Obama's State of the Union Address

Obama's speech last night was an attempt to be as partisan or liberal as possible, while sounding as reasonable as possible. "Why would that be a partisan issue, helping folks refinance?," the president asked as part of this strategy. The Republican Party continues to suffer an image problem of being out of the mainstream, and the president was trying to capitalize on this moment of vulnerability. There is broad support for preventing the budget "sequester," on minimum wage legislation, and a path to citizenship for children of immigrants - the president knows it, and he is leveraging public support to try to secure compliance from errant members of Congress.

As he showed in his Second Inaugural Address, this is not a president willing to mince his words any more. To talk about climate change and the "overwhelming judgment of science" is to take a clear, uncompromising position. "If Congress won't act soon to protect future generations," he said, "I will." Presidents at least since Theodore Roosevelt have painted themselves as active problem-solvers, as opposed to bickering members of Congress, in order to justify a muscular, even unilateral executive branch. Conservatives who are quicker to see this pattern in liberal presidents should remember the perils of presidential bravado in the next conservative administration; liberals who are enjoying their president pulling his weight should pause to consider if they can consistently stomach the same unilateralism in a different time for different purposes, when it is a conservative president who proclaims, "Now's the time to get it done."

Get it done. They deserve a vote. Send me a bill. But the Constitution doesn't work like that. The televised address makes it look like the president is legislator-in-chief, but he is anything but that. He can only execute the law; but to make the law he wants to execute, he needs Congress. So it may be a stroke of luck that a day after Obama's speech, the news cycle is still consumed with the Christopher Dorner story, suggesting that Americans are tired of politics and political news after the previous year of campaign mud-slinging. Obama's supporters want him to get on the permanent campaign, but some forget that doing well on the speech circuit could well generate congressional resentment and mobilize the "party of 'no'" against him. There is a time for splashy, public campaigns; but look out for silent strokes of executive action in the days to come. "Decision, activity, secrecy, and despatch" are and remain the hallmarks of the executive Publius defended in Federalist 70. Obama has already signaled unabashedly that he will make the tough decisions. He appears to be doing so very publicly, but there is a secret side to transformative agendas. When the going gets tough and Congress doesn't get going, expect Obama to be traversing his agenda with much despatch. His State of the Union address this year constitutes full disclosure, if we care to parse it carefully.

Obama's Second Inaugural Address

Conservatives hate it; liberals love it. His Second Inaugural Address evinces Barack Obama projecting himself unvarnished and real before the world. No more elections for him, so also less politics. He is number 17 in the most exclusive club in America - presidents who get to serve a second term. Yes, there's still the bonus of a legacy. But the legacy-desiring second-term president would just sit back and do no harm, rather than put himself out there for vociferous battles to come.

For better or for worse, Barack Obama believes that the constitutional compact from whence he derives the fullness of his authority gives him a responsibility. He believes that the framers of the Constitution "gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people. Entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed." But he did not mean that he was an originalist, or a "constitutional conservative." Indeed, the very opposite is true. Obama believes that the "founding creed" is no less than this: "we have always understood that when times change, so must we, that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges." Originalism means change, he is telling us.

This is a president no longer prepared to dally, or to punt on his liberal beliefs. "The commitments we make to each other through Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative. They strengthen us," he said. "Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law," he also proclaimed. In his mind, there is no need to coddle the political right anymore, and he believes that the truth as he tells it will set us free.

So unreserved was Obama's conviction that he took the sacred line of modern conservatism, "We the people declare today that the most evident of truth that all of us are created equal -- is the star that guides us still" and turned it into the most liberal of philosophies, that "our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth." Obama never really had much of a stomach for unadulterated libertarianism; in his heart of hearts, this former community organizer is a communitarian. This is why he cited "We the People" five times in his address.

Call Obama liberal, or call him correct; the point is half the country does not agree, and there are tough wars to come. That Obama has been so uncharacteristically upfront about his intentions signals, though, his belief that the national political tide has turned. That on gay rights, immigration, and so forth, either because of his electoral mandate or the changing demographics of the country, he believes he holds the upper hand.

And however short his second-term "honeymoon," I think he does. Had Obama not been re-elected, his first term might have been construed as a fluke; a bit of electoral charity from a guilt-ridden America willing to give a half-African-Anerican a chance to deliver at the White House. But Barack Obama was re-elected by a vote differential of 5 million. Only the most measly of partisan spirits will deride this victory, and deny Obama the honeymoon that he justly earned.

