Category: Keepers

The Obama campaign has put out an online ad that uses two of the most potent things in political commercials – a candidate's own words in his own voice and the opinions of ordinary voters, in their own voices. The person-on-the-street interview – as we watch them watch the video on an iPad for the first time – also captures classic Internet memes and television cliches. But notice how most respond:

Romney called 47 percent of Americans self-described victims. And here's what he thinks his relationship to them should be in the context of this campaign:

[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

They couldn't even be convinced to take care of themselves, as long as they can get government handouts. Romney thinks that applies to almost one in two Americans. Or to put it bluntly: the real crime of 47 percent of Americans is their laziness – and then they have the gall to whine about the One Percent. He is using the key argument of racists against African-Americans through the ages against 47 percent of the country. That's the equivalent of calling a lot of old white people the n-word.

Romney's Randian callousness also goes against the core American grain. Americans do not see themselves as victims, but as potential winners, even in rough times. Romney's contempt for the 47 percent violates a central tenet of the American dream: anyone can make it. Romney is saying that half the country can't make it, don't even want to make it, and are parasites on the rest. Asking for their vote would be like asking children to give up their toys. Why would they?

More to the point: this was a cynical man with a cynical tone different – and more convincing – than his usual stilted public speech. The best defense of it – morally – is that it was designed for an audience of super-rich donors who say these things all the time in private, listen to Rush Limbaugh, and needed to be ginned up. He is whatever he needs to be for each separate audience. He aims to please.

So there are two possibilities: this is the real Romney, a callous cynic with contempt for half the country, the weaker part; or that Romney is a man so empty of human qualities he even has to fake cynicism.

Obama has never apologized for America, merely at times acknowledged its mistakes (like torturing prisoners against clear prohibitions in domestic and international law) alongside its strengths (like being one of the the most stable and benign democracies in history). I don't see this acknowledgment of fallibility and error over time as some kind of craven weakness, but actually the kind of strength that a successful, self-confident democracy can deploy when necessary. Democracies can admit when they have screwed up; dictatorships cannot. I regard that as a strength. Romney for some reason regards it as a weakness.

But even George W. Bush differed from Romney on this. And so it was that after some US troops were found using the Koran for target practice, George W. Bush apologized to the prime minister of Iraq:

"He apologized for that in the sense that he said that we take it very seriously," White House press secretary Dana Perino said. "We are concerned about the reaction. We wanted them to know that the president knew that this was wrong."

Bush apologized for Japanese-American internment (sorry, Michelle Malkin):

Here he is in Africa on the legacy of slavery:

"Human beings delivered, sorted, weighed, branded with marks of commercial enterprises and loaded as cargo on a voyage without return," Mr. Bush said. "One of the largest migrations in history was also one of the greatest crimes of history." The president recited a litany of Africans and African Americans who made contributions to American society, from the arts to politics: abolitionist Frederick Douglass, slave-poet Phillis Wheatley and Martin Luther King Jr.

"The stolen sons and daughters of Africa helped to awaken the conscience of America," he said. Mr. Bush did not apologize for slavery but noted Americans throughout history "clearly saw this sin and called it by name."

Here is the statement that Mitt Romney called "disgraceful", issued before a mob attacked the Benghazi consulate:

The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.

The only thing we learned last week is that Romney and Netanyahu know they are losing this race so far and are desperate to use anything to turn it into a polarizing, global religious conflict where they think they can win. That's why Romney did this week what no president should ever do: see a brushfire of anti-Americanism and pour some more gasoline on it. And why Netanyahu is standing by with a few more barrels if necessary.

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He is now actively involved in the Republican campaign to get a war against Iran – preferably before the election in order to scramble a race that Obama now looks as if he could win. He is pulling a Cheney, equating Salafist Sunni mobs in Libya with the Shiite dictatorship in Iran:

“Iran is guided by a leadership with an unbelievable fanaticism. It’s the same fanaticism that you see storming your embassies today. Do you want these fanatics to have nuclear weapons?”

