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Jennifer Rubin sums up last night.

… On assault weapons, neither made a pitch for gun control. Romney was able to turn the conversation to families, schools and parents as well as bipartisanship. He also got in a slam on Fast and Furious.

On outsourcing, Romney reverted to explainer-in-chief, making a case for making the United States attractive to business and throwing in some China bashing.

On how they were mischaracterized, Romney assured people that he cares about the whole country. Obama launched a belated attack on the 47 percent.

On style, Romney was generally more commanding throughout and at his best when explaining policies. He faltered on Libya, perhaps surprised to have a layup handed to him. Obama was feistier but at times strained and grasped to intervene.

Crowley was generally competent and kept things moving, but her taking sides on the Libya question was a rare and noticeable breach in moderator etiquette. At times, both candidates tried to push her around, usually to no avail.

Winners: Romney (overall a draw, so he prevents a change in momentum), especially his answers on energy, the Obama record, his pivot to families and schools on the gun question and his answer on hiring women.

Losers: Romney’s Libya answer, the myth of undecided voters (nearly all of the questioners had an ax to grind), Obama supporters who were hoping for a change in momentum.

Just in time for last night’s debate Michigan Capitol Confidential has the story of the latest Obama funded company to go bankrupt.

Electric car battery-maker A123 Systems has filed for bankruptcy, according to Bloomberg News.

The company was promoted heavily by President Barack Obama and Michigan politicians and received hundreds of millions of dollars through federal “stimulus” and Michigan Economic Development Corp. programs. Earlier this year, Michigan Capitol Confidential uncovered a video of these politicians promising “hundreds” and “thousands” of jobs – the video was eventually taken down by the MEDC but saved by CapCon.

Despite known financial trouble, just a few months ago A123 awarded sweetened severance packages to its top executives. From CapCon:

“Vice President and General Manager of Energy Solutions Group Robert Johnson, for example, would see his severance increase an extra $200,000 from the agreement, boosting it from $400,000 to $600,000. Johnson’s base salary is $400,000 this year, up 21 percent from his 2011 base salary of $331,250. That raise is consistent with a pattern of large pay increases top executives at A123 Systems have received.”

In sum: The president of the United States, Michigan’s former governor, the state’s two U.S. senators and the U.S. Secretary of Energy promised thousands of jobs from a company that in a mere two years went bankrupt. Despite a bankruptcy or buyout predicted by outside observers, the company continued to reward its top executives while laying off most of its workforce.

Taxpayers should not be surprised: This is only the latest example where political calculations trumped market ones. Only government bureaucrats spending other people’s money would think this was a good investment.

Mark Steyn visits Benghazi.

“The entire reason that this has become the political topic it is, is because of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.”

Thus, Stephanie Cutter, President Obama’s deputy campaign manager, speaking on CNN about an armed attack on the 9/11 anniversary that left a U.S. consulate a smoking ruin and killed four diplomatic staff, including the first American ambassador to be murdered in a third of a century. To discuss this event is apparently to “politicize” it and to distract from the real issues the American people are concerned about. For example, Obama spokesperson Jen Psaki, speaking on board Air Force One on Thursday:

“There’s only one candidate in this race who is going to continue to fight for Big Bird and Elmo, and he is riding on this plane.”

She’s right! The United States is the first nation in history whose democracy has evolved to the point where its leader is provided with a wide-body transatlantic jet in order to campaign on the vital issue of public funding for sock puppets. Sure, Caligula put his horse in the Senate, but it was a real horse. At OhioStateUniversity, the rapper will.i.am introduced the President by playing the Sesame Street theme tune, which, oddly enough, seems more apt presidential walk-on music for the Obama era than “Hail To The Chief.

Obviously, Miss Cutter is right: A healthy mature democracy should spend its quadrennial election on critical issues like the Republican Party’s war on puppets rather than attempting to “politicize” the debate by dragging in stuff like foreign policy, national security, the economy and other obscure peripheral subjects. But, alas, it was her boss who chose to “politicize” a security fiasco and national humiliation in Benghazi. At 8.30 p.m., when Ambassador Stevens strolled outside the gate and bid his Turkish guest good night, the streets were calm and quiet. At 9.40 p.m., an armed assault on the compound began, well-planned and executed by men not only armed with mortars but capable of firing them to lethal purpose – a rare combination among the excitable mobs of the Middle East. There was no demonstration against an Islamophobic movie that just got a little out of hand. Indeed, there was no movie protest at all. Instead, a U.S. consulate was destroyed and four of its personnel were murdered in one of the most sophisticated military attacks ever launched at a diplomatic facility.

Looks like the main stream media won’t be able to drag the president across the finish line this time. Howard Fineman starts the excuse machine. 

Last spring a leading Democrat in the Hispanic community begged top officials in President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign to find at least one new, inspiring idea for the 2012 campaign.

It didn’t have to be costly, this adviser said, just something to project optimism and a crusading sense of novelty into what, even at that time, was a nasty, essentially defensive campaign against Mitt Romney.

Obama officials hinted — but didn’t quite promise — that they would unveil a new proposal at the Democratic convention in Charlotte.

The convention came and went. Nothing.

As the polls and Electoral College map have tightened in the last two weeks, some Democrats privately are second-guessing “Chicago,” aka the Obama high command, on everything from basic strategic doctrine to diplomatic relations with Capitol Hill.

If the president ends up losing the race to Romney, here are some of the reasons — in addition to the lack of a fresh second-term agenda — that Democrats will eventually, but certainly, cite in public: …

Late Night Humor with A. Malcolm.

Fallon: Debate polls show Obama trailing Romney by one point. One point. Or as it’s also known, “The thing Obama failed to make during his first debate.”

Letterman: These debates are supposed to appeal to Americans in the working class. America still has a working class? I don’t think so.

Fallon: Did you see last night? One QVC saleswoman fainted on-air. Her co-host kept talking like everything was fine. So, one person unconscious, the other kept talking, just like the first presidential debate.

Tweet of the Week: @TheTransom; What really hurt Obama was the format of the debate, where he had to talk to Romney about stuff.

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Niall Ferguson posts on the VP debate.

… Last year, in the heyday of Occupy Wall Street, it was all about the 1 percent and the 99 percent. But now Democrats want to make membership of the 47 percent a badge of honor.

This language of percentiles strikes me as transitional. Americans have never been comfortable with the language of class—hence the strange phenomenon that all candidates, including both Biden and Ryan, now claim to represent the middle class. But the voters have absorbed the idea of politics as a zero-sum game, in which resources are redistributed through the systems of taxation and welfare—hence all the percents.

Yet the reality is that the real distributional issue the country faces is not between percentiles but between generations. As Paul Ryan put it in a powerful peroration, which temporarily silenced the ranting to his right, “A debt crisis is coming. We can’t keep spending and borrowing like this. We can’t keep spending money we don’t have.”

You don’t need to take this from Paul Ryan. In its latest “World Economic Outlook,” the International Monetary Fund points out that the U.S. public debt now exceeds 100 percent of GDP. The last time debt was this high, the IMF shows, the results were an “unexpected burst of inflation” and policies of “financial repression.” But that combination doesn’t look likely today—which means the debt is going to be around for years to come. More importantly, in the absence of the kind of reforms of Medicare, Social Security, and the tax system that Paul Ryan has long advocated, it’s going to keep on growing.

Already a staggering $16 trillion, the debt represents nothing less than a vast claim by the generation currently retired or about to retire on their children and grandchildren. …

William McGurn looks forward to tonight’s debate in light of the last between President Romney and his predecessor.

… Some 67 million Americans were watching on TV. What they saw was the scene from the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy’s dog pulls back the curtain to reveal there is no wizard at all, just a man from the Midwest who pumped himself up into something far beyond his mortal self—and got the whole of Oz to believe it.

Yes, we had earlier glimpses that Mr. Obama might not be all he has pretended. We saw how quickly he becomes irritated whenever an interviewer departs from the full fawn, such as when a Dallas TV reporter corrected him about his margin of defeat in Texas in the last presidential election. We’ve even seen the occasional lampoon, such as the 2008 Saturday Night Live skit satirizing how journalists who went hard on Hillary Clinton during Democratic debates served up softballs to Mr. Obama.

These, however, were only moments. They were nothing like the 90 minutes of presidential incoherence in Denver and the outrage of liberals who now hail Joe Biden for his savvy—not to mention the days of pointed, sustained Obama ridicule on late-night TV that, for the first time, laughed at the president rather than with him.

In the two remaining debates, Mr. Obama will surely be more assertive, more competitive, and more engaged than he was in round one. But this time the curtain has been pulled back and the aura is gone. That means Mr. Obama’s Republican opponent—for the first time in two presidential contests—will finally be contesting a mere mortal, not a wizard of his own Oz.

Frank Rich writes in the NY Magazine about the eventual triumph of the tea parties. Yes, that’s right. The liberal Rich says the right in the U. S. will not be denied. Here is the sub-title; “This is a nation that loathes government and always has. Liberals should not be deluded: The Goldwater revolution will ultimately triumph, regardless of what happens in November.” There is much to dislike here, but it is interesting to see our aspirations treated with so much distaste.

Were the 2012 campaign a Hitchcock movie, Mitt Romney would be the MacGuffin—a device that drives a lot of plot gyrations but proves inconsequential in itself. Then again, Barack Obama could be, too. Our down-to-the-wire presidential contest is arguably just a narrative speed bump in the scenario that has been gathering steam throughout the Obama presidency: the resurgence of the American right, the most determined and coherent political force in America. No matter who is elected president, what Romney calls severe conservatism will continue to consolidate its hold over one of our two major parties. And that party is hardly destined for oblivion. There’s a case to be made that a tea-party-infused GOP will have a serious shot at winning future national elections despite the widespread liberal belief (which I have shared) that any party as white, old, and male as the Republicans is doomed to near or complete extinction by the emerging demographics of 21st-­century America.

But isn’t the tea party yesterday’s news, receding into the mists of history along with its left-wing doppelgänger, Occupy Wall Street? So it might seem. It draws consistently low poll numbers, earning just a 25 percent approval rating in a Wall Street Journal–NBC News survey in September. The tea-party harbinger from 2008, Sarah Palin, and the bomb throwers who dominated the primary process of 2012, led by the congressional tea-party caucus leader Michele Bachmann, were vanquished and lost whatever national political clout they had, along with much of their visibility (even on Fox News). So toxic is the brand that not one of the 51 prime-time speakers at the GOP convention in Tampa dared speak its name, including such tea-party heartthrobs as Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. Scott Brown, who became an early tea-party hero for unexpectedly taking Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in 2010, has barely alluded to the affiliation since.