On the Second Amendment: Should We Fear Government or Ourselves?

The tragic shootings in Newtown, CT, have plunged the nation into the foundational debate of American politics.

Over at Foxnews, the focus as been on mourning, and the tragedy of what happened. As far as the search for solutions go, the focus has been on how to cope, what to say to children, and what to do about better mental health screening. It is consistent with the conservative view that when bad things happen, they happen because of errant individuals, not flawed societies. The focus on mourning indicates the view that when bad things happen, they are the inevitable costs of liberty.

At MSNBC, the focus has been on tragedy as a wake up call, not a thing in itself to simply mourn; on finding legislative and governmental solutions -- gun control. This is consistent with the liberal view that when bad things happen, they happen because of flawed societies, not just the result of errant individuals or evil as an abstract entity.

The question of which side is right is an imponderable. Conservatives believe that in the end, our vigilance against tyrannical government is our first civic duty. This, in the end, was the logic behind the Second Amendment. It comes form a long line of Radical Whig thinking that the Anti-Federalists inherited. That is why Second Amendment purists can reasonably argue that citizens should continue to have access to (even) semi-automatic guns. They will say that the Second Amendment is not just for hunting; it is for liberty against national armies. Liberals, on the other hand, believe that a government duly constituted by the people need not fear government; and it is citizen-on-citizen violence that we ought to try to prevent. This line of thinking began with Hobbes, who had theorized that we lay down our arms against each other, so that one amongst us alone wields the sword. Later, we called this sovereign the state. The Federalists leaned in this tradition.

Should we fear government more or fellow citizens who have access to guns? Should government or citizens enjoy the presumption of virtue? Who knows. There is no answer on earth that would permanently satisfy both political sides in America, because conservatives believe that most citizens most of the time are virtuous, and there is no need to take a legislative sledgehammer to restrict the liberty of a few errant individuals at the expanse of everybody else. Liberals, conversely, believe that government and regulatory activity are virtuous and necessary most of the time, and there is little practical cost to most citizens to restrict a liberty (to bear arms) that is rarely, if ever, invoked. Put another way: conservatives focus on the vertical dimension of tyranny; liberals fear most the horizontal effects of mutual self-destruction.

What is a President to do? It depends on which side of the debate he stands. Barack Obama believes that the danger we pose to ourselves exceeds the danger of tyrannical government (for which a right to bear arms was originally codified.) The winds of public opinion may be swaying in his direction, and Obama appeared to be ready to mould it when he asked: "Are we really prepared to say that we are powerless in the face of such carnage?"

Here is one neo-Federalist argument that Obama can use, should he take on modern Anti-Federalists. If the Constitution truly were of the people, then it is self-contradictory to speak of vigilance against it. In other words, the Second Amendment is anachronistic. It was written in an era of monarchy, as a bulwark against Kings. To those who claim to be constitutional conservatives, Obama may reasonably ask: either the federal government is not sanctioned by We the People, and therefore we must forever be jealous of it; or, the federal government represents the People and we need not treat it as a distant potentate and overstate our fear of it.

If this is to be the age of renewed faith in government, as it appears to be Obama's mission, then the President will be more likely to convince Americans to lay down our arms; he will persuade us that our vigilance against government by the people is counter-prouctive and anachronistic. But, to move "forward," he must first convince the NRA and its ideological compatriots that we can trust our government. Only the greatest of American presidents have succeeded in this most herculean of tasks, for our attachment to the spirit of '76 cannot be understated.

The Case Against Marriage

The following is a transcript of the speech I gave at Wes Thinks Big on Dec 4, 2012 at Memorial Chapel, Middletown, CT.

As we look to the future, it is only a matter of time that same-sex marriage will become the law of the land. The question is not whether, but when. Yet past this horizon a new one awaits. Advocates for same-sex marriage argue, correctly, that the civil privileges that the state grants to straight couples should not be held back for gay couples. Everyone agrees there. Yet not many advocates of gay marriage consider that if an existing institution, in this case, marriage, is unjust and flawed – there is another reform possibility. We can just abolish it. As crazy as this may sound, let me make a case for it today.