He is making Santorum’s argument that the entire regime in Iran sees itself and its entire country as a suicide bomber, eager to destroy itself in order to annihilate the Jewish state. Does he provide an historical example of such suicidal tendencies for the nation as a whole? No. Because there is no precedent. No precedent in Mao’s China in its most radical era. No precedent in the Soviet Union under Stalin. No precedent even in North Korea, run by total loonies. The obvious answer, if you believe in just war theory, is to ratchet up non-military pressure to get real, effective inspection of Iran’s nuclear facilities while protecting its absolute right to pursue peaceful nuclear power. Another obvious answer, if you think non-proliferation is the key to world peace (which I don’t) is to get Israel to give up its nuclear weaponry – so that the entire region is nuke-free.

There is no just war theory on earth that can justify a pre-emptive strike against nuclear facilities which have not been used to produce a weapon in a country whose Supreme Leader has explicitly called a “sin” to deploy.

As for a radical regime in terms of international relations, which country in the Middle East has launched more wars than any other since its creation, has occupied territory it has then sought to ethnically re-balance, has killed civilians outside its borders in the thousands, has developed a nuclear capacity outside of international non-proliferation treaties, has physically attacked both Iraq and Syria to destroy their nuclear programs, and is now threatening war against Iran, a war that could convulse the entire world into a new clash of civilizations?

Israel is the answer. I have no doubt that this new incident of anti-American Salafist violence in the Middle East is now being used by prime minister Netanyahu to concoct a casus belli with which to scramble global events and get rid of Obama – and his continuing threat to Israel’s illegal expansionism.

When the prime minister of an ally is openly backing one political party in the US elections in order to plunge this country into a war whose consequences are unknowable and potentially catastrophic is a new low. If it is allowed to succeed, if Romney were to win and hand over US foreign policy in the Middle East to Netanyahu and Israel’s growing religious far right, then we will be back to the Bush era without even a veneer of sympathy for Arab democratic convulsions. Above, Netanyahu calls those, like me, who favor containment, stupid. We are not as stupid as you think we are, Mr. Netanyahu.

Michael Lewis's Obama article is now online and worth reading in full. Michael is our greatest nonfiction writer right now, and he is able to capture the full dimensions of what being POTUS means – by telling two stories, of a soldier dropped into the Libyan night and a commander-in-chief of almost preternatural calm thousands of miles away.

I remain of the view – it has strengthened over these past four years – that while Barack Obama is obviously fallible, has made mistakes (blowing off Bowles-Simpson too soon), gaffes ("you didn't build that"), and one critical miscalculation in the debt ceiling end-game (asking for more revenue just as Boehner was being cut off at the knees by Ryan and Cantor), he is also one of the coolest temperaments to have sat in that chair. What people don't note enough is both the self-discipline (that we know doesn't come easily) and the zen-like calm he exudes. Occasionally I ask some sources close to him how he reacted to some piece of news or the other. They almost all say that his range of emotion is about a tenth of the average human being – and that he is as intent on being a good father and husband as being a good president. He is cool not in the pop culture sense, but in the "old soul" sense. This is why so many wavering Americans still like him. In an ocean of drama, he is an island of public calm.

I have very little of that temperament. I'm not good in crises. But when I think of the characteristics I want in a president in turbulent times, this capacity for calm and poise comes pretty high on the list. And that's why I think this past week was almost as damaging to Romney as the week before. He over-reacted in a petty, political way to a sudden, murky series of events that demanded restraint and calm and fact-gathering. Then he doubled down on his attempt to politicize it. This was talk-radio performance, not presidential behavior. 

Then there's just practical wisdom. Again, the right's attempt to equate Obama with Jimmy Carter – because it's their iconic moment of electoral triumph – could not be further off-base. Obama is not micro-managing the White House tennis courts. Michael (full disclosure: old friend, former colleague) asked the president to "Assume that in 30 minutes you will stop being president. I will take your place. Prepare me. Teach me how to be president." Part of Obama's response:

“You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” The self-discipline he believes is required to do the job well comes at a high price. “You can’t wander around,” he said. “It’s much harder to be surprised. You don’t have those moments of serendipity. You don’t bump into a friend in a restaurant you haven’t seen in years. The loss of anonymity and the loss of surprise is an unnatural state. You adapt to it, but you don’t get used to it—at least I don’t.”

