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If someone claims opposition to Obama is racist, pass along today’s Pickings because all of the selections are from authors who are black. But that’s not the only thing they have in common. They are also smart. First off Deroy Murdock writes on the essential decency of Mitt Romney.

Why is Mitt Romney rising? Americans who watched the GOP nominee debate President Obama never met the cold, greedy, sexist, racist, carcinogenic tax cheat that Team Obama promised would appear. The calm, steady, and reasonable gentleman who opposed Obama was no Gordon Gekko.

Americans might like Romney even more if they understood his random acts of kindness and significant feats of bravery. As Mara Gay, Dan Hirschhorn, and M. L. Nestel wrote for TheDaily.com: “A man weighed down by the image of a heartless corporate raider who can’t relate to people actually has a history of doing remarkably kind things for those in need.”

• After Joey O’Donnell, 12, died of cystic fibrosis in 1986, Romney built a playground in his honor. “There he was, with a hammer in his belt, the Mitt nobody sees,” the boy’s father and Romney’s neighbor, Joseph O’Donnell, told Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, authors of The Real Romney. A year later, Joey’s Park needed maintenance. “The next thing I know, my wife calls me up and says, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but Mitt Romney is down with a bunch of Boy Scouts and they’re working on the park.’ . . . He did it for like the next five years, without ever calling to say, ‘We’re doing this,’ without a reporter in tow, not looking for any credit.” …

Thomas Sowell contributes a four-part piece on Obama v. Obama.

Many voters will be comparing Mitt Romney with Barack Obama between now and election day. But what might be even more revealing would be comparing Obama with Obama. There is a big contrast between Obama based on his rhetoric (“Obama 1″) and Obama based on his record (“Obama 2″).

For example, during the 2008 election campaign, Obama 1 spoke of “opening up and creating more transparency in government,” so that government spending plans would be posted on the Internet for days before they passed into legislation. After he was elected president, Obama said, “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.”

This Obama 1 sounds like a very good fellow. No wonder so many people voted for him.

But then there is Obama 2. He passed a mammoth ObamaCare bill so fast that even members of Congress didn’t have time to read it, much less the general public. It was by no means posted on the Internet for days before the vote, as promised.

The Constitution of the United States requires transparency as well. When people are nominated by a President to become Cabinet members, the Constitution requires that they be confirmed by the Senate before they can take office, so that facts about them can become known before they are given the powers of their offices.

Although President Obama complied with this requirement when he appointed Cabinet members, he also made other appointments to powerful positions created by Executive Orders — people aptly called “czars” for the vast, unchecked powers they wielded, in some cases greater than the powers exercised by Cabinet members.

These “czars” never had to be confirmed by the Senate, and so had no public vetting before acquiring their powers. We had unknown and unaccountable rulers placed over us. …

Sowell’s Part Two covers Israel and his anti-western bias.

Nowhere is the contrast between Barack Obama, as defined by his rhetoric (“Obama 1″) and Barack Obama as defined by his actions (“Obama 2″) greater than in his foreign policy — and especially his policy toward Israel.

What if we put aside Barack Obama’s rhetoric, and instead look exclusively at his documented record over a period of decades, up to and including the present?

The first thing that is most striking about that record is the long string of his mentors and allies who were marked by hatred of the United States, and a vision of the world in which the white, Western nations have become prosperous by oppressing and exploiting the non-white, non-Western nations.

The person most people have heard of who matched that description has been Jeremiah Wright, whose church Barack Obama attended for 20 years, and was still attending when he began his campaign for the presidency. But Jeremiah Wright was just one in a series of mentors and allies with a similar vision and a similar visceral hostility to the West.

Barack Obama was virtually marinated in that vision from childhood. His mother clashed with her Indonesian husband when he began to move away from his earlier anti-Western radicalism and to work with Western businesses investing in Indonesia.

As a counterweight to whatever ideological influence her Indonesian husband might have on her son, she extolled the virtues of his absent Kenyan father, who remained a doctrinaire, anti-Western socialist to the end. …

In Part Three, Sowell wonders if he thinks he is a citizen of the U. S. or owes allegiance to another flag.

… Those who have questioned whether Barack Obama is really a citizen of the United States have missed the larger question: Whether he considers himself a citizen of the world. Think about this remarkable statement by Obama during the 2008 campaign: “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that every other country is going to say, ‘OK.’”

Are Americans supposed to let foreigners tell them how to live their lives? The implied answer is clearly “Yes!” When President Obama went to the United Nations for authority to take military action and ignored the Congress of the United States, that was all consistent with his vision of the way the world should be.

How has Obama gotten away with so many things that are foreign to American beliefs and traditions? Partly it is because of a quiescent media, sharing many of his ideological views and/or focused on the symbolism of his being “the first black President.” But part of his success must be credited — if that is the word — to his own rhetorical talents and his ability to project an image that many people accept and welcome.

The role of a confidence man is not to convince skeptics, but to help the gullible believe what they want to believe. Most of what Barack Obama says sounds very persuasive if you don’t know the facts — and often sounds like sheer nonsense if you do. But he is not trying to convince skeptics, nor worried about looking ridiculous to informed people who won’t vote for him anyway.

This is a source of much polarization between those who see and accept Obama 1 and those who see through that facade to Obama 2.

Sowell’s summary takes us back to the risks to Israel.

… Barack Obama is not the first leader of a nation whose actions reflected some half-baked vision, enveloped in lofty rhetoric and spiced with a huge dose of ego. Nor would he be the first such leader to steer his nation into a historic catastrophe.

In Barack Obama’s case, the potential for catastrophe is international in scope, and perhaps irretrievable in its consequences, as he stalls with feckless gestures as terrorist-sponsoring Iran moves toward the production of nuclear bombs.

The rhetoric of Obama 1 says that he will protect Israel but the actions of Obama 2 have in fact protected Iran from an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities — until now it is questionable whether Iran’s deeply buried nuclear facilities can be destroyed by the Israelis.

Those deeply buried facilities took time to build, and Obama’s policies gave them that time, with his lackadaisical approach of seeking United Nations resolutions and international sanctions that never had any serious chance of stopping Iran’s movement toward becoming a nuclear power. And Barack Obama had to know that.

In March, “Foreign Policy” magazine reported that “several high-level sources” in the Obama administration had revealed Israel’s secret relationship with Azerbaijan, where Israeli planes could refuel to or from an air strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The administration feared “the risks of an Israeli strike on Iran,” according to these “high-level sources.” Apparently the risks of an Iranian nuclear strike on Israel are not so much feared.

This leak was one of the historic and unconscionable betrayals of an ally whose very existence is threatened. But the media still saw no evil, heard no evil and spoke no evil.

The only question now is whether the American voters will wake up before it is too late — not just for Israel, but for America.

Jason Riley comments on Obama’s “plan.”

… In reality the president, who can’t run on his dismal economic record, has also failed to explain in any detail what he hopes to accomplish in a second term. Throughout the campaign, and especially during the debates, Mitt Romney has been keen to point this out. The Obama campaign’s “blueprint” stunt is a concession that Mr. Romney is on to something.

Riley also comments on what Hurricane Sandy might mean to the vote next week.

… The good news for Mr. Romney is that his supporters don’t appear to be the fair-weather kind. “The GOP nominee maintains a potentially pivotal advantage in intensity among his supporters,” says Politico. “Sixty percent of those who support Obama say they are ‘extremely likely’ to vote, compared to 73 percent who back Romney. Among this group, Romney leads Obama by 9 points, 53 to 44 percent.”

Star Parker writes on education challenges to our country when we have a president owned by teacher’s unions.

… “I now want to hire more teachers, especially in math and science, because we know that we’ve fallen behind when it comes to math and science,” said the president. “And those teachers can make a difference.”

But, Mr. President, what information do you have that leads you to conclude that more teachers can make a difference?

According to information recently published by “Face the Facts,” a project of the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs, over the last decade, the federal government spent $293 billion and states spent a combined $5.5 trillion – money targeted to improving academic performance – with no discernable change in reading and math scores. “A quarter of high school seniors don’t meet basic reading standards and a third fall below basic math proficiency.”

Throwing money at education may make those who get the money better off, but there is little if any evidence that it makes any difference at all in improving academic performance.

Recently I sat down and interviewed one of my heroes – Dr. Ben Carson, Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at JohnsHopkinsHospital.

Outside of his work, Dr. Carson’s passion is education. As someone who grew up in a Detroit ghetto, who’s mother was a domestic who could not read, he has some idea what it means to start with nothing and achieve the American dream.

But listening to Carson, whose latest book is entitled “America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great,” you get a much different take on what is wrong with education and our nation today than what we hear from politicians.

Carson says, “We were a “can do” nation and now we’re a “what can you do for me nation.” …

Walter Williams continues the look at Obama’s education policy.

If I were a Klansman, wanting to sabotage black education, I couldn’t find better allies than education establishment liberals and officials in the Obama administration, especially Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who in March 2010 announced that his department was “going to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement.”

For Duncan, the civil rights issue was that black elementary and high school students are disciplined at a higher rate than whites. His evidence for discrimination is that blacks are three and a half times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers. Duncan and his Obama administration supporters conveniently ignored school “racial discrimination” against whites, who are more than two times as likely to be suspended as Asians and Pacific Islanders.

Heather Mac Donald reports on all of this in “Undisciplined,” appearing in City Journal (Summer 2012). She writes that between September 2011 and February 2012, 25 times more black Chicago students than white students were arrested at school, mostly for battery. In Chicago schools, black students outnumber whites by four to one.

Mac Donald adds, “Nationally, the picture is no better. The homicide rate among males between the ages of 14 and 17 is nearly ten times higher for blacks than for whites and Hispanics combined. Such data make no impact on the Obama administration and its orbiting advocates, who apparently believe that the lack of self-control and socialization that results in this disproportionate criminal violence does not manifest itself in classroom comportment as well.”  …

Williams concludes wondering why blacks support politicians who fail them.

… Last year, in reference to President Obama’s failed employment policies and high unemployment among blacks, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., who is chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said, “If Bill Clinton had been in the White House and had failed to address this problem, we probably would be marching on the White House.” That’s a vision that seems to explain black tolerance for failed politicians — namely, if it’s a black politician whose policies are ineffectual and possibly harmful to the masses of the black community, it’s tolerable, but it’s entirely unacceptable if the politician is white.

Black people would not accept excuses upon excuses and vote to re-elect decade after decade any white politician, especially a Republican politician, to office who had the failed records of our big-city mayors. What that suggests about black people is not very flattering.

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Camille Paglia was caught mid-rant about Obama by Ann Althouse.

I was very excited about him. I thought he was a moderate. I thought that his election would promote racial healing in the country. It would be a tremendous transformation of attitudes. And instead: one thing after another. Not least: I consider him, now, one of the most racially divisive and polarizing figures ever. I think it’s going to take years to undo the damage to relationships between the races. 

