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David Mamet with a note to a “stiff-necked people.”

To those Jews planning to vote for Obama:

Are you prepared to explain to your children not the principles upon which your vote is cast, but its probable effects upon them? 

Irrespective of your endorsement of liberal sentiments, of fairness and “more equal distribution,” will you explain to your children that top-down economic policies will increasingly limit their ability to find challenging and well-paid work, and that the diminution in employment and income will decrease their opportunity to marry and raise children?

Will you explain (as you have observed) that a large part of their incomes will be used to fund programs that they may find immoral, wasteful and/or indeed absurd? And that the bulk of their taxes go to no programs at all, but merely service the debt you entailed on them? 

Will you tell your children that a liberal government will increasingly marginalize, dismiss and weaken the support for and the safety of the Jewish state? …

Mark Steyn compares and contrasts Sandy and Benghazi.

In political terms, Hurricane Sandy and the Benghazi consulate debacle exemplify at home and abroad the fundamental unseriousness of the United States in the Obama era. In the days after Sandy hit, Barack Obama was generally agreed to have performed well. He had himself photographed in the White House Situation Room, nodding thoughtfully to bureaucrats (“John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; Tony Blinken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; David Agnew, Director for Intergovernmental Affairs”) and Tweeted it to his 3.2 million followers. He appeared in New Jersey wearing a bomber jacket rather than a suit to demonstrate that when the going gets tough the tough get out a monogrammed Air Force One bomber jacket. He announced that he’d instructed his officials to answer all calls within 15 minutes because in America “we leave nobody behind.” By doing all this, the president “shows” he “cares” – which is true in the sense that in Benghazi he was willing to leave the entire consulate staff behind, and nobody had their calls answered within seven hours, because presumably he didn’t care. So John Brennan, the Counterterrorism guy, and Tony Blinken, the National Security honcho, briefed the president on the stiff breeze, but on Sept. 11, 2012, when a little counterterrorism was called for, nobody bothered calling the Counterterrorism Security Group, the senior U.S. counterterrorism bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, FEMA rumbles on, the “emergency management agency” that manages emergencies, very expensively, rather than preventing them. Late on the night Sandy made landfall, I heard on the local news that my state’s governor had asked the president to declare a federal emergency in every New Hampshire county so that federal funds could be “unlocked.” A quarter-million people in the GraniteState were out of power. It was reported that, beyond our borders, 8 million people in a dozen states were out of power.

But that’s not an “emergency.” No hurricane hit my county. Indeed, no hurricane hit New Hampshire. No hurricane hit “17 states,” the number of states supposedly “affected” by Sandy at its peak. A hurricane hit a few coastal counties of New Jersey, New York and a couple of other states, and that’s it. Everyone else had slightly windier-than-usual wind – and yet they were out of power for days. In a county entirely untouched by Sandy, my office manager had no electricity for a week. Not because of an “emergency” but because of a decrepit and vulnerable above-the-ground electrical distribution system that ought to be a national embarrassment to any developed society. A few weeks ago, I chanced to be in St. Pierre and Miquelon, a French colony of 6,000 people on a couple of treeless rocks in the North Atlantic. Every electric line is underground. Indeed, the droll demoiselle who leads tours of the islands makes a point of amusingly drawing American visitors’ attention to this local feature.

If you’re saying, “Whoa, that sounds expensive,” well, our government is more expensive than any government in history – and we have nothing to show for it. …

Interesting look at our election from Britain’s Telegraph.

… In 2012, Obama is the candidate of the warfare/welfare establishment that has dominated American politics for eighty years. Today, the real revolutionaries are the Tea Party, who have hijacked the Republican Party and turned it into an imperfect (and often reluctant) vehicle for a return to the fundamentals of Americanism: small, constitutional, limited government. To do this, they had to reject the politics of both Obama and Bush – and Mitt has slowly caught up. There was a significant moment in the second debate when a citizen asked Romney how he would distinguish himself from George W Bush. Romney said, “President Bush and I are different people, and these are different times.” He cited differences over aid to small business, balancing the budget, energy policy and relations with China. Remarkably, Obama then jumped in to defend Bush. “George Bush didn’t propose turning Medicare into a voucher,” the Prez said. “George Bush embraced comprehensive immigration reform … George Bush never suggested that we eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood.”