I actually prefer presidents who do not seek constant exposure and remember the banal loveliness of ordinary, relatively anonymous life, and are eager one day to get back to it. That was Reagan and the Bushes. It wasn't Clinton or McCain. It is Obama – the sanest conservative president since Eisenhower.

(Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty.)

Yes, the ad blitz is coming; yes, the debates will be crucial, yes, turnout matters a huge amount too, anything can happen, blah blah blah. But right in front of our noses is some compelling data that in the first real skirmish of the campaign proper, the Romney-Republicans blew it.

Gallup's tracking poll of Obama's job approval has shifted more dramatically than in a long time – and we won't see the full impact of the DNC – especially Obama's speech – for a while. But Gallup is striking, especially, because, as I've noted before, this election it has tended to be more Republican-leaning than other polls:

A nine point lead yesterday is a ten point lead today. It looks as if the Democrats told a more convincing story than the Republicans. Even Rasmussen, a fully-fledged GOP-leaning outfit, shows Obama's ratings going from 46 – 54 disapprove to 49 – 50 disapprove in the last three days – a big swing toward Obama of seven points.

What does this mean for the race? It's still too early, but it's beginning to look as if the RNC may have brought down the prospects of the Republican nominee. Here's Gallup's tracking poll of the race in August through to today:

If Obama gets to 50 percent and stays there, this is a changed race, affected by the parties' presentation of their candidates and their core messages. I.e. GOP-FAIL. Sam Wang who analyzes state polling and thereby the electoral college vote has a fascinating graph of the shape of the race for the past few weeks. Here's how his Electoral College measurement has moved:

What you see is how effective the Bain ads were in the swing states in July, how the selection of Ryan helped reboot Romney, wiping out the Bain damage, then how from Akin onwards through the GOP convention, the Democrats gained almost 25 electoral college votes. Here's Nate Silver's Electoral College predictions over the last few months:

Again, you have to be blind not to see a serious shift in the race toward Obama from the GOP Convention onwards. It's as if there was one Democratic convention for two weeks, with Romney's negative bounce intensifying as the second week, and Bill Clinton's evisceration, continued.

Here's Sam Wang's reading:

It appears that the race shifted towards President Obama by 6-15 EV, or about 1.0% of Popular Vote Meta-Margin. From an analytical perspective, a negative bounce is quite remarkable because all the talk in recent weeks has been of bounces being smaller or zero, but always in the hosting party’s favor. It is all the more remarkable because of the relatively small number of state polls over the last week, so that the Meta-analysis’s inputs have not fully turned over (for discussion see comments). So the negative bounce may be larger than what is shown in the graph. Such an event would have been missed in past years (and even this year) because national polls don’t have the best resolution.

Rasmussen's GOP-leaning data also found this:

Perhaps more significantly, Democratic interest in the campaign has soared. For the first time, those in the president’s party are following the campaign as closely as GOP voters. Interest in a campaign is typically considered a good indicator of turnout.

I think the Democrats just won the argument's first round by a knockout. Now the air-war, the debates and the turn-out. But something shifted these past two weeks. My guess is that the "choice election" Obama wanted and Romney resisted has really begun to hit home.

The Tampa anti-climax gives the president a serious opening. He can bank on a vacuous speech by Romney, a series of brazen lies by Ryan, and a Mediscare campaign to rally his base and peel away some seniors from Romney – and hope that's enough, along with his GOTV operation. My own view is that this is not sufficient and if Obama thinks he can run a negative campaign from here on out, get his base out, and win, he's deluding himself. If he thinks all he needs is the same kind of empty slogans that Romney delivered, he needs a reality check. For his potential second term to be seen as something new, something offering a fresh start, something that can break through the partisan deadlock and get to real solutions to problems that can no longer be kicked down the road, then he has to do something bold.

Get up there and say: if a version of the Bowles-Simpson proposal comes to my desk that stays within its rough parameters and saves as much money, then I will sign it. I didn't before because the Congress killed it before it came to my desk, my own party was skittish on Medicare and entitlements, the Pentagon was panicking about the cuts, and Paul Ryan made sure that the GOP would not cooperate. Well, this time we have a chance to defeat Paul Ryan and get to advance Tom Coburn and other deficit-serious Republicans who will agree to the Grand Bargain we need. That will give us enough credibility with the bond markets to push through a second stimulus. In other words: a little fiscal push now, serious, shared sacrifice for the future. This is the most logical and potentially powerful way forward – for the US and the world.

