayonets” on your debate drinking game list? I know I did. Advantage Obama for articulating a position on military spending grounded in strategy rather than red-meat blusterc.

8:45-9:00. With a question on Iran this was the who-can-stroke-Israel’s-penis-with-greater-devotion-and-tenderness part of the evening. Romney again spent more time agreeing with Obama than differing, saying of the sanctions imposed on Iran that “they do work…You’re seeing it right now in the economy.” It turned nastier when Romney played one of his moldiest oldies — the “Obama apology tour” card, which the CNN dial group did not go for at all, and which Obama dismissed as “just about the biggest whopper” of the campaign. Romney offered up the painfully simplistic but rhetorically effective observation that “We’re four years closer to a nuclear Iran” coupled with a scolding of Obama for skipping Israel on that 2008 “apology tour” (drink); Obama comes back at him with a narrative travelogue of his visit to Israel in 2008 as a candidate. Romney asserts our influence around the world is receding “because of the failure of the president to deal with our economic challenges at home” (pivot!). Obama thanks Romney for supporting his policies, and wraps up the segment with an emotional ground zero story. A draw on Iran and Israel (both quite tender and devoted); slight advantage Obama for leaving Romney with a look on his face that says “now where did I put that bayonet?”

9:00-9:15. Afghanistan. There is very little daylight between their approaches here, and it showed. Both plan to be out by the end of 2014, both think Pakistan is a scary place, both like drones and killing bad guys. The exchange does show that on at least this one issue U.S. policy is basically unified and bipartisan. That might be a good thing, except that as a result nobody is having a serious moral conversation about the use of drones for indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians, about presidential kill lists, about the limits of executive power in the age of terror. Advantage: mindless violence and endless war.

9:15-9:30. China! If you had “cheap chinese tires” on your drinking game list this was the segment for you. Obama accuses Romney of poor judgment on trade involving said tires, then pivots back to domestic issues — education, technology, and the evils of Romney’s budget. Romney replies that the greatest threat the world faces is nuclear Iran (just to make sure we all get that), and then launches his China currency manipulation bit, which always kills. Schieffer asks if Romney is planning to start a trade war, Romney reveals his recent discovery that there are counterfeit products out there (valves of some sort), and before you know it Obama is telling us that if we listen to Romney “we’d be buying cars from China instead of selling cars to China.” Obama neglects to say if those cars would have cheap Chinese tires on them. (drink anyway!) The China-trade segment is more or less a draw until Romney lets Obama bait him on the auto bailout into a defensive rant (an attempt to “airbrush history,” Obama declares). Cue an Obama stump speechlet on domestic policy, followed by a Romney stumplet, culminating in a gratuitious assertion that “I love teachers.” You mean like you love Israel?

9:30ish. Closing statements. Both candidates hop another fast train to boilerplate city. Nothing compelling although Romney did assert that he wants “to see growing peace in this country.” I have no idea what that means but candidates don’t talk about peace enough in my book, so slight advantage Romney on the closing statements.

Who won? The instant polls said Obama, ranging from margins of 8 points in CNN’s survey of debate watchers to a whopping 30 points in a CBS poll of only undecided voters. And as well they should: We can concede that Romney accomplished his modest goal of looking reasonable and qualified, and we can debate whether the all important wilted-flower voting segment finds verbal assertiveness off-putting. But the bottom line is that we saw the incumbent deliver an adept, knowledgeable, forceful performance that generally over-matched the well meaning foreign policy amateur sitting next to him. It won’t move the polls as debate #1 did, but it does amply reinforce the current narrative: a very thin Obama lead nationally, with a bit of a wider margin in the electoral college — leads that are barely there, but more likely to expand (though not much) than contract.

But wait …

10:48 pm: Hannity on Fox points out that horses are ridden by soldiers in Afghanistan. Anderson Cooper on CNN mentions that Marines still use bayonets. Obama gaffe city, baby! Cue the 24/7 cable spin cycle! Game, set match! Call the election! It’s over!