The problem begins precisely because the case for same-sex marriage is iron tight. Proponents of same-sex marriage have argued, I think correctly, that if two consenting adults choose to have a relationship with one another, that should be that, and the state has no business withholding the status of marriage to these two individuals. Usually, a secondary argument is presented alongside this primary argument, namely, that no one is harmed in this consensual relationship. Ergo, same-sex marriage should be legal. Remember these two arguments: A. consent, and B. no harm done.

The problem is that one can imagine many types of relationships that satisfy both these arguments, not just same-sex relationships. Arguments A and B appear to be over-inclusive. Social conservatives are right on this front. Let me demonstrate this with two examples.

Consider the case for incestuous same-sex marriage. Let's call this twincest. Wouldn’t both the primary, and the secondary reasons I have just presented for same-sex marriage apply to justify legalization of incestuous same-sex marriage? As long as there are A. two consenting adults, and B. as long as there are no negative procreative consequences, I see no reason to deny marriage to a pair of sisters or brothers.

What argument can we adduce to separate same-sex marriage from twincest. To make the former admissible, but the latter inadmissible? Let me right off the bat throw out the argument from procreation, since neither pairing is procreative. Let me suggest that the only remaining reason one can adduce for separating same sex marriage and twincest is an emotional reason: i.e. C. disgust or moral indignation. Same sex marriage doesn’t repulse us, incest does. Not so fast. This won’t work either, since revulsion or moral indignation is exactly the sentiment shared by opponents of same-sex marriage. If advocates for same-sex marriage want to deny incestuous marriage on the basis of moral indignation, they can hardly offer a reply to those who think that same-sex marriage is morally repugnant. This is the problem of legislating morality – one man’s virtue is another man’s vice.

Let me present a second example that highlights the same problem. Plural marriage. We want to say yes to same-sex marriage, but no to plural marriage. Plural marriage can come in the form of polygyny (one man many women) or polyandry (one woman many men.) Now, I will not recommend polygyny, that is marriage between several women and one man, since there are legitimate issues of gender inequality that such an arrangement implicates. It fails argument B. But I propose polyandry, that is marriage between one woman with several men. Again, the same reasons that permit same-sex marriage would also appear to legitimate polyandry. As long as A. consulting adults engage in activity in which B. they do no harm, they should be permitted to proceed as they please. Now, if you counter-argue that society will crumble, remember that this was the same reason that opponents of same-sex marriage had used years ago. As in the case of twincest, we have failed to find a reason to permit same-sex marriage, but disallow another type of relationship, in this case, polyandry.

Where do we go from here? I suggest that the reason why we cannot find a rule for permitting same-sex marriage but not twincest or polyandry is that the whole institution is arbitrary. There are no good answers because we haven’t asked the right question. And the question is: what reason could the state possibly have to elevate and privilege one type of human relationship over others? I can think of no reason. It is not that we haven’t found the elusive discriminatory criteria that would allow one relationship but not the other. It is that we cannot. My point is that neither we, nor the state, should be in the business of selectively endorsing and sanctifying one type of human relationship over another.

What the debate over same-sex marriage is going to do is to draw us to this inevitable conclusion. Once we realize that our reasons for establishing a cut-off point to a law or institution is arbitrary, the law or the institution must unravel. When it comes to traditional marriage, our society has defended an arbitrary cut-off point, determining for the longest time that marriage should only be limited to one man and one woman, bestowing the privileges and attendants benefits to those in such a relationship. The point I am trying to make is that shifting the cut-off point, as we are attempting to do today, draws attention to the arbitrariness of where we have historically set the cut-off point, and highlights the arbitrariness of our new cut-off point.

So I’ve used two apparently odious examples but I don’t need them to make the same point about the boundaries of state regulatory activity of which marriage laws is only a subset: the state should not have the authority, ever, to sanction and elevate particular conceptions of the good life over others. We already acknowledge this principle generally, outside of the realm of intimate relations, in the principle of liberal neutrality. For example, should I choose to spend the rest of my life watching endless reruns of Family Guy trying to determine the proper pronunciation of “cool whip,” I should be free to do so, without fear that the law will penalize me for what would appear to be a waste of my time.

