Category: Keepers

After two full weeks of moving to and living in New York City, I just got back to DC for ten days (doctor’s appointments, etc.). All I can say is: what a relief.

Moving is never easy; moving to New York City even harder. Moving to New York while blogging an election was probably too large a leap for an excitable chap like myself. Visiting NYC has always been a thrill. But living there? After the initial wonderland feel, you get to adjust to a whole new rhythm. Just in some basic respects – like getting online or using your phone – it’s like going back in time a little. Time Warner cable … well, I probably don’t need to tell New Yorkers what it’s like there. We bought the most expensive cable package to expedite my work at home – and it just decides to crawl like dial-up every few minutes. My mifi cannot get a signal that’s stable. My iPhone is suddenly iffy – calls are dropped and online access is far slower than in DC. And if you keep your wifi open, it gets grabbed by squeegee hotspots that are hard to get rid of. Not a good time to lose Google maps either.

Then the following: we went to a store and found a couch; they delivered the wrong one. We went to Best Buy to get a new TV; they delivered the wrong one. When they did deliver the right one, the cable-box was dead. We could not get any DVR either. I had to go into the Beast offices to live-blog Obama’s implosion. Scalding hot water comes out of the cold faucet – randomly. And the space we live in is one fifth the size of our place in DC. Just to walk a few blocks requires barging your way through a melee of noise and rudeness and madness. And a glance at your bank account shows a giant sucking sound as the city effectively robs you of all your pennies at every juncture. When you’re there for a few days or a week, it can be bracing. But living with this as a daily fact of life? How does anyone manage it?

I’m told I should give it a few months.  Since our lease is for twelve, I don’t have much choice. Adjustment to NYC is a process. A really long, exasperating, draining process. Do you just have to harden yourself to live as if this is normal? Or will it get better? Please tell me it gets better.

Update: You can read through the long thread that resulted from this post here.

If you want cheering up, go read Kos. He has some swing state polling that shows that the Obama free-fall may have stalled for a bit. I only note that in the poll of polls, Obama has now thrown away his leads in Florida and Virginia (Romney’s now ahead), and is now only clinging on in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Colorado. Obama basically threw away six months of hard and smart campaigning in an interminable hour and a half. I’ve never seen a candidate do that before in my lifetime. And if a fast-backfiring Sesame Street ad was the Obama campaign’s response to the implosion of last week, I’m not reassured. Seriously: after your entire agenda has been stolen from you by one of the most shameless con-men in politics on live TV, you decide that the way to come back is by playing the Big Bird card? That’s why I’m worried. Romney is now amazingly the clear centrist in this election, because he has now said he will reform the tax code to goose growth without adding to the tax burden of the middle class. It’s a lie. The math cannot work, and I assume that Romney understands it doesn’t work but will borrow more money to cover up the gaping holes – money that is effectively a second stimulus, which is okay with the GOP because all they really care about is winning. They don’t give a damn about the debt as we saw under Reagan and the second Bush. We would be back to Bush-Cheney economics. But Obama was too busy musing about his day-trip to the Hoover Dam to rebut that argument or call it out. And now you see how cynical, total GOP obstructionism works: Romney cheerfully blames Obama for gridlock and plausibly says he’ll now enact much of Obama’s debt commission agenda (except for defense cuts) because he has the votes and Obama doesn’t. You want an end to gridlock? Vote for Romney. We all know Senate Democrats roll over backwards when necessary. I know this isn’t constructive criticism. But I cannot say I feel invested in a candidate who preferred to spend a day goofing off than prepping for his first debate. If you do that, and forfeit the debate, how on earth do you motivate your base to work their hearts out for you? And yet Obama did not lose the debate. For the first time I can recall, he forfeited it – and we are where we are. No sitting president since debates began has ever lost a first debate by the margin Obama did. I don’t think any challenger has ever done that badly either in terms of impact (suggestions welcome for a precedent of some kind). So what to do?

I think he needs to reboot by embracing Bowles-Simpson in its entirety (but he’s far too timid to do that and he fumbled the moment when he really could have done it) and challenging Romney on his big Pentagon spending. Or he could warn us of another Middle East war, if he hadn’t already committed himself to such a war if Iran refuses to buckle. Or he could unleash a blistering attack on Romney’s math. That Big Lie is waiting to be exposed. The Big Lie is that Romney will slash tax rates for the wealthy, launch a new war in the Middle East, increase defense spending and leave traditional Medicare as an option – while not burdening the middle class and cutting the debt. It’s mathematically impossible. I have no idea what the Obama campaign is doing now, but if “Where’s the Beef?” brought Mondale back from the dead, then “Show Us The Math!” might be a good place to start.

It can be done. Obama saw Bill Clinton do it. Biden might begin to turn the tables Wednesday. Many of us have tried to make the case for Obama he cannot deign to make himself. Obama has two more debates to try and claw his way back. I’m still clinging to the hope that Obama is best when up against it, and that Americans, on second and third look, will see what a liar and opportunist Romney is and swing back to the incumbent. But my assumption now is that Romney will win this election now, barring a game-changer as big as last week’s debate. Somehow Obama has to find that to reverse what was a public act of self-destruction.

(Graph: the current poll of polls with extra sensitivity, showing Obama’s collapse as a candidate.)