A version of this post appears on the Nashville Scene‘s Pith in the Wind blog.

Debate Round 3: Sketchy Deals and Womanly Binders

First sign that a debate didn’t go very well for your side: when the gathering conventional wisdom on your side is that the outcome is a draw. That’s where the sensible GOP money seemed to land as the dust settled after Tuesday night’s second presidential debate at Hofstra University on Long Island. Sure, there were the inevitable true believers, like Red State blogger Erick Erickson, who somehow managed to convince himself that Mitt Romney ate Barack Obama’s lunch. But cooler redheads sought to detoxify Romney’s underwhelming performance with an antidote of balance. The National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru credits Obama with halting liberal handwringing but concludes “otherwise a draw.” Former Bush flack Ari Fleischer merged Romney’s jabs at Obama’s first-term shortcomings with Obama’s assault on Romney into the same conclusion: “draw.” Anyone buying that?

Second sign that a debate didn’t go very well for your side: when your dominant post-debate spin theme is an obsessive attempt to read earth-shaking subterfuge into an unremarkable short phrase in a presidential statement on a narrow issue that very few people care about. The subject here, of course, is Libya, and it was one of the most heated exchanges of the evening. Taking umbrage at Romney’s suggestion that he wasn’t on the ball right after the 9/11 attack in Benghazi, Obama pointed out that he stood in the Rose Garden the next day and said it was an act of terror. Romney, effectively calling the president a liar, insisted that “it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.” Obama shot back, “Get the transcript.” What that transcript shows is Obama saying on 9/12: “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation.” The meaning here and its connection to the Benghazi raid is patently obvious, yet many Repubs were beside themselves after the debate denying this clear semantic reality (for instance, a Karl Rove tweet: “Obama didn’t directly call Lybia attack ‘act of terror’ in Rose Garden — broadly referred to acts of terror”). This is not to say that the Obama administration might not still have a bit of a Libya problem. It is to say that if you’re building your post-debate spin on a dubious parsing of words in a month-old statement, it didn’t go very well for your side.

Third sign that a debate didn’t go very well: when you start piling on the moderator. Some Dems fell into this trap after the disaster in Denver twelve days earlier, and this time it’s Republicans calling CNN’s Candy Crowley to account for letting Obama talk too much or for picking biased questions, or (especially) for injecting her own factual take. Her crime: saying to Romney in an attempt to move the Libya conversation off the did-so-did-not stalemate: “He did call it an act of terror.” For this mild act of honest journalism, wrote Jim Geraghty at the National Review, “Candy Crowley is responsible for one of the most egregious misjudgments of any moderator in the history of presidential debates.” Holy overreaction, Batman!

Romney wasn’t uniformly terrible by any means. He offered the usual, and as usual pretty effective, critiques of Obama’s record on domestic economic matters, overachieved on a question inviting him to distinguish himself on policy fronts from George W. Bush, and displayed at times his customary deftness at pivoting from issues raised to Obama jabs.

But just as Obama in Denver seemed unprepared to cope with revisionist Mitt, Romney at Hofstra came off as blindsided by the directness of Obama’s punch after punch at Romney’s policies as well as his shifting inconsistencies. On the latter — hammering Romney for running in the campaign’s final weeks on a version of himself that deviates broadly from his more severely conservative past in the primaries — Obama’s frontal assault brought to fruition a major tactical shift. Team Obama has throughout this campaign avoided an emphasis on the flip-flopper angle, having judged that being a flip-flopper isn’t so bad in the eyes of swing voters, especially if the flopping is in a direction those voters like. In deciding how to update Obama’s debate approach after the Denver calamity, Obama and handlers apparently arrived at the sensible decision to spend much more time not just refuting Romney’s arguments, but also labeling them and labeling him. This was effective because there’s not much for the other guy to do in response to a label but deny it — and appear defensive in the process.