Even though my argument appears controversial, I think most of you already implicitly agree with me. There are a whole host of other equally important and gratifying relationships that marriage laws today do not endorse. The sexual love between a man and a man, the platonic affection between a man and a woman, the bond between a man and his dog, the friendship between a girl and her grandmother. Don’t we all get a little miffed when our best friend finds a new girlfriend and they fall off the face of the earth (until they break up)? Who’s to say that these other types of relationships do not deserve public sanction, or at least a title equal to the privileged status of those who are traditionally married?  Indeed these relationships can also go under or beyond two persons. Consider self-love, Narcissus’s love for himself. Who’s to say someone who chooses to remain single has chosen a lesser path? Or, we can go up in numbers for more complex kinds of relationships: kinships in extended families, membership in fraternal organizations can be as rewarding as monogamous long-term relationships between two people. All of these relationships produce human flourishing. Yet I ask: why is it that we place the romantic, oftentimes sexual relationship between two people (homosexual or heterosexual) on a pedestal above all others? There has got to be a reason if we are to keep the institution of marriage. The state should only act when there are plausible, publicly defensible reasons. Institutions should exist only if the state can articulate reasons for their existence. Tradition or the warm feeling of romance isn’t enough, precisely because we have already chosen to unravel the traditional meaning of marriage in our support for same-sex marriage. (And by the way, Plato privileged platonic love over sexual love, so whatever I’m saying isn’t really new.)

I am not seeking to invalidate the choices of those who are already married. If you want to get into a long term monogamous and romantic relationship, go for it. But do not assume that this relationship is more deserving of state sanction than a host of other important intimate, caregiving relationships. Don’t do it because you want a public badge of honor. Do it in spite of the institution of marriage, not because of it. You will be perceived as weird, even Wesleyan weird, but you will be right.

Those who are trying to do the good work to modernize marriage need to consider the other possibility of reform and challenge the assumption that the institution itself is worth saving. By all means fight for equality. But don’t just fight for gays and lesbians. Fight for everyone, fight for anyone who wishes to live by an unconventional standard of love.

Let me conclude. If you think about it, marriage appears to do the exact opposite of that which it has traditionally been supposed to do. Marriage doesn’t encourage love; it restrains it. With the infinite variety of human interactions, is there really a need for the state to establish the gold standard of human relationships? (If liberty requires that we should each be free to love as we please, equality demands that the state remains neutral as to whom and how we love, or indeed, whether or not we love at all.) Marriage purports to be an institution that celebrates love; yet history shows us that marriage has served only to control and restrain the possibilities of human love. Civil marriage, however defined, will always and arbitrarily confer social meaning and hierarchies. Perhaps we should simply abolish it.

The Era of Partisan Polling

It is tempting now that the election returns are in for us to want to plow forward and forget the spectacular silliness we just traversed. But before we move on, it is critical that we call out those who had predicted a huge Romney victory, among them Dick Morris, Michael Barone, and Karl Rove. Ours is the era of partisan polling, and it is intellectually dishonest and bad for democracy. When Karl Rove held out in disbelief that his predictions were entirely off on Foxnews last night, and Megyn Kelley had to make the awkward walk backstage to the Decision Desk to "verify" their decision, it became abundantly clear that wishful thinking cannot be a substitute for objective reasoning.

This was madness the electorate should not have had to bear. The election was never as close as many had suggested. Barack Obama was ahead in the electoral college most of the last year, and there was never a moment when he possessed less paths to victory than did Romney.  Rove cashed in all his credibility from his previous predictions by cooking up a cockamamie story about how all the polls were wrong because they assume a 2008 turnout rate and demographic. However, one of two candidates remained the same between 2008 and 2012 -- this basic logic of historical induction was enough to convince most posters that 2008 was a useful baseline to make predictions.  And they were right. If anything, pollsters had underestimated the turnout and size of the latino vote.

Then we had the claims about how Barack Obama was underperforming in early voting returns. Well, he won by 53 percent last time. He had 3 percentage points to play with! Denial is one thing, reporting wishful thinking in the name of fairness and balance is another.

Piercing through this wishful thinking is a necessary epistemological step Republicans must take before they even begin to soul-search and rebuild the party. We all make the assumption, often wrongly, that everyone thinks like us. But to operate in the world we must constantly check this instinct, surveying the alternative data and opinions around us. A personal intuition is not a collective summation. Yet already, some Tea Partiers are doubling down on their insistence that the Republicans should have picked a more orthodox candidate. Fortunately, there are voices of reason amidst them.

Obama has won a second term, with an electoral college victory larger than both of the ones his predecessor earned. Obamacare will not be repealed and it will be implemented, and so "greatness" is now within Obama's reach. He has shown that he is not shy about taking on big problems. The national debt and immigration reform are two of them. "Tonight, you voted for action, not politics as usual," Obama said on election night. He will be true to his word, though not everyone will like his actions.