The Pew poll is devastating, just devastating. Before the debate, Obama had a 51 – 43 lead; now, Romney has a 49 – 45 lead. That’s a simply unprecedented reversal for a candidate in October. Before Obama had leads on every policy issue and personal characteristic; now Romney leads in almost all of them. Obama’s performance gave Romney a 12 point swing! I repeat: a 12 point swing.

Romney’s favorables are above Obama’s now. Yes, you read that right. Romney’s favorables are higher than Obama’s right now. That gender gap that was Obama’s firewall? Over in one night:

Currently, women are evenly divided (47% Obama, 47% Romney). Last month, Obama led Romney by 18 points (56% to 38%) among women likely voters.

Seriously: has that kind of swing ever happened this late in a campaign? Has any candidate lost 18 points among women voters in one night ever? And we are told that when Obama left the stage that night, he was feeling good. That’s terrifying. On every single issue, Obama has instantly plummeted into near-oblivion. He still has some personal advantages over Romney – even though they are all much diminished. Obama still has an edge on Medicare, scores much higher on relating to ordinary people, is ahead on foreign policy, and on being moderate, consistent and honest (only 14 percent of swing voters believe Romney is honest). But on the core issues of the economy and the deficit, Romney is now kicking the president’s ass:

By a 37% to 24% margin, more swing voters say Romney would improve the job situation. Swing voters favor Romney on the deficit by a two-to-one (41% vs. 20%) margin…. Romney has gained ground on several of these measures since earlier in the campaign. Most notably, Obama and Romney now run even (44% each) in terms of which candidate is the stronger leader. Obama held a 13-point advantage on this a month ago. And Obama’s 14-point edge as the more honest and truthful candidate has narrowed to just five points. In June, Obama held a 17-point lead as the candidate voters thought was more willing to work with leaders from the other party. Today, the candidates run about even on this (45% say Obama, 42% Romney).

Lies work when they are unrebutted live on stage. And momentum counts at this point in the election.

Now look at Pew’s question as to who would help the middle class the most:

Look: I’m trying to rally some morale, but I’ve never seen a candidate this late in the game, so far ahead, just throw in the towel in the way Obama did last week – throw away almost every single advantage he had with voters and manage to enable his opponent to seem as if he cares about the middle class as much as Obama does. How do you erase that imprinted first image from public consciousness: a president incapable of making a single argument or even a halfway decent closing statement? And after Romney’s convincing Etch-A-Sketch, convincing because Obama was incapable of exposing it, Romney is now the centrist candidate, even as he is running to head up the most radical party in the modern era.

How can Obama come back? By ensuring people know that Romney was and is a shameless liar and opportunist? That doesn’t work for a sitting president. He always needed a clear positive proposal – tax reform, a Grand Bargain on S-B lines – as well as a sterling defense of his admirable record. Bill Clinton did the former for him. Everyone imaginable did what they could for him. And his response? Well, let’s look back a bit:

With President Obama holed up in a Nevada resort for debate practice, things can get pretty boring on the White House beat right now. Pretty boring for Obama too, apparently. “Basically they’re keeping me indoors all the time,” Obama told a supporter on the phone during a visit to a Las Vegas area field office. “It’s a drag,” he added. “They’re making me do my homework.”

Too arrogant to take a core campaign responsibility seriously. Too arrogant to give his supporters what they deserve. If he now came out and said he supports Simpson-Bowles in its entirety, it would look desperate, but now that Romney has junked every proposal he ever told his base, and we’re in mid-October, it’s Obama’s only chance on the economy.

Or maybe, just maybe, Obama can regain our trust and confidence somehow in the next debate. Maybe he can begin to give us a positive vision of what he wants to do (amazing that it’s October and some of us are still trying to help him, but he cannot). Maybe if Romney can turn this whole campaign around in 90 minutes, Obama can now do the same. But I doubt it. A sitting president does not recover from being obliterated on substance, style and likability in the first debate and get much of a chance to come back. He has, at a critical moment, deeply depressed his base and his supporters and independents are flocking to Romney in droves.

I’ve never seen a candidate self-destruct for no external reason this late in a campaign before. Gore was better in his first debate – and he threw a solid lead into the trash that night. Even Bush was better in 2004 than Obama last week. Even Reagan’s meandering mess in 1984 was better – and he had approaching Alzheimer’s to blame.

I’m trying to see a silver lining. But when a president self-immolates on live TV, and his opponent shines with lies and smiles, and a record number of people watch, it’s hard to see how a president and his party recover. I’m not giving up. If the lies and propaganda of the last four years work even after Obama had managed to fight back solidly against them to get a clear and solid lead in critical states, then reality-based government is over in this country again. We’re back to Bush-Cheney, but more extreme. We have to find a way to avoid that. Much, much more than Obama’s vanity is at stake.

(Photo: Obama as he imploded, by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images.)

This is why, apparently, the president was incapable for an hour and a half last week of articulating anything of substance or clarity:

“The president showed up with the intent of answering questions and having a discussion, an honest discussion of where we will go as a country, and Romney showed up to deliver a performance, and he delivered a very good performance,” Axelrod said. “It was completely un-rooted in fact, it was completely un-rooted in the positions he’s taken before and he spent 90 minutes trying to undo two years of campaigning on that stage, but he did it very well.”