All this evidence is misleading. As one conservative commentator, Doug Mataconis of Outside the Beltway, wrote during the GOP convention, it means nothing that Republican leaders don’t mention the tea party anymore. “In reality, of course the Republican party of 2012 is pretty much the tea party at this point,” he wrote. “One need only look at the party platform and listen to what the speakers are actually saying to recognize that fact.” He saw the tea party as “likely to see its influence increase after the November elections regardless of what happens to the Romney/Ryan ticket”—and rightly so. Though the label itself had to be scrapped—it has been permanently soiled by images of mad-dog protesters waving don’t tread on me flags—its ideology is the ideology of the right in 2012. Its adherents will not back down or fade away, even if Obama regroups and wins the lopsided Electoral College victory that seemed in his grasp before the first debate. If anything, the right will be emboldened to purge the GOP of the small and ideologically deviant Romney claque that blew what it saw as a “historic” opportunity to deny a “socialist” president a second term.

History tells us that American liberals have long underestimated the reach and resilience of the right, repeatedly dismissing it as a lunatic fringe and pronouncing it dead only to watch it bounce back stronger after each setback. …

John Tierney writes for the NY Times on the jump from 128,000 feet.

A man fell to Earth from more than 24 miles high Sunday, becoming the first human to break the sound barrier under his own power — with some help from gravity.

The man, Felix Baumgartner, an Austrian daredevil, made the highest and fastest jump in history after ascending by a helium balloon to an altitude of 128,100 feet. As millions around the world experienced the vertiginous view from his capsule’s camera, which showed a round blue world surrounded by the black of space, he stepped off into the void and plummeted for more than four minutes, reaching a maximum speed measured at 833.9 miles per hour, or Mach 1.24.

He broke altitude and speed records set half a century ago by Joe Kittinger, now 84, a retired Air Force colonel whose reassuring voice from mission control guided Mr. Baumgartner through tense moments. Engineers considered aborting the mission when Mr. Baumgartner’s faceplate began fogging during the ascent, but he insisted on proceeding and made plans for doing the jump blind.

That proved unnecessary, but a new crisis occurred early in the jump when he began spinning out of control in the thin air of the stratosphere — the same problem that had nearly killed Mr. Kittinger a half-century earlier. But as the atmosphere thickened, Mr. Baumgartner managed to stop the spin and fall smoothly until he opened his parachute about a mile above the ground and landed smoothly in the New Mexico desert. …

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Charles Krauthammer has more on Romney’s first debate.

No mystery about the trajectory of this race. It was static for months as President Obama held a marginal lead. Then came the conventions. The Republicans squandered Tampa; the Democrats got a 3- to 4-point bounce out of Charlotte.

And kept it. Until the first debate. In 90 minutes, Mitt Romney wiped out the bump — and maybe more.

Democrats are shellshocked and left searching for excuses. Start with scapegoats: the hapless John Kerry, Obama’s sparring partner in the practice debates, for going too soft on the boss; then the debate moderator for not exerting enough control.

The Obama campaign’s plea that the commander in chief could find no shelter under Jim Lehrer’s desk did not exactly bolster Obama’s standing. Moreover, the moderator’s job is not to control the flow of argument, but to simply enforce an even time split.

Lehrer did. In fact, Obama took more time than Romney — 41 / 2 minutes more — while actually speaking 500 fewer words. Romney knew what he thought and said it. Obama kept looking around hoping for the words to come to him. They didn’t.

After the scapegoats came the excuses. …

Streetwise Professor explains Iraq and “sunk costs.”

Regardless of what you think about the prudence-or even sanity-of invading Iraq in 2003, if you are rational you have to understand that sunk costs are sunk.  You can’t undo the past.  You can’t bring back those who died in 2003-2008.  You can’t retrieve the hundreds of billions spent.

So when becoming president in 2009, the arguments for or against invading Iraq and fighting the insurgency in the years following should have been beyond irrelevant in determining the correct policy going forward.  By 2009, post-surge, Iraq was relatively stable.  It was-is-the keystone of the Middle East.  It borders Iran.  It is vulnerable to Iranian influence, and has represents a threat to Iran.  It has large oil production, but its reserves are immense, making its future potential even greater.  So even if the cost of invasion and fighting 5+ years of civil war were not worthwhile in retrospect, those costs were sunk in 2009.  The cost of maintaining a military presence going forward would have been relatively modest, and the potential geopolitical and strategic benefits would have been great.  Perhaps not so great as to justify the expenditures in life and treasure 2003-2008, but those costs were sunk by 2009.

But Obama was so obsessed with Iraq that he made withdrawal-on any terms-a priority.  So he bugged out, leaving a vacuum in Iraq.  A vacuum that local radicals and Iran have filled.  So now Iraq permits overflights of Iranian weapons to Syria, and supplies fuel to Syria.  The country is being pulled into the Iranian orbit.

And Obama thinks this is a marvelous accomplishment.  A major part of his legacy.”

The NY Times finally figures out Benghazi is going to be part of this campaign.

The Obama administration’s handling of the Libya attack has opened a new front in the presidential campaign just weeks before Election Day as Republicans seize on it to question the president’s performance as commander in chief.

The dispute over the episode escalated after Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said during the debate on Thursday night that “we weren’t told” that Americans in Libya wanted security bolstered, despite Congressional testimony that the administration had turned down requests. Mitt Romney’s campaign on Friday accused the vice president of trying “to mislead the American public.”

The conflicting statements over security came after the administration’s fluctuating assessments of the attack on the diplomatic post in Benghazi that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. For President Obama, who had counted on foreign policy as a political strength, the issue has put him on the defensive, while Republicans who had focused on the economy now see a chance to undercut his credibility with the public on national security.

In a sense, the issue goes beyond foreign policy, which has not been a top priority for voters this year, polls show. Instead, Republicans are framing the matter as a larger indictment of Mr. Obama’s leadership and transparency, presenting him as unable to create enough jobs at home or protect American interests abroad, while trying to shift the blame to others. Democrats counter by accusing Republicans of politicizing a national tragedy.

Mr. Romney wasted little time in criticizing the vice president for contradicting testimony about security concerns in Libya. “He’s doubling down on denial,” Mr. Romney said during a rally in Richmond, Va. “And we need to understand exactly what happened, as opposed to just having people brush this aside. When the vice president of the United States directly contradicts the testimony, sworn testimony, of State Department officials, American citizens have a right to know just what’s going on, and we’re going to find out.”

Two officials in charge of security in Libya told a House committee this week that they asked for more security officers but were rebuffed by the State Department. Asked about that on Thursday night during his debate with Representative Paul D. Ryan, Mr. Romney’s running mate, Mr. Biden said: “We weren’t told they wanted more security again. We did not know they wanted more security again.”

The White House tried to explain Mr. Biden’s comments by saying that diplomatic security requests were handled by the State Department, not the White House. …

Matthew Continetti on Ryan’s debate. 

Hold it, I’m confused. I watched all of the vice presidential debate last night, and someone did not show up. Vice President Joe Biden was there—how could one miss him, with all the grinning, grunting, interrupting, and sneering. But where was the Ayn Rand-worshiping, rape-redefining, fanatically exercising zealot who wants to throw grandmothers off of cliffs and whose budget plan is, according to the president, “thinly veiled Social Darwinism” that is “antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility”? That Paul Ryan was nowhere to be found.

What America saw instead was a young and likable and knowledgeable conservative worried about the current trajectory of fiscal, monetary, foreign, and social policy. Where Biden harrumphed, Ryan calmly litigated President Obama’s failed record. Twice in eight days, the caricatures against which President Barack Obama and Biden are purporting to run have been exposed as grotesque exaggerations. The liberal attempt to frighten America with the illusory specter of an extremist Republican ticket dissolved on first contact with, well, the actual ticket. The reality principle asserted itself once again. We have an open race.

Perceptions matter. Why did 67 million people watch the first debate? One reason may have been that Americans, open to an alternative to the incumbent, wanted to know who the Republican nominee actually was. They only had vague knowledge of Mitt Romney going into the Denver bout—and their impression was not favorable.

What they knew was largely limited to the messages of $217 million in negative advertising from Obama and his allies: Romney was rich, secretive, out of touch, paying little in taxes, hiding his tax returns, stashing money in the Cayman Islands, singing out of tune, shipping jobs overseas with little thought of the lives he affected, dismissing out of hand 47 percent of the country, in favor of raising middle-class taxes and health-care costs for seniors, and waging a “war on women” with Todd Akin to “turn back the clock” on women’s rights. …

Here’s Howie Carr’s latest on Scott Brown and the harpy.

… One candidate has $14.7 million worth of investments, but when asked on MSNBC which equities she owned, insisted that she didn’t have any stocks, only “mutual funds.”

One candidate couldn’t name the two years the Red Sox won the World Series in this century, and predicted that the team would win 90 games this year. (They won 69.)

One candidate has a daughter who’s trying to make it as a singer. The other candidate has a daughter who runs a George Soros-backed organization that sued the state to send out prepaid voter registration forms to every welfare recipient in Massachusetts, including illegal aliens.

One candidate has supporters who in Dorchester made Indian war whoops and tomahawk chops like Jane Fonda used to do at Braves’ games, after which he was denounced for allowing “hate speech.” Another candidate’s supporters made anti-gay slurs at a supporter of the other candidate. The Globe pooh-poohed that incident as “inappropriate.”

One candidate has season tickets to the ballet, is a “longtime” member of the Museum of Fine Arts, and once described growing African violets as one of her “favorite pastimes.”

Ask yourself this: Does Mass-achusetts really need a senator who’s even phonier than John Kerry?

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Mort Zuckerman explains why the country is tired of Obama.

When you accumulate some of the adjectives from the pundits, the media, and other appraisals that were not from the right but from baffled sympathizers and centrists, there is no doubt that President Barack Obama clearly lost the debate this week, as a matter of both substance and tone. Take your pick from the river of insults: listless, meandering, lazy, dull-brained, long-winded, languid, and flaccid were just some of the epithets from the pundits. Even the New York Times opined that “He lost his competitive edge.” The worst that Mitt Romney’s relatively few critics could come up with was that his tax cut was unaffordable.

All Obama could do was repeat the charge, and Romney was able to make the pledge that he would not reduce revenues through his tax cut because they would be offset by the elimination of special write-offs and loopholes. What was remarkable was that Romney, who has been in everyone’s dog house for months with an erratic campaign, has suddenly assumed the stature of a president. He was warm, articulate, logical, informed, forceful, and most important, presidential. He was more engaged, more detailed, more decisive, more animated, more aggressive in attack, and more robust in defense than the president, who was lackadaisical and without mastery of the facts or the ability to respond to what was put forth by his challenger.

But what is at issue isn’t debating style, questions of posture and demeanor, “gotcha moments,” or “You’re no Jack Kennedy” zingers. The fundamental issue for America is that we seem to have lost our way and we haven’t found it after four years of the Obama administration, thanks to a leadership so lacking that the American dream now seems to be a chimera of nostalgia. The president appears to have lost his intellectual interest.

It is all very well to raise a sword and cry “Forward!” but to what? …

Noemie Emery with the before and after of the great debate. 