A Second Term for Obama?

So it looks like Obama is going to win a second term. It doesn't look like Romney is going to take Ohio, and his backup plan, Pennsylvania, doesn't look like it would pan out either.

After all the campaigning and all the ads and over a billion dollars spent, the partisan balance in Washington will likely remain exactly the same. The  House will remain Republican, the Senate will remain Democratic, and the White House will most likely remain Democratic.

Who did Sandy Help?

Everything is political at this time of the electoral calendar, so there is no use pretending that Hurricane Sandy will not have an effect on the presidential race.

President Obama has been given a new life line. Forced to take politics out of his campaign, he can take a break from defending his record for two days. When an incumbent president is forced by emergency events to stop talking politics, he always enjoys the glow emanating form the Oval Office. This is especially so for a candidate who appears, to some undecided voters, to have lost his luster from 2008, so campaigning has limited marginal returns for him anyway. It's a difficult balancing act for an incumbent president campaigning to keep his job, because he must both be president and a politician. For two days, Barack Obama can be the latter by being the former.

If any candidate was enjoying any momentum in this last week of the campaign, it was probably Romney; and the news stories about Sandy has put a pause on that. Romney was out today collecting canned food and donations, and he will benefit from the humanizing pictures of his campaign's outreach. However, the challenger always does better when he can be in unfettered, attack mode.

This leaves us with two days before the weekend before Election Day, when voters will weigh the closing arguments of both campaigns. The Republicans have been successfully pushing a narrative of chaos, uncertainty, and an America in decline -- this has hurt the president's numbers. The critical question for the next two days is if the Romney campaign can congeal this declension narrative with the post-Sandy chaos. This is a high-risk thing to attempt - not least because Governor Chris Christie has praised Barack Obama's handling of this crisis and declared it out of bounds.

The Obama campaign also has an opportunity here. Americans have a love-hate relationship with the welfare state, but in war and emergency situations, most embrace the federal government without reservation. The Obama campaign will likely recognize an opportunity here to showcase what the government can do for us, when individuals and states are incapacitated by acts of God.

One thing we do not yet know, however, is how Sandy may have affected early voting in Ohio. Obama has been up in almost every poll in the last month in Michigan (16), Nevada (6), Pennsylvania (20), and Wisconsin (10), which gives Obama 252 electoral college votes. If he wins Ohio's 18, he wins, that is why Sandy's impact matters. (If he wins Florida, he also wins.)

Assuming that Romney takes Colorado (9), North Carolina (15), Virginia (13), and Florida (29), he will have 257 votes in the electoral college. If he takes New Hampshire (4) and/or Iowa (6) he still needs to peel one of the industrial mid-west states to his column. But if Romney takes Ohio, he wins. That is why there is a tremendous spin war going on about who is winning the early vote in Ohio.

With Final Debate Over, Ground Game Intensifies

Mitt Romney barely passed the bar on Monday night's debate. He was tentative and guarded, not just because he was being strategic, but because he wasn't, understandably, in command of the facts of foreign policy as a sitting president would be. Barack Obama "won" the debate, but it will have minimal impact on altering the fundamental dynamics of the race.

A number of polls now find Romney's momentum continuing at the national level. Romney's team has been playing a national strategy because he needs to swing nearly all the battleground states in his direction, whereas Obama has played a state-by-state strategy because he has a couple of paths to 270. The upshot of this is that Romney is intensifying his lead at the national level, but this movement at the aggregate level has not translated as well to the battleground states. Most importantly, Obama still leads by a razor's edge in Ohio.

The Obama campaign is making a bet: that in these last two weeks, it is the ground game that matters most, because there are more registered Democrats than they are registered Republicans, and the key for Obama is turnout, not ideological conversion (as it has been for Romney). This is why Obama leads in field offices in key battleground states. Both campaigns acknowledge that the Democrats will dominate in this ground game.