Certainly Obama benefited substantially from some of the territory covered. Given the corners into which Romney allowed himself to be painted by his party’s primary process on social issues, there is no imaginable debate context in which Romney is likely to come off well on subjects like pay equality, contraception, and immigration. Plus Obama made some adroit preemptive moves. For instance, instead of waiting for Romney to bring up something like Planned Parenthood and use it as a cudgel, Obama went there first, waving PP (appropriately) as a badge of honor in his defense of women’s health issues, then offering it up again later to make the point that Romney on social issues is to the right of George W. Bush. Although lots of spinners tweeted lots of platitudes afterward, I do think veteran Dem Donna Brazile aptly summed up the effectiveness of Obama’s attacks: he “knew Romney’s positions better than his opponent.”

Fourth sign the debate isn’t going well: when you find yourself telling the other guy he should spend more time with his mutual fund statements. Perhaps Romney will be kind enough to lend Obama some binders to store them in.

A version of this post appears on the Nashville Scene‘s Pith in the Wind blog.

Debate Round 2: As My Guitar Gently Veeps

The definition of a draw in a vice presidential debate has three elements: (1) each side can say with a reasonably straight face that its guy did well and prevailed; (2) each side can say with similar face that the other side’s guy was, well, faced; and (3) both sides can make these claims publicly without coming off as delusional or hallucinatory. All three conditions were met at Thursday’s debate, and a pair of instant polls right after piled on with a mixed verdict: a CBS survey of uncommitted voters gave Joe Biden the wind by 19 points (50-31), while a CNN survey had Paul Ryan up by 4 points (48-44). Taken as a whole it adds up to a night where everyone finds a reason to come away happy and nobody goes to bed grumpy, as huge swaths of blue America did last week.

There was good and bad in each candidate’s performance. Biden was frequently assertive and substantive — when he wasn’t being snide and dismissive. On the down side, he had trouble at times stopping himself from being overly snide and dismissive. Yes, several of Ryan’s vapid little prepared speechlet-answers invited dismissiveness in spades, but the act of being dismissive eats valuable time that could have been used to cry bullshit in a far more substantive ways.

Much will be said about Biden’s occasional high-amp grinning and eye-rolling while listening to Ryan speak. Ok, we get it, the debate coaches wanted upbeat and engaged, not dour like Obama last week, but this was overcompensating. It seriously overstates the case to call it, as Fox News’s Brit Hume did, “derisive sneering,” but it did grow off-putting. Fortunately, as the debate wore on Biden managed to dial back the split-screen mugging. Early on Biden seemed to have difficulty finding his way into the right give-and-take rhythm with opponent and moderator, but he found his footing in the second half, spending more time orchestrating the conversation rather than just reacting to it. He also knew how to look straight into the camera at times and address the folks at home directly — this worked well. It wasn’t clear that Ryan had any idea where the camera was.

Ryan did show himself to be the prepared and fluent policy guy one expects him to be, full of factoids, having memorized the names and dates and numbers he needed to memorize, as well as the phrases he needed to summon forth to tie his factoids together. He was simultaneously garrulous and glib, if such a thing is possible, spinning a multilayered web of articulate and at times quite persuasive prattle that succeeded in making it hard for Biden to know what to attack first. When this debating style worked, as it did during much of the first half of the encounter, an exasperated Biden would offer up some vague observation about how much of what the audience just heard is nonsense, and the making of that general assertion would crowd out any specific refutation. Point for Ryan. But in the second half Ryan was less effective as Biden seemed to figure out that you combat arguments with better arguments, not with chuckling assertions that the other guy’s arguments are lousy.