Lame. Which helps explain the extraordinary shift in Florida polls (above) after the debate (made to heighten sensitivity). Lamer still:

As for why Obama did not address Romney’s “47 percent” comments at the debate, Axelrod said “the president obviously didn’t see the appropriate opportunity.” “The president was earnestly trying to answer questions that were asked on the topics that were being discussed, and he didn’t find the opportunity to raise it, and it’s obviously well known,” Axelrod said. Obama, Axelrod said, “was a little taken aback by the brazenness with which Gov. Romney walked away” from his past positions and his record.

Where does one start? Lehrer’s decision to allow the candidates free-style answers gave Obama carte blanche. The first question was about their differences on the economy. The obvious first answer from Obama should have been that he’s trying to help all Americans, while Romney is on record saying he doesn’t care about 47 percent of them. Bang. You’re off on the offense. And if Axelrod had not prepped Obama that Romney is capable of lying massively with total sincerity, or that, for Romney, truth is simply a utilitarian construct, then Axelrod failed to do due diligence. If Obama was rattled by Drudge, Carlson and Hannity yelling “Remember he’s a nigger!” the days before, then the Romney campaign has gotten into Obama’s usually impermeable head. To lose a debate is one thing. To default on it is quite another. To default on it in a way that reveals you cannot explain to anyone what your agenda is for the next four years is close to disqualifying. Here’s what the debate did in Ohio, the critical firewall for Obama:

More worryingly, Romney’s core Etch-A-Sketch is his adoption of Bowles-Simpson’s rhetoric for the fiscal future. He now says (checking my watch) he wants to eliminate deductions and lower rates in a way that doesn’t reduce the burden on the wealthy or increase it on the middle class. That’s mathematically impossible, of course, especially when you add in the costs of more military spending and Romney’s pledge to launch a new war on Iran.  But Romney, like Reagan, is counting on no-one doing the math and more flim-flam on how growth would provide revenues. Alas, as I noted at the time, Obama did not have the balls to embrace Bowles-Simpson fully against his own party after Paul Ryan prevented it from getting to a Congressional vote. So now Romney has dishonestly stolen it from him – which will give him much more credibility on the debt with independents and undecideds. The problem with the debate is that if you simply default on rebutting those lies, low-information voters who can see a smart president incapable of responding or rebutting draw the obvious conclusion: Romney must be right. And when that is the first impression of the two debating, it’s devastating. And that’s why I think the entire election has been recast on Romney’s centrist terms, terms which Obama allowed to get away from him a while back, and which suddenly makes Romney – once again – the favorite.

Not because the economy sucks – but because Romney provided a much clearer, if utterly dishonest, plan for the next four years, while Obama offered nothing. His closing statement was nothing.

Of course, I’m excitable. This is a bounce for Romney and will presumably subside a bit. Perhaps by the next debate, the president will have a clue what he wants to do for the country and the world – and be able to communicate it. But I’m also angry. If Axelrod couldn’t see the Etch-A-Sketch coming, when Romney’s campaign all but told us they were cynical enough to do and say anything to win, then he truly is incompetent.

The only solace is that Obama is best when up against it. I remember how he just threw away the primary race in New Hampshire, rather than fighting. I recall how he allowed Obamacare to languish in the Congress for months, almost lost it with Scott Brown’s election, and finally brought it home. I remember how he let DADT drift for months, only to pull it from the fire in the nick of time in a lame-duck Congress. He does this. He works your last nerves. But I have never seen him phone it in as weakly as he did last week, and I can see no strategy behind it.

Who never wavered in his love and support for me from the second I told him I was gay; whose face dropped like an ashen landslide when he discovered I had become HIV-positive; who – a former high school rugby captain, national mid-distance runner, and player on our town's team, a man's man in many ways – has never faltered in defending his son's orientation even to his boss in a pretty conservative small town. He has been a rock for me on this question my adult life.

I remember a conversation long, long ago, when I was dating someone way out of my league, before I had come out to my folks. My boyfriend, who was older, Californian, and goddamn beautiful, said something to me that never left my consciousness, when I told him I hadn't yet told my folks: "Don't you deserve to have parents?" I said: "I do and they love me." He said "But how can they love you if you will not allow them to see all of you? If they do not know the part that loves another human being, how can they love the full you?"

I suddenly saw the closet was both a form of self-protection but also something that hurts and wounds a family. The closet denies your family and some of your closest friends the chance to embrace as well as disdain. It is a silent statement that you do not think they can rise to the occasion. In some cases, it can lead to disaster. But in more cases than you'd think, it doesn't. In fact, it is that self-revelation that, in my view, is almost entirely responsible for the shift in attitudes toward gay equality and integration. This was a grass roots development that the center had to adjust to; not a crazy idea foisted upon a world unready for it. Watch the honest video above and see how ready many can be.

It's a risk. Integrity is always a social risk. But you only have one life. Why not tell the truth and be set free? Why not give your own parents the chance to love all of you? When you make yourself that vulnerable, there is a kind of freedom in it.

And a chance for grace.

(Video from Expedia.)

[Re-posted from earlier today].

If you are a salesman and you see life and politics as about the sell, you adjust the sell every time to a different customer-base. Most people find this perfectly natural in a business setting, and it makes a lot of sense. It’s called marketing. You can and should sell the product to different audiences emphasizing which elements will appeal to each. 