And so, in this final stretch, it will be two great partisan armies getting the vote out in the battleground states that will determine the final outcome. The artificial high that Obama was riding through the summer, as Mitt Romney was still battling his compatriots during the primaries, was vitiated as soon as Romney took the national stage and glided back to the ideological center. On the other hand, whatever momentum Romney has today will not easily pierce the Democratic firewall in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

This means that silly season in American elections is in full swing. To get the vote, both sides must claim that Armageddon would arrive if one or the other candidate wins. Scare tactics, mud-slinging, and even a Donald Trump surprise are intended to rile people up and get them to the ballot box, or make them so disillusioned that they fail to turn out for their candidate. It is a quadrennial irony we face that everything that is wrong about American democracy is on full, unvarnished display at the same time that citizens prepare to perform one of their greatest acts in a democracy. The good news is this will all be over in two weeks.

On the Second Presidential Debate

The second presidential debate tells us about the candidates' readings of their own campaigns. Both Romney and Obama were fighting for air time, trying to break out of the impasse of "he-said-she-said."

Women were mentioned about 30 times in the debate, because Romney knew that he had to close the gender hap. Obama joined in on the China bashing, because Romney has started to gain traction with workers in Ohio with his attacks on China's trade violations.

Obama knew that he had to deflate the Libya story, so he took full responsibility for what happened in Benghazi, even though Secretary Clinton had given him an out. Obama's taking offense at Romney's charges would not have gained him any Republican converts, but they are likely to have a net positive impact on undecided voters, who are usually willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the Commander-in-Chief, because nobody has access to intelligence information the way the president does. The good news for Obama is that the next debate, on foreign policy, will shield him from his weakest link, the economy.

Where Romney will continue to have the benefit of the doubt is his proposed handling of the economy. His strongest moment in the second debate was when he pulled up statistics on the number of people unemployed, on food stamps, the size of the national debt, etc. This was Republican version of Bill Clinton's "arithmetic" speech. Obama tried to characterize Romney's economic plan as a "sketchy deal." The problem is that he doesn't exactly start off with a whole lot of credibility.

Emboldened by his last debate performance, Romney might have been too enthusiastic in the second debate. At times, he may have been snarkier than he should have been. Undecided voters, who already don't like negativity, would not have liked Romney's smack-down of Obama. ("That wasn't a question; that was a statement.")

Overall, Obama did much better in this debate than in the last, but he did not do enough to make up the ground he lost, in part because of the town hall format. A victory when a candidate is standing beside his opponent and sparring with him directly is more compelling than a (possible) victory when both are directing their comments to a small group of voters. The town hall format is just less interesting to watch, and I won't be surprised that audiences were bored and were channel surfing during the second debate.

As far as the horse race goes, Obama still has more paths to 270. Romney is looking good in Florida, but Obama leads in Virginia and Ohio. The Romney team knows that their campaign needs to put Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin in play in case they lose Ohio. Watch for a re-nationalized campaign strategy from Team Romney if they see movement in these previously leaning-Democrat states.

Looking Ahead to the Second Debate

Paul Ryan did a good job at the vice-presidential debate; but Joe Biden did a little better. Biden came off condescending in the initial part of the debate with his laughter, but he mellowed out toward the end. He was aided in part by the fact that Martha Raddatz, the moderator, was somewhat tougher on Ryan than on Biden.

Ryan's best line was his rebuttal to Biden's discussion of Romney's "47 percent remark," when he noted that Biden has had his own foot-in-mouth moments. Biden's best moment during the debate was when he informed the audience that the Congressman had sent him two letters asking for federal aid to stimulate job growth in Wisconsin. Ouch on both counts.

But this debate did not change the dynamics of the race. Independents care more about the top of the ticket, so Obama will still have to come back swinging in the next presidential debate if he wants to regain the lead he had two weeks ago.

The Romney bump from the first debate comes from one thing more than any other: it was the first time since the primaries that he had the freedom to come back to the political center. Before, he was hemmed in and awkward because he was trying to out-flank his competitors on the right. Now, by moving back to the center, Romney was able to tap into the reserve of undecided voters, while his critics on the right have no choice but to bite their tongue when they watch him take new positions, such as accepting parts of Obamacare, because they would rather Romney wins than Obama.

Knowing this, the best way forward for Obama on Tuesday is to draw out the Romney from the primaries. He will try to remind Americans of the Romney who was polling so poorly most of summer while the Obama team was bombarding the airwaves trying to define Romney as the guy with the offshore bank accounts who doesn't quite get middle America. To remind voters of himself back in 2008, Obama needs to recall the language of community, mutual obligations, and the promise of "a more perfect Union."