It was in Denver one week ago that the long-running romance between Barack Obama and the national press — aka the “Slobbering Love Affair,” as Bernard Goldberg put it — hit the wall. The motel bill, unpaid these many long months and ages, at long last came due.

It had been the real thing, not a commonplace fling with your generic Democrat, but the love of a lifetime, the genuine article, the sum of all dreams: He was not just a Democrat, he was also a liberal. He was not just a liberal, he also biracial, also multinational; also hip, cool, and clever. He was themselves as they wanted to be. Like them, he was gifted at writing and talking (and, as it turned out, not much beyond that), like them, he stood up for Metro America; like them, he viewed the people outside it with a not-very-measured disdain. “I divide people into people who talk like us and people who don’t talk like us,” said David Brooks, speaking for all of them. “You could see him as a NewRepublic writer … he’s more talented than anyone in my lifetime … he IS pretty dazzling when he walks into a room.” …

… Obama had seen that his friends would protect him, and so he believed he could mail it in Wednesday, but this was the venue that could not be spun. No filter. No edits. No choosing what to put in or leave out. No shaping of the story. Just the story itself, rolled out in real time, sans narration, before 70 million American voters, undoing six years of hype and hysterics. It revealed one small, not all that keen academic, having been inflated by the narrators beyond all recognition, dissolving before everyone’s eyes.

Jack Welch explains why the employment numbers are open to debate.

… The unemployment data reported each month are gathered over a one-week period by census workers, by phone in 70% of the cases, and the rest through home visits. In sum, they try to contact 60,000 households, asking a list of questions and recording the responses.

Some questions allow for unambiguous answers, but others less so. For instance, the range for part-time work falls between one hour and 34 hours a week. So, if an out-of-work accountant tells a census worker, “I got one baby-sitting job this week just to cover my kid’s bus fare, but I haven’t been able to find anything else,” that could be recorded as being employed part-time. 

The possibility of subjectivity creeping into the process is so pervasive that the BLS’s own “Handbook of Methods” has a full page explaining the limitations of its data, including how non-sampling errors get made, from “misinterpretation of the questions” to “errors made in the estimations of missing data.”

Bottom line: To suggest that the input to the BLS data-collection system is precise and bias-free is—well, let’s just say, overstated.

Even if the BLS had a perfect process, the context surrounding the 7.8% figure still bears serious skepticism. Consider the following:

In August, the labor-force participation rate in the U.S. dropped to 63.5%, the lowest since September 1981. By definition, fewer people in the workforce leads to better unemployment numbers. That’s why the unemployment rate dropped to 8.1% in August from 8.3% in July.

Meanwhile, we’re told in the BLS report that in the months of August and September, federal, state and local governments added 602,000 workers to their payrolls, the largest two-month increase in more than 20 years. And the BLS tells us that, overall, 873,000 workers were added in September, the largest one-month increase since 1983, during the booming Reagan recovery.

These three statistics—the labor-force participation rate, the growth in government workers, and overall job growth, all multidecade records achieved over the past two months—have to raise some eyebrows. There were no economists, liberal or conservative, predicting that unemployment in September would drop below 8%. …

Michael Barone wonders why it is a president said to be a constitutional scholar is so quick to skirt the country’s laws. 

“The Illegal-Donor Loophole” is the headline of a Daily Beast story by Peter Schweizer of the conservative Government Accountability Institute and Peter Boyer, former reporter at the New Yorker and the New York Times.

The article tells how Obama.com, a website owned by an Obama fundraiser who lives in China but has visited the Obama White House 11 times, sends solicitations mostly to foreign email addresses and links to the Obama campaign website’s donation page.

The Obama website, unlike those of most campaigns, doesn’t ask for the three- or four-digit credit card verification number. That makes it easier for donors to use fictitious names and addresses to send money in.

Campaigns aren’t allowed to accept donations from foreigners. But it looks like the Obama campaign has made it easier for them to slip money in. How much foreign money has come into the Obama campaign? Schweizer and Boyer say there’s no way to know.

The campaign, as my former boss pollster Peter Hart likes to say, always reflects the candidate. A campaign willing to skirt the law or abet violations of it reflects a candidate who, as president, has been doing the same thing.

Examples abound. Take the WARN Act, which requires employers to give a 60-day notice of layoffs. It was sponsored and passed by Democrats.

The WARN Act requires defense contractors to give notice on Nov. 2 of layoffs that will be necessary on Jan. 3 when the sequestration law requires big cutbacks in defense spending.

The administration has asked companies not to send out the notices. And it has promised to pay companies’ WARN Act fines. Why the solicitude? The warnings could cost Obama Virginia’s 13 electoral votes.

When did Congress give presidents the power to suspend operation of this law? What law authorizes the government to pay the fines of those who violate the law?

Or consider the welfare waivers …

Looking forward to the Romney administration, Jennifer Rubin speculates about the people who fill two important jobs.

There are four weeks to go in the presidential race and anyone who tells you they know who will win is a fool. But as the possibility of a Romney presidency becomes more likely, it is worth considering the sorts of people who would fill out his administration. I’ll for now focus on perhaps the two most important jobs. …

Media-Ite with a short on the reaction to Joe Biden from a grown-up liberal.

Morning Joe host Mika Brzezinski disagreed with guest Tom Brokaw on Friday morning when discussing the previous night’s debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan.

Both Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough agreed that “to know Joe is to love him,” despite poll results pointing to the contrary. Brokaw, however, approached the Vice President’s performance a bit more critically, saying that he simply “can’t contain himself” before pointing to the fact that Biden continued to smirk or laugh while he and Ryan discussed serious, solemn issues like Iran and Libya.

“I don’t think he was laughing,” said Brzezinski, but rather showed that he was “amused” at Ryan’s approach to these issues.

It’s about tone, Brokaw argued, regardless of one’s level of amusement, and he maintained that Biden’s demeanor should have been “dialed down” during discussion about critical, serious matters.

Kim Strassel has thoughts on Biden.

… the Biden performance was nothing more than a nastier repeat of Barack Obama’s event in Denver. It wasn’t that the president had an off night or altitude sickness (as suggested by Al Gore). Mr. Obama’s problem last week was that he didn’t have answers to Mitt Romney’s challenges. In the aftermath of a debate, if your campaign’s main theme is Big Bird, you have a problem.

Within the first few minutes of this debate, it what clear that Mr. Biden’s one and only strategy was to wrap as many scare quotes around the Romney-Ryan team as humanly possible in a limited time period. In his first answer in the domestic policy section, Mr. Biden packed so many diatribes into his opening lines—Mr. Romney would let Detroit go “bankrupt”; he’d let mortgage owners sink; he’d throw the elderly under the bus; he didn’t care about he 47%; he was flacking for millionaires—that the worry was he’d run out of breath. He didn’t.

Amid it all, too, were the constant quips designed to ram home the Obama campaign’s recent desperate strategy to paint the Romney-Ryan campaign as “liars” and flip-floppers. Mr. Biden never used that word itself, but his intent was clear. “Malarkey,” he stated. “Incredible,” he snorted. “Not true, not true,” he insisted. “I may be mistaken: [Romney] changes his mind so often, I may be wrong,” he explained. “I never say anything I don’t mean,” he said by way of contrast. And then said it again, in case anyone missed it.

Not that Mr. Biden didn’t offer plenty to keep honest fact-checkers busy, were they inclined to investigation. He repeated the utterly discredited Obama line that Mr. Romney intends to cut taxes to the tune of $5 trillion. He misrepresented a Ryan plan to reform Medicare—a plan that isn’t even part of the Romney-Ryan agenda. He once again made the argument that somehow it was the war in Iraq and the Bush tax cuts that put the economy into recession—rather than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and subprime mortgages, and easy Federal Reserve money.

Yet the moments of policy discussion—such as they were—were largely obscured by the bullying Biden. …

Telegraph, UK – Where Scotland has gone wrong.

In 1926 my father, aged 19, left an Aberdeenshire farm to be a rubber planter in Malaya. Apart from a year back home after enduring a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, he didn’t return to live in Scotland until he was almost 70. He was dismayed by what he found. It seemed to him that the Scots were no longer the hard-working, energetic and self-reliant people they had been in his youth. Instead they were given to self-pity and the belief that the world owed them a living and the state would provide.

There were exceptions, of course. The oil-rich north-east was not short of people starting their own businesses. But in general he believed that the Scots were sunk in a dependency culture, and this depressed and irritated him. He was out of sympathy with modern Scotland, though he was quite typical of his own era, when the Protestant work ethic ruled and the judgment “he’s done well for himself” was an expression of approval.

My father wouldn’t have been surprised by Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Tory leader, asserting that only 12 per cent of Scottish households make a net contribution to the economy, and that Scotland is suffering from the “depression of dependency which has held our country back for so many years”. …

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Out of Boulder comes the updated U of Colorado election forecast.

An update to an election forecasting model announced by two University of Colorado professors in August continues to project that Mitt Romney will win the 2012 presidential election.

According to their updated analysis, Romney is projected to receive 330 of the total 538 Electoral College votes. President Barack Obama is expected to receive 208 votes — down five votes from their initial prediction — and short of the 270 needed to win.

The new forecast by political science professors Kenneth Bickers of CU-Boulder and Michael Berry of CU Denver is based on more recent economic data than their original Aug. 22 prediction. The model itself did not change.

“We continue to show that the economic conditions favor Romney even though many polls show the president in the lead,” Bickers said. “Other published models point to the same result, but they looked at the national popular vote, while we stress state-level economic data.”

While many election forecast models are based on the popular vote, the model developed by Bickers and Berry is based on the Electoral College and is the only one of its type to include more than one state-level measure of economic conditions. They included economic data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. …

Matthew Continetti shows how liberals eat their own kind.

As Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama debated Wednesday evening it was possible to detect, if one was alert, the ground of American politics shift beneath one’s feet. Sometime during the first 45 minutes or so, when it became clear that Romney, not moderator Jim Lehrer, was in command, the tectonic plates of Obama’s ego and of reality crashed together. The tremor that followed was pronounced. What had been to the Democrats and the media an irrevocable fact—that Romney’s campaign was in shambles and Obama’s reelection assured—crashed resoundingly. Like all earthquakes the convulsion produced panic, in this case among liberals. Their response was typical of their kind: They devoured their own.

“A liberal,” said Robert Frost, “is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” Wednesday saw poetic confirmation of his aphorism. Not only was Obama unable to take his own side against Romney; afterwards Democrats and the liberal media could defend neither their fellow partisan Obama nor their colleague Lehrer. The hysterical and self-destructive frenzy that resulted was nothing less than spectacular. Patrons of social media could watch, in real time, as the president’s most ferocious champions realized that the avatar of hope and change could not withstand a direct and withering criticism; could convey only diffidence and contempt and exhaustion when confronted by a talented opponent; and could not possibly live up to the mythological expectations that his devotees had constructed for him.

