“Mitt Romney has picked a big fight fraught with political risks amid an ongoing foreign policy crisis with heartbreaking and murderous consequences for the U.S. diplomatic corps. And by the end of the day on Wednesday he walked straight into a forearm shiver from the commander-in-chief – one that may leave a mark and intensify scrutiny of Romney’s foreign policy qualifications.”
Steve Erickson says that Mitt Romney has a “character problem:”
Romney’s current troubles don’t stem from miscalculation or even a duff convention in Tampa but are manifestations of his own political character as heard and witnessed over the past half-decade. This is a man who has altered his positions—not modified, not tailored, not hedged, but utterly transformed—on every single issue from abortion to climate change to the health-care reform that he signed as governor in Massachusetts. Now he runs a campaign that doesn’t want to talk about his record as governor or as a financier and that refuses to put forth an economic alternative of any detail beyond building the Alaska pipeline and lowering taxes for people like himself, even as at the same time he won’t show us what he pays in taxes now or whether he pays taxes at all. His adamant hostility to revealing anything that resembles an authentic belief or credible strategy for accelerating the recovery is not only losing Romney the choice part of the election but the referendum part as well, as the Democrats succeed in making this a referendum on Romney, not Obama. Romney’s selection of Ryan was meant both to reassure the party’s base and bathe the presidential candidate in the glow of the vice-presidential candidate’s reputation as a man of integrity and candor. As evinced by the ticket’s appearances on this past Sunday morning’s news programs and Ryan’s speech at the Republican Convention, when he blamed Obama for a plant that closed during his predecessor’s term and for a Medicare cut that Ryan himself supports and for not embracing a debt-commission report that Ryan himself opposed and for the country’s credit downgrading that Ryan himself brought about as much as any single individual, it is truth-teller Ryan who bathes in the glow of Romney’s irrefutable standing as the phoniest nominee of our lifetime.
“This year, the major economic indicators are headed in the right direction, albeit slowly. We’ve been adding jobs, though not enough. We’ve been growing, though not particularly fast. We’ve seen the unemployment rate drop, though partially because workers are leaving the labor force. All in all, it’s not an impressive record. But it’s weak growth, not a new recession. And the political valence of that weak growth is unusually hard to discern, as voters continue to place more blame for our current economic troubles on George W. Bush than on Barack Obama.”
Ambers is not concerned with the post-convention polls, but is more interesting in the enthusiasm gap:
Until the last three weeks before the election, you can safely skip the top-line numbers for every poll you read. That’s why I’m less impressed by the president’s post-convention “bounce,” a term that implies that whatever is up shall come down. Generally, what’s more striking is that the president’s enthusiasm deficit among self-described independents who tend to vote Democratic has been erased. Those voters are moving (back) into his corner, and they’re providing his buoyancy.
Nate Cohn notices more enthusiasm among non-white voters, who heavily favor Obama.
“Mitt Romney began the 2012 anniversary of Sept. 11 by calling for a suspension of politics. ‘There is a time and a place for that, but this day is not it,’ he said at a morning National Guard gathering in Reno, Nev. Just hours later, Romney could no longer resist… He saw an opportunity to tie his claim that Barack Obama apologizes for American greatness to the news cycle…”
“In the final weeks of a campaign of this scale, there are very few moments that really count. But when they matter, they can reshape the race. A day that began with Romney calling for national unity before politics in the face of terrorism ended with just the opposite. Voters will now get to decide if the shift revealed Romney as a statesman displaying the courage of his convictions or a politician seeking advantage in a time of turmoil.”