But we often find the same strategy a little ethically dubious in politics and religion. Why? Because the product you are selling, in these contexts, is something in the future, not something we can see now, touch and examine and test. When you change both the pitch and the product for different audiences, and refuse to tell people what the final product may be, you need a lot of chutzpah and salesmanship to do the job. You need to have a facility for lying, while seeming utterly sincere. You need to have a face that can be re-set constantly to assess and sell to every door you knock on, especially if what you are selling does not, in normal reality, add up. Especially if the people you are selling to are in desperate straits, seemingly out of their control, in confusing times, where they are losing, and looking for hope and order and authority that will never crack or reveal weakness or lose its smile:

Now I’ve slept on it, that seems to me what happened last night. It was such a mesmerizing sales job and so relentless, checked at no point by Lehrer, and at no point checked by past reality or facts, Obama was left with two options: say this pleasant-seeming guy next to him is a shameless weather-vane and liar (wouldn’t work in a debate, is just against Obama’s character) or to try and remind the country of Romney’s actual policies as he has laid them out, and rebut the facts relentlessly. Obama tried the latter really, really badly, but the obvious retort to Romney’s smiling total pivot was: what on earth are you talking about? Who are you? Who will you be tomorrow?

But here’s the key political-policy point, it seems to me. In the last few days, Romney has said he will keep the DREAM executive order, keep all the good things in Obamacare, while getting rid of “Obamacare” (impossible); he will protect Medicare from Obama’s $700 billion “raid” and keep it as an option for seniors for ever, if they choose; and he will enact his version of Simpson-Bowles, because he is more moderate and bipartisan than Obama. Lehrer, who made Romney’s case for getting rid of PBS funding all by himself, did not see himself as a fact-checker – or even a moderator who could press a candidate to explain himself. He was simply a facilitator for the Romney sales job, which flummoxed Obama, in the worst public performance bar none of his campaign (I watched him give an economic policy speech once that was seriously coma-inducing).

More fatally for the president, the argument works. And it works precisely because of GOP extremism. If one party simply refuses to support anything a president of another party proposes and is primarily devoted to obstructionism on everything, then they can, if they are reckless enough both to create a credit crisis and prevent any further stimulus, succeed in essentially blackmailing the country by destroying its political system and then blaming it on the president. It’s cynical and corrupt and contemptible and unpatriotic – but lethal.

So in reality, we recall that Obama actually set up a Simpson-Bowles Grand Bargain, but Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, vetoed it (as was his prerogative on the commission, unlike a real fiscal conservative, Tom Coburn) and made sure it never got to a Congressional vote. Obama, in the worst mistake of his presidency, decided then to bob and weave on this, rather than risk embracing it alone. That’s what gave Romney his opening last night. He simply lied and said Obama killed S-B and Romney will resurrect it, but in line with his plan. So the obvious policy mix for now – a short-term stimulus, a long-term bipartisan debt-reduction deal on S-B lines – can only be passed in this scenario by a Republican president so long as he has a Republican House. A Democratic president cannot even hope that in the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, a single person from the GOP will compromise on anything. The Senate Democrats, however, are not like the House Republicans. They compromise. And the fiscal crisis keeps worsening. So Romney last night stole the key centrist argument of the economic debate from Obama’s weak hand – the hand he refused to seize S-B with when he could have.

So in terms of debate prowess, it was a knock-out. But from the strategic political argument, it was a very canny and dramatic move to the center, if, of course, utterly without consistency or principle.

So the obvious response to this new Romney is to say: now you’ve gone into a debate and denied you are lowering taxes on the wealthy: prove it. Show us where the new revenues come from or at least which are on your chopping block (sorry, PBS won’t solve the problem). The end of all corporate welfare? The end of the mortgage deduction? The charity deduction? Where is the money coming from? More to the point, you have to provide much more savings in the tax code than Simpson-Bowles, if you are also going to take us to higher-than-Cold-War “defense” spending, as you have also promised. How will that not mean a net shift from the already struggling middle class to the super-rich?

If I were Obama, I’d focus now entirely on Romney’s new plan. What is it? How is it paid for? What is he hiding from us? And why?

10.31 pm. Look: you know how much I love the guy, and you know how much of a high information viewer I am, and I can see the logic of some of Obama's meandering, weak, professorial arguments. But this was a disaster for the president for the key people he needs to reach, and his effete, wonkish lectures may have jolted a lot of independents into giving Romney a second look.

Obama looked tired, even bored; he kept looking down; he had no crisp statements of passion or argument; he wasn't there. He was entirely defensive, which may have been the strategy. But it was the wrong strategy. At the wrong moment.

The person with authority on that stage was Romney – offered it by one of the lamest moderators ever, and seized with relish. This was Romney the salesman. And my gut tells me he sold a few voters on a change tonight. It's beyond depressing. But it's true.

There are two more debates left. I have experienced many times the feeling that Obama just isn't in it, that he's on the ropes and not fighting back, and then he pulls it out. He got a little better over time tonight. But he pulled every punch. Maybe the next two will undo some of the damage. But I have to say I think it was extensive.