Liberals hurriedly searched for scapegoats as the edifice collapsed. They closed in on Obama and Lehrer. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on the debate.

It is not surprising that aides would be “shell-shocked,” as the Daily Beast put it, over President Obama’s horrendous performance at the debate. That no one on the left imagined that he would do so poorly tells us much about the Obama bubble and the president’s distorted self-image.

Push back on the excuse narrative just a bit, and you see how attenuated the rationale must become to preserve Obama’s image of the most brilliant man ever to hold the presidency. How can someone supposedly so rhetorically gifted, so smart and so wonkish be stumped, halting and testy? We are told, “Partly lost in the fray was Obama’s history as a good but not necessarily great debater with a style at times nonchalant and diffident.” Such a description attempts to preserves the notion he could do better if he really wanted to. But that’s bizarre, to put it mildly, a confession of arrogance in defense of incompetence.

Truth be told, he gave a rotten convention speech, and his State of the Union addresses have varied from deadly dull ( 2011) to inconsequential (2012). Maybe, he is a one-trick orator, the Meredith Willson of politics. A single speech (with variations thereon) is all he’s got. The “red states-blue states, have hope, and we’re going to reinvent the globe” got him through a 2008 campaign, but it has no place in the repertoire for a sitting president in a reelection campaign. …

Yuval Levin posts on the bizarre Dem debate reaction.

In the days since last week’s presidential debate, the Democrats have fallen into a very peculiar sort of disarray. Four days on, they are still, and apparently on purpose, sustaining the “Romney won big” story by furiously making excuses for Obama’s poor performance. He didn’t do that badly, but listening to Obama himself, his campaign, and his bewildered surrogates the last few days you would think that Obama was utterly destroyed by some kind of evil genius who was equal parts master actor, pathological liar, and bully. You should watch the debate again to see how silly this is. And it’s hard to understand why the Democrats continue to advance this story. I bet that if you polled people today about who won and lost the debate, Obama would do even worse than he did in Wednesday night’s instant polls, thanks to his and his campaign’s continuing self flagellation.

The Democrats also don’t seem to have fully considered what their excuses are communicating about Romney’s agenda. Romney advanced a series of principles and policies in the debate, and rather than argue that these are bad for the country, the Democrats are basically arguing that Romney’s ideas are too good to be true—so good, moderate, and sensible that they couldn’t really be Mitt Romney’s, and therefore that Romney is not telling the truth about his agenda. These charges of dishonesty aren’t just false (though they are false), they’re also downright strange. A Republican candidate stands before 60 million voters and commits to an agenda and his opponent responds that this isn’t really his agenda, and that voters should instead look to Democratic attack ads and liberal think-tank papers to learn what the Republican is proposing. That’s the strategy? …

Dennis Byrne says it looks like Bob Woodward was right.

… Obama’s fatal flaw is not just his policies (as bad as they are), but the fact that he isn’t and never was cut out to be president. He’s not up to it. He’s the kid who got thrown into the pool without knowing how to swim. He lacks the experience, composure and certain qualities of leadership required of a president — qualities that Romney put on display. The pro schools the neophyte.

Bob Woodward described it in his new best-seller, “The Price of Politics,” which detailed the collapse last year of the “grand bargain” on spending and debt. While Woodward found fault with both parties, he held Obama’s insufficiencies mostly responsible for leaving America heading for the fiscal cliff it now faces. Woodward’s book describes an arrogant, withdrawn, indecisive and uncompromising president. These are dispositions that would doom Obama to failure as a private sector boss. And ought to in the public sector. …

It will make your hair hurt, but have a look at Robert Samuelson trying to explain the snarl over the $5 trillion tax cut.

… On taxes, uncertainties abound. If you cut everyone’s tax rates by 20 percent, the rich — with the highest rates and the biggest tax bills — get the biggest breaks. The present top rate of 35 percent drops to 28 percent; the lowest rate falls only from 10 percent to 8 percent. (Each reduction is one-fifth, or 20 percent.) If that were all, Romney’s plan would indeed represent a windfall for the wealthy. Those with annual incomes exceeding $1 million would save an average of $175,000, estimates the Tax Policy Center (TPC), a research group. (By the TPC’s estimates, the 0.8 percent of taxpayers with incomes of more than $500,000 currently pay 28 percent of federal taxes.)

But there’s also Romney’s pledge to recoup losses by trimming tax deductions, credits and other tax breaks. The package would be “revenue neutral.” The tax system would then end up with lower rates, which would arguably spur faster economic growth. Workers and companies would keep more of any increased earnings; they’d have stronger incentives to work and invest. Although it’s contestable, that’s the theory of “tax reform.”

The trouble is that there’s a major snag, the TPC said in an August report. In practice, the tax breaks affecting the rich (generally, those with incomes exceeding $200,000) aren’t sufficient to offset all of their tax savings from lower rates. Achieving revenue neutrality would compel Romney to raise taxes on the middle class — something he has also vowed not to do.

To justify its $5 trillion figure — the estimated tax loss over a decade — the Obama campaign had to cherry-pick Romney’s proposal and the TPC analysis. It had to ignore any revenue raised by reducing tax breaks and assume that, faced with a conflict between the rich and the middle class, Romney would automatically side with the rich — as opposed to shielding the middle class from any tax increase. On Wednesday, Romney promised to protect the middle class.

The TPC report was widely interpreted as saying Romney would have to raise taxes on the middle class. It didn’t, says the TPC’s Howard Gleckman. It simply pointed out that he couldn’t keep all “his ambitious campaign promises.” He’d have to make choices and modifications. So what else is new? …

Mark McKinnon brings an interesting debate perspective.

… Running for president is brutal. It’s like running naked through a cactus patch on fire. The process is designed to crush you and see what you’re made of, for the tests to come in the Oval Office are far more cruel.

But you can never show the pain.

He may not have been in pain at the beginning of the night, but the President Obama who showed up to debate against a trailing Romney did not look as if he wanted to be there. And more than 70 million viewers noticed.

The president came across as tired, confused, and unprepared for battle. He looked older than the man 14 years his senior standing to his right. And he sometimes slouched, standing with one leg bent, either from fatigue, lack of interest or insecurity.

Though Obama spoke for four minutes longer than the challenger, he said less. Mr Hope and Mr Change never made it into the building. And whether it was the thin air of Denver’s high altitude or the president’s thin skin, his face betrayed a peevishness even as he refused to look directly at Romney when challenged.

Romney took command – of the stage, of the debate, and of the evening. He looked and acted presidential.

The former Massachusetts governor was energetic, with both feet planted firmly on the ground. He was aggressive, but always with a smile. And rather than run from criticism of his positions, Romney ran right to them, ticking off crisp, multi-point answers. …

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Jonathan Tobin says Obama’s mojo picked a fine time to leave him. 

The biggest difference between discussing the outcome of a sporting event and a political debate is that the outcome of the former is, or at least ought to be, objectively determined by the score while the latter is, almost by definition, a subjective judgment. Nevertheless, though debates are often muddled affairs with no clear winners or losers, some are fairly clear-cut in their impact. Wednesday night’s set-to between President Obama and Mitt Romney was one such encounter. The left-wing talkers on MSNBC, the establishment types chattering on CNN and the conservatives on Fox News all agreed Romney won hands down. But the post-debate pushback from Democrats has centered not only on disingenuous “fact checking” but on the idea that the debate either didn’t matter much or that the Republican’s superiority was a superficial effect that dissipates on closer inspection. But in this case the liberal spinners have a problem: the audience.

It turns out ratings for this debate went through the roof. The Nielson ratings agency reports that 67.2 million Americans watched the debate on television at home. That’s the second highest audience for such a debate in history (number one was the first debate between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter in 1980). And that doesn’t count those who either watched it in airports, hotels, bars or other venues or the many millions who watched it on their computers, tablets or phones. In other words, the president picked the wrong night to mail in his performance. …

John Podhoretz says it was not a bad night for Obama, but an indefensible bad four years. 

This week’s “Saturday Night Live” had a sketch portraying “Day 3″ of MSNBC’s coverage of “the worst thing that has ever happened anywhere”—the debate on Wednesday night. This brilliant bit of parody (no, my wife doesn’t work there any longer, so this does not require a disclaimer) captured one of the strangest aspects of the liberal response to Barack Obama’s performance: The masochistic insistence on going over and over and over just how bad and awful and terrible Obama was.

But was Obama really that terrible? The argument he was rests on the presumption that he failed to make his case and failed to call Romney out. He did fail at those, but as Yuval Levin argues in today’s must-read blog post, that may be due more to the fact that he doesn’t have a case to make and can’t call Romney out so easily; he’s spent the year running against a caricature of Mitt Romney, not on the grounds that he has a positive agenda for a second term. Romney did not let Obama’s distorted descriptions of his policies go unchallenged, and Obama’s inability to come back at Romney is in part the result that all Obama has are allegations, not substantial criticisms.

There’s a reason why Democrats, liberals, and Obama camp followers are concentrating on the debate. They want to isolate it, scapegoat it, and push it over the cliff. They want to say it was a bad night, an off night, a misfire, a lousy game…because anybody can have one of those. …

Washington Post interviews Jim Lehrer.

Jim Lehrer has a few words in response to those who thought he let President Obama and Mitt Romney ramble on and roll over him in Wednesday’s presidential debate:

“So what?”

The veteran PBS newsman, who was persuaded by the Presidential Debate Commission to moderate his 12th debate — the last one he’ll do, he vows — says the event wasn’t about “control” or the strict enforcement of rules. It was about producing a sharp discussion and substantive contrast between the candidates. Besides, he says, few people seemed to understand that the new format, which divided the discussion into 15 minute segments, was supposed to encourage such exchanges.

In this edited transcript of a phone conversation Friday morning, Lehrer, 78, lays out his thoughts about what went down in Denver the other night.

Question: What was your overall impression of the debate?

Answer: Well, there was a new format, [that has] never been tried before. People have always said what we really ought to have is a more open exchange among the candidates, keep moderators out of it and let the candidates really talk to each other. Well, this was a step toward doing that. And I felt that from that point of view it certainly worked.

Q: Were there drawbacks to it?

A: I had wanted to cover a lot more ground in terms of subjects. …

American Thinker says it’s the sycophantic media that ruined the president.

It’s not an “Incumbent Curse,” as MSNBC would call Obama’s performance at Wednesday’s first presidential debate.  It was not Obama’s fear of coming across as the angry black man, as Michael Eric Dyson surmised, that prevented Obama from driving a strong debate on the issues with Mitt Romney.  And it was not that Mitt Romney has been practicing since June for the debates, per David Axelrod’s analysis.  Nor was it a question of Obama losing the debate stylistically rather than substantively.  And certainly it was not that Mitt Romney was untruthful, thereby catching Obama off-guard.  The fact is that this Obama we saw Wednesday night and have endured for the last four years is a product of our liberal leftist media.