But beyond that, I am just sick and tired of endless war. I was in favor of bombing the hell out of the Afghanistan mountains after 9/11, but I would have never agreed to this land war in Afghanistan, this endless land war, as well as things like this Libyan incursion that Obama appears to have been pushed into by these women, like Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, the chaos in foreign policy, the bowing to foreign leaders.

Also the Obamacare: of course, we need health care reform in this country. What a mess! Everyone agrees about that. But the Obamacare is, to me, a Stalinist intrusion — okay? — into American culture.

But beyond that, I am just sick and tired of endless war. I was in favor of bombing the hell out of the Afghanistan mountains after 9/11, but I would have never agreed to this land war in Afghanistan, this endless land war, as well as things like this Libyan incursion that Obama appears to have been pushed into by these women, like Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, the chaos in foreign policy, the bowing to foreign leaders.

Also the Obamacare: of course, we need health care reform in this country. What a mess! Everyone agrees about that. But the Obamacare is, to me, a Stalinist intrusion — okay? — into American culture.

The creation of this culture of surveillance, from these bureaucracies, which is also carried over into Obama’s endorsement of drones on the military level as well as for police control of the population. I mean, I don’t understand how any… veteran of the 1960s who’s a Democrat could not see the dangers here, that Obama is a statist. It’s exactly what Bob Dylan was warning about in “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” okay?

You don’t want government agencies being empowered to intrude into people’s lives like this. The controlling force in Obamacare is the IRS! Okay? This flies in the face of what the Free Speech Movement was about at Berkeley or about any of the values, I feel, of my generation. …

Charles Krauthammer comments on the third debate between President Romney and his predecessor.

… Obama lost. His tone was petty and small. Arguing about Iran’s nuclear program, he actually said to Mitt Romney, “While we were coordinating an international coalition to make sure these sanctions were effective, you were still invested in a Chinese state oil company that was doing business with the Iranian oil sector.” You can’t get smaller than that. You’d expect this in a city council race. But only from the challenger. The sitting councilman would find such an ad hominem beneath him.

Throughout the debate, Obama kept it up, slashing, interjecting, interrupting, desperate to gain the upper hand by insult if necessary. That spirit led Obama into a major unforced error. When Romney made a perfectly reasonable case to rebuild a shrinking Navy, Obama condescended: “You mentioned . . . that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed.”

Such that naval vessels are as obsolete as horse cavalry?

Liberal pundits got a great guffaw out of this, but the underlying argument is quite stupid. As if the ships being retired are dinghies, skipjacks and three-masted schooners. As if an entire branch of the armed forces — the principal projector of American power abroad — is itself some kind of anachronism.

“We have these things called aircraft carriers,” continued the schoolmaster, “where planes land on them.”

This is Obama’s case for fewer vessels? Does he think carriers patrol alone? He doesn’t know that for every one carrier, 10 times as many ships sail in a phalanx of escorts?

Obama may blithely dismiss the need for more ships, but the Navy wants at least 310 and the latest Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel report says that defending America’s vital interests requires 346 ships (vs. 287 today). Does anyone doubt that if we continue as we are headed, down to fewer than 230, the casualty will be entire carrier battle groups, precisely the kind of high-tech force multipliers that Obama pretends our national security requires? …

Michael Barone posts on a newspaper endorsement that might matter.

Most newspaper endorsements mostly don’t matter. The Washington Post on Friday endorsed Barack Obama; I confess that as much as I admire the editorial writers of the Washington Post (and I do) I haven’t read it yet. The Post, as I recall, has regularly endorsed Democratic candidates for a long time, although in 1988, when I was on the editorial page staff, it chose not to endorse either Michael Dukakis or George H. W. Bush, a stand that I think was logical in light of the paper’s editorial page stances—generally but not always liberal, often thoughtful in an intellectually interesting way—over the years.

But occasionally there comes an editorial page stance that matters. The Des Moines Register has endorsed Mitt Romney.

Nolan Finley of the Detroit News says desperation is showing in the administration.

… the president’s campaign is now driven by desperation. Obama’s team promised at the beginning of this election cycle to “kill” Romney, and yet the challenger is very much alive, weathering $300 million in attack ads.

Obama can’t pivot from destroying Romney to making the case for his own re-election.

The campaign is stepping up the “war on women” charge, hammering battleground markets with abortion messages.

He’s also hop-scotching college campuses to wake up voters who’ve returned to apathy because of their dismal job prospects. Obama recruited the morally-challenged character from HBO’s “Girls” series to do a spot equating a vote for him to losing your virginity to a really nice guy.

Vulgar is part of the repertoire; Obama called Romney a “bullsh—er” in an interview. Very presidential.

What else will Obama backers pull out in the final days? …

Andrew Ferguson says the new “trust” meme is like déjà vu all over again.

… The news readers from NPR were mum-mum-mumbling in the background the other morning as I was putt-putt-puttering around the house when .. all of a sudden . running counter to every fiber of my being .. pulling against my every natural inclination .. I began to pay attention! President Obama, one of the news readers said, was giving a speech in the Midwest to road-test a new theme for the campaign’s final weeks: “trust.”

“There’s no more serious issue in a presidential campaign than trust,” the president said. “Trust matters!” The Midwesterners cheered.

At these words my attention loosened and my mind, what’s left of it, flew backwards in time, 20 years almost to the day, and I was sitting in a room in the White House, in 1992, huddled with two other speechwriters around a little speaker set on a table in a high-ceilinged room. We were listening to a closed-circuit transmission from a campaign rally in the Midwest. A different president was desperately seeking reelection. This was President Bush—the first President Bush, I mean, the one that Democrats hated but later pretended to like after they decided they hated his son more. 

We speechwriters were anxious that afternoon because—well, because presidential speechwriters are always anxious—but we were particularly anxious because at this rally in the Midwest, the president was going to road-test a new campaign theme. 

One issue surpassed all others, President Bush said. “It’s called trust. When you get down to it, this election will be like every other. Trust matters!”

The Midwesterners cheered. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Leno: Obama’s top debate point was saying how sanctions are crippling Iran’s economy. And if anyone knows about crippling an economy it’s Obama.

Conan: “Paul Ryan Shirtless” is nine times more popular an Internet search term than “Paul Ryan budget.” The awkward part is, most of those searches have been traced back to Joe Biden’s laptop.

Leno: That was the third and final presidential debate. The good news is that was the third and final presidential debate.

Conan: At the third-party presidential debate each candidate favored medical marijuana. It was the first presidential debate to air on the Cartoon Network.

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We devote all of our selections today to Benghazi and aftermath. Streetwise Professor posts on modern-day McClellans.

The administration’s efforts to escape accountability for the clusterf*ck in Benghazi on September 11 grow more disgusting by the day.  These efforts betray a nauseating combination of cowardice, dissimulation, and projection.

Yesterday, Hillary responded to revelations that within hours of the commencement of the assault, that the State Department, Pentagon, FBI, Intel agencies-and yes, the White House-had received an email stating that an Al Qaeda-linked group had claimed responsibility for the attack.  Hillary’s response?  How dare you-DARE YOU-”cherry pick” intelligence.

How’s that for projection, eh? What.  Fixating on the (Mohammed video) wasn’t cherry picking?  Really?  Look at all the revelations that have come out demonstrating that the State Department and the White House had numerous reports to the effect that this was a planned terrorist assault.  Yes, the evidence was conflicting.  But they decided to run with the MoVid story-even going to the extreme of recording a sick-making apology video.  They picked the most rotten cherry from the bunch and went with that.  And they excoriate others for cherry picking-even when those others pick far better ones, plural. …

Craig Pirrong also says Leon Panetta has brought friendly fire on himself when he says the situation in Benghaze was too confusing.

There were drones in the air.  There was a trained special operator on the roof of the annex lazing targets (while manning a machine gun).  CIA personnel were in constant radio contact with their commanders.  They were providing the coordinates of the mortars firing on the annex.

In brief, Panetta and others in DC had about as good real time information as you can possibly expect in a combat situation.  Certainty? No: that’s not possible.  But it is hard to imagine having better information.  So not “knowing what’s going on” is not a valid excuse.

Is it a coincidence that multiple sources unloaded these devastating details the day after Panetta spoke?

I think not.  The events themselves, the coverup (of which Panetta’s remarks are a part), and the attempts to pin blame on the intelligence agencies have no doubt made very many people very angry.  People who know things.

Count on more fire to come.

Bill Kristol posts on what that incoming fire towards the administration might look like as Petraeus throws Obama under the bus.

Breaking news on Benghazi: the CIA spokesman, presumably at the direction of CIA director David Petraeus, has put out this statement: “No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate. ” 

So who in the government did tell “anybody” not to help those in need? Someone decided not to send in military assets to help those Agency operators. Would the secretary of defense make such a decision on his own? No.

It would have been a presidential decision. There was presumably a rationale for such a decision. What was it? When and why—and based on whose counsel obtained in what meetings or conversations—did President Obama decide against sending in military assets to help the Americans in need?

Back to Streetwise Professor as Craig posts on President Gutsy Call and the questions Obama should answer.

… To reprise some famous questions: what did he know and when did he know it?  To which I add: and what did he do about it?  What was he doing during the 7 hours of the assault?  Was he in the White House situation room?  If not, why not?  If not, who was?  Was he in communication?  What decisions did he make? What was his reasoning?

The answers to these obvious questions don’t require him to await the completion of an investigation.  They require him to open his mouth and tell the country what he knew; what he did; and why he did it.   President, investigate thyself.

The guy who is in love with first person pronouns (have any doubts about that, check out the transcript of the last debate) loves to talk about himself and his wonderfulness.  Why so shy now?

I think I know exactly why.  He is running as Mr. Gutsy Call, the guy who made the daring decision to take out Osama.  If it turns out that he made a not so gutsy call here, or didn’t make any call at all, that whole meme is shot to hell.  And other than that, WTF does he have to run on?

There’s a big difference between approving execution of a plan that has been meticulously crafted, critiqued, and practiced over a period of months on the one hand, and making a split second call in a fast-developing situation with less than perfect information on the other.  The real gutsy calls-gutsy in terms of courage, and in terms of having to rely on gut instinct rather than analysis and debate-are the split second kind.

It is an awesome responsibility to have to make either kind of decision, but especially the latter.  I think that people would be understanding if he could provide a reasonably defensible rationale of his decision.  There is usually a tendency to rally around the president, and to give him the benefit of the doubt about hard decisions, especially those involving combat: Jimmy Carter actually got a positive bump after the Desert One disaster.   If he truly thinks it was the right call, he should be able to defend it, and should have a receptive audience.

Which leads me to the following observation: his refusal to answer any questions about Benghazi means that he can’t defend his decision.

It is the president’s bad luck all this came to a head as Mark Steyn was looking for a topic for his weekly column. 

“We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video,” said Hillary Clinton. No, not the person who made the video saying that voting for Barack Obama is like losing your virginity to a really cool guy. I’ll get to that in a moment. But Secretary Clinton was talking about the fellow who made the supposedly Islamophobic video that supposedly set off the sacking of the Benghazi consulate. And, indeed, she did “have that person arrested.” By happy coincidence, his bail hearing has been set for three days after the election, by which time he will have served his purpose. These two videos – the Islamophobic one and the Obamosexual one – bookend the remarkable but wholly deserved collapse of the president’s re-election campaign.