10.30 pm. But Romney's closing statement – very, very vague and highly deceptive. And is it me, or does he even sound like Reagan? And his final statement is on defending Medicare! He's the protector of that entitlement, even as his actual plan is a radical overhaul of it.

10.29 pm. How is Obama's closing statement so fucking sad, confused and lame? He choked. He lost. He may even have lost the election tonight.

10.25 pm. The idea that the candidate of the current Republican party is portraying himself as the most willing to reach across the aisle is staggering. That he is more persuasive on this than the president is a staggering personal failure on Obama's part. And now Obama is saying he is the candidate of "saying no". Just staggering incompetence on his part.

10.23 pm. Lehrer has basically handed the moderation of this to the candidates, and Romney has taken command. And he has done so by speaking for three minutes less.

10.22 pm. The liar has managed to make Obama seem dishonest. In an act of will, Romney's lies are made effective.

10.19 pm. A reader writes:

My wife and I are feeling the same hysteria you're expressing. Romney, while coming off as more than a bit aggressive, is clear, authoritative, and on point. Obama is a confusing, meandering, stuttering mess.

I'm a high information voter, so I know the context of Obama's complaints about Romney's tax plan not adding up, or comments about Medicare, Dodd-Frank, etc. I also know when Romney is lying through his teeth or contradicting his own past statements. Most of your Dish readers are probably in the same boat. But America as a whole? I'm not so sure. And to them I'd think Romney looks like he's creaming Obama.

And given how badly Romney's years at Bain have played in the media and ad wars to this date, I'm truly impressed by how well Romney has been able to play up his years of business experience. I have to admit, the way he's spinning it, not only does it sound impressive, but incredibly relevant to the issues being discussed.

In live-blogging a debate, I am not judging the intellectual cogency alone. I am judging it as a debate, which is a complex thing, with many factors in play. But I know debating, am good at it, and I can see a wipe-out when it's, well, in front of one's nose.

10.17 pm. Romney is even sounding Reagan-like and compassionate right now. The Etch-A-Sketch is shaking, and the old Romney is back, with coded appeals to his base. And then he adds onto that a litany of woes currently experienced. Again, even after Obama's eloquent answer, Romney is better.

10.14 pm. Obama's description of the role of government is actually elegant, and eloquent. Invoking Lincoln was great; invoking Eisenhower would have been even better. Education is the key. But hearing Obama defend his record, after hearing Clinton, is painful. Truly painful.

10.12 pm. Finally, Obama manages to point out the vagueness of Romney's hazy alternatives. But Romney, who just rolls ovr Lehrer. Yet another round to Romney. I don't think Obama has won a single exchange in this entire debate.

10.08 pm. Romney has somehow managed to turn healthcare into a fantasy decision between grim rationing bureaucrats versus patients and hospitals. It's an amazingly good performance, given the facts and arguments he has to deploy. In response, Obama is stuttering, detailed, wonkish, ineffective.

10.06 pm. I find myself bored silly by Obama. If I am bored silly by this wonkish lecture, and his refusal to rebut specific points, i.e. lies, Obama's in trouble.

10.03 pm. I simply cannot believe that Mitt Romney is saying he is more bipartisan than Obama. And Obama never pushes back. He is leaving argument after argument on the table, while he seems to be writing a memo to himself whenever Romney is speaking.

10.01 pm. Finally, Obama thanks Romney for Obamacare. The first time he actually turned the tables. Staggering it took him an hour to get there. And now Romney's lies on healthcare are becoming effective. And Obama is still looking down. Did no one tell him there is a split screen? Just political malpractice.

9.58 pm. Romney is now so clearly lying about how president Obama decided to do healthcare before jobs I wonder if he's over-reaching. But you notice that the second Romny stops speaking and Obama starts, the approval line sinks. That's grim data. Obama is going full metal wonk.

9.55 pm. More dissents:

It's 9:46, and you're becoming hysterical. Romney is so aggressive he's frightening. He's lying so quickly and changing positions so radically that no one could keep up with it. Take it easy. Obama seems like a normal person. Romney seems like he's been drinking Red Bull for 72 hours straight. It is not attractive.

Another:

I disagree with you completely. The confident person is the President. The anxious, sweating and near-hyperventilating person–Romney. I read you regularly–and like your work–but I sometimes think that you prepare yourself for the worse by announcing its arrival prematurely. I believe that your "live-blogging" thus far reflects that predisposition.

Another:

Romney seems flat out willing to lie, but I guess no one reads the fact check after?

9.53 pm. Some readers agree with me that Obama has been losing this debate, although I do think he is improving, waking up, finally and gaining momentum. One reader writes:

I'm sitting in a room with six other people.  These aren't all ravenous Democrats.  No one is having the reaction you are.  Not.  One.  Obama HAS flat-out asked Romney how he plans to pay for his budget.  Over and over and over again.  Seriously, man, what debate are you watching?

They're both tight and trying to cram a ton of details into their answers.  Yes, Romney is ravenously attacking.  What else did you expect him to do?  That's not Obama's style, and you've known it now for four years.  He was never going to rip at Romney's throat. This is who Obama is.  You know that. Keep calm, debate on.

9.51 pm. Romney is dominating Lehrer. And the debate. Just in pure alpha male terms.