No he didn’t – and that underscores the fact that Romney offers an alternative not only to Obama but also to Bush. He offers an alternative to whole New Deal, big spending, debt hiking, contraception distributing, sexy state circus. And he’s only so radically different because the Tea Party made him that way. Romney went into the primaries branded a moderate and came out branded a conservative. He’s a better, more important candidate for it.

The Romney/Paul ticket seems to have grasped that America simply cannot continue the way it is going. In a globalised world, smaller government is more competitive and more competitive is more beautiful. It is also more concomitant with the American historical tradition. When a US president compels citizens to buy a consumer product – and gets away with it thanks to the Supreme Court – you know that something is amiss in the land of the free. …

Michael Barone makes the call for a Romney win. 

Fundamentals usually prevail in American elections. That’s bad news for Barack Obama. True, Americans want to think well of their presidents and many think it would be bad if Americans were perceived as rejecting the first black president.

But it’s also true that most voters oppose Obama’s major policies and consider unsatisfactory the very sluggish economic recovery — Friday’s jobs report showed an unemployment uptick.

Also, both national and target state polls show that independents, voters who don’t identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans, break for Romney.

That might not matter if Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 39 to 32 percent, as they did in the 2008 exit poll. But just about every indicator suggests that Republicans are more enthusiastic about voting — and about their candidate — than they were in 2008, and Democrats are less so.

That’s been apparent in early or absentee voting, in which Democrats trail their 2008 numbers in target states Virginia, Ohio, Iowa and Nevada.

The Obama campaign strategy, from the beginning, has recognized these handicaps, running barrages of early anti-Romney ads in states that Obama carried narrowly. But other states, not so heavily barraged, have come into contention.

Which candidate will get the electoral votes of the target states? I’ll go out on a limb and predict them, in ascending order of 2008 Obama percentages — fully aware that I’m likely to get some wrong. …

WSJ this past weekend with a piece on wildlife making a comeback in our back yards. 

This year, Princeton, N.J., has hired sharpshooters to cull 250 deer from the town’s herd of 550 over the winter. The cost: $58,700. Columbia, S.C., is spending $1 million to rid its drainage systems of beavers and their dams. The 2009 “miracle on the Hudson,” when US Airwaysflight 1549 had to make an emergency landing after its engines ingested Canada geese, saved 155 passengers and crew, but the $60 million A320 Airbus was a complete loss. In the U.S., the total cost of wildlife damage to crops, landscaping and infrastructure now exceeds $28 billion a year ($1.5 billion from deer-vehicle crashes alone), according to Michael Conover of Utah State University, who monitors conflicts between people and wildlife.

Those conflicts often pit neighbor against neighbor. After a small dog in Wheaton, Ill., was mauled by a coyote and had to be euthanized, officials hired a nuisance wildlife mitigation company. Its operator killed four coyotes and got voice-mail death threats. A brick was tossed through a city official’s window, city-council members were peppered with threatening emails and letters, and the FBI was called in. After Princeton began culling deer 12 years ago, someone splattered the mayor’s car with deer innards.

Welcome to the nature wars, in which Americans fight each other over too much of a good thing—expanding wildlife populations produced by our conservation and environmental successes. We now routinely encounter wild birds and animals that our parents and grandparents rarely saw. As their numbers have grown, wild creatures have spread far beyond their historic ranges into new habitats, including ours. It is very likely that in the eastern United States today more people live in closer proximity to more wildlife than anywhere on Earth at any time in history.

In a world full of eco-woes like species extinctions, this should be wonderful news—unless, perhaps, you are one of more than 4,000 drivers who will hit a deer today, or your child’s soccer field is carpeted with goose droppings, or feral cats have turned your bird feeder into a fast-food outlet, or wild turkeys have eaten your newly planted seed corn, or beavers have flooded your driveway, or bears are looting your trash cans. And that’s just the beginning.

In just a few decades we have turned a wildlife comeback miracle into a mess that’s getting messier, and costlier. How did this happen? The simple answer: Forests grew back over the past two centuries, wildlife came back over the past century and people sprawled across the landscape over the past half-century. …

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Jennifer Rubin liked Romney’s speech Friday in Wisconsin.

If Mitt Romney wins Wisconsin, it may be because of the speech. If he loses the election it might be argued it was because he didn’t give that speech at the convention. But whatever the outcome, the speech Romney gave in Wisconsin today was the best written and best delivered of his campaign, probably of his political life.