Obama was not ready Wednesday, he has never been ready, and he will never be ready to be the leader this country needs, for he is the first president to have never been vetted.

My own mother observed that “it’s the media’s fault that Obama lost the debate.  Watching the debate reminded me of a child set out on his own after being raised by parents who failed to teach him responsibility and accountability and let the child think that he was above being corrected or disciplined.  This was the time that Chris Matthews could not jump in and tell the people what Obama meant to say.”  Indeed, Obama has been brought up by an adoring and overindulgent liberal media who have coddled him for the last eight years on everything from his appearance to Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, and his caught-on-a-live-microphone secret handshake with Russian President Medvedev, where he promised that he will have “more flexibility after the election” to work with the Russians on missile defense.  Additionally, we have the age-old public displays of media affection, including Dave Brooks’ awe over the crease in Obama’s pants and the “thrill up” Chris Matthews’ leg.  With a sycophantic media like this, who needs accountability? …

James Warren in the Daily Beast interviewed Bill Daley, former Obama chief of staff, pushed out by Valerie Jarrett.

… “What seems to be a victory in optics for Romney may create an opportunity for those people to take a second look. Looking at the polling going into the debate, he needed that,” said Daley, who oversaw Vice President Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign against George W. Bush.

“Opinion is that he had an extremely good night, and that is a big advantage,” said Daley. “That’s big for a guy on the ropes, now perhaps back with solid legs in the ring. Whether that now turns into a fundamental beginning of a reshape of the campaign is unknown.”

At least two current Obama campaign aides were more blunt than Daley and used the term “shell-shocked” over the Obama performance. There were various analyses of what went wrong, including finger-pointing at debate preparations. Those included claims that Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who played the role of Romney in mock debates, probably wasn’t tough and aggressive enough. (“He does, after all, want to be Secretary of State,” claimed one aide.)

Partly lost in the fray was Obama’s history as a good but not necessarily great debater with a style at times nonchalant and diffident. …

Toby Harnden with an astonishing revelation. President Clueless thought he’d won the debate.

When President Barack Obama stepped off the stage in Denver last week the 60 million Americans watching the debate against Mitt Romney already knew it had been a disaster for him.

But what nobody knew, until now, was that Obama believed he had actually won.

In an extraordinary insight into the events leading up to the 90 minute showdown which changed the face of the election, a Democrat close to the Obama campaign today reveals that the President also did not take his debate preparation seriously, ignored the advice of senior aides and ignored one-liners that had been prepared to wound Romney.

The Democrat said that Obama’s inner circle was dismayed at the ‘disaster’ and that he believed the central problem was that the President was so disdainful of Romney that he didn’t believe he needed to engage with him.

‘President Obama made it clear he wanted to be doing anything else – anything – but debate prep,’ the Democrat said. ‘He kept breaking off whenever he got the opportunity and never really focused on the event. …

Wisconsin prof reacts to the University’s gift in kind to the Obama campaign.

It’s no secret that academia is largely made up of liberal Democrats. But the University of Wisconsin made it painfully obvious when President Obama came to speak at a campaign rally on campus Thursday.

“My reaction to President Obama’s visit has gone from unease, to mild irritation, to serious concern,” political science Professor Kenneth Mayer wrote in an email to university administrators. “In a very real sense, we are forcing them (students) to become participants in the campaign and express their support for the campaign.”

How? ..

Tongue in cheek, Andrew Malcolm turns a NASA photo of the Helix Nebulae into a political lesson.

… Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, or 671 million miles an hour. The Helix light moved at those speeds for 650 Earth years. (It still is, for that matter.)

In other words, this Helix light traveled 3,900 trillion miles to reach this page. We’ll find out what comes after trillion if Obama gets a second term. But suffice to say, in money or miles, it’s a very large number.

Now, why care what was going on 650 light years away and ago?

Because that’s precisely what’s going to happen much closer to home to our Sun — in about five billion years. By that time we should be whittling down Obama’s national debt, although real immigration reform will still be but one of his many promises.

When Nature finally throws the dimmer switch and our Sun begins to die over time, it won’t be George W. Bush’s fault. And it won’t even take 650 days to figure out. We’ll get the message of diminished light within less than nine minutes. …

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Mark Steyn’s turn with the debate.

Apparently, Frank Sinatra served as Mitt Romney’s debate coach. As he put it about halfway through “That’s Life”:

“I’d jump right on a big bird and then I’d fly … .”

That’s what Mitt did in Denver. Ten minutes in, he jumped right on Big Bird, and then he took off – and never looked back, while the other fellow, whose name escapes me, never got out of the gate. It takes a certain panache to clobber not just your opponent but also the moderator. Yet that’s what the killer Mormon did when he declared that he wasn’t going to borrow money from China to pay for Jim Lehrer and Big Bird on PBS. It was a terrific alpha-male moment, not just in that it rattled Lehrer, who seemed too preoccupied contemplating a future reading the hog prices on the WZZZ Farm Report to regain his grip on the usual absurd format, but in the sense that it indicated a man entirely at ease with himself – in contrast to wossname, the listless sourpuss staring at his shoes.

Yet, amidst the otherwise total wreckage of their guy’s performance, the Democrats seemed to think that Mitt’s assault on Sesame Street was a misstep from whose tattered and ruined puppet-stuffing some hay is to be made. “WOW!!! No PBS!!! WTF how about cutting congress’s stuff leave big bird alone,” tweeted Whoopi Goldberg. Even the president mocked Romney for “finally getting tough on Big Bird” – not in the debate, of course, where such dazzling twinkle-toed repartee might have helped, but a mere 24 hours later, once the rapid-response team had directed his speechwriters to craft a line, fly it out to a campaign rally and load it into the prompter, he did deliver it without mishap.

Unlike Mitt, I loathe Sesame Street. It bears primary responsibility for what the Canadian blogger Binky calls the de-monsterization of childhood – the idea that there are no evil monsters out there at the edges of the map, just shaggy creatures who look a little funny and can sometimes be a bit grouchy about it because people prejudge them until they learn to celebrate diversity and help Cranky the Friendly Monster go recycling. That is not unrelated to the infantilization of our society. Marinate three generations of Americans in that pabulum, and it’s no surprise you wind up with unprotected diplomats dragged to their deaths from their “safe house” in Benghazi. Or as J. Scott Gration, the president’s Special Envoy to Sudan, said in 2009, in the most explicit Sesamization of American foreign policy: “We’ve got to think about giving out cookies. Kids, countries – they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes.” The butchers of Darfur aren’t blood-drenched machete-wielding genocidal killers but just Cookie Monsters whom we haven’t given enough cookies. I’m not saying there’s a direct line between Bert & Ernie and Barack & Hillary … well, actually, I am. …

Andy McCarthy has a turn at the plate.

Do you think Barack Obama knows who Ernie Banks is? Count me a skeptic. The purported White Sox fanatic couldn’t name a single player for the home team on the South Side, so I doubt he knows Wrigley Field from his beloved “Cominskey Field.” But even if the president was never gripped by the Cub slugger’s infectious calling card — “Let’s play two today!” — he has now heard the Mitt Romney version: “It’s fun, isn’t it?”

That’s how the GOP nominee bucked up a befuddled Jim Lehrer during Wednesday night’s ground-shifting debate. It was only 20 minutes in, but the moderator was fretting over the clock while the president fretted over Romney. Already, the challenger had the incumbent reminding 70 million viewers of “Bad Bad Leroy Brown,” the last Chicago legend in his own mind to emerge from a decisive brawl looking like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone.

Whatever you may think of the former Massachusetts governor’s politics, there should never have been any hesitation about Romney the man. This is a bright, self-made man, one whose public and private philanthropy, which puts most of us to shame, should be legendary. It is not. That’s because his good works weren’t done to burnish his political credentials and his decency discourages their exploitation toward that end. You don’t have to agree with Romney on everything to see that he is a mensch. He obviously loves the America that is — the land of opportunity that has rewarded his work ethic. Like most of us, he wants that America preserved, not “fundamentally transformed.”

Yet, for months, the Obama campaign has relentlessly portrayed Romney as an inveterate scoundrel: a dissolute shylock — maybe even a felonious one — who fleeced mom-and-pop stores, secreted his ill-gotten gains in offshore vaults, and, in his spare time, tortured his own pooch. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it” — it’s the Alinskyites following their dog-eared rule book.

The problem for our community organizer–in–chief is the debate setting. With no slavish Obamedia filter between the candidates and the viewers, the Obama campaign’s ludicrous distortion of Romney collided, one on one and for all to see, with the reality of Romney. The challenger’s upbeat energy simultaneously effused respect for the president’s office and sheer joie de vivre at the prospect of laying bare the president’s miserable record — of forcing Obama’s vision of Euro-America to compete with Romney’s traditionally confident, self-determining America. …

… It doesn’t matter to me, though. I was already voting against Obama. Now, though, I’m voting for Romney.

Gay Patriot blogs on the new meme in the liberal world that maybe Obama doesn’t like being president.

.. Mary nicely, succinctly sums up the new conventional wisdom:  ”In my household, we say Obama likes the job — he’s just not much interested in the work.”   Mary, I don’t think yours is the only household where they’re saying that now.  

I believe if it was Jonah Goldberg (UPDATE:  or was it Clarice Feldman?**) who first caused me to question whether Barack Obama even liked the job of President of the United States.  Sure, the Democrat liked the title and the perks, but he didn’t relish the responsibilities that came with those privileges.

In the past few months, particularly with the release of Bob Woodward’s book, The Price of Politics, numerous conservative pundits and bloggers have been asking a similar question.  Two weeks ago, Michael Barone observed that Obama “is a president who is much more comfortable campaigning than governing.” …

Jammie Wearing Fools give updates on the international reaction to the debate.

You think the U.S. media is in total meltdown? Get a load at the view from abroad, where the observers apparently don’t service the administration before their readers. …

… The Daily Mail, never understated:

“Barack Obama has been savaged over his performance in last night’s presidential debate, with one commentator even suggesting that he was less effective than the hapless Jimmy Carter.

Even those who have been the President’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders in the past lined up to denounce the evening as a ‘disaster’ for Mr Obama, and worried that Mitt Romney’s resounding win would allow him to turn around his struggling campaign.

Prominent Obama fans admitted the President as ‘off his game’, with one even saying: ‘I don’t know what he was doing out there.’

But perhaps the most stinging blow came from the Right, with one conservative commentator quipping: ‘Not since Jimmy Carter faced Ronald Reagan has the U.S. presidency been so embarrassingly represented in public. Actually, that’s an insult to Jimmy Carter.’” …

Long time readers will remember enjoying the monthly missives from Camille Paglia that ended when she went to ground to finish a book. Looks like the book is finished because she has surfaced with an essay in the WSJ on the future of art which ends with an interesting view of the world from her ever observant mind.