When it comes to the all important pivot maneuver — shifting on a dime from a question posed to an angle preferred —the candidates were both putting on a clinic. Biden did it right out of the gate in the first minute, turning a question about the Libyan embassy debacle into a broad-form treatise on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Osama. Ryan showed he’s got the moves when he turned a mini-lecture on the ticket’s economic plan into a sermon on Mitt Romney as the greatest most magnanimous human who ever walked the planet. Thank God (pun intended) they both turned the moderator’s inane late question about religion into an abortion policy question. My favorite pivot of all was about 56 minutes in when Biden pivoted from debating Ryan to debating the moderator Martha Raddatz. Raddatz was good but Biden won on points.

If Ryan’s objectives were to pass himself off as something other than a scary conservative extremist, and to present himself as someone ready to step into the top job should circumstances require, he’s batting .500. He came off as genial and thoughtful, without rancor, but also as scripted and out of his depth on international affairs. If Biden’s objectives were to reinvigorate a base that was starting to panic after last week, and to arrest the ascent of perceptions that Mitt Romney might be a reasonable, moderate guy after all, he’s one for two as well. Biden’s performance successfully cauterizes the bloodletting about Denver, and should help the already stalling Romney polling bounce to a soft landing. The race returns more or less to where it was a month ago.

When the debate ended, as commentators were busy forging the conventional wisdom — good night for Biden, good night for Ryan, mostly functional moderator, an engaging and substantive exchange — the question on everyone’s mind was “what about those independents?” At 9:30 pm CT were undecideds thinking “Biden sold me”? Were they thinking “that Ryan kid’s got moxie”? Either is possible, but I’m guessing most of them were thinking “holy shit, the Titans are beating the Steelers.”

On to Long Island…

A version of this post appears on the Nashville Scene‘s Pith in the Wind blog.

Debate Post-Mortem: It’s the Cheesecake, Stupid

Spinning as hard as he could after the debate ended, Obama senior advisor David Plouffe told a gaggle of visibly perplexed MSNBC talking heads that “Our strategy was not zingers.” No shit. Nor was it engagement, apparently. The prevailing reaction among the commentariat that it had been a good night for Mitt Romney and a weak one for Barack Obama took hold quickly and reasonably. Romney did pretty well, but the collective verdict was propelled more by Obama’s weakness than Romney’s strength. As James Carville summed it up, “The president didn’t bring his A game.”

To be sure, some heaped effusive praise on Romney for strategic and rhetorical brilliance (“head and shoulders above anything we’ve seen him do before,” declared David Gergen on CNN). But the Romney on display wasn’t really markedly different from the Romney we’ve seen all along: a prepared, lucid and congenial politician right out of central casting who will look into a camera and say whatever he thinks he needs to say to get past a question, facts and prior positions be damned. Romney owns that role, and it showed.

The disappointment articulated by Obama supporters seemed to focus on the things he didn’t talk about: job creation numbers, Bain, Detroit, foreign bank accounts, obstructionism in Congress, women, and of course that 47 percent business, to name a few. All true, but some of the biggest missed opportunities weren’t things not said, but rather things that were said — by Romney. Two in particular stand out as big openings for Obama to draw a broad and compelling contrast between their big-picture governing philosophies.

The first came in an exchange on entitlements. Pointing out that his approach to Medicare wouldn’t kick in big changes for several years, Romney said if you are 60 years old or over “you don’t need to listen any further.” Intended perhaps as a throw-away line aimed at reassuring seniors edgy about Paul Ryan’s Medicare-killing wet dreams, the remark spoke volumes about Romney’s view of the role of self-interest vs. collective responsibility — or would have spoken volumes if Obama has noticed it. Only someone who views society through a lens of selfishness and greed (the sort of person who parks their money in the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes) believes that seniors could care less about the intergenerational future of Medicare as long as they get theirs, Obama should have shot back. Since the convention the Obama campaign has been cultivating an “all in it together” theme as a counternarrative to the GOP’s righteous devotion to individualism; Romney’s remark opened up a set of double doors for Obama to stroll right through.