If this is too much for his base – it would put clear distance between him and Pelosi – then he should, as a second option, unveil a clear plan for radical tax simplification and regulation reform. Both parties say they want to get rid of deductions and pull off a 1986-style reform of the tax code. This is in Bowles-Simpson, but it can be removed from the debt question and embraced as revenue neutral to make it more bipartisan of necessary. Everyone hates the current tax code, and its inherent benefits for those who can hire the most expensive accountants. There is no reason to duck it. Ditto a Gore-like commission to study how to get rid of any and all regulations that are anachronistic or over-reaching or too onerous for small business owners. Some of that is already under way. But leading with debt reduction, a new jobs bill, tax simplification and a rollback of unnecessary regulation of small business would change the dynamic of this race in ways nothing else will.

Yes, tell the real story of the last four years. Rebut the Republican fantasy Obama. But for Pete's sake, offer a new and realistic agenda: real progress on the debt; real tax reform; a second stimulus; full implementation of universal healthcare and a laser-like focus on cost controls, along with immigration reform that attracts the intelligent from the world over and relieves long-term illegal immigrants with a pathway to citizenship. He can argue that the looming sequestration makes some kind of fiscal action necessary by January 1, and that he doesn't just want a place-holder but a new long-term plan. He can say the reckoning is coming – and he, unlike the GOP, has a plan to tackle it fairly.

I'm afraid he thinks he can win only by attacking Romney. He can't. He must offer his vision for radical, deep change. He must not run away from his first slogan: change we can believe in. He must say he is running to fulfill it against Republican obstructionism and a brutal global recession. He must run as who he is: not some leftist demagogue reiterating the slogans of a flailing candidate, Elizabeth Warren, but as a reasonable fellow dealing with an opposition gone mad in a world teetering on economic collapse and religious war.

And he has to make news. Embracing Bowles-Simpson for a second term would be news. It would highlight the utter fiscal unseriousness of Paul Ryan, and the 1981-style policies of Romney. It would win back the center. And it would, in my view, win the election. If he plays safe this week, which will be his instinct, or if the convention is a tired attack on Romney's wealth or aloofness, or if it reeks of class war or racial resentment, he will lose. If he takes a risk and embraces his own commission – and dares the GOP to support him on it, he could win big. Yes, I still think that's possible. The sheer weakness of the republican non-arguments last week – their gaping intellectual contradictions and cultural obsessions – gives the president an opportunity to inspire us now as he did four years ago. He told us then it wasn't going to be easy to change Washington. But by embracing Bowles-Simpson now, he will show he remains serious about that kind of radical change.

We'll see this week what he's made of. A serious change agent or a man desperate to keep his job at any costs? I know who I supported in 2008. Now comes the acid test: did he mean change or just say it?

(Photo: President Barack Obama shakes hands with supporters after speaking at a Grassroots Rally September 2, 2012 on the University of Colorado campus in Boulder, Colorado. Obama discussed his plan to help the middle class, Obamacare's impact and the importance of the youth of America getting out to vote in the upcoming election. By Marc Piscotty/Getty Images.)

There are two toxic possibilities for the fall campaign focused on two aspects of each candidate's life. The first is race; the second is Mormonism. Romney has now firmly grasped the race weapon, while I doubt very much that Obama will touch the LDS church. That shows you who's still got the edge at the moment: Obama. I try not to jump to conclusions about racial appeals – but the two-pronged campaign assault by Romney, on Medicare and welfare, does not rise to the level, in my view, of plausible deniability.

The key to both is the classic notion that unworthy blacks are taking from worthy whites. And so the Medicare ad uses white old faces expressing shock at the notion that Obama would transfer money from their retirement healthcare for health insurance for those without, i.e. the poor, who tend to be more minority than the rich. It's basically a lie – Ryan would cut the same from Medicare as Obama would, and there is no direct quid pro quo between the two policies. It's also dishonest: Ryan and Romney are promising to cut Medicare spending and yet are running against Obama for doing exactly that.