9.45 pm. Finally, Obama began to make sense on Medicare. He made a simple, comprehensible case, and actually looked the boomers in the eye, when he said so. But Romney equaled him on this subject. I notice that as soon as Obama starts to speak, whatever he says, the green line of male approval goes down. It's the gender gap illustrated live.

9.44 pm. How Obama has managed to give Romney the advantage on Medicare in this exchange is political malpractice. Its not just an advantage so far. It's a wipe-out for Romney.

9.42 pm. This is a rolling calamity for Obama. He's boring, abstract, and less human-seeming than Romney! I can't even follow hm half the time. Either exhausted, over-briefed … or just flailing. He is throwing this debate away.

9.39 pm. First unforced Romney error: "I may need a new accountant."

9.31 pm. Finally, Obama is hitting his stride. But if the first half hour counts in basic impression, it's looking grim.

9.29 pm. Here's what Obama is missing: energy, optimism, passion. Whereas in style, I tend to agree with Wilkinson so far:

Romney seems relatively relaxed and is coming off fairly clear and authoritative. He should cut out the bemused smile he makes when Obama talks, though.

9.25 pm. Romney is running on Bowles-Simpson! And he's relating it to alleviating human suffering. A devastating round for the president. Romney has taken charge, even as Obama has spoken more. And Romney has now managed to make this into a status-quo versus change dynamic. Just terrible for Obama so far, in my opinion. And again, he keeps looking down to write. He should look him in the eye.

9.24 pm. I sure hope Obama wakes up. He's beginning to. And then he used the word "data".

9.22 pm. Notice how Romney is talking about actual individuals, while Obama is talking abstract ideas. And Obama has not made a clear simple argument for getting more jobs. How did he not prepare an answer for that?

9.18 pm. Obama's looking down as Romney speaks. Horrible TV. Why doesn't Obama just say: "How do we afford this? Where will you get the money to pay for the big tax cuts?" I hate to say this but Romney is connecting more than Obama, it seems to me. Obama is professorial and wonkish. He's on defense.

9.16 pm. Man, Obama is boring and abstract. He's putting us to sleep. I get his points but he is entirely wonky tonight. And he is on the defensive. Romney's crazy math is somehow made legitimate. Romney is kicking the president's ass.

9.11 pm. A good volley back from Obama  but Romney is coming off like Reagan, and has managed to provide anecdotes and stories, while Obama is a little wonky. But when Romney actually said that he wasn't cutting taxes for the very wealthy, it seems completely out of sync with his actual proposal.

9.07 pm. A nervous but competent beginning by Obama, but I'm struck by the visuals. Romney just looks like a classic president and Obama a very different one. The visuals are with Romney. And his answer was a total re-boot on compassion. This first round goes solidly to Romney.

9.01 pm. Basically the same height, which is not always the case.

8.57 pm. Here's the spousal money shot, with Ann putting on her Mary Tyler Moore "Ordinary People" face:

It's from Nicholas Kamm/Getty.

8.53 pm. The shots of Ann and Michelle are almost a study in acute tension. This is my first live-blog sitting next to a colleague, Chris, in the NYC Beast offices. You know why? I don't have a television in the new place yet. Or cable. And my mifi is on the blink.

(Top photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

The Dish actually transcribed the entire Obama speech – Carlson's massively hyped "scoop" yesterday – in June 2007. You can read the speech in full here. What struck me at the time was the following quote:

We can diminish poverty if we approach it in two ways: by taking mutual responsibility for each other as a society, and also by asking for some more individual responsibility to strengthen our families.

So Carlson is trying to make a speech that was in part about African-Americans taking "more individual responsibility to strengthen our families" into a leftist rant.

Yes, Obama defended government programs – to help young mothers with infants, for example – but the speech's blend of conservative goals and liberal policies is almost Obama's centrist brand. Yes, he implied that in many inner cities there is a constant quiet riot and that the authorities tolerate things there they wouldn't elsewhere (sounds like Giuliani to me). He also implied that the Feds did not respond to Katrina with sufficient urgency in part because the people affected the most were black and powerless. Isn't that obviously true? If Katrina had hit Georgetown, or San Francisco, do you think residents would be on their roofs begging for federal help for days? Yes, in black audiences his cadence shifts a little. So fucking what?

Here was what I wrote about it at the time:

Notice the conservative pitch for a liberal policy. Obama focuses on young children and ex-offenders. His big government programs are all geared toward fostering conservative social behavior and opportunity.

All that Carlson did is clip it to get an "angry black man" in the minds of Americans. It's at once one of the most desperate and lame and vile plays of the race card I can remember – an obvious recognition that the 47 percent tape can only really be countered emotionally with race-baiting. But it lit up "conservative" media in ways that Conor best expresses:

If the New York Times was constantly searching for archival footage to prove that Mitt Romney doesn't like black people, or that he is "whipping up race hatred," the conservative media would accuse them of frivolously ignoring the actual issues that this election ought to turn on. It would say that they were exploiting the racial anxieties of Americans to tarnish the character of a man whose long record of public policy-making shows no evidence of racial animosity or radicalism.

When it comes to racial demagoguery, the right has become everything it says it hates about the left.

Carlson used to be a brilliant writer. He's now a racist demagogue. He's a story in one person of how degenerate and disgusting much of American "conservatism" has become.