… Over the past century, industrial design has steadily gained on the fine arts and has now surpassed them in cultural impact. In the age of travel and speed that began just before World War I, machines became smaller and sleeker. Streamlining, developed for race cars, trains, airplanes and ocean liners, was extended in the 1920s to appliances like vacuum cleaners and washing machines. The smooth white towers of electric refrigerators (replacing clunky iceboxes) embodied the elegant new minimalism.

“Form ever follows function,” said Louis Sullivan, the visionary Chicago architect who was a forefather of the Bauhaus. That maxim was a rubric for the boom in stylish interior décor, office machines and electronics following World War II: Olivetti typewriters, hi-fi amplifiers, portable transistor radios, space-age TVs, baby-blue Princess telephones. With the digital revolution came miniaturization. The Apple desktop computer bore no resemblance to the gigantic mainframes that once took up whole rooms. Hand-held cellphones became pocket-size.

Young people today are avidly immersed in this hyper-technological environment, where their primary aesthetic experiences are derived from beautifully engineered industrial design. Personalized hand-held devices are their letters, diaries, telephones and newspapers, as well as their round-the-clock conduits for music, videos and movies. But there is no spiritual dimension to an iPhone, as there is to great works of art.

Thus we live in a strange and contradictory culture, where the most talented college students are ideologically indoctrinated with contempt for the economic system that made their freedom, comforts and privileges possible. In the realm of arts and letters, religion is dismissed as reactionary and unhip. The spiritual language even of major abstract artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko is ignored or suppressed.

Thus young artists have been betrayed and stunted by their elders before their careers have even begun. Is it any wonder that our fine arts have become a wasteland.

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Leno: Last weekend I flew on American Airlines. They gave me a bag of nuts. And then a bag of bolts to go with them and hold my seat down.

Fallon: The first presidential debate was the other night. Although a lot of big names didn’t show up to the event — Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, President Obama.

Leno: The only people who thought Obama won last week’s debate were the replacement refs.

Conan: Cadbury has come out with a candy bar specifically designed to appeal to women.  It’s called, “Chocolate.”

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Krauthammer on the debate.

… By the end of the debate, Obama looked small, uncertain. It was Romney who had the presidential look.

Reelection campaigns after a failed presidential term — so failed that Obama barely even bothers to make the case, preferring to blame everything on his predecessor — hinge almost entirely on whether the challenger can meet the threshold of acceptability. Romney crossed the threshold Wednesday night.

Reagan won his election (Carter was actually ahead at the time) when he defused his caricature as some wild, extreme, warmongering cowboy. In his debate with Carter, he was affable, avuncular and reasonable. That’s why with a single aw-shucks line, “There you go again,” the election was over.

Romney had to show something a little different: That he is not the clumsy, out-of-touch plutocrat that the paid Obama ads and the unpaid media have portrayed him to be. He did, decisively.

That’s why MSNBC is on suicide watch. Why the polls show that, by a margin of at least 2 to 1, voters overwhelmingly gave the debate to Romney.

And he won big in an unusual way. This could be the only presidential debate ever won so definitively in the absence of some obvious and ruinous gaffe, like Gerald Ford’s “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.”

Romney by two touchdowns.

Daniel Henninger.

… Barack Obama, perhaps the most self-confident person to occupy that office in our lifetime, was always skating along the edge of a cliff of self-destructive arrogance. No other president would have thought to berate the members of the Supreme Court as they sat in front of him during his State of the Union speech. The famous GeorgeWashingtonUniversity speech in which he ridiculed his Republican partners in the deficit-negotiation talks, who had come to the speech expecting to hear a policy response, was another sign of potential danger.

And finally there was the report a few weeks ago that Mr. Obama did not respect Gov. Romney and did not consider him competent to be president.

This is a president, dismissive and condescending to any opposition, who went into that debate in Denver and essentially got his head handed to him by a better-prepared opponent.

What was especially damaging to Mr. Obama is that when it became clear early in the initial discussion of tax policy that Mitt Romney was going to take his argument to a deeper level, the president’s response was essentially to start cutting and pasting stock lines from speeches he’s been giving for years. After awhile, he looked like a guy who was rummaging through a drawer for old audio cassettes. “The oil industry gets $4 billion a year in corporate welfare.” He even rolled out the corporate jets.

The president sounded like someone who had simply run out of ideas. His challenger was elaborating detail on his policies, and the president was the candidate living in the past. His references to what he would do with a second term were minimal. Instead, he had to spend most of the 90 minutes trying to defend his policies from Mr. Romney’s critique.

This was most notable on the biggest issue of all— the future of ObamaCare. Mr. Obama’s defense of the 15-member review board came down to citing some process reforms at the Cleveland Clinic. Gov. Romney immediately turned that around as an example of a private institution experimenting its way toward new ideas—a difference of policy and philosophy. …

Jonah Goldberg.

… For a guy who supposedly gives wonderful speeches, he rarely persuades the un-persuaded or inspires those he didn’t already have at “hello.” That’s partly the fault of his speechwriters, who always did him the disservice of producing the kind of pedantic and clichéd boilerplate that Obama mistook for soaring oratory. He thought he smashed through the Democratic primaries like a battering ram through concrete when he mostly pushed on open doors.

As president, he’s convinced himself that he is a policy wonk with a deeper understanding of the machinery of government and the mysteries of the economy than even his advisors. And yet he had to learn on the job that “shovel-ready jobs” were magic beans sold to him by party hacks hungry for pork. He bought a stimulus that only stimulated political cronies. In the debate, he touted windmills and solar power as the energy sources of the future as if he still honestly believes that.

The media’s infatuation with Obama and/or their contempt for his critics only served to reinforce his delusions. When the press laughs at all of your jokes and takes your glib excuses as profound insights, the inevitable result is a kind of flabby narcissism. Kings can be forgiven for thinking they are the greatest poets when the court weeps at their clunky limericks.

The Obama who delivered a shockingly lackluster convention speech last month is the same man who walked into that Denver stadium in 2008 to rapturous approval. The man who lost the debate Wednesday night is the same man who never managed to make Obamacare popular after more than 50 speeches and pronouncements on it in his first year.

The key difference now is that the hunger for Obama has been replaced with the indigestion that follows after four unimpressive years in office. In sales, they say you sell the sizzle, not the steak. In 2008, the man was all sizzle, and the ravenous throng was sold. Now he must sell the steak itself, and it’s full of gristle, fat and bone. He may yet still close the deal, but only if people fall for his Puss in Boots eyes.

Keith Koffler at White House Dossier blog has more on the president that didn’t show up.

… Obama, who was barely present onstage last night, was the same president who has been failing to show up for years.

He’s the man who can’t be bothered to tackle entitlement reform, to keep his promises on immigration, to negotiate a Middle East peace deal, to remind Americans that we are at war, to meet regularly with members of Congress, to meet with any world leaders at the UN last week, and to put away his golf clubs.

Last night, he couldn’t be bothered to debate. And today, the Obama campaign is feeling very bothered indeed.

In light of the Obama debate failure, Fred Barnes has a, now ironic, piece on the bias in the media. Maybe they will be too embarrassed now to continue.

The Time cover story last week was headlined “The Mormon Identity.” The cover, featuring Mitt Romney in a stained-glass window, said in smaller type, “What Mitt Romney’s faith tells us about his vision and values.” Newsweek had President Obama on the cover, identifying him as “The Democrats’ Reagan” and heralding the story inside as “What Obama Will Achieve in His Second Term.”

Neither of the stories, to put it mildly, was helpful to Romney’s presidential campaign. The piece in Time was fair, but the timing, long after Mormonism had faded as a factor in the election, was suspect. In Newsweek, Obama was lionized, while Romney and Republicans were treated like hyperpartisan right-wingers.

My point in citing the newsmagazines is not that they’re colluding to reelect Obama. They don’t have to. It comes quite naturally to these pillars of the mainstream media to elevate issues with a pro-Obama tilt. And they’re not even the biggest contributors to the liberal bias that has dominated media coverage of the presidential race.

The bias has been so massive, palpable, and unprecedented that the scales have begun to fall from the eyes of a few stalwarts of the media establishment. Obama, Mark Halperin of Time noted last week, “has been covered as a candidate, rather than as an incumbent whose record needs to be scrutinized.” As you might suspect, this coincides neatly with the president’s reelection strategy.

The Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman has suggested the media have all but given the president a free ride. …

A perfect illustration of the rush to make amends is the New Yorker cover due out today. Toby Harnden of the London Daily Mail notes the significance of the cover showing Romney debating an empty chair.

… For the liberal ‘New Yorker’ to carry such a cover is all the more remarkable because David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, is an admirer of Obama who wrote a positive and well-received book on the President entitled ‘The Bridge’.

The cover – and Obama’s debate performance – could be seen as a degree of vindication for the Romney advisers who gave Eastwood a prime-time slot on the final night of the Republican convention in Tampa and allowed him to ad-lib his speech.

At the time, senior Republicans were livid with some calling for top Romney aides to be fired. But although Eastwood’s improv show was panned by the media, he appears to have created an enduring motif representing Obama – and one that has now been embraced to a large extent by the liberal establishment.

Senator Blutarsky blogs on what we might see in the next debates.

It seems fair to say that most of us on the right were pleasantly surprised by the result of the first Presidential debate, Wednesday evening, if nothing like so shocked as the mainstream media or the Obama fluffers at MSNBC.

In 2008, Obama got to debate John McCain. The acclaim for his campaign has always struck me as over the top in light of that fact. And on Wednesday night we saw what Obama looks like in a debate where the dessicated and ineffectual old man in the room in not his opponent but merely the moderator.

From where I’m sitting, the best thing about the outcome of the first debate is how it sets Mitt Romney up for the second debate. Like a power pitcher behind in the count, Obama is under pressure to bring the heat, but he’s got to be exceedingly careful about how he does it. 

Obama’s most fervent partisans want to see him become much more aggressive in attacking Romney, and after seeing the reviews of his performance in the first debate, Obama is probably happy to oblige. And therein lay the danger.

The upside, from Obama’s perspective, of his performance on Wednesday night, was that it kept his natural churlishness in check. He smirked, and offered other tells, but mostly you had to be looking for them in order to notice. In going after Mitt Romney aggressively, Obama risks showing Americans a side of his personality that he’d be better off hiding.

Simply put, Barack Obama is a smug prick. He is not used to being challenged, and is prone to react badly when it happens. The more effectively he conceals this, the better off he’ll be, but he is now under pressure to adopt a debate posture that risks highlighting it.

In this way, the town hall format of the second debate may work to his disadvantage. …

There are, of course, many other things happening in the country. We apologize for the singular focus on the campaign, but there is little more important than sending the fool packing. A good illustration of that, is the dire straights of black men in the country. If Obama had turned out to the president we all hoped for, he might have turned his attention to this problem. Bloomberg/Business Week calls it to our attention.