You’ll recall that a near month-long attempt to blame an obscure YouTube video for the murder of four Americans and the destruction of U.S. sovereign territory climaxed in the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden’s bald assertion that the administration had been going on the best intelligence it had at the time. By then, it had been confirmed that there never had been any protest against the video, and that the Obama line that Benghazi had been a spontaneous movie review that just got a little out of hand was utterly false. The only remaining question was whether the administration had knowingly lied or was merely innocently stupid. The innocent-stupidity line became harder to maintain this week after Fox News obtained State Department emails revealing that shortly after 4 p.m. Eastern, less than a half-hour after the assault in Benghazi began, the White House situation room knew the exact nature of it.

We also learned that, in those first moments of the attack, a request for military back-up was made by U.S. staff on the ground but was denied by Washington. It had planes and Special Forces less than 500 miles away in southern Italy – or about the same distance as Washington to Boston. They could have been there in less than two hours. Yet the commander-in-chief declined to give the order. So Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods fought all night against overwhelming odds, and died on a rooftop in a benighted jihadist hell hole while Obama retired early to rest up before his big Vegas campaign stop. “Within minutes of the first bullet being fired, the White House knew these heroes would be slaughtered if immediate air support was denied,” said Ty Woods’ father, Charles. “In less than an hour, the perimeters could have been secured, and American lives could have been saved. After seven hours fighting numerically superior forces, my son’s life was sacrificed because of the White House’s decision.”

Why would Obama and Biden do such a thing? Because to launch a military operation against an al-Qaida affiliate on the anniversary of 9/11 would have exposed the hollowness of their boast through convention week and the days thereafter – that Osama was dead, and al-Qaida was finished. And so Ty Woods, Glen Doherty, Sean Smith and Chris Stevens were left to die, and a decision taken to blame an entirely irrelevant video …

… Both videos – the one faking Obamagasm and the one faking a Benghazi pretext – exemplify the wretched shrinkage that befalls those unable to conceive of anything except in the most self-servingly political terms. Both, in different ways, exemplify why Obama and Biden are unfit for office. One video testifies to a horrible murderous lie at the heart of a head of state’s most solemn responsibility, the other to the glib shallow narcissism of a pop-culture presidency, right down to the numbing relentless peer-pressure: C’mon, all the cool kids are doing it; why be the last holdout?

If voting for Obama is like the first time you have sex, it’s very difficult to lose your virginity twice. A flailing, pitiful campaign has now adopted Queen Victoria’s supposed wedding advice to her daughter: “Lie back and think of England.” Lie back and think of America. And then get up and get dressed. Who wants to sleep twice with a $16 trillion broke loser?

Summing up, James Delingpole of London’s Telegraph says Benghazi will do to Obama what Al Qaeda did to Chris Stevens.

… The Obama administration’s duplicity and mendacity is nothing those of us who’ve been observing, aghast, his disastrous foreign policy approaches since at least his infamous Cairo surrender monkey speech couldn’t have predicted. And while it’s nice to see his chickens coming home to roost and encouraging to realise that his chances of becoming a second-term president are diminishing by the minute, it’s hardly a situation you might call – hmm what’s the word? Oh yeah – “optimal” for the grieving relatives of the four men who died needlessly in order to satisfy the President’s wishful thinking that the Al Qaeda threat is diminishing and that there’s nothing wrong with the Middle East’s intractable problems that can’t be solved with a few emollient words, beautiful lies and maybe the occasional NASA-endorsed outreach programme….

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Alana Goodman has a great post covering Friday’s front page in the Des Moines Register. It is a good example of how the media can steer perceptions.

I wrote yesterday about the Obama campaign’s tussle with the DMR over an editorial board interview the president initially demanded be off the record. After the Register’s editor blogged about the unusual stipulation, the campaign relented and released the transcript of the interview without comment or explanation. I’m not sure that has anything to do with today’s front page, but it can’t be a good idea to ding the Iowa media days before election day in a highly competitive state.

Here’s the Register’s lede on Romney, who apparently received an enthusiastic greeting at EasternIowaAirport yesterday:

“This must be what momentum looks like.

It was a dramatic entrance into Iowa for Mitt Romney on Wednesday: As stirring music played, his campaign airplane, with his motto “Believe in America” visible along the fuselage, touched down at the Eastern Iowa Airport, taxied toward a hangar and parked just 50 feet behind the stage.

Romney stepped down the jetway to meet a cheering crowd of more than 3,000 and deliver a high-energy speech that was by turns sharply critical of incumbent President Barack Obama and confidently optimistic about the nation’s future under new leadership.”

And here’s the lede on the paper’s Obama story:

“Fighting a tense re-election battle, President Barack Obama let loose a blistering attack on GOP opponent Mitt Romney during a campaign rally here Wednesday, the first leg in what he called “a 48-hour, fly-around marathon campaign extravaganza.”

Obama was more forceful than usual on the stump, using a booming voice to tear into Romney as an untrustworthy double-talker and then, in more measured tones, to concede he hasn’t achieved all the goals he spelled out in Iowa four years ago.” …

Toby Harnden on the fearmonger-in-chief.

Four years after he was elected as a self-described ‘hopemonger’ promising a new post-partisan era, President Barack Obama is trying to claw his way to re-election with an ugly, divisive campaign in which he is playing the role of fearmonger-in-chief.

On a chilling Wednesday evening in a Las Vegas park, Obama spoke to a raucous gathering of some 13,000 – more than twice the number his opponent Mitt Romney had attracted a few days earlier but a far cry from the crowds of 2008 when he was swept into office with a seven-point victory over Senator John McCain.

With his own star power fading, Obama had enlisted the help of teen heartthrob Katy Perry to sing before he appeared. Resplendent in a black-and-white latex dress emblazoned with a ballot paper, she delivered five of her pop hits to screams and squeals from the younger attendees.

When Obama finally took to the stage, he began with light-hearted quips about Perry’s 91-year-old grandmother getting lipstick on his cheek and nearly getting him in hot water with his wife Michele. ‘I’m just telling you – you might get me in trouble!’

Right on cue, and just like 2008, a woman shouted out: ‘We love you, Obama!’ He responded, just as he always has: ‘I love you back!’

But the mood quickly darkened and it was at this point that any comparisons with 2008 evaporated. Obama – who was reading his remarks from two teleprompters flanking the stage – launched into a exhaustive and exhausting diatribe about Romney. …

… Obama’s tactics in the final days of this campaign might well pay off. Politically speaking, he may not have any other way of scraping a narrow victory – though the risk is that he will turn-off moderate voters.

But if Obama is re-elected the way he has run his campaign may make it almost impossible for him to govern effectively – let alone in the spirit of the ‘better angels of our nature’ that Abraham Lincoln cited in his first inaugural speech and that Obama used to love quoting.

It was John McCain who said in 2008 that he would not ‘take the low road to the highest office in the land’. 

Obama seems to believe that the load road is his only route back to the White House in 2012. It is the kind of strategy that Candidate Obama in 2008 would have viewed as beneath contempt.

More of this from Jennifer Rubin.

There is nothing so revealing or, frankly, pathetic as the president of the United States, who has studiously avoided serious news interview shows, going on the Jay Leno show to tell women that Republicans don’t understand that “rape is rape.” It is a window into the mindset of a candidate and a campaign that is pulling its hair out over the gender gap and thinks the way to solve it is to treat women like quivering children. …

… No wonder the president is now drawing in the RealClearPolitics average the support of (you guessed it) 47 percent of the voters. He’s systematically eliminating those parts of the electorate that want a mature, problem-solving moderate. He was that candidate in 2008; now, as reflected in his frenetic appeals to fear (“not one of us”) and envy he’s become, metaphorically, a pol with as much appeal as a state senator in a blue state with a heavily Democratic electorate. Obama — The One, the leg-tingler — is now a crass pol from Chicago once again.

Romnesia? Kimberley Strassel compares Obama to Obama.

“The way Bush has done it over the last eight years is . . . [he] added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back. . . . That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic”—Sen. Obama, July 2008.

“I don’t remember what the number was precisely. . . . We don’t have to worry about it short term”—President Obama, September 2012, on the debt figure when he took office ($10 trillion) and whether to worry about today’s $16 trillion figure.

“So if somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant, they can, it’s just that it will bankrupt them”—Sen. Obama, January 2008, on his plans to financially penalize coal plants.

“Now is the time to end this addiction, and to understand that drilling is a stop-gap measure, not a long-term solution”—Sen. Obama, August 2008.

“Here’s what I’ve done since I’ve been president. We have increased oil production to the highest levels in 16 years. Natural gas production is the highest it’s been in decades. We have seen increases in coal production and coal employment”—President Obama, October 2012.

Ross Douthat says Obama’s smelling like a loser.

… Losing campaigns have a certain feel to them: They go negative hard, try out new messaging very late in the game, hype issues that only their core supporters are focused on, and try to turn non-gaffes and minor slip-ups by their opponents into massive, election-turning scandals. Think of John McCain’s desperate hope that elevating Joe the Plumber would change the shape of the 2008 race, and you have the template for how tin-eared and desperate a losing presidential campaign often sounds — and ever since the first debate cost Obama his air of inevitability, he and his surrogates have sounded more like McCain did with Joe the Plumber than like a typical incumbent president on his way to re-election. A winning presidential campaign would not normally be hyping non-issues like Big Bird and “binders full of women” in its quest for a closing argument, or rolling out a new spin on its second-term agenda with just two weeks left in the race, or pushing so many advertising chips into dishonest attacks on its rival’s position on abortion. A winning presidential campaign would typically be talking about the issues that voters cite as most important — jobs, the economy, the deficit — rather than trying to bring up Planned Parenthood and PBS at every opportunity. A winning presidential campaign would not typically have coined the term “Romnesia,” let alone worked it into their candidate’s speeches. …

David Harsanyi comments on Obama’s jobs plan. Not.

Fear not, Barack Obama has an economic plan for America, and it’s all in a glossy brochure, called “The New Economic Patriotism: A Plan for Jobs & Middle-Class Security” — an antidote, we’re told, to the vagueness of Mitt Romney’s agenda.

This is what the president, according to a campaign official, believes will ensure that “every voter knows what a second term of an Obama presidency would mean for middle-class Americans.” So, in other words, a shiny substance-free pamphlet is a metaphor for the Obama presidency — because these 11 pages of fluff make Romney’s tax proposal look like an annotated edition of the Talmud.

Even if we accepted that this is a “jobs plan” at all — and one would have to stretch the imagination — there are perhaps two items even tangentially connected to the issue at hand. Members of the middle class will be pleased to learn that their children’s future will feature marginally smaller class sizes and work as a midlevel functionary in a green-energy factory. According to the president, the best way to grow the middle class outward (whatever that means) is to strive for more menial labor work in an unproductive manufacturing sector. Forward. …

The Hill’s A. B. Stoddard has the same reaction to the plan.