[Re-posted from earlier today.]

One reason I find the Romney-Ryan proposals for the economy somewhat alarming is that, in an era of hyper-social-inequality, they will almost certainly increase it still further. The Republicans are radical Randians in that sense, not Tories, as I have tried to argue. When you see an unexpected and sharply upward trend in inequality and want to accelerate it some more, you have ceased to be a conservative.

But why should conservatives worry in any way about inequality? For much of my adult life, that was my position. In principle, growing up in the 1970s, in a failing socialist country, I yearned for a polity where talent and hard work could be rewarded, where the state could be ratcheted back to allow for a more dynamic and meritocratic creation of wealth. Thatcher provided it, and Major and Blair entrenched it. One of its lynchpins was what they called the “Big Bang” in the City of London, when finance was deregulated, just as Glass-Steagall was repealed in the US.

Suddenly, I saw so many of the brightest minds of my generation go into finance and make a fortune. Suddenly, it seemed, growth was possible again, and inequality could actually fuel it. It seemed win-win through the 1990s, and entrenched in my mind at least, the wisdom of the Thatcher-Reagan analysis of the core problem of economic growth in the 1970s. For striving individualists like me, this was a golden era. To see the Eastern bloc collapse reinforced our complacency.

But we should have seen the danger signs that our complacency blinded us to. Enoch Powell, a very high Tory, once said that every political career ends in failure, because the problems that they have solved will have inevitably ceded by then to new ones, and new exigencies and new times. And so it remains true that Reaganism, enormously successful in its moment, can be seen as irrelevant to the new challenges its success spawned. Yes, growth soared for a while, but it soared far, far more for those at the top than those in the middle and the bottom. I saw no problem with that as such. I remember even mocking Al Gore’s in retrospect prophetic denunciation of the “top one percent” in 2000. But over time, the extremity of this inequality began to trouble me, because of its impact on the legitimacy of capitalism and liberal democracy. And when I first saw Barack Obama speak, his argument made me prick up my ears. I wasn’t buying it yet, but he was onto something. The good thing about having a blog is that I can go back and read my first impression from more than five years ago now:

I went to see Obama last night. He had a fundraiser at H20, a yuppie disco/restaurant in  Southwest DC. I was curious about how he is in person. I’m still absorbing the many impressions I got. But one thing stays in my head. This guy is a liberal. Make no mistake about that. He may, in fact, be the most effective liberal advocate I’ve heard in my lifetime. As a conservative, I think he could be absolutely lethal to what’s left of the tradition of individualism, self-reliance, and small government that I find myself quixotically attached to.

Not as lethal as the Bush administration was, but you get the point. And you’ll notice the early twitches of my political/intellectual migration. It was clear by then that three decades after Reagan’s great reduction in taxes, the middle class was struggling hard, moving upward largely on credit, while the top were in a new stratosphere. I didn’t buy any crude redistribution solution from the left, but I also saw how the right was coming up empty with proposals, apart from rationalizations. Hence my support for Clinton in 1992, and for Bush’s allegedly humbler, but ultimately catastrophic betrayal of conservatism from 2001 on. More to the point, as income growth stalled, and middle and working class Americans saw their richer peers leave them further and further behind, there were greater incentives for government to rush in to placate the middle, to ease the pain, to give them something to retain the illusion that the American dream was still alive. Jon Rauch, in a four-star must-read, explores what the economic profession has now discovered about the linkages involved:

Marianne Bertrand and Adair Morse, of Chicago’s business school, have found that legislators who represent constituencies with higher inequality are more likely to support the easing of credit. Several papers by International Monetary Fund economists comparing countries likewise find support for the “let them eat credit” approach. And credit splurges, they find, bring on instability and current-account deficits.

So you have most of the wealth going to a tiny few, and the rest trying to keep up in a credit bubble, while the federal government keeps on borrowing to pay for a growing entitlement state (even in its best non-dependency form, like the EITC) that its poorer citizens increasingly needed. Then .. well back to Jonathan:

For decades, more than half of the increase in the country’s GDP poured into the bank accounts of the richest Americans, who needed liquid investments in which to put their additional wealth. Their appetite for new investment vehicles fueled a surge in what Arkansas State’s Brown calls “financial engineering”—the concoction of exotic financial instruments, which acted on the financial sector like steroids.

And we all know what happened when those instruments unraveled, leaving us where we are. And where we are is not 1979. This is not an ideological shift; it’s an empirical deduction. To quote Rob Shapiro of the post-Reagan consensus:

The debate for many years looked settled. Changes in the economy and changes in the data have reopened the debate.

No surprise that Rob studied Oakeshott. An open mind can be a dangerous thing in today’s politics. And the point, of course, is that conservatives who care about the tradition of free enterprise and a thriving middle class should be among the first to worry about our return to the 1920s. It is that kind of instability that leads to expansions of the entitlement state. It is that kind of inequality and abuse of freedom (on Wall Street) that forces the state to intervene.

Conservatives, from Aristotle on, have always understood the central importance of the “middle way” and the “middle class” in sustaining a liberal democracy. Disraeli and Bismarck were the European pioneers of this conservatism. I think of Eisenhower in the last century as its great conservative defender in the US. Reagan was a necessary, even vital, correction, after liberal over-reach, but when that correction became dogma, and the right became fundamentalist about it, and the political fundamentalism was fused with a religious one, you saw the GOP degenerate into its Cheneyite and then Tea Party form: intellectually incoherent, angry beyond reason, and defined by cultural fear.