Obama should also be prepared to answer questions about the security situation at Benghazi. The best defense is an offense for him. Even if the administration had beefed up security in Benghazi -- and most of the requests were for extending the tours of security guards in Tripoli, 400 miles away -- there is no evidence to think that the embassy assault on Sep 11 could have been prevented or repelled.

Polls seem to indicate that the Romney bump from the last debate has tapered out. Both candidates will have to fight harder every day, as the number of persuadable voters decline as we approach November 6. After the second presidential debate, the ground game (as opposed to the air war) is going to become increasingly important -- and here is where Romney could be at a disadvantage, which is why he needs to ace this debate more than Obama.

Obama Out of Practice for First Debate

President Obama had a bad night. The key to succeeding in a presidential debate is recognizing that it is not a parliamentary debate. The rules, the moderator, and even the immediate audience (since they are not permitted to applaud) do not matter. Instead, candidates should bare their souls to the camera lenses. There, magic is made.

Like a legislator used to addressing the president of the chamber and not the audience, Obama was too formal last night. Obama was looking down on his notes too often when Romney was speaking. Silent moments matter too -- because candidates can still connect with the audience with their eyes. Even when he was not looking down, Obama was looking at Jim Lehrer rather than at the camera most of the time.

Obama's advisors must have, rightly, warned Obama not to lose his presidential poise. But they forgot to add that in a two-person setup, a basic modicum of aggressiveness was required. Given that Obama's countenance is naturally already cool, he would have benefitted from a reminder that he's back on the campaign trail, president or not. Advisors should tailor-make advice for their candidate. Next round, they should tell Obama to forget that he is president. He should look into the camera at every moment, when he is talking and when he is silent, pleading for the vote. Obama should also keep an internal clock, knowing that Jim Lehrer did him no favors last debate by allowing him to ramble longer than the pre-allotted two-minute segments.

Obama tried too hard to take Romney to task on the specific numbers of his tax plan. But there are no scorers in presidential debates. It doesn't actually matter who won the logical argument; but it does matter who passed the plausibility threshold. Mitt Romney did last night. He kept repeating the $716 billion cut from Medicare and in American politics, saying it is so, makes it so. Nobody cares about what the fact-checkers are saying today. Or about Dodd-Frank or Simpson-Bowles. Or whether rebuttals come the day after. Over 10 million tweets were shared as the debate proceeded last night, many about Big Bird, and most declaring Romney victorious.

Obama's biggest missed opportunity was on the discussion about the role of the federal government, when Obama normally would have excelled. Romney rightly reached to the sacred scripture of the Republican Party, the Declaration of Independence, referring to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Obama failed to counter. The sacred scripture of the Democratic Party is the Preamble of the Constitution. Life, liberty and happiness matter, but so do justice, a more perfect Union, and the general welfare. Bill Clinton knew this when he gave his spectacular speech at the DNC Convention. Obama forgot his roots last night.

In terms of the horse race, this was not a game-changer; it certainly would not change the ground game in the electoral map. There were no forced errors on Obama's part, just missed opportunities. He should be advised, however, not to go overboard the other way in the next debate, as Al Gore had done in 2000. Obama was wise not to mention the 47 percent comment or offshore bank accounts. That information is already out there and there is no need for the President of the United States to do the dirty work that his surrogates can.

Obama is a quick rebounder. He will be back in the game in the next debate, and we will have a showdown.

Obama is Surging

The Obama campaign, by fortune or by wit, has peaked at the right moment. Early voting has already started in Virginia, and starts in Iowa and Ohio next week. This means that the polls telling a uniform story of an Obama surge in crucial swing states aren't just snap-shots; they are predictive of how voters -- about 35 percent of total voters -- are actually starting to vote as we speak.

Republicans like Karl Rove are saying that the CBS/NYT/Quinnipiac polls are wrong because they are using the turnout model of 2008. But Gallup found similar results. So did Bloomberg. So did the Washington Post. Obama's numbers are moving up, and it is intellectually dishonest and ultimately self-defeating for some Republicans to spin a story about over-sampling Democrats to deny the plausible reality that a triangulation of polls are pointing to.  (And by the way, the over-sampling spin is rather more complicated even than what its wonkish advocates say on tv, if only because no one knows what turnout is going to be.)