It’s almost certain that President Obama released his agenda, titled “The New Economic Patriotism,” the night before a Donald Trump blockbuster announcement designed to derail Obama’s reelection. He had to have been hoping dearly the Trump stink-bomb would take all the oxygen away from any second-day stories about the “plan for jobs and middle-class security” the campaign published. It’s not just that the plan is the first voters have heard of any Obama has for his second term — two weeks before Election Day — but that the brochure is about as cheesy a cheap shot as they come.

Unfortunately for Obama, Trump’s pathetic gambit failed to trump the headline that Obama is trying to pass off recycled retreads as new plans and that he was forced to do so after losing the first presidential debate to Mitt Romney, plunging in the polls and sending Democrats into a state of nauseated panic. How, they asked the campaign, could the president possibly win a second term in such a tight race without having outlined an agenda for the next four years? And so an eleventh-hour glossy appeared to answer the charge that Obama had nothing in mind for 2013-2017, with pretty pictures and pabulum to prove it. Brace yourself, the plans include a tax plan that cuts the deficit and creates jobs, energy made in America, a reminder of all that is good about ObamaCare, a pledge to stop Medicare or Social Security from being privatized, reviving manufacturing, investing in education and growing small businesses. …

Jonathan Tobin thinks liberal denial will get worse.

… the refusal of many Democrats to accept the reality of the Romney surge may be rooted in something more emotional than just skewed poll numbers. Many if not most liberals share the attitude of contempt for the Republicans that were so easily discerned in the attitudes of both President Obama and Vice President Biden during the debates. Though most Americans have rejected the attempt by the president’s campaign to define Romney as a heartless plutocrat or a monster, liberals bought it hook, line and sinker. The idea that such a person could have caught and passed Obama in the space of a few short weeks seems impossible to them not so much because they think the numbers don’t support this thesis but because they just don’t want it to be so.

Rather than debunking Romney’s wave, liberal analysts who seek to deny it are merely confirming their inability to look dispassionately at what has occurred. Democrats living in liberal echo chambers need a reality check.

There will be no landslide in the presidential race this year, or even a decisive victory like the one Obama scored in 2008. It’s possible that the president can rebound in the last days of the campaign and that Romney could falter. But barring some late October surprise that would help the president (as opposed to one, like last month’s Libya fiasco, which hurt him), it’s hard to see momentum shifting back in his favor. If it doesn’t, expect liberal denial about Romney’s strength to deepen.

We can thank Fidel Castro for the picture of a ’50′s era Packard we culled from Friday’s WaPo.

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Breitbart tells us about the NY Democrat state assemblyman who is campaigning for Romney in Florida.

In a move to enlighten the Jews of Florida about the dangers of reelecting Barack Obama, Orthodox Jewish Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a Democrat, is heading to South Florida to convince Democrats to vote for Mitt Romney.

Hikind is convinced that the election is of huge importance for America and Israel, saying:

“This is one of the most important elections I have ever been a part of. I hope to convince my fellow democrats that the choice this year should be a Republican.  Looking at the last four years, I can’t think of a single area where we have been successful. People in Florida have asked me to come down and speak to Democratic voters. I am more than happy to do my part to help and, in fact, I made that offer on national television when I appeared with Neil Cavuto on Fox News. I am going down there, as a Democrat, to speak to Democrats about my concerns.” …

Thomas Sowell on Libya and lies.

It was a little much when President Barack Obama said that he was “offended” by the suggestion that his administration would try to deceive the public about what happened in Benghazi. What has this man not deceived the public about?

Remember his pledge to cut the deficit in half in his first term in office? This was followed by the first trillion dollar deficit ever, under any President of the United States — followed by trillion dollar deficits in every year of the Obama administration.

Remember his pledge to have a “transparent” government that would post its legislative proposals on the Internet several days before Congress was to vote on them, so that everybody would know what was happening? This was followed by an ObamaCare bill so huge and passed so fast that even members of Congress did not have time to read it.

Remember his claims that previous administrations had arrogantly interfered in the internal affairs of other nations — and then his demands that Israel stop building settlements and give away land outside its 1967 borders, as a precondition to peace talks with the Palestinians, on whom there were no preconditions?

As for what happened in Libya, the Obama administration says that there is an “investigation” under way. An “on-going investigation” sounds so much better than “stonewalling” to get past election day. But you can bet the rent money that this “investigation” will not be completed before election day. And whatever the investigation says after the election will be irrelevant. …

Someone in the administration leaked to Reuters three damaging emails that blow the Obama Libya cover story. Jennifer Rubin posts.

President Obama is playing the media and, in turn, the American people for fools on the Libya scandal. Reporters and columnists who carried his water have been hung out to dry. The White House cover story — namely that CIA got it all wrong and the White House (in urging us to believe the murder of four Americans was the result of a video riot gone bad) was telling us what it knew, when it knew — has been severely undercut. Three e-mails sent to the White House within two hours of the attack identify it as a terrorist operation and inform the White House that local jihadists with al-Qaeda connections claimed responsibility. Reuters reminds us:

U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the Benghazi assault, which President Barack Obama and other U.S. officials ultimately acknowledged was a “terrorist” attack carried out by militants with suspected links to al Qaeda affiliates or sympathizers.

Administration spokesmen, including White House spokesman Jay Carney, citing an unclassified assessment prepared by the CIA, maintained for days that the attacks likely were a spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim film

This was false. And we know now the White House knew better. Three separate e-mails were sent to the White House on Sept. 11:

The first email, timed at 4:05 p.m. Washington time — or 10:05 p.m. Benghazi time, 20-30 minutes after the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission allegedly began — carried the subject line “U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi Under Attack” and the notation “SBU”, meaning “Sensitive But Unclassified.”

The text said the State Department’s regional security office had reported that the diplomatic mission in Benghazi was “under attack. Embassy in Tripoli reports approximately 20 armed people fired shots; explosions have been heard as well.” …

Mark Steyn with a Corner post on free speech in danger in the U.S. and Australia.

The other day, Andy McCarthy wrote that “it’s not just Obama’s lies, it’s the premise of Obama’s lies” – ie, the notion that a video (or a cartoon, or a book, or a play) can legitimately be blamed for murderous violence:

Constitutionally protected speech can never be legitimized as a cause of violence. Period.

It’s not a small thing when the President of the United States chooses for political advantage to inflict significant damage on America’s commitment to free speech. One thing the western left shares with Islam is a ferocious need to punish dissent – or (to give it its proper name) apostasy. Down Under, something called the “Australian Communications and Media Authority” (that’s to say, the usual bunch of statist hacks) has just ordered Alan Jones, the country’s Number One morning man, to undergo “factual accuracy training” (that’s to say, re-education camp) for saying the following:

’The percentage of man-made carbon dioxide Australia produces is 1 per cent of .001 per cent of carbon dioxide in the air,” Jones told his listeners on March 15 last year. “Nature produces nearly all the carbon dioxide in the air.”

Apparently, according to a global warm-monger of dubious provenance himself, the correct figure is 0.45 per cent. So the percentage of non-Australian carbon dioxide in the air is 99.55 per cent rather than 99.99999 per cent. For this outrageous crime, Alan Jones must report for “factual accuracy training”.

The death of free speech doesn’t seem immediately relevant to people worried about jobs and mortgages, but it is: When it’s a crime to be skeptical of “climate change” alarmism, it’s harder to object to the diversion of tax dollars from you and yours to Solyndra and other “green” boondoggles. Killing freedom of expression renders honest discussion of everything from the economy to foreign policy all but impossible – which suits both the left and Islam just fine.

If Australia keeps this nonsense up, I may have to come back for another nationwide tour. If they let me in.

Andrew Malcolm notes Obama’s slide.

Barack Obama’s reelection campaign is in trouble. It’s silently slowing down in North Carolina and now, even Florida. Even raising hundreds of millions in a record number of fundraisers, his campaign has had to borrow from a bank. Obama can’t admit it all though.

And he desperately needs to motivate his vaunted ground troops in these last 13 days.

So, in Monday’s debate the Democrat wasn’t trying to stem the hemorrhaging of independents and women from his side. He was trying to serve some red meat to rally party loyalists after his disappointing debate performances. Hence, his sarcastic praise for Gov. Mitt Romney agreeing that al Qaeda is a threat.

And hence this less-than-presidential response to Romney’s concern over the Democrat’s planned massive cuts in the nation’s defense spending:

“But I think Governor Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works.

“You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military has changed. 

“We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of Battleship where we’re counting ships; it’s what are our capabilities.”

This from the half-black man who suckered so many millions of countrymen into believing he was sincerely interested in uniting Americans of all kinds and colors for a new day. That seems so much farther away than merely 1,373 days ago.

But re-reading Obama’s attempted debate mocking, there is some sweet justice watching a man show off how much he knows but actually reveal instead, not only a pettiness, but how little he actually knows. Like his speech last year when he hailed a heroic Navy corpsman as a “corpseman.” …

So far the reviews have not been very kind, but it’s still good news when Tom Wolfe writes another novel. USA Today has an interview.

… It’s Wolfe’s fourth novel, his first in eight years, and coincides with the 25th anniversary of his prescient best seller The Bonfire of the Vanities, about the financial and moral collapse of a Wall Street trader.

Blood (the title refers to bloodlines) is “highly journalistic,” says Wolfe, who became a literary celebrity in the 1960s and ’70s. He pioneered the “New Journalism,” using novelistic techniques in non-fiction, including The Right Stuff, his 1979 best seller about American astronauts.

In his living room, he describes Miami as “the only city in the world where more than half the residents are recent immigrants, and not just Cubans, but Haitians and Russians and Nicaraguans. In the past 33 years, the Cubans have staged a political takeover — not through an invasion but at the ballot box! It’s probably the only city like that.”

Wolfe is dressed in what has become his uniform: a three-piece white linen suit, blue shirt, polka-dot tie and black-and-white shoes, which he calls “faux spats.” (Which leads to the first of several digressions: “Did you know that spats came of age when there was no central heat?” he asks. “Only I have looked into this matter.”)

Wolfe’s closets are filled with 32 white suits, he says. “I used to have more. A bit overboard?” he suggests with a smile. …

Weather Nerd has a warning for the east coast about Hurricane Sandy.

… After Jamaica, Sandy will briefly re-emerge over water, but will then hit eastern Cuba. By the time it emerges from its passage over Cuba, the upper-level wind shear will have increased, likely preventing much further strengthening — at least as a pure warm-core tropical system. (More in a moment on what I mean by that.) All things considered, it is unlikely Sandy will, in its purely tropical phase, ever be worse than a Category 1 hurricane.

However, after Sandy crosses Jamaica and Cuba, things get really interesting — and dangerous — because the atmospheric setup is uniquely conducive for Sandy to become a bizarre and, possibly, extremely destructive hybrid storm, injecting its tropical moisture, warm core, and low barometric pressure into a dynamic atmospheric situation involving a diving upper-level trough, driven by the jet stream, and the resulting clash between warm and very cold air. We could end up with a “subtropical hurricane” — a category that isn’t even supposed to be able to exist — bashing the U.S. East Coast with fierce wind, rain and surge, while its back side produces extremely heavy snow over the northern Appalachians. It would be like a nor’easter on steroids. …

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Toby Harnden posts on Monday’s debate.