The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any wealthy nation, with about 2.3 million people behind bars at any given moment. (That’s 730 out of 100,000, vs. just 154 for England and Wales.) There are more people in U.S. prisons than are in the country’s active-duty military. That much is well known. What’s less known is that people who are incarcerated are excluded from most surveys by U.S. statistical agencies. Since young, black men are disproportionately likely to be in jail or prison, the exclusion of penal institutions from the statistics makes the jobs situation of young, black men look better than it really is.

That’s the point of a new book, Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress, by Becky Pettit, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington. Pettit spoke on Thursday in a telephone press conference.

On the day Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009, Pettit said, “there was hope that perhaps the U.S. was becoming a post-racial society.” But it wasn’t true then, and it’s not true now. The gap between blacks and whites remains wide in employment, income, wealth, and health. And as Bloomberg’s David J. Lynch reported earlier this month: “The nation’s first African-American president hasn’t done much for African-Americans.”

The unemployment rate and the employment-to-population ratio reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics are based on a survey of households—people “who are not inmates of institutions (for example, penal and mental facilities and homes for the aged) and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces.” …

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Neal Boortz has some advice.

It’s been a full day since the debate, and I have just one piece of advice for those of you who love freedom: Don’t get cocky.

Spengler on the character test in this election.

The Romney the world saw at last night’s debate — confident, enthusiastic about his ideas, hopeful and articulate — is no stranger to those fortunate enough to have heard him speak in person during the past year. I reported in this space on a primary campaign breakfast in November 2011 where Romney won me over. What changed last night emphatically was not Mitt Romney. What changed is that we finally got to see the real Mitt Romney. The Republican candidate, that is, defined himself against Barack Obama, rather than allowing an overwhelmingly hostile media to define him. And Barack Obama, alone on the stage with his opponent, stripped of teleprompter and fawning media, revealed himself to be a fearful, petulant, petty man. Not only did Romney win; Obama lost.

There has never been a presidential candidates’ debate on national television where the instant polls declared such a lopsided victory (3 to 1 in Romney’s favor according to CNN) — not Kennedy-Nixon, nor Reagan-Carter. Response to televised debates in the past split neatly down partisan lines, so much so that conventional wisdom states that presidential debates simply weren’t a factor in the election. The voters watched the debate and assigned a better performance to the candidate they liked beforehand. Al Gore’s sighs or Richard Nixon’s sweats influenced the electoral outcome in legend more than in fact.

Just because debates weren’t decisive in the past doesn’t mean that this one won’t be decisive now. The most lopsided factor in this election is the character of the candidates. What we saw last night is a unique and unprecedented event in American political history. We have never had a president like Barack Obama, and the American public got its first peek at the man behind the curtain.

Barack Obama is a narcissist and a sociopath, with the skills of persuasion that children abandoned by their parents learn as a survival mechanism. In the adoring light of the liberal media, Obama reflected power and self-confidence — so long as he was in control, and stood in front of the teleprompter. The real Barack Obama is the one who cowered in the Oval Office protected by his Praetorian guard, who declined to hold cabinet meetings or meet with Republican leaders: McBama surrounded by the weird sisters, Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice and Michelle. Obama’s greatest strength always has been his greatest weakness, potentially a catastrophic one: he manipulates so effectively because he has a compulsion to be in control. When he knows that he is not in control, Obama is paralyzed. Absent last night were the easy rhetorical flourishes and rock star pose of 2008.

Andrew Malcolm posts on the debate.

… Even though it was night-time in Denver, Gov. Romney handed the ex-state senator his lunch — and it wasn’t one of Michelle’s nutritious school meals either. (Scroll down here for the full debate video. The full transcript is here.)

The president was disappointing. Maybe Obama needs to fire his debate-prep partner, John Kerry, who was such a good debater in 2004 that he blew his own bid for the White House. Obama was awful. He looked and sounded unprepared, listless, in deep water way over his head. What was he doing at that Vegas resort since Sunday, besides visiting the Hoover Dam?

Without a teleprompter feeding him lines, Obama lacked specifics, dissembled, at one point pleading with a deferential moderator Jim Lehrer to change the topic, as if Obama owned the debate. The president, who got four more minutes of speaking time from Lehrer than did Romney, spent much of the debate looking down at the podium, not addressing his challenger.

Devout Democrat James Carville observed, “The president didn’t bring his A-game.” A-game? He didn’t bring his M-game. It wasn’t quite an empty chair, but….

When Obama, who doesn’t bother with many full Cabinet meetings, began touting generalized training for jobs of the future, it was Romney the well-briefed, no-nonsense, rational business executive who pointed out:

“But our training programs right now, we got 47 of them housed in the federal government, reporting to eight different agencies. Overhead is overwhelming.”

At the start Obama looked shocked that Romney spoke to him so directly. Commentator David Gergen, who’s worked in White Houses under both parties, noted that first-term staffs are packed with sycophants. He speculated that no one inside the presidential bubble has talked to Obama that way in years. …

Roger Simon was watching too.

It was a bad twentieth wedding anniversary night for Barack and Michelle Obama. Twenty-five should be better. No irritating debates to deal with. It won’t even be an election year. Maybe they can celebrate with a Mai Tai or two in their new beachfront home on Oahu.

All the networks agreed last night, even the court eunuchs on MSNBC, as did the polls and the focus groups, that Romney won the debate. Obama looked like a warmed-over version of Richard Nixon, shifty and evasive in his answers. But Nixon was always infinitely more prepared than our current president and considerably more informed.

The fuddy-duddy liberal choir of the mainstream media looked shell-shocked. But secretly some of them may actually be relieved. Anyone with an IQ in triple digits knows that Romney would be a better president than Obama with the country and the world in the situation they are. And that probably includes Obama himself, considering the level at which he debated.

If Romney is elected, dad would be back and they (the media) would get to be kids again, living la vida loca while protesting until blue in their collective faces everything Romney does in the coming years. They get to be “against the man” once more. They don’t have to defend the man, such as he is.

A few of these media folks may even subtly throw Obama under the bus – a just deserts since he has done that favor to so many others. We’ll have to see. It did seem to me while watching the debate that even moderator Jim Lehrer, try as he might to help the president, was starting to realize Romney was the better man. Even Ed Schultz and Bill Maher apparently tweeted that Romney had won …

Robert Costa gives us a peek at Romney’s debate prep.

The elements of Mitt Romney’s RockyMountain rout were hatched weeks ago in Vermont’s Green Mountains. In early September, Romney slowed down his campaign schedule and retreated with a small group of advisers to the home of Kerry Healey, his former lieutenant governor. Ohio senator Rob Portman, a trusted ally, joined Stuart Stevens, Eric Fehrnstrom, Bob White, and a handful of other Romney confidants. They spent days holding mock debates, and nights reviewing President Obama’s stylistic tics. When they needed a break, they roamed around Healey’s secluded estate, which is 100 miles south of Burlington, Vt. But mostly they talked, over hot chocolate and coffee, about how best to communicate Romney’s message.

Portman says Romney’s willingness to fully commit to the prep was striking. Day after day, he’d get up early, exercise, and then join the team for hours of work. Advisers certainly played a role, but according to Portman, it was the candidate who drove his advisers. Even when he had a busy week of campaigning, Romney would always find time to study or hold a brief mock debate. “It was all him,” Portman tells me. “Honestly, I’ve spent a lot of time with Mitt Romney for the past month or so, and what I saw on stage is who he is. He’s smart, he’s articulate, and he’s got a big heart.”

During the opening prep sessions, the group quickly came to a consensus: At the podium, Romney would be forceful, nearly as assertive as he was in Healey’s living room. His advisers have always admired Romney’s ability to peel apart arguments in private, and they encouraged him to do the same at the debate, with a little polish. The goal was to overwhelm the president with liveliness and information, to force him to confront the messy details of his economic and fiscal record. The strategy, sources say, clicked with Romney for two reasons: He did not want to spend hours tinkering with his mannerisms, and he wanted to focus on internalizing data. He’d take advice on his voice, his posture, and the rest, but he wanted his prep time to be a policy workshop.

“This whole thing about ‘zingers,’ I never even heard that word discussed in debate prep,” Stevens says. “If you go back to the history and look at Governor Romney’s 20 debates, he likes policy, he likes substance, and he likes strong arguments that are based on merits and on differences. He’s never been one for debate tricks and sleight of hand.” …

Jonathan Tobin wonders if the Dems are going to draw the wrong conclusions from their debate debacle.

… Democrats know that personal attacks on Romney have taken a huge toll on the Republican in recent months. They have had some success depicting him as a heartless plutocrat who cares nothing about ordinary people and who stashes money abroad while not paying taxes at home. Romney’s “47 percent” gaffe hurt him in large measure because it fit right into the portrait Democrats have been painting of him. But the assumption that the president would have done better had he echoed these nasty and quite personal barbs is faulty. Presidents are supposed to be presidential while leaving the business of carving up their opponents to lesser beings like vice presidents. If Obama’s cheering section in the media thinks getting down into the gutter on stage during a presidential debate is what Obama needs to do, they may soon be proved wrong.

The problem with the president last night wasn’t that he wasn’t nasty enough but the arrogance with which he seemed to regard the proceedings. His body language and long-winded lectures betrayed not just a man who didn’t adequately prepare for the format, but also a man who has no respect for his opponent or the ideas he put forward.

Yet the ultimate problem for the president is not so much what he did or didn’t say; it’s that he gave us a glimpse of the man that Republicans have always claimed him to be: the arrogant liberal poseur who looks down his nose at the rest of us. More than all the videos in which Obama uses racial incitement or talks down individual initiative, the real danger is that on the big stage of the first debate, he came across as less likeable. The stuffy, long-winded bore we saw in Denver is not the historic figure that inspired millions with his messianic promises of hope and change. …

John Hinderaker posts on the debate in Power Line.

… The Daily Mail headlines: “The new Jimmy Carter? Obama slammed by media as even his own supporters trash debate performance after Romney’s crushing win.” Per Drudge, Michael Moore comments, “This is what happens when u pick John Kerry as your debate coach.” Dennis Miller: “Obama better hope a kicked a** is covered under Obamacare.”

So where do we go from here? My guess is that we will see a slight uptick in the polls for Romney, but don’t expect anything dramatic. It takes time and reinforcement for people’s perceptions to change. Last night was the beginning of a process, not the end.

The remaining debates will be important; more important, I think, than if the first one had not been such a blowout. The pressure will be on Obama to do better next time, and liberal moderators will do all they can to help him. (One reason last night’s debate was so one-sided was that, with the exception of one or two rather feeble efforts to lend Obama a hand, Jim Lehrer stayed out of the way.) …

VodkaPundit liked one of the pictures of the debate aftermath.

Any further comment would just be rubbing salt in the wound — so let’s do that.

We’ve discussed before one of the most difficult things about unseating an incumbent president: He just looks so darned presidential. He has Air Force One, he has a custom Cadillac limo, he even has a marching band at his disposal. This johnny-come-lately trying to unseat him has none of that.