Then there's the simple bald lie that Obama is allowing welfare recipients to escape work requirements. I don't remember a campaign in my lifetime which based an entire line of attack on a total fabrication, in fact a reverse of the truth. The welfare waivers are designed exclusively to experiment with how to increase the effectiveness of the work requirement for welfare, and waivers have been granted to Republican governors as well. And yet we get this from the Romney campaign:

"Our most effective ad is our welfare ad," a top television advertising strategist for Romney, Ashley O'Connor, said at a forum Tuesday hosted by ABCNews and Yahoo! News. "It's new information."

It's not. It's new disinformation. It's Orwellian propaganda. Chris Matthews was righteously indignant yesterday about the revival of Atwaterism – but the real scandal is that a major campaign is running a race-baiting ad based on nothing. And it's their most effective. 

The subtext to this is pretty obvious. James Bennet notes the following unguarded aside by Karl Rove to the Washington elite's stenographer, Mike Allen. Rove was unsurprisingly comfortable enough to say the following about a chat with Mitch Daniels:

And I said, 'Mitch, is there a white Democrat south of Indianapolis who's supporting Obama who's not a college professor in Bloomington?' [Laughter] And he stopped for a minute over his green beans and says, 'Not that I can think of.'

You know, Indiana's gone.

The simple assumption of racial politics as the driver of campaigns is what's striking. Karl Rove became what he is – a persistent whitehead on the face of American politics – because he learned the art of race-baiting politics in the South. Romney – having given up on Latinos and blacks and gays – is now betting the bank on the white resentment that has been fast losing potency since the 1990s. Which is where Bill Clinton comes in. He is used in that ad. His speech at the DNC should take on this lie aggressively, call Romney personally on it, and demand that the lie end. No one has more cred on this than Clinton. He should punch hard.

In many ways, this is the biggest moment in Bill Clinton's post-presidential life. Killing racial wedge politics would be a fitting finale to his life's work on that subject.

(Photo: Robyn Beck/Getty.)

Noah Millman thinks the "Obama Administration has been a quintessentially small-'c' conservative one, in that it has tried its best to preserve the status quo in just about every area":

It would be helpful if commentators like Friedman would acknowledge not only that the Republican Party has become a right-wing populist party rather than a conservative one, but that the Obama Administration is the sensible, centrist conservative Administration they claim to want – and either declare their support (rather than wishing for a better opposition) or, if they don’t like the results, reconsider their centrist policy preferences.

Indeed. Which is why my support is so passionate, because Obama is, in my view, the conservative reformist of my dreams. Almost the entire Tory party in Britain would now fit comfortably in the Democratic Party – and Cameron is clearly closer to Obama than to Romney. In fact, there is no mainstream conservative party in the West even close to the GOP's fundamentalist, revolutionary populism.

Of which other Western right of center party could the following be said: it holds that  man-made climate change is a hoax and that more carbon energy is harmless and indeed vital. On immigration, the party supports a vast wall across the Southern border, and eventual deportation by attrition of 11 million illegal immigrants. On the deficit and debt, the GOP is the only party in the West that refuses to raise any revenues to close the gap, even as revenues are at 60 year lows. On social issues, the GOP would ban any recognition for gay couples, including civil unions and would criminalize abortion in every state by constitutional amendment. More amazingly, a Romney presidency would tackle the genuinely dangerous debt and deficit by cutting taxes on everyone, especially the super-rich, vastly increasing defense spending, and making all the cuts in government medical care for the elderly and the poor. The poor get shafted first by gutting Medicaid; then the elderly get cosseted for another generation until mine and those younger than me – much poorer than the boomers – take the hit. It is, to put it bluntly, a near-parody of far-right extremism.

Larison objects to this definition of "conservative" but Millman holds his ground. Massie intervenes:

There’s a better label for Obama than conservative: Tory. The President is no kind of revolutionary. The change we can believe in is the change needed so things can remain much as they were. This is one reason why he has disappointed what remains of the Democratic left. From Gitmo to drone warfare; from protecting Wall street from the torch-and-pitchfork brigade to accepting the need for long-term deficit-reduction Obama has proved himself a very rum type of peacenik-socialist…

I can see how Obama’s interventions in the economy – from bailing-out Detroit to passing his stimulus package – can be seen as a massive expansion of government power even though a more judicious appraisal would conclude they were designed, sensibly or not, to minimise disruption, uncertainty and fear…

If Obama had come to power in happier times he might have run a different, more expressly liberal, administration. (Then again: in happier times he might never have run for the Presidency, far less won it). But constrained by circumstance and events he’s been compelled to lead in a notable unideological fashion. Rather like one kind of old-fashioned Tory, in other words.