There were some lovely, memorable flourishes: “The door to a brighter future is there, open, waiting for us. I need your vote, I need your help. Walk with me, walk together. Let us start anew.” “Walk with me” was the grace note, a welcome variation from exhortations to follow politicians. And there was some effective parallel structure (maybe the most compelling rhetorical form when done well):

“You know that if the President is re-elected, he will still be unable to work with the people in Congress. He has ignored them, attacked them, blamed them. The debt ceiling will come up again, and shutdown and default will be threatened, chilling the economy. The President was right when he said he can’t change Washington from the inside. In this case, you can take him at his word.

When I am elected, I will work with Republicans and Democrats in Congress. I will meet regularly with their leaders. I will endeavor to find those good men and women on both sides of the aisle who care more about the country than about the politics. Together, we will put the nation on track to a balanced budget, to reform our tax code, and to finally reaffirm our commitment to financial responsibility.

You know that if the President is re-elected, he will continue his war on coal and oil and natural gas. He will send billions more dollars to his favorite solar and wind companies. And all of this will guarantee higher energy prices at the pump and fewer jobs. Today, gas costs twice what it did when President Obama was elected.” …

Charles Krauthammer explalins Tuesday’s choice.

… An Obama second term means that the movement toward European-style social democracy continues, in part by legislation, in part by executive decree. The American experiment — the more individualistic, energetic, innovative, risk-taking model of democratic governance — continues to recede, yielding to the supervised life of the entitlement state.

If Obama loses, however, his presidency becomes a historical parenthesis, a passing interlude of overreaching hyper-liberalism, rejected by a center-right country that is 80 percent nonliberal.

Should they summon the skill and dexterity, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan could guide the country to the restoration of a more austere and modest government with more restrained entitlements and a more equitable and efficient tax code. Those achievements alone would mark a new trajectory — a return to what Reagan started three decades ago.

Every four years we are told that the coming election is the most important of one’s life. This time it might actually be true. At stake is the relation between citizen and state, the very nature of the American social contract.

John Fund wrote the book on voter fraud.

Patrick Moran claims he was just joking about encouraging voter fraud. But he nonetheless resigned last week as field director for the campaign of his father, Virginia Congressman Jim Moran.

Guerrilla videographer James O’Keefe caught Patrick Moran on tape offering advice on how to commit in-person voter fraud. The scheme involved forging utility bills that would satisfy Virginia’s non-photo ID law, and then casting ballots in the name of others — relying on the help of Democratic lawyers stationed at the polls if there were any problems. Some joke.

Last April, a 22-year-old O’Keefe associate showed how easy it is to vote in someone else’s name if no ID is required by being offered the ballot of Attorney General Eric Holder simply by mentioning his name to a Washington, D.C. poll worker. Now O’Keefe has shown just how easy it is to commit in-person voter fraud in states that have loose non-photo ID laws

But opponents of voter ID dismiss worries about our voting system’s vulnerability. The liberal Advancement Project claims “you’re more likely to get hit by lightning than find a case of prosecutorial voter fraud.” I guess the Advancement Project missed these recent lightning strikes: …

According to the Examiner, Doug Wilder is having Obama doubts.

Former Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder, America’s first elected black governor, has his own reservations about America’s first black president, Barack Obama.

Wilder, an emphatic Obama supporter in 2008, said his fellow Democrat should have focused more on creating jobs during his first term and faulted the president for failing to keep his campaign promise to bridge the partisan gap in Washington.

“I think he’s governed left of center and didn’t focus on jobs and economic recovery,” Wilder told The Washington Examiner.

But will Wilder still vote for Obama on Tuesday in a battleground state Obama is desperate to win again?

“I have not said anything differently,” Wilder said with a chuckle.

In 2008, Wilder helped Obama become the only Democratic presidential candidate to win Virginia in half a century.

But Wilder said the presidential race in the state remains a tossup this late into the election cycle because many independents feel disappointment in the man they helped put in power four years ago. That has opened the door for Romney to make his case and it has been a compelling one so far, Wilder said. …

Mark Tapscott has the Lee Iacocca story.

… “But the reason we’re supporting Mitt Romney for president is because our entire country faces a critical turning point. The truth of the matter is we can’t afford four more years like the last four years.

“Mitt Romney is the leader with the plan and the experience to lead our nation and restore her strength, which also just happens to be the best thing we could do for America’s automotive industry and the people whose lives depend on this critical industry.”

Go here for the full text.

Whoever wins next Tuesday, Iacocca is likely to give the same advice to them as he did to Chrysler and General Motors in 2009 in an AP dispatch:

“They’re on you day and night. Their oversight is just too extreme. That’s why our 10-year loan, we paid it back in three years. We couldn’t stand the government. The bureaucracy kills you.”