If you had been on an extended vacation for the past four years, you would have been forgiven for watching this debate and thinking you were viewing a President Mitt Romney being challenged by a pretender called Barack Obama.

Obama, although clearly in command of foreign policy issues, clearly came into the debate believing he had to score points and change the dynamic of the race.

In short, Obama started the 90 minutes here in Boca Raton, Florida believing he was losing his bid for re-election.

Romney, by contrast, felt he could play things safe. He was a kinder, gentler presence than he was in the second debate in Hempstead, New York, when he fought back hard against a hyper Obama desperate to make up for his catastrophic performance in the first showdown in Denver.

By and large, Romney succeeded in Boca. He came across as knowledgeable and reasonable and made no mistakes. In short, he passed the commander-in-chief test.

Having proved in the first debate he had the backbone, policy expertise and determination to try to tackle America’s economic woes, tonight he showed that he was a plausible commander-in-chief. It was not an especially high bar, but he cleared it.

Obama entered the debate hall armed with a number of pre-cooked zingers and lines that he deployed adroitly. But at this stage if the campaign an incumbent President should be on a higher plane, looking down on a pipsqueak opponent daring to challenge the most powerful man in the world.

When he should have been going big, Obama went small. At one point, he said: ‘The fact is, while we were coordinating an international coalition to make sure these sanctions were effective, you were still invested in a Chinese state oil company that was doing business with the Iranian oil sector.’

This was the kind of ‘oppo’ point that a lowly apparatchik in Obama’s Chicago headquarters should have been firing out via Twitter. Instead, the leader of the free world was using it in answer to a question about the Iranian nuclear threat. …

Jennifer Rubin has ten debate follow ups.

In the aftermath of the last presidential debate, we can draw a number of conclusions from the candidates’ behavior and rhetoric.

1. President Obama is in some state of duress, realizing he lacks an agenda. His repackaged binder of ideas got a thumbs down from the skeptical media:

2. The president didn’t attempt in Monday’s debate to respond to Romney’s citations of Obama apologies or to his jab about telling Russian leaders that he’d have more “flexibility” after the election. Plainly, the Obama team doesn’t have a good argument for those points, neither of which it wants to spend much time debating.

3. Obama hit the campaign trail immediately and invoked the “Romnesia” taunt. After a test debate in which he repeatedly tried and failed to bait Romney, it is telling that he remains stuck on these juvenile barbs.

4. Republicans are capitalizing with statements (and ads sure to follow) on Obama’s slam against rebuilding our Navy. As a political matter, the Romney camp sees this as a significant gaffe for the president in places like Newport News.

5. As in the town-hall debate, the Romney camp thinks the moments when Romney looked straight into the camera to lay out his agenda are compelling for undecided voters. …

Mark Steyn comments on the binder BS. 

So the other morning a reader emails me a picture of a handful of women demonstrating outside the headquarters of the Ohio Republican Party – in what we expert analysts round about this point in the quadrennial election cycle like to call the critical battleground of the BuckeyeState. The women each wore two giant pieces of cardboard, front and back. Ah, I thought, a timely protest. These activists understand that, with Obama’s flatline economy drifting inexorably to a $20 trillion federal debt, we’ll soon be living in cardboard shacks in shanty towns in the parking lot of the bankrupt Solyndra factory. Or it’s what they’ll be using for the X-ray plates at your local hospital once the Obamacare rationing kicks in. Or maybe it’s the perfect visual metaphor for the flimsiness of U.S. government security at its Middle Eastern embassies before the “Death to the Great Satan!” crowd punched through the compound like so much soggy cardboard.

But no. The women were chanting “Equal rights, not binders,” and they were protesting the following remarks by Mitt Romney at the presidential debate:

“And so we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our Cabinet. I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks?’ And they brought us whole binders full of women.”

Yes!!!!!!! With one bound, Obama was unbound! Romney had just made the worst presidential-debate gaffe since Gerald Ford declared there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. In the previous weeks, Obama had attempted to have a serious conversation with the citizenry, as befits the electoral process of a mature republic. He had raised the critical questions of our time – free contraceptives for middle-aged coeds, the outrageous right-wing Muppophobic assault on Big Bird – but the public had failed to bite. Now, in one fatal error, Romney had handed him the winning issue: binders!

On the stump, Obama is a man reborn. At a campaign stop outside Cedar Rapids – in what we expert analysts like to call the critical battleground of the HawkeyeState – the president declared: “I’ve got to tell you, we don’t have to collect a bunch of binders to find qualified, talented, driven young women.” No, sir! In the Democratic Party, driven young women are dropping into your lap. At the Island Grove Regional Park Exhibition Hall in Greeley, Colo., Joe Biden told the crowd: “When Gov. Romney was asked a direct question about equal pay, he started talking about binders. Whoa! The idea that he had to go and ask where a qualified woman was, he just should have come to my house. He didn’t need a binder.” The crowd roared its approval. “What I can’t understand,” continued the vice president, “is how he has gotten in this sort of 1950s time warp in terms of women.”

Yes, indeed. Romney wants to return us to the 1950s, when a woman’s place was in the binder, when every predatory male had his little black binder, and condescending misogynists would interview applicants for Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts and smirk, “Why, Miss Jones, you’re beautiful without your binder…”  …

Excellent City Journal article on the Walter Duranty Awards. The author also points out some of the outstanding journalists in action today.

I recently attended the Walter Duranty Awards for Journalistic Mendacity, a highly entertaining event aimed at calling attention to the past year’s most egregious instances of mainstream-media bias. Sponsored jointly by The New Criterion and PJ Media, the awards are named after the most notoriously corrupt journalist of all time: the New York Times Moscow correspondent, Soviet apologist, and 1932 Pulitzer winner who pushed the Stalinist line that reports of the great famine in the Ukraine—brought on by forced collectivization and causing an estimated 6 million deaths—were nothing more than “malignant propaganda.”

Needless to say, many contenders vied for the Duranty. …

… it strikes me that conservatives might also go out of their way to honor other journalists: the relative handful in the mainstream media who diverge from the pack to commit fair-minded journalism. Because these reach an audience not generally accessible to Fox News, talk radio, and other right-of-center media outlets, they often have a considerable impact on general perception. More to the point, in a business in which the overwhelming majority of their peers are committed liberals—and in which the aim is more to impress fellow journalists than to inform viewers or readers—it can take genuine courage to break ranks.

Who are some who have lately distinguished themselves in this regard? There’s Gretchen Morgensen, the Market Watch columnist for the New York Times and coauthor of Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon, about the origins of the housing meltdown. Morgensen plays it straight down the middle, not hesitating to name names on either side. Indeed, the most villainous figure in her book is former Fannie Mae CEO James A. Johnson, a longtime Democratic operative.

Then there’s Jake Tapper of ABC News. Beginning his current tenure as the network’s senior White House correspondent by breaking the story on Tom Daschle’s non-payment of taxes that killed Daschle’s appointment as Health and Human Services secretary, Tapper has since distinguished himself by his tenacity in pursuing stories that others shy away from. Indeed, his pointed, discomforting questions to Press Secretary Jay Carney often seem a rebuke to reporters around him sitting on their hands in the White House briefing room. “Given the fact that so much was made out of the video that apparently had absolutely nothing to do with the attack on Benghazi, that there wasn’t even a protest outside the Benghazi post,” he recently asked Carney, “didn’t President Obama shoot first and aim later?”

No reporter has been more intrepid in reporting on the turmoil in the Middle East, from both the battlefield (and, horrifically, Cairo’s Tahrir Square) and the home front, than Lara Logan, the chief foreign correspondent of CBS News. …

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John Fund on last night’s debate.

(Last night’s) debate won’t be remembered as one of the most significant of presidential debates. Both candidates ran through their rehearsed talking points and zingers, and did score some points. The CNN poll of debate watchers essentially called it a tie — 48 percent said President Obama did better, to 40 percent for Romney. When it came to whether they could see the candidates as commander-in-chief, 63 percent responded affirmatively for President Obama, but 60 percent said “yes” for Romney, too. The strategy Romney appeared to focus on — not addressing the Benghazi terror attack and making calming points for war-weary voters in the audience — appears to have worked in political terms. Obama, by way of contrast, came across as an aggressive challenger who sometimes veered into peevishness. As just one example, CNN’s post-debate poll found viewers believed Obama was the more aggressive of the two tonight by a margin of 68 percent to 21.

But for many independent and undecided voters, there turned out to be two debates tonight. There was a foreign-policy debate that was scheduled, and that debate, Obama may have won narrowly on points. But there was also another debate: More than a quarter of the 90 minutes veered into domestic issues — ranging from education to job training to unemployment and the growing national debt.

That mini-debate went to Mitt Romney as he relentlessly repeated his major themes — the president’s last four years haven’t worked, take-home pay is down, 23 million are unemployed or underemployed, and the national debt has grown from $10 trillion to $16 trillion. Since far more Americans ultimately vote on domestic concerns than foreign policy, Romney was smart to reserve his sharpest criticism for Obama’s fiscal and economic record. Those points hit home, and Obama seemed a bit surprised and on the defensive when trying to justify his domestic record.

So there were two debates, but the one that was not advertised — the one on domestic policy — went to Romney, and likely will solidify his position with independent voters on the issues that matter most to them.

Dorothy Rabinowitz says the ever changing “Scheherazade-like tale” that has become their Benghazi narrative, is just one item in the administration’s constant and continuing lack of candor.

… All administrations conceal, falsify and tell lies—this is understood—but there’s no missing the distinctive quality of the prevaricating issuing from the White House in these four years.

It’s a quality on vivid display now in the administration’s mesmerizing narrative of the assault on the U.S. consulate in Libya. Here’s a memorable picture, its detail brutally illuminating, of Obama and company in crisis mode over their conflicting stories about who knew what when. The resulting costs to truth-telling and sanity, or even the appearance thereof, are clear. Nor can we forget the strong element of farce—think U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice on those five Sunday talk shows, reciting with unflagging fervor that official talking point regarding mob violence and a YouTube video. Farce, but no one is laughing.

Team Obama clung to its original story—the attack had come spontaneously at the hands of a mob enraged by that now famous video insulting to the Prophet—long after it was clear that it had been an organized terrorist assault by an al Qaeda affiliate. By Tuesday’s debate, we saw a Barack Obama in high dudgeon over suggestions that his office might have deliberately misrepresented the facts. It was, he fumed, an intolerable insult that such charges could have been made about him, the president who had had to receive the bodies of the slain Americans—and who then had to set about getting to the bottom of this murderous terror assault.

Profound and urgent concerns indeed—which, the president neglected to say, had not prevented him from jetting off to his fundraiser in Las Vegas the day after the murders. His administration was not given to politicizing serious matters, the president sternly informed the nation in that second debate: “That’s not what we do.”

