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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are at least three variations of what happened. …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Krauthammer with more on the Benghazi aftermath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Charles Krauthammer covers the last debate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Henninger on the un-president. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instapundit tells us another paper sees the light.

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

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

Precisely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a link to video of the Dinner.

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

The crisis of leadership in American government is easily explained: thanks to a flawed presidential primary system that rewards strident rhetoric and hyper-partisanship, candidates tailor their messages to fringe elements in small, unrepresentative states. The result? A nasty, shallow and expensive process that rewards sound bites rather than solutions and gamesmanship instead of ideas. This year, however, we have witnessed a rare phenomenon in American politics. A candidate has emerged from the rough and tumble of the primaries with his dignity intact. The system has produced not a demagogue but a manager, a candidate whose experience is rooted in the pragmatism of the business world rather than the ideology of partisan politics.

That candidate is Mitt Romney.

Gov. Romney won the Republican Party’s nomination precisely because he is not an ideologue—and that is no small achievement. He persuaded enough Republican primary voters that the time has come to put aside dogma and inflexibility in favor of real-world solutions to the array of problems America faces at home and abroad.

Over the last few weeks, Mr. Romney has shown that he is a moderate to his core—he is a manager, and a listener, who believes he can restore the balance between the private and public sectors that has been a hallmark of the American economy.

The Observer endorses Mr. Romney’s candidacy and urges readers to support him. …

… Mr. Romney will not stand by idly while vicious anti-Semites in Egypt’s ruling Muslim Brotherhood threaten Israeli civilians. He will not bow to wishful thinking when terrorists hijack protest movements in the Arab world. And he will call out Israel’s critics in the West for their hypocrisy and utter disregard for the Jewish state’s security concerns.

The United States simply cannot afford another four years of weak leadership. The genius of American capitalism and the moral authority of American foreign policy must be restored.

Mitt Romney has a plan to do both. He has the credentials to restore the economy and to defend American values in a hostile world. He has the skills to help create jobs and a brighter future for our country.

This election is a true turning point for the next generation. Mitt Romney is the change the nation needs. And he is the change New York needs.

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Jennifer Rubin sums up last night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Steyn visits Benghazi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The convention came and went. Nothing.

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

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

Late Night Humor with A. Malcolm.

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

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

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

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

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Niall Ferguson posts on the VP debate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Charles Krauthammer has more on Romney’s first debate.

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

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

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

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

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

After the scapegoats came the excuses. …

Streetwise Professor explains Iraq and “sunk costs.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Continetti on Ryan’s debate. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mort Zuckerman explains why the country is tired of Obama.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or consider the welfare waivers …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kim Strassel has thoughts on Biden.

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

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

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

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

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

Telegraph, UK – Where Scotland has gone wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Continetti shows how liberals eat their own kind.

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

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

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

Jennifer Rubin posts on the debate.

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

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

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

Yuval Levin posts on the bizarre Dem debate reaction.

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

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

Dennis Byrne says it looks like Bob Woodward was right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark McKinnon brings an interesting debate perspective.

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

But you can never show the pain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Washington Post interviews Jim Lehrer.

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

“So what?”

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

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

Question: What was your overall impression of the debate?

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

Q: Were there drawbacks to it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How? ..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mark Steyn’s turn with the debate.

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

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

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

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

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

Andy McCarthy has a turn at the plate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

… The Daily Mail, never understated:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

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

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

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

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