The second was on the role of government generally. “Government is not effective about bringing down the cost of anything,” Romney intoned during the health care segment, adding that “the private market and individual responsibility always work best.” Rather than letting Romney drag him into the weeds on the similarities and differences between Obamacare and Romney’s Massachusetts reform, Obama should have seen this as a golden opportunity to pivot into painting Romney as an anti-government extremist. He should have reminded viewers of the many critical things that only government can do, from public safety and public health to transportation, education and poverty alleviation, and then bridged to threats to these core public functions posed by Romney’s and the Republican party’s approach to government.

Painting Romney as beholden to the far right instincts of his party is a key piece of the president’s re-election campaign strategy in battleground states, yet a disengaged Obama in Denver failed to identify and seize on opportunities to do just that. Some observers after the debate chalked it up to being out of practice, or to running an administration where he is rarely if ever challenged in the way that Romney did on stage. Others said Romney came with a plan and Obama didn’t. All of that could be right, but the biggest impression I came away with was that Obama just wasn’t dialed in.

Shortly before the debate began the networks reported that Mitt Romney came to the hall for the debate after finishing a Cheesecake Factory dinner. I was all ready with my snarky elitist quip about how that kind of culinary decision making surely disqualifies one’s candidacy for Leader of the Free World. Memo to Axelrod: Apparently there’s some secret sauce in that cheesecake.

Funny how news cycles come and go. The far right’s effort over the last couple of days to foist an angry-black-man video of a 2007 Obama speech on us now fades into oblivion, replaced by a 90-minute disengaged-black-president video that has Mitt Romney enjoying the next couple of news cycles a whole lot more than the last several.

A version of this post appears on the Nashville Scene‘s Pith in the Wind blog.

How Romney Reboots the Race

Much of the chatter in the run-up to Wednesday’s first debate is about how Mitt Romney seizes the opportunity to reverse the blue momentum that opinion polls have been documenting over the last few weeks. The obvious answer is lurking deep in the internals of this morning’s new Washington Post/ABC News poll.

Near the bottom of that survey pollsters assess the all-important likability factor, but not in a direct way, like asking respondents how much they like each candidate. Instead, they pose a set of comparative hypotheticals of the “who would you rather do ___ with” sort. Here’s the full set of questions and the overall result for registered voters in the sample who responded to each question:

On a ship in a storm, who would you rather have as the captain? (Obama +12%)

Who would you rather invite to dinner at your home? (Obama +22%)

Who would you rather go on an overnight camping trip with? (Obama +14%)

Who would you rather have babysit your children? (Obama 41%, Romney 41%)

Whose music playlist would you rather listen to? (Obama +16%)

Who would you rather see as a contestant on Dancing with the Stars? (Obama +25%)

On most of these questions demographic breakdowns favor Obama regardless of age, gender, income, or education. Even those over 50 would rather listen to Obama’s playlist by 10 percentage points. Only those who self-identify as Republicans or conservatives are more apt to invite Romney to dinner, go on a camping trip with him, or groove on his tunes.

But how about that babysitting thing? Men prefer Romney as babysitter by 15 percentage points, as do folks who make more than $50K/year. Those with a college degree would rather have Romney looking after the kids by 8 points, while those without prefer Obama by 7 points.

And — to come to the heart of the matter — what about those all-important independents? It turns out they favor Romney by 2 points as babysitter, but prefer Obama by 14 points as dinner guest (and for dinner music prefer Obama’s playlist by 13 points). Bottom line: independents want Romney to keep an eye on the kids while they spend quality time making goo-goo eyes at the incumbent president.

So Romney’s strategy for Wednesday is now abundantly clear. To win the debate and move the needle, forget jobs, forget the taxes, forget the Middle East. Just look voters straight in the eye and make us a poll-tested promise: “Vote for me and I will come over and babysit.” Game change!

By the way, personally I would much rather see Romney dance than Obama.

A version of this post appears on the Nashville Scene‘s Pith in the Wind blog.