Good to know. Americans might otherwise have gotten the wrong impression in the past four years, not least from Attorney General Eric Holder, who heads the most openly politicized Justice Department in the nation’s history. Among his more recent noteworthy pronouncements, this one relevant to the coming election, Mr. Holder declared that photo ID requirements intended to prevent voting fraud were nothing less than a “poll tax.” He was referring to an infamous institution from the days of Jim Crow, whose aim was to suppress black voting. Mr. Holder—so famously fastidious about group sensibilities that he has never been able to bring himself to utter any description identifying a terrorist as Muslim—has apparently had no inhibitions about smearing whole segments of the population as racists.

Mr. Obama’s outrage notwithstanding, the administration’s prolonged efforts to muddle the picture of the Benghazi attack raised proper suspicions. The Obama team’s instant response—that Republicans were attempting to politicize a tragedy—was entirely characteristic. If ever a story screamed its politicized nature, it was the administration’s Scheherazade-like tale, now five weeks old and rolling on, about that Sept. 11 assault. A tale that left little doubt of its motivation: fear of the impact, so close to the election, of a successful terrorist attack—the clear indication that al Qaeda was not, as claimed, on the run. …

Ed Morrissey smells desperation in the Obama campaign and compares it to the losing effort of Bush the Elder.

It’s been a while since we’ve had an incumbent President lose an election.  In fact, it was 20 years ago, when George H. W. Bush lost in a three-way fight to Bill Clinton.  What made that election remarkable was that Bush had enjoyed some of the best-ever job approval ratings of any modern American President just a little over a year earlier, into the 80s — unthinkable these days for anyone, Republican or Democrat.  Bush, a decorated veteran of World War II and a longtime player in diplomacy and national security, lost the election to an upstart Governor when the economy turned somewhat sour.

I recall the moment when I realized for the first time — not feared, but realized — that Bush would lose the election.  Bush was campaigning in Michigan at the end of October, trying to whip some energy back into his campaign in the home stretch, a task that would fall far short just a few days later.  Then-Governor John Engler told the Warren, MI crowd that the Bush campaign was “hot” and the Democrats “dead in the water,” which was merely the kind of fantasy all campaigns spin toward the end.

Bush then spoke, and went after Clinton and Al Gore in a personal, demeaning way I’d not heard from the President before then: …

The NY Post says more desperation shows in the way the Obama campaign has rigged its collection apparatus.

The Obama re-election campaign has accepted at least one foreign donation in violation of the law — and does nothing to check on the provenance of millions of dollars in other contributions, a watchdog group alleges.

Chris Walker, a British citizen who lives outside London, told The Post he was able to make two $5 donations to President Obama’s campaign this month through its Web site while a similar attempt to give Mitt Romney cash was rejected. It is illegal to knowingly solicit or accept money from foreign citizens.

Walker said he used his actual street address in England but entered Arkansas as his state with the Schenectady, NY, ZIP code of 12345.

“When I did Romney’s, the payment got rejected on the grounds that the address on the card did not match the address that I entered,” he said. “Romney’s Web site wanted the code from the back of card. Barack Obama’s didn’t.”

In September, Obama’s campaign took in more than $2 million from donors who provided no ZIP code or incomplete ZIP codes, according to data posted on the Federal Election Commission Web site.

The Obama campaign said the FEC data was the result of “a minor technical error.” …

Matthew Continetti says the inner jerk is coming out.

Remember when President Barack Obama was likable? Once upon a time the public viewed the incumbent more favorably than his challenger by large margins. These days Obama’s favorable and unfavorable ratings are similar to Mitt Romney’s. The televised debates have unveiled the current administration as alternately listless, manic, angry, soporific, rude, bullying, aloof, and thin-skinned. Americans who have just begun to tune into the election are seeing the president unmediated. They no longer are looking at him through the scrim of fawning press, majestic settings, and roaring crowds. And they are discovering that Obama is not so likable at all. He is actually something of a jerk.

Those who read coverage of the Obama administration closely will have known this for a long time: The president is cold, abstract, prickly, and insular. His brand of cerebral partisanship is better suited for liberal blogging than for leading the free world. He doesn’t enjoy interacting with strangers or even with associates outside his immediate clique. He has few close friends. He relies on about half a dozen senior advisers. His impromptu speech is given to cutting, sarcastic remarks.

Put him in front of an adoring and obsequious audience and he will be charming and suave. But the real Obama is revealed the second you remove the klieg lights. This isn’t a guy who will spend his post-presidency more or less running the Democratic Party, a la President Bill Clinton. Obama will spend his retirement as a solitary member of the irritable left, receiving honorary degrees, appearing on MSNBC, and scribbling for Salon.

The president’s unsociability is one of those obvious facts that are conveniently overlooked. Earlier this week Neera Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress, caused a mini-controversy when New York magazine quoted her saying, “Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost anyone. It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people.” Tanden, who has worked for Obama, later “clarified” her remarks. What she meant to say, she tweeted, was that Obama “is a private person.” Note, however, that one can be a private person and still not “like people.” Tanden did not really take back her words. Nor should she. Her initial comments were factual and honest.

A “Democrat deeply familiar” with the Clinton-Obama relationship said pretty much the same thing to Ryan Lizza a few months ago: “Obama doesn’t really like very many people.”  …

After his career in politics was over, George McGovern tried his hand at making an honest living. In 1988 he and some associates purchased a hotel and small conference center in Connecticut. It failed. In 1992 he wrote an OpEd for the WSJ making the point he would have been a far better legislator if he had any real concept of the difficulties governments create for business.

It’s been 11 years since I left the U.S. Senate, after serving 24 years in high public office. After leaving a career in politics, I devoted much of my time to public lectures that took me into every state in the union and much of Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.

In 1988, I invested most of the earnings from this lecture circuit acquiring the leasehold on Connecticut’s Stratford Inn. Hotels, inns and restaurants have always held a special fascination for me. The Stratford Inn promised the realization of a longtime dream to own a combination hotel, restaurant and public conference facility — complete with an experienced manager and staff.

In retrospect, I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of such a business, especially during a recession of the kind that hit New England just as I was acquiring the inn’s 43-year leasehold. I also wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made me a better U.S. senator and a more understanding presidential contender.

Today we are much closer to a general acknowledgment that government must encourage business to expand and grow. Bill Clinton, Paul Tsongas, Bob Kerrey and others have, I believe, changed the debate of our party. We intuitively know that to create job opportunities we need entrepreneurs who will risk their capital against an expected payoff. Too often, however, public policy does not consider whether we are choking off those opportunities.

My own business perspective has been limited to that small hotel and restaurant in Stratford, Conn., with an especially difficult lease and a severe recession. But my business associates and I also lived with federal, state and local rules that were all passed with the objective of helping employees, protecting the environment, raising tax dollars for schools, protecting our customers from fire hazards, etc. While I never have doubted the worthiness of any of these goals, the concept that most often eludes legislators is: “Can we make consumers pay the higher prices for the increased operating costs that accompany public regulation and government reporting requirements with reams of red tape.” It is a simple concern that is nonetheless often ignored by legislators. ..

Andrew Malcolm with humor.

Conan: The National Atheist Party has endorsed Barack Obama for President. When told the news, Obama said, “Thank God.”

Week’s Top Tweet: @BlackGirlGOP   So you don’t know how to find birth control pills without a Federal program, but you’re worth equal pay? Walk me through this one.

Mitt Romney at the Al Smith Foundation Dinner: I would never say the media is biased. They have their job. And I have mine. My job is to lay out a positive agenda for the nation. Theirs is to make sure no one else finds out about it.

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Bill Kristol thinks Romney should act like the grown-up in tonight’s debate.

… There’s no need for Mitt Romney to flyspeck Barack Obama’s foreign policy record. Voters are aware of the deficiencies of Obama’s foreign policy.In any case, Obama is not going to win the presidency on the strength of his foreign policy. So Romney doesn’t have to mount a detailed critique of various Obama foreign policies. He has to stipulate that all is not turning out as Obama claimed it would, that all is not well in the state of the world. Then, even more important, Romney has to demonstrate that he can be trusted to steer the American ship of state in a sounder direction and with a steadier hand. This will require setting forth the core principles he will follow—principles of American strength and leadership, of standing by our allies and of standing up to enemies—and then explaining how, in general terms, he will execute a foreign policy based on these principles.

Speaking for America also means speaking -presidentially. It means speaking less as a challenger to the current president, less as a critic and a prosecutor of the current president, and more as .  .  . the next president. Romney should appear by Election Day to be more presidential than the incumbent.

Mitt Romney is a combative and competitive man. But his worst moments in the debates were when he became too pettily combative. His best were when he briefly stipulated the failures of President Obama’s policies, then pivoted to lay out his own agenda for the nation for the next four years and beyond.

It’s possible that adopting what might be called a -pre-presidential rhetoric would deprive Romney of -various small victories on the campaign trail. But the point isn’t to win small debating skirmishes. The point is to win the presidency. The way to win the presidency is to speak for America.

Jennifer Rubin explores the ways the administration went wrong in Libya.

I suspect, although we will know for sure tomorrow night, that President Obama will claim organizational incompetence in connection with acknowledging that the Libya jihadist operation was, well, a planned jihadist operation.

The Associated Press reports how quickly confirmation came that this was not a spontaneous mob action. The AP tells us that within 24 hours of the attack “the CIA station chief in Libya reported to Washington that there were eyewitness reports that the attack was carried out by militants.” However, the report continues, “It is unclear who, if anyone, saw the cable outside the CIA at that point and how high up in the agency the information went. The Obama administration maintained publicly for a week that the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans was a result of the mobs that staged less-deadly protests across the Muslim world around the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks on the U.S.”

This has created a series of contradictions and questions about the president’s handling of the matter. (CNN, among other outlets, had an extensive report.)

Coupled with a New York Times report that a key suspect is sipping a ”strawberry frappe”in plain sight unafraid he might be “hunted down” by the United States. The entire episode threatens to drag down the president on the eve of his final debate.

There are at least three variations of what happened. …

… Pick your favorite theory or a combination thereof. Lay blame at the intelligence community or at the feet of national security adviser Tom Donilon, whose job is to make sure all aspect of national security are in sync. But the president, even if not willfully misrepresenting events to the public, has engaged in a great deal of magical thinking ( from refusing to call jihadists “jihadists” to believing he had al-Qaeda on the run to thinking he could engage the mullahs). His executive skills, which lead to havoc and missed opportunities on the domestic side, can prove deadly in matters of war and peace.

Whatever the explanation for the fiasco, it is hard to muster any confidence that this president has the judgment, will or skills to be a successful commander in chief. He hasn’t been one so far.

A WSJ OpEd explores the theoretical underpinnings of Obama’s foreign policy incompetence.

… Thus the way to defeat the terrorists, according to President Obama, isn’t to counter extremist Islamist ideology but to focus on how the United States, through its actions and delinquencies—its supposed excessive support for Israel, for example, and failure to provide more economic aid—is to blame for the hatred that spawns terrorism.