WSJ reviews a book on Thomas Jefferson in his role as slave owner. The Dems might want to re-think their claim of Jefferson as the founder of the beginnings of the Democrat party. Then again, they might be comfortable with the hypocrisy.

… Whatever moral ambivalence he may have felt toward the institution of slavery he overcame when he sat down and did the numbers for Monticello. In 1792, he calculated precisely what his slaves were worth. Mr. Wiencek writes: “What Jefferson set out clearly for the first time was that he was making a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children. The enslaved children were yielding him a bonanza, a perpetual human dividend at compound interest.” To intimates, Jefferson described slavery matter-of-factly as a good investment strategy, advising one friend that if his family had cash to spare, “every farthing of it [should be] laid out in land and negroes.”

When it comes to Jefferson the slave owner, Mr. Wiencek’s judgment is unsparing. “His assets reliably compounding, his philosophy rendering him deaf to the appeals of humanity, he plowed through any contradiction,” he writes. “He wielded a species of power that made its own reality.” Mr. Wiencek notes that Jefferson deliberately presented visitors with an idyllic but artificial picture of slave life at his estate. He would point to a few exceptionally industrious slaves who in fact, Mr. Wiencek says, “were desperate to remain in the master’s favor, to stay on the mountaintop”—that is, the part of the estate closest to the house—”and not be sent [to the plantations] below, where the overseers were in charge.” …

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In the Chicago Sun-Times, Steve Huntley writes on how the president erodes the American dream. 

One of President Barack Obama’s latest campaign themes is trust — that he can be trusted and Republican nominee Mitt Romney can’t. Thanks to his own words, we know that Obama can be trusted to put ideology ahead of commonsense economic goals to put people back to work.

In an interview with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register, Obama was asked if he regretted his push to enact health-care overhaul legislation when he had huge Democratic majorities in Congress instead of emphasizing measures to fix the economy. “Absolutely not,” responded the president.

That must have come as a slap in the face to the 23 million Americans out of work, trapped in part-time jobs or given up looking for work; to the 50 percent of college grads who can’t find jobs or labor at doing something below their hard-earned college credentials, and to the 5.5 million unemployed women and the 27.5 million women in poverty, increases of, respectively, 500,000 and 3.6 million over the levels when Obama took office. …

David Harsanyi reacts to Obama’s idea of a “Department of Business.”

… But the most obvious pitfall of a Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, or whatever it’ll be called, is that it would further institutionalize the absurd notion that government can foresee what consumers desire and then “invest” accordingly. When Obama talks about “jobs of the future” he means jobs the government will subsidize because people who vote for him like the sound of it. The more they fail, the more it will have to “invest.” It’s not about what you want, it’s about you need.

If the Obama Administration was an investment house, it would have tanked long ago. Its record on green energy is horrid. It has heaped federal loans and subsidies onto coal-powered electric cars — an “investment” that “will not only reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” Obama said in 2009, but “put Americans back to work.” Hardly. The Chevy Volt’s been a tepid seller, at best, and without taxpayer subsidizes few could afford a $100,000 compact car. Toyota, the world’s largest carmaker has stopped mass production of a new sub-compact iQ plug-in, and offering the public 100 units. Toyota executive Takeshi Uchiyamada recently explained that, “current capabilities of electric vehicles do not meet society’s needs, whether it may be the distance the cars run, or the costs or how it takes a long time to charge.”

Does government care if ethanol or a windmill meets society’s needs? Does it care about cost? Toyota’s Uchiyamada risks stockholder investments — real investments — while politicians’ decision-making rests on political and ideological pressures. So how could a Department of Business be a good idea?

Debra Saunders thinks Romney can get the job done.

… Romney earned his reputation as a turnaround artist, a venture capitalist and savior of the Olympics. He balanced four state budgets and passed a landmark health care bill with the help of Kennedy, a former rival. Romney has proved that he can get things done, work across the aisle and broker deals.

I asked Martin F. Nolan, former Boston Globe Washington bureau chief, how Romney got along with the BayState’s Democratic leaders. “He didn’t love them, but he talked to them,” quoth Nolan. Romney held regular Monday meetings with the leadership, which is why “you never hear any of them trashing him.”

And he knows how to get a job done.

Nashua, NH’s paper switched this year and supports President Romney. 