But look at that photo again. Does that man look presidential to you? Does he look like the most powerful man in the world? He’s not even the most powerful man on that little stage, even though the johnny-come-lately came without the jumbo jet or the phalanx of Marines.

But Mitt Romney did show up ready to be President. Obama showed up with — as — the Empty Chair. He stared at his feet. He grimaced. Occasionally a smile would flash on his face, with all the spontaneity of Bush 41′s “Message: I Care.” He was whiny, he was defensive. Worst of all? Empty Chair’s body language didn’t just show contempt for Romney. He displayed contempt for the setting, for the requirement that he be there, and I think it even showed contempt for the office he (still) holds.

Barack Obama is tired of being President. I’m not sure he ever enjoyed it. That is what he brought to the debate last night, and that is why he lost.

Bill Kristol finds a good quote from Jimmy Carter, another debate loser.

A friend notes Jimmy Carter’s diary entry from the day after the 1980 Reagan debate—the last time a Democratic president lost a debate to a Republican challenger:

“He apparently made a better impression on the TV audience than I did, but I made all our points to the constituency groups—which we believe will become preeminent in the public’s mind as they approach the point a week from now of actually going to the polls,” writes Carter.

Leaving aside Carter’s wishful thinking, it’s striking how explicitly Carter confirms Jay Cost’s thesis that the modern Democratic party is a collection of “constituency groups” to be appealed to, and that the leaders of that party think of their job as appealing to those groups rather than speaking to and on behalf of the nation. The experience of Reagan and Romney both suggest that a forceful appeal to the common good can trump constituency group politics.

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Sunday morning we’ll spend more time on the debate, but a little bit now will be fun. Last night we got to see what happens to lazy presidents. Barry outsourced his job while prancing around the country and the world. Now he can’t come up with a logical defense of the actions of his administration. Here’s John Hinderaker from Power Line;

I’ve been watching presidential debates for quite a few years, but I have never seen one like this. It wasn’t a TKO, it was a knockout. Mitt Romney was in control from the beginning. He was the alpha male, while Barack Obama was weak, hesitant, stuttering, often apologetic. The visuals were great for Romney and awful for Obama. Obama looked small, tired, defeated after four years of failure, out of ammo. One small point among many: Obama doesn’t even know how to stand at a podium, as he continually lifted up one leg. He would be below average as a high school debater. …

And here’s my favorite tweet. This is from Bob Owens.

Some people eat when they get depressed. I hope Michelle put Bo outside for the night.

Craig Pirrong posts on the debacle in Libya.

It’s hard to know what is more appalling: the administration’s handling of Benghazi before the assault on the consulate and the killing of Ambassador Stevens and 3 other Americans, or its handling of the aftermath.

The ranking doesn’t matter really, because both are off the charts bad.

It is now abundantly clear that the security situation in Benghazi was atrocious before September 11, and that there were myriad warnings that Al Qaeda was active in the city.  The Brits withdrew their personnel from the city in July. American State Department personnel asked for more security-and were turned down.

It is now acknowledged that the judgment of the intelligence community within 24 hours of the attack was that it was a planned terrorist attack by Al Qaeda.

Well, duh.

Even a cursory review of what happened made the administration’s “spontaneous flash mob in response to a movie nobody saw” narrative obvious bullshit.

But in some respects the planned vs. unplanned debate is a red herring.  Would it actually be better for the administration and the State Department if the consulate and the ambassador were so vulnerable to an extemporaneous, unplanned attack that such an assault could overwhelm security in minutes and kill 4 Americans?  It’s a defense that American security was so bad that an ad hoc attack could kill the ambassador?

The only thing that really matters is that there were armed, hostile elements in the vicinity and that American security was completely insufficient to handle it. …

Andrew Malcolm says America’s savings rate has soared, suggesting how they might vote.

… “People have lost their appetite for risk,” the Brookings Institution’s Karen Dynan told the Washington Post the other day.

Think about that. It’s true. Just about everybody knows somebody who’s lost a job, a home, a marriage in recent times. Or all three.

That kind of pervasive uncertainty, even fear, is confining, feeds caution and creates a high hurdle for any incumbent to overcome. A challenger need only present himself as a conceivably presidential alternative.

That’s Romney’s challenge — and opportunity — tomorrow evening before a nationwide audience on the same stage with the Big Guy. To look like the former governor could become a president. He’ll have three chances to create a collective impression of that this month.

Polls show the race strangely close now. Which reminds us of that contentious statewide recall vote in Wisconsin back in early June, the most recent broad political measure we have. Unions and Democrats had successfully petitioned to force a vote on recalling Republican Gov. Scott Walker over his fiscal restraints and budget cuts. 

Remember how slow broadcasters were to call the race that evening? Know why?

Results from waves of exit polls throughout the day told them it was going to be a real squeaker either way. So, they were very careful with their words until the trend could not be ignored.

In the end, of course, it wasn’t close at all. Walker kept his job by a larger margin than he’d won with just 24 months previously against the same opponent. So, how to explain the skewed survey?

Concerned about how they’d be perceived voting against a Democrat and the unions in favor of a Republican, many voters lied to pollsters.

Imagine that.

Michael Barone says Obama has declared war on the young who elected him.

… Government has grown bigger. But big business doesn’t generate jobs; most are created by small businesses and startups. Unions have shrunk, and most union members are public employees.

Meanwhile, public policies have remained in place. Every year, government transfers increasing amounts from working-age taxpayers to the elderly through Social Security and Medicare. Obamacare amplifies this by requiring young workers to buy expensive insurance far beyond their needs.

In the meantime, the collective impact of Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and the fiscal cliff we are headed toward — all Obama policies — has cut job growth below the rate of population increase. Why?

“If you are a small business,” Dallas Fed head Richard Fisher says, “… you are stymied by not knowing what your tax rate will be in future years, or how you should cost out the social overhead of your employees, or how you should budget from the proliferation of regulations flowing from Washington.”

At the same time, Obama vows to resist any changes in Medicare, which is on a trajectory to welsh on its obligations well before the first Millennial turns 65.

For the young, Obama promises to expand college loans. But just as housing policies created a housing bubble, college loan policies have created a higher education bubble. The flood of money has been captured by colleges and universities through above-inflation tuition increases and administrative bloat.

But the Obama administration does not crack down on them, but on graduates or dropouts with thousands in college loan debt, which they can’t escape through bankruptcy. …

Whoever is elected, Bill Gross says he will have to deal with our $16 trillion debt, and the country’s $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Bill Wilson of NetRight Daily has the story.

Woe unto the next president, whoever he may be.

Managing director and co-founder of the world’s largest bond trader Pimco, Bill Gross, has released a shocking warning to the U.S. that promised entitlements to citizens may not be worth the paper they’re printed on.

He called the U.S. “an addict whose habit extends beyond weed or cocaine and who frequently pleasures itself with budgetary crystal meth.”

Gross counts some $60 trillion of unfunded liabilities that will ultimately be added to the now $16 trillion national debt to pay for future benefits.

“It just so happens that the $60 trillion comes not in the form of promises to pay bonds or bills at maturity, but the present value of future Social Security benefits, Medicaid expenses and expected costs for Medicare,” Gross wrote in his “Investment Outlook” newsletter.

Gross warned that unless we begin to address our fiscal crisis, disaster will eventually follow. “If we continue to close our eyes to existing 8 percent of [Gross Domestic Product] GDP deficits, which when including Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare liabilities compose an average estimated 11 percent annual ‘fiscal gap,’ then we will begin to resemble Greece before the turn of the next decade.”

Gross is correct. This is a ticking time bomb. In the past fiscal year alone, the national debt has grown by more than $1.2 trillion and under current projections will grow by about $1 trillion every year for the next decade.

The $16 trillion total liability is already larger than the entire economy. By 2022, it is expected by the Office of Management and Budget to swell to $26 trillion. Nobody except for the insane asylum on Capitol Hill expects economic growth will be able to keep pace with that level of debt accumulation. …

Great background piece in the Weekly Standard about the race in MA.

… “I don’t kid myself. I know it’s going to be a fight,” Warren says. Her voice is flat, her rhythm slow and deliberate. “I know it’s going to be tough. I know they’re going to throw everything they possibly can at me. I know this. I know this. But here’s what I want to tell you. I am not afraid.” Warren’s voice gets louder. “I am not afraid.” And more piercing. “I am not afraid!”

And why should she be? Warren is running for senator as a liberal Democrat in Massachusetts, in a year when the liberal Democratic president is up for reelection, and in a state where he’s never been more popular. Her opponent is the 53-year-old incumbent, Scott Brown, the only Republican in the state’s congressional delegation, and the only Republican statewide elected official. Brown won a low-turnout special election in 2010 by driving around the state in his pickup truck, wearing a brown Carhartt jacket. His image as a moderate Republican with blue-collar roots appealed to Democratic-leaning middle-class independents. In Massachusetts, though, Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than three to one. Warren ought to be running away with this race.

But Warren’s not running away with this race. The Real Clear Politics poll average shows Warren fewer than 2 points ahead of Brown, and a Rasmussen poll released last week shows the candidates tied. Most observers consider the race a toss-up. At the candidates’ first debate on September 20, a whole cadre of national reporters traveled to Boston to watch. It turns out the year’s most interesting Senate race isn’t in a swing state like Virginia or Ohio but in deep-blue Massachusetts.

The fact is, Scott Brown is one of the most gifted natural politicians in the country, and Elizabeth Warren simply isn’t. 

Warren’s campaign has had its fair share of stumbles. When the media first began asking questions about her claim of Cherokee heritage, especially whether she had used that claim to advance her career, Warren was unclear and contradictory in her answers. Her television advertisements, most of which feature a serious Warren speaking directly to the camera, have fallen flat. Her best ad is a testimonial from a well-known boxing trainer, Art Ramalho of Lowell, who praises the Harvard lawyer from Oklahoma in his thick New England accent. Warren herself doesn’t appear in the ad until halfway through. 

But it’s on the trail that Warren really looks out of her league. …

According to Our Amazing Planet, Nadine is becoming one of the hero hurricanes.

Nadine was born, declared to be over, came back from the dead and just keeps sticking around.

And now, the cyclone’s longevity will earn it a spot in the record books: By tonight, it will become the Atlantic Ocean’s 10th longest-lasting tropical cyclone, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC). A tropical cyclone is an organized storm with winds greater than 32 mph (52 kph), and includes tropical depressions, tropical storms and hurricanes.

Nadine is expected to retain tropical cyclone strength for another three to four days, in which case it could become one of the top five longest-lasting cyclones, said Dennis Feltgen, an NHC spokesman.

The longest-lasting Atlantic cyclone ever was the San Ciriaco Hurricane of 1899, which hung on for 28 days. Nadine, which has been a cyclone for 19 days, is not expected to challenge that record, Feltgen told OurAmazingPlanet. [50 Amazing Hurricane Facts]

Nadine has had an interesting life.