White House senior director for the National Security Council Samantha Power wrote some years ago, while a HarvardUniversity lecturer, that America should adopt a foreign-policy “doctrine of mea culpa.” This is the frame of mind that President Obama brought to his famous June 2009 Cairo speech in which he suggested that tensions between America and the world’s Muslims are largely America’s fault. It was in that speech that President Obama asserted: “Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism.”

And so we get to the false insistence for day after day that the murderous attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi arose from anger about a YouTube video. Because Mr. Obama misdiagnoses terrorism and extremism, it is not surprising that he failed to recognize their consequences; instead, he reflexively looked in the Benghazi wreckage for a cause that originated in this country.

Such thinking infects many streams of Obama administration foreign policy. If the president were clear-eyed about Islamist extremism, he wouldn’t have cold-shouldered the antiregime demonstrators in Iran in June 2009. He wouldn’t have cut funds for promoting democracy and human rights abroad. He wouldn’t have made a diplomatic representative of Salam al-Marayati, who calls for Hezbollah’s removal from the U.S. terrorist list and has said that “Israel should be put on the suspect list” for the 9/11 attack. And the president wouldn’t have spent more energy denouncing foolish American bigots than condemning organized, anti-American terrorism.

Krauthammer with more on the Benghazi aftermath

On Friday night’s broadcast of “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel, host Sean Hannity asked Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer why the White House waited so long to acknowledge that the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi was a pre-planned terrorist strike.

According to Krauthammer, the Obama administration delayed announcing the news primarily to protect the president’s image on foreign policy.

“They had two reasons to lie,” Krauthammer said. “The first reason was the fact that the Sept. 11 attack occurred a week after they just spent four days in Charlotte dancing on the grave of bin Laden. Remember, this is their single foreign policy achievement. There is none other. Look at Iran Look at Russia. Look at Israel. Look at Syria. Look at the Arab spring. It’s all in collapse. They got one thing to argue, and they sure argued it, where they made the point again and again and again with that ridiculous slogan from Vice President [Biden], ‘bin laden dead, GM alive,’ because what Libya said, what it was proclaiming to the world and the reason the attack was launched in the first place was to say, ‘bin Laden dead, al-Qaida alive.’ That is what has happened as a result of leading from behind in Libya.”

Krauthammer said the problems stemming from the president’s foreign policy extend beyond Libya. …

Ed Morrissey has more on the Rosa Brooks piece in Foreign Policy.

With the last of the three presidential debates taking place in just three days, and with Barack Obama on his heels in polling after the first two, one would expect Obama allies to come out of the woodwork to sing his praises on foreign policy, the topic of Monday night’s forum.  After all, Democrats — including Obama himself — bragged six weeks ago at the Democratic convention that Obama would bury Mitt Romney in this arena.

Instead, former Obama administration Defense undersecretary and State Department adviser Rosa Brooks writes at Foreign Policy that her former boss’ team on foreign policy desperately needs an intervention, and that Obama needs to finally get involved by doing more than giving a few speeches:

“Despite some successes large and small, Obama’s foreign policy has disappointed many who initially supported him. The Middle East initiatives heralded in his 2009 Cairo speech fizzled or never got started at all, and the Middle East today is more volatile than ever. The administration’s response to the escalating violence in Syria has consisted mostly of anxious thumb-twiddling. The Israelis and the Palestinians are both furious at us. In Afghanistan, Obama lost faith in his own strategy: he never fought to fully resource it, and now we’re searching for a way to leave without condemning the Afghans to endless civil war. In Pakistan, years of throwing money in the military’s direction have bought little cooperation and less love.”

Power Line posts on Candy Crowley’s efforts to make sure the slow talking Obama got out the same number of words.

If authentic, CNN’s memo explaining why Candy Crowley permitted President Obama to speak four minutes more than Mitt Romney during Tuesday’s presidential debate is devastating to that network:

On why Obama got more time to speak, it should be noted that Candy and her commission producers tried to keep it even but that Obama went on longer largely because he speaks more slowly. We’re going to do a word count to see whether, as in Denver, Romney actually got more words in even if he talked for a shorter period of time.

One of Crowley’s main jobs as moderator was to enforce the rules that were established for the debate. The rules established time limits, not word limits.

When I debated in high school and college, we had to stop speaking when our time ran out. It didn’t matter how many words we had gotten in (I wish it did when I debated John in practice rounds). When, as I lawyer, I argued cases before Courts of Appeals, I had to sit down when my time was up. It didn’t matter whether my opponent had uttered more words in his or her alloted time.

CNN’s explanation of “why Obama got more time speak” is an admission that Crowley intentionally gave Obama extra time because she thought he hadn’t said enough. It’s also an admission that it doesn’t know whether, objectively, Romney said more than Obama in the same amount of time. CNN hadn’t done a word count when it made the claim, and Crowley certainly hadn’t performed one when she gave Obama more time than Romney.

Crowley was, however, watching the time, as she told the candidates several times. As the CNN memo confirms, she wanted to give Obama more time than Romney.

This is just one reason why Crowley should not be permitted to moderate another high-stakes debate. Indeed, assuming the authenticity of the CNN memo, no one from that outfit should be permitted to do so.

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Charles Krauthammer covers the last debate.

… President Obama gained a narrow victory on points, as borne out by several flash polls. The margin was small, paling in comparison to Romney’s 52-point victory in the first debate.

At Hofstra, Obama emerged from his previous coma to score enough jabs to outweigh Romney’s haymaker, his dazzling takedown of the Obama record when answering a disappointed 2008 Obama voter.

That one answer might account for the fact that, in two early flash polls, Romney beat Obama on the economy by 18 points in one poll, 31 in the other. That being the overriding issue, the debate is likely to have minimal effect on the dynamics of the race.

The one thing Obama’s performance did do is re-energize his demoralized base — the media, in particular. But at a price.

The rub for Obama comes, ironically enough, out of Romney’s biggest flub in the debate, the Libya question. That flub kept Romney from winning the evening outright. But Obama’s answer has left him a hostage to fortune. Missed by Romney, missed by the audience, missed by most of the commentariat, it was the biggest gaffe of the entire debate cycle: Substituting unctuousness for argument, Obama declared himself offended by the suggestion that anyone in his administration, including the U.N. ambassador, would “mislead” the country on Libya.

This bluster — unchallenged by Romney — helped Obama slither out of the Libya question unscathed. Unfortunately for Obama, there is one more debate — next week, entirely on foreign policy. The burning issue will be Libya and the scandalous parade of fictions told by this administration to explain away the debacle. …

Daniel Henninger on the un-president. 

Conventional wisdom holds that Barack Obama “lost” in Denver because he lacked intensity. He brought his A-game to Hofstra this week. There’s still a problem.

The most significant event in the 2012 presidential election remains the Romney miracle bump after the first debate. If Mr. Romney wins the election, analysts and scholars will spend years picking apart the Denver debate the way they have the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate.

Richard Nixon didn’t lose that election because of his five o’clock shadow, and Barack Obama isn’t going to win or lose his presidency because he lacks intensity. What we learned on Long Island is that Mr. Obama lacks something more damaging to an incumbent—a sense of presidential responsibility.

One of the most familiar Obama positions—repeated at every campaign stop—is that he “inherited” a bad economy from George W. Bush. Set aside that whatever the cause, everyone concedes he took over a tough situation. More to the point is Mr. Obama’s compulsive insistence that anything awry in the economy during his first term is “not my fault.”

The Bush-did-it narrative was a banality by the time of the debates. Then came Benghazi. Within days, the political question at the center of the incident was: What did the White House know and when did it know it? No matter one’s politics, it became impossible not to see that the White House was intent on putting “distance” between the president and responsibility for the security breaches. .

Vice President Biden in his debate with Paul Ryan explicitly transferred early responsibility to some offshore cloud called “the intelligence community.” Then this week, Secretary of State Clinton accepted formal responsibility. By now, this had the look of Hillary taking the fall for the president’s candidacy.

So came the moment late in the Hofstra debate when moderator Candy Crowley looked at Mr. Obama and asked: “Does the buck stop with your secretary of state as far as what went on here?”

Staring back, the president clutched for a second. He looked like a fourth-grader being confronted in front of the whole class by Miss Crowley of all our childhood nightmares. That moment revealed the problem: At the core of Barack Obama’s persona and his presidency is a constant instinct to deniability. …

Here’s some change; Orlando Sentinel endorses Romney. Last cycle they supported his predecessor. 

Two days after his lackluster first debate performance, President Barack Obama’s re-election hopes got a timely boost. The government’s monthly jobless report for September showed the nation’s unemployment rate fell below 8 percent for the first time since he took office.

If that were the only metric that mattered, the president might credibly argue that the U.S. economy was finally on the right track. Unfortunately for him, and for the American people, he can’t.

Economic growth, three years into the recovery, is anemic. Family incomes are down, poverty is up. Obama’s Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, highlighted these and other hard truths in this week’s second debate.

Even the September jobless numbers deserve an asterisk, because more than 4 million Americans have given up looking for work since January 2009.

And while the nation’s economy is still sputtering nearly four years after Obama took office, the federal government is more than $5 trillion deeper in debt. It just racked up its fourth straight 13-figure shortfall.

We have little confidence that Obama would be more successful managing the economy and the budget in the next four years. For that reason, though we endorsed him in 2008, we are recommending Romney in this race. …

Same change from Chicago’s Jewish paper; Chicago Jewish Star.

… We like Mr. Romney- and strongly endorse his candidacy for president- because of his moderate, small-government views

We like Mr. Romney because he is able to travel to a hot-bed area like Israel and- openly, unapologetically, and accurately- commend the Jewish state for its achievements, while frankly acknowledging that it is Palestinian recalcitrance which has denied peace to the area.

We like Mr. Romney because he understands the need to create jobs by providing the right environment for the private sector to do so.

Finally, we like Mr. Romney because he, and his running mate Paul Ryan, have announced that they believe in accountability. The buck stops in the Oval Office.

Finally we like Mr. Romney in comparison to his opponent. The administration of Barack Obama has been a failure. …

Instapundit tells us another paper sees the light.

Another large paper abandons Obama in favor of Romney.  The Reno Gazette- Journal, which endorsed Obama in 2008, switches to Romney, telling its readers:

“A vote to re-elect Obama promises four more years of the same. In the two debates between the two candidates so far (a third, on foreign affairs, is scheduled for Monday), the president has shown little understanding of how his failures are affecting the nation, and he hasn’t offered any tangible proposals to change course.”

Precisely.

It is not just the president, house Democrats have significant headwinds also. Josh Kraushaar explains;

One of House Democrats’ favorite talking points this cycle has dwelled on one statistic: the number of Republicans holding seats in districts that President Obama carried in 2008 and the newly created seats that the president won (66).  It’s a reminder of the days of yore, intended to demonstrate that the midterm wave in 2010 was something of a fluke. But the real revelation this year – and why House Democrats aren’t close to netting the 25 seats to take back the majority – is how far the president’s standing has fallen from four years ago.