Four years ago, with little hesitation, we endorsed then-Sen. Barack Obama to become the 44th president of the United States, saying it was a time for “new leadership, a new approach to governing, a new way of conducting the people’s business.”

So the basic question facing The Telegraph editorial board when it met last week came down to this: Did the former Illinois senator do enough to live up to those admittedly high expectations to warrant a second term?

After several hours of spirited debate, not unlike conversations taking place in kitchens and living rooms across America, we reached a consensus that he had not. Perhaps more importantly, when we identified the key challenges facing the nation – jobs, the economy and the national debt – we concluded he was not the best candidate to meet them.

That person is former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and we hereby endorse him to become the 45th president of the United States. …

Noemie Emery on the two big reasons for Obama’s loss. 

If President Obama loses next Tuesday, we will be tempted to point to two days that did it: Sept. 11, 2012, (riots in Cairo and elsewhere); and Oct. 3, (the first debate). But the real cause may lie in two paths not taken, in which unwise decisions led to bad outcomes.

The first came in January 2010, when Scott Brown, running as the 41st vote to finish Obamacare, won a special election to fill the seat of Ted Kennedy by an unexpected large margin in blue Massachusetts, which had gone overwhelmingly for the Democrats in 2008. This came after the off-year elections in Virginia and in New Jersey. These states, which also had gone for Obama, made large swings to install Republican governors, who campaigned against his ideas. Protests had dogged Democrats at town meetings, polls showed the public despised his proposals, and his approval ratings had fallen dramatically. He had two choices. One was to scale down his health care bill to a few proposals which could have won broad approval, try to win over some centrist Republicans, and have a small but real win he could take to the public. The other, which he chose, was to go big: ram the bill back through the House of Representatives, enrage the people already against him, and add to their number those made as angry by the procedure as others had been by the bill. …

Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom review the book on affirmative action by Sander and Taylor.

The moral arguments against racial preferences in higher education — racial double standards in admissions — have been made once too often. They’re powerful, but we all know them inside out: Affirmative action violates the central principle that all of us should be treated not as members of racial groups, but as individuals, judged by the content of our character. It has long been time to move on, which is precisely what Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. have done in their remarkable new book. They have shifted the focus of the entire debate. Bypassing the standard arguments about core principles, their extensive research focuses on the actual effects of racial preferences on the students they were intended to benefit. Drawing upon data never before available to independent-minded scholars, they find, to their dismay, that such policies actually do more harm than good to black and Hispanic students. From now on, it will be impossible to have a serious debate on this subject without extensive reference to the evidence provided in this volume.

The data are culled from Sander’s research over the past 15 years, and from other recent scholarly investigations. The subtitle conveniently gives us the bottom line: Institutions of higher education admit black and Hispanic students using criteria very different from those applied to white and Asian applicants, and have been killing the former with kindness. These students are thrilled to have been admitted to a highly selective school but quickly discover they cannot cope with the competition from their better-prepared classmates. Thus, they generally do poorly. If their math skills are primitive, they cannot follow a tough economics course. Those who weren’t taught much science in high school are not ready for rigorous pre-med instruction.

These students have plenty of potential for intellectual growth in institutions that are right for them. But a great many of them, alas, are at the wrong schools — “mismatched.” Preferential admissions have enabled them to attend academically rigorous schools for which they are marginally qualified at best. Not only do they fare badly in the classroom at the outset, they fall farther behind with each passing college year. In selective colleges across the land, about half of all black students rank in the bottom fifth of their class. And the gap between them and their white and Asian classmates grows wider over successive years. …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jason Riley comments on Obama’s “plan.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Williams concludes wondering why blacks support politicians who fail them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such that naval vessels are as obsolete as horse cavalry?

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

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

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

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

Michael Barone posts on a newspaper endorsement that might matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Midwesterners cheered. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Count on more fire to come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This must be what momentum looks like.

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

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

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

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

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

Toby Harnden on the fearmonger-in-chief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More of this from Jennifer Rubin.

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

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

Romnesia? Kimberley Strassel compares Obama to Obama.

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

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

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

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

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

Ross Douthat says Obama’s smelling like a loser.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jonathan Tobin thinks liberal denial will get worse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Sowell on Libya and lies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Malcolm notes Obama’s slide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Toby Harnden posts on Monday’s debate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Rubin has ten debate follow ups.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Steyn comments on the binder BS. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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John Fund on last night’s debate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Continetti says the inner jerk is coming out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Malcolm with humor.

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

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

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