In an email Jon wrote discussing this subject, he expanded:

Conservatives should be MORE worried about inequality than liberals, at least the kind of inequality we’re seeing now. It will wreck the legitimacy of the values they hold dear and discredit them for two generations (a narrative Romney is doing his formidable best to set up).

Exactly. Romney personifies the kind of person who profited fantastically from the post-Reagan era and Ryan the small, tight brain that is still intellectually arrested in 1979. I know their abstract arguments and want to agree with them. But they are not in tune with these times – and are not responding to them. They have dogmas but no solutions. Obama, at least, is steering the ship a little further away from the rocks. That will have to do for now – it may be all anyone can do for now. And it’s what a real conservative would support.

This is the man who allegedly apologizes for America:

We believe that freedom and self-determination are not unique to one culture. These are not simply American values or Western values – they are universal values. And even as there will be huge challenges that come with a transition to democracy, I am convinced that ultimately government of the people, by the people and for the people is more likely to bring about the stability, prosperity, and individual opportunity that serve as a basis for peace in our world.

What the misguided right has turned into an ugly supremacist nationalism, Obama describes as the Founders did. The city on the hill is blessed because it has a government of the people, by the people and for the people. It is strong because of its commitment to justice and equality and liberty at home (however many failures and sins and crimes there have been on the way), not because it has the biggest military in the world and likes to use it. America is a great country because of its ideals, enshrined in its constitution, which the Founders insisted were universal. And that includes freedom of speech. It is our First Amendment.

The conservative in me pushes against this as a guide to practical action – because such freedom is a complex, fragile, social and cultural achievement (as David Brooks notes today), not an abstract idea that can be forced onto a society unready for its responsibilities and opportunities. But Obama's Toryism shines through:

I know that not all countries in this body share this understanding of the protection of free speech. Yet in 2012, at a time when anyone with a cell phone can spread offensive views around the world with the click of a button, the notion that we can control the flow of information is obsolete. The question, then, is how we respond. And on this we must agree: there is no speech that justifies mindless violence.

There are no words that excuse the killing of innocents. There is no video that justifies an attack on an Embassy. There is no slander that provides an excuse for people to burn a restaurant in Lebanon, or destroy a school in Tunis, or cause death and destruction in Pakistan.

More broadly, the events of the last two weeks speak to the need for all of us to address honestly the tensions between the West and an Arab World moving to democracy. Just as we cannot solve every problem in the world, the United States has not, and will not, seek to dictate the outcome of democratic transitions abroad, and we do not expect other nations to agree with us on every issue. Nor do we assume that the violence of the past weeks, or the hateful speech by some individuals, represents the views of the overwhelming majority of Muslims– any more than the views of the people who produced this video represent those of Americans.

However, I do believe that it is the obligation of all leaders, in all countries, to speak out forcefully against violence and extremism. It is time to marginalize those who – even when not resorting to violence – use hatred of America, or the West, or Israel as a central principle of politics. For that only gives cover, and sometimes makes excuses, for those who resort to violence.

And as in the world, so in America:

A politics based only on anger – one based on dividing the world between us and them – not only sets back international cooperation, it ultimately undermines those who tolerate it. All of us have an interest in standing up to these forces. Let us remember that Muslims have suffered the most at the hands of extremism. On the same day our civilians were killed in Benghazi, a Turkish police officer was murdered in Istanbul only days before his wedding; more than ten Yemenis were killed in a car bomb in Sana’a; and several Afghan children were mourned by their parents just days after they were killed by a suicide bomber in Kabul.

The moments in the speech that identified with the democratic forces in the Middle East, that included them in the victims of Jihadist violence, were the ones that affected me the most – and have the most power. The most incoherent part of the speech was on Iran:

We respect the right of nations to access peaceful nuclear power, but one of the purposes of the United Nations is to see that we harness that power for peace. Make no mistake: a nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained. It would threaten the elimination of Israel, the security of Gulf nations, and the stability of the global economy. It risks triggering a nuclear-arms race in the region, and the unraveling of the non-proliferation treaty.

There is no reference here to the nuclear arsenal of Israel which, if matched by a regional rival, immediately offers the kind of mutually assured destruction that kept the world peaceful during a far more dangerous period, especially for the US. If Israel's nukes were dismantled as a condition for full and open inspection of Iran's key nuclear plants, the US would have a teensy bit of credibility. But Obama is claiming that a lone nuclear power in the Middle East is destabilizing the whole place. No shit. But there is only one nuclear power in the Middle East and it, unlike Iran's disgusting dictatorship, has launched several pre-emptive wars on its neighbors near and far. To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle.

The globalization of which the American president speaks is as fast as it is furious. But it also means that certain assumptions – that of course Israel, but no other country in the region, can have nuclear weapons, but POTUS is not allowed even to mention Israel's nukes in public – are becoming unsustainable. Obama knows this; many Israelis know this; but so far, they are cannily leading from behind.

(Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama collects his thoughts before his address at the UN General Assembly on September 25, 2012 in New York City. By John Moore/Getty Images)