With Mitt Romney running ahead of Obama nationally, 2004 is shaping up to be a much more instructive baseline for the upcoming elections than Obama’s historic win in 2008. Indeed, only eight House Republicans hold districts that John Kerry won in 2004. That, more than anything, explains how the Democratic expectation of being within striking distance of the majority is falling far short of reality. Call it the 2008 illusion. 

One of the most striking discrepancies between the perception of this year’s electorate and the realities behind it is taking place in Obama’s home state of Illinois, one of the few states gerrymandered to maximize opportunities for Democrats. Four House Republicans – Reps. Joe Walsh, Bobby Schilling, Judy Biggert and Robert Dold — were drawn into districts that Obama carried with at least 60 percent in 2008. In two other districts where the incumbent retired (one Democrat, one Republican), the president carried more than 55 percent of the vote. All of this pointed to significant Democratic gains in the state, providing them a bouncing-off point for a comeback.

That still could happen, but it’s looking a lot less likely several weeks before November. …

All of which makes Jennifer Rubin’s look at Romney’s cabinet timely.

… Both in Massachusetts as governor and in his presidential campaign, Romney has had women as the face of his operation. The campaign communications team is regarded as amiable but lacking the heft, authority and access to the candidate of the type the White House communications director and press secretary would require. Among his campaign advisers, Romney has a fleet of women who are experts with the press (Kerry Healey, Barbara Comstock, who made a splash on MSNBC this week). If he doesn’t select a woman, look for someone with executive-branch experience. Several top Republicans, including one former White House communications person, have floated the name of Tony Fratto, a former Treasury Department spokesman and one of the better Romney surrogates.

For White House chief of staff, Romney could go with a Boston inner-circle member such as Healey or Beth Myers. However, he will have a huge legislative agenda in which inside experience and skills in legislative relations are key. Ed Gillespie, who seized control of the campaign and whipped it into shape when it hit the skids in August, is a natural fit. Portman, who has held two White House posts and has House and Senate experience, should not be overlooked. (He would likely be on the short list for Treasury as well.) From the campaign, Lanhee Chen, policy director, is in line for domestic policy adviser.

What about Democrats? Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who caucuses with the Democrats, is frequently mentioned for the secretary of state job. A bold move would be to select a former or current Democratic senator such as Evan Bayh, John Breaux (an early advocate of premium-support Medicare) or Joe Manchin. Nabbing a top Democrat involved in bipartisan budget deals (Erskine Bowles would be the most daring) would certainly signal that Romney wants to get a deal done.

Romney has consistently surprised media elites and D.C. insiders. Look for his cabinet to be more diverse and interesting than previous GOP cabinets.

Dilbert endorses Romney. He follows a circuitous route but gets there finally. And he makes a few good points about our nutty drug wars.

… For the record, President Obama did not technically kill anyone to get elected. That was just a hypothetical example. But he is putting an American citizen in jail for 10 years to life for operating medical marijuana dispensaries in California where it is legal under state law. And I assume the President – who has a well-documented history of extensive marijuana use in his youth – is clamping down on California dispensaries for political reasons, i.e. to get reelected. What other reason could there be?

One could argue that the President is just doing his job and enforcing existing Federal laws. That’s the opposite of what he said he would do before he was elected, but lying is obviously not a firing offense for politicians.

Personally, I’d prefer death to spending the final decades of my life in prison. So while President Obama didn’t technically kill a citizen, he is certainly ruining this fellow’s life, and his family’s lives, and the lives of countless other minor drug offenders. And he is doing it to advance his career. If that’s not a firing offense, what the hell is?

Romney is likely to continue the same drug policies as the Obama administration. But he’s enough of a chameleon and a pragmatist that one can’t be sure. And I’m fairly certain he’d want a second term. He might find it “economical” to use federal resources in other ways than attacking California voters. And he is vocal about promoting states’ rights, so he’s got political cover for ignoring dispensaries in states where medical marijuana is legal.

So while I don’t agree with Romney’s positions on most topics, I’m endorsing him for president starting today. I think we need to set a minimum standard for presidential behavior, and jailing American citizens for political gain simply has to be a firing offense no matter how awesome you might be in other ways.

If you missed the Al Smith Dinner, Andrew Malcolm has the details.

Regular readers here will know of our fascination with political history, and the lessons it often offers for the present and beyond.

The unlikely and yet strangely appealing coincidental appearance Thursday evening of both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama at the 67th annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York City is too tempting to pass up a recollection of this Smith fellow. And share the candidates’ one-liners in a video below.

The white tie dinner, actually a fundraiser for the charitable foundation established in 1946 by Cardinal Spellman, is a roast. It offers politicians — and in leap years, the presidential candidates — an opportunity to tell jokes written for them to present a more human face to the public.

We have, as usual, the C-SPAN video of the full affair below. We’ve seen Obama perform well at delivering one-liners at gridiron dinners the last few years. But like this fall’s first presidential debate, the Al Smith dinner offered Romney a golden opportunity to explode the myth of his robotic Kelvin-level personality perpetuated by more than $200 million in opposition ads over this past summer.

The fact that the former governor looked surprisingly human, organized, well-versed, direct and tough-speaking back on Oct. 3 is still producing poll benefits for him, as we wrote here Thursday morning.

Romney, like the president, delivered his jokes with deft timing last night. He claimed that he’d been asked how he prepared for the debates: First, he said, he abstained from alcohol for 65 years. He then looked for the biggest straw man he could find–and Big Bird never saw him coming.

Speaking of Sesame Street, Romney said, the night’s dinner was being brought to diners by the letter O and the number 16 trillion. …

Here’s a link to video of the Dinner.

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The NY Observer, the paper for the city’s carriage trade has endorsed Romney.

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. …

… 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.

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.

Toby Harnden has a good summary of President Romney’s second debate with his predecessor.

President Barack Obama needed a game-changing night here in Hampstead, New York and Mitt Romney made sure he didn’t get it. Over the 90 minutes, Obama might have edged it – just – but strategically he did little if anything to blunt Romney’s growing advantage.

Just as Al Gore over-compensated for his poor first debate in 2000, we saw a completely different Obama this time around. He had clearly had some intensive coaching from his debate prep team and was acting under orders to do change everything. Romney strategist Stuart Stevens quipped afterwards that he became ‘Joe Biden without the charm’.

The problem is that the difference was so stark it was jarring. And by throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Romney – we had tax rates, Bain, big bird and the 47 per cent – there was more than a whiff of desperation. While Obama flung mud, Romney was intent on dismantling Obama’s record in office.

 

Romney was awkward on Benghazi, challenging Obama on whether he had described the attack as an ‘act of terror’ without being completely sure of his ground. And Obama got in a good retort when Romney suggested the president’s pension contained foreign investments, shooting back: ‘I don’t ‘t look at my pension. It’s not as big as yours.’

These were small, tactical victories for Obama though. Although snap polls conducted by CNN gave Obama a win, the underlying numbers for him were bad - 58 to 40 per cent in Romney’s favour on the economy, 49 to 46 per cent on health care, 51 to 44 per cent on taxes, 59 to 36 per cent on the deficit.

What matters in a presidential debate is not who is declared the victor on the night but how the two performances change the landscape of the race.

If this had been the first debate then Obama would in all likelihood not be in the perilous danger he now faces of being a one-term president. But it wasn’t the first – it was effectively a do-over and one that will not erase the memory of a man in Denver who made no attempt to defend his record and was steamrollered by Romney. …

David Harsanyi says once again Obama’s record wins a debate for President Romney.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney couldn’t match his soaring first debate performance in a rematch with Barack Obama … but considering it was often a two-on-one, he didn’t do that poorly either.

And after taking a drubbing in the first presidential debate, a re-energized President Barack Obama vowed to bring passion to HofstraUniversity. He did. Feeling better in the more tranquil altitude of Long Island, the president deployed all his populist hits.

On style points it was close, but it’s unlikely anyone won by a wide enough margin to alter the fundamentals of the race. And as a CBS News snap poll found, 65 percent thought Romney would do a better job on the economy and only 34 percent believed Obama would – though the president scored a 37 to 30 overall win over Romney, with 33 percent believing it was a tie.

A big storyline for conservatives was moderator Candy Crowley, who injected herself into the mix to aid Obama. But a bigger story should be how she used a contrived Townhall setting to pick predominately slanted and loaded questions about the “evils” of guns, unfair pay practices and a mass imagined “outsourcing” of American jobs from our cast of allegedly undecided voters. Almost all questions played to Obama’s advantage, though few were especially relevant to this election. …

Megan McArdle says Obama is not running on anything but, “I’m not Romney.”

… This is really fairly remarkable.  Lots of presidential candidates have run on a platform of Not The Incumbent, but Obama may be the first to define himself entirely as Not the Challenger.   One of Romney’s pollsters suggested to USA Today that this has been a costly decision, as the Mitt Romney people are seeing in the debates doesn’t look much like the horrific, granny-killing, woman-hating GOP monster that Obama has been running against.  Which may be why the gender gap, which has been giving Obama a big advantage, has started to close:  

“In general, women tend to be later decision-makers than men and the Obama campaign has gone out of their way to run a negative campaign against Governor Romney among women,” Newhouse says. “The first debate had a significant impact on these voters as they watched it and Governor Romney appeared nothing like the candidate that was essentially a caricature in the advertising by the Obama campaign. It’s these voters who began to realize that the picture being painted of him was not reality.”  

Of course, this is Romney’s campaign talking, so take that with a big grain of salt.  However, I suspect that the core implication is correct:  Obama is not going to make it across the finish line solely on the basis of who he isn’t. …

The Economist reviews a new book on the AustrianSchool of free-market economics.

HOW did a few Viennese economists persuade a grocer’s daughter, a former film star and Europe’s greatest chicken farmer to unravel 40 years of state expansion? How did a group of men dismissed as cranks and called neoliberals change world politics for good? Daniel Stedman Jones is the latest writer to tackle the issue. His response is finer than most.

Neoliberalism originated in Austria. As governments fattened in Britain and America in the 1940s, three men started a lonely battle against the new collective politics. Karl Popper, a philosopher and ex-communist, criticised thinkers from Plato to Marx who valued the collective over the individual. Ludwig von Mises, an economist and former left-winger, said no bureaucracy had the means to restrain itself. Friedrich Hayek said central planning was impossible, because no person, however clever, knew what people wanted.

Mr Stedman Jones teases out the professorial squabbles. Hayek and Mises wanted their message to be radical. Popper sought to woo as many as possible, even liberals and socialists. No hardliner, Popper later saw flaws in market ideology, comparing it to a religion. Hayek, ever the Utopian, pressed ahead. He started the Mont Pelerin Society to foster his ideas. Thus was neoliberalism founded. One hitch with writing about it is that the word is frequently misused today. Leftists use “neoliberal” to describe people whom they essentially do not like. Mr Stedman Jones seems to think the word should not be ditched; the original pugilists against state control happily went by that name.

Milton Friedman, a Chicago economist who headed the second wave of state-bashers, preferred the word “neoliberal” in a 1951 essay entitled, “Neoliberalism and Its Prospects”. …