That's why I have long been baffled as to why people said my preference over Obama was some kind of shift to the ideological left. Nope. Against a radical right, reckless, populist insurgency, Obama is the conservative option, dealing with emergent problems with pragmatic calm and modest innovation. He seeks as a good Oakeshottian would to reform the country's policies in order to regain the country's past virtues. What could possibly be more conservative than that? Or less conservative than the radical fusion of neoconservatism, theoconservatism and opportunism that is the alternative?

For thinking conservatives of a classic variety, Obama is the best president since Clinton and the first Bush. We need him for the next four years if we are to avoid the catastrophes that always follow revolutionary ideology. Like another Iraq; or another Katrina; or another Lehman.

(Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty)

Gallup's latest analysis focuses on shifts since the spring in public perceptions of both candidates. In some, Romney has closed a large gap, especially on the "strong leader" question (although he is still seen as weaker than Obama by five points). But Obama has gained on two: taxes and healthcare. On taxes, Obama was behind Romney by four points a month ago; now he's ahead by 9 – a 13 point swing toward the president in one month. On healthcare, Obama was even with Romney a month ago; now he's nine points ahead. In terms of winning the debate, that's a big turn-around.

But here's what's staggering to me: on the deficit, Romney is ahead. The man pledging to slash taxes and increase military spending, while gutting Medicare only for the post-boomers … is actually seen as more credible than Obama. All of which simply reiterates what may come to be Obama's fatal, mortal decision not to embrace Bowles-Simpson, even as his party and Paul Ryan torpedoed it. Imagine if Obama were able to challenge Ryan directly, on the lines David Brooks notes today, and could say: I made the hard decision to cut the debt in a realistic bipartisan fashion, and your fixation on Ayn Rand killed it.

Obama, instead, ducked. If he loses this election, it will largely, in my view, be because of that. And if I were to offer a single piece of advice to the campaign, it would be to use the convention to declare that he would sign Bowles-Simpson as written if it came to his desk. He'd instantly own the fiscal center, isolate the GOP's extremism, and reaffirm his credibility on the deficit.

The paradigm can still be shifted. Obama can say he didn't embrace the original commission because the necessary majority in the Congressional committee couldn't be rustled up. He can openly and rightly blame Ryan for torpedoing the sanest, most practical debt reduction we have on the table. He can tell his own party that they have to tackle entitlement spending and using the Mediscare tactic is not worthy of the constructive change Obama promised four years ago. He can even say he regretted not going out on a limb – but he thought a grand bargain could be reached through negotiation instead. GOP fanaticism stopped it.

The reason – incredibly – that Obama has not done this is a dislike of the big defense cuts and queasiness over muddying the Medicare issue against Romney. This shouldn't matter. What matters is that Obama should declare his first priority on being re-elected would be a grand bargain on the lines of Bowles-Simpson. Force Romney to say no. Isolate him on his tax extremism and defense spending boom. Show you're more serious on entitlement reform than Ryan's ideological fantasies – because you're backing the most credible, practical option available. Re-capture that sliver of the middle that wants to know what Obama wants to do in his second term.

And make news. So far, most of the news Obama has made has been in exposing Romney. He's got the choice election he wanted (a huge strategic achievement) and he has successfuly defined the other party's proposals (ditto). Now he needs to offer the positive choice he represents: a real grand bargain on spending and taxes, immigration reform, infrastructure investment, and embrace of multicultural America. That's the missing piece. In my view, if it isn't fixed in Charlotte, the dynamics of this race in this economy are slowly working against him.

If he doesn't shift to a positive agenda on spending and taxes, in other words, he could well lose. And deserve to.

(Photo: In this handout provided by the White House, U.S. President Barack Obama throws a football at Soldier Field following the NATO Summit working dinner on May 20, 2012 in Chicago, Illinois. By Pete Souza/The White House via Getty Images.)