So right now, it is not looking good for Romney, who has to wait until October 5 to stand toe-to-toe with Obama, and demonstrate his presidential stature. It may be too late by then, which is why the Romney campaign has finally shifted from a national strategy to a state-by-state strategy, starting in Ohio. Whether or not it was wise to wait this late to start the ground game, we will know in six weeks. The Obama campaign has 96 offices in Ohio, nearly three times as many as Romney does -- a strategic bet by the Democrats that the ground game matters more than the battle over the airwaves. The Republicans are expecting, in the post-Citizens United world, that the superPACS will step up to seal the deal for Romney.

Every fumbling campaign has at least one correctable problem -- the candidate. Romney and Ryan need to stop complaining about how bad it is, or at least spend as much time telling us how good we could have it in the next four years. Even independent voters don't want to hire a doomsayer for president, and this is especially important because the alternative, Obama, is a positive, likable guy. Even if Americans do not feel better off today than they were in 2008, the real question is whether they would be better off in 2016 under Obama or under Romney. It is not just about malaise in America, but also about morning in America. What can Americans look forward to with President Romney? For better or for worse, voters need to be flattered, and they don't want to to be told that the only reason not to vote for a sitting president is the disaster he will bring; they also need to be inspired by someone who would awaken their better angels and lead them to greener pasture.

The September Surprise

Mitt Romney definitely did not count on foreign policy becoming a major issue two weeks after he chose budget hawk, Paul Ryan, to be his running mate, making his the weakest ticket on foreign policy for decades.

What is even more perverse is that Romney himself chose to go off message. Instead of hammering Obama on the economy, he decided to come out to call the administration's alleged failure to deliver a more forceful repudiation of the attacks on 4 Americans in Benghazi "disgraceful." The result is that foreign policy will now dominate the airwaves even more than it would have without Romney's provocation. It also means that foreign policy will figure more in the upcoming debates than it would have, and Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney, who know a lot more about economics than war, will have plenty of opportunity to trip up against Joe Biden and Barack Obama. 

This is a continuing pattern of a campaign in constant search of an attack strategy that would work, one that willingly goes off message because for whatever reason, the message isn't working. A merely reactive campaign waiting on the sidelines to jump on a mistake cannot have a coherent message. 

The fact, anyway, is that President Obama is far more vulnerable on his economic record than he is on foreign policy. Yet he is not vulnerable enough. And this is the dilemma that the Romney team has not been able to resolve in the last couple of months. Each time they have tried a new message other than the economic declension narrative on the national debt and unemployment, they have had to ease up on the only strategy that has worked, but only to an insufficient degree. They are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Infusing foreign policy into the campaign, however, is particularly counter-productive for the Romney campaign because foreign policy is a very poor fit with their existing economic message, unlike say healthcare reform / repeal. This is why the RNC convention barely talked about foreign policy. When voters are uncertain about their economic future, they have historically been prepared to take a leap of faith in a challenger candidate; but when voters are uncertain about global unrest, they have tended to stay the course with the incumbent. Further, Obama's likability numbers translate most easily into his role as Commander-in-Chief. This is not an area on which he could be easily challenged, however loudly the voices of a minority in the Republican Party suggest otherwise. 

Post-Mortem on DNC Convention

The Democrats are enjoying a little bump from their convention last week, but it had little to do with Barack Obama, and a lot to do with Bill Clinton. The reason why Clinton's speech worked was because he was specifically charged to address the substance of his speech to independents and older white males. He was very successful in making his speech appear reasonable, while delivering very partisan conclusions. As such, the speech was becomingly presidential.

Obama's speech on the hand was predictable and tired. He seemed not to have recognized that he was in a very different position than four years ago. The language of empathy and hope falls on deaf ears when the speaker's credibility has been tarnished. What his research team needs is a catalogue of facts, such as those presented by Bill Clinton, for making the case that the administration has made some progress on various fronts ahead of the presidential debates next month. Unlike Romney, Obama must walk a tightrope of appearing presidential when still appealing to his base. Facts, not emotions, are his best allies this time.

In the end, for better or for worse, elections are now about persons, not parties. Candidates make all kinds of promises and voters have to make their judgment calls by triangulating imperfect indices of credibility. This is why negative ads can be so damaging. But so can strategic endorsements. One of the most powerful moments in the Republican convention was when Ann Romney shed light on some of Mitt Romney's  private acts of charity.

The rest of the Democratic convention was uninspiring. The choreography of minorities conspicuously put on display and the overplaying of the abortion issue crowded out precious time that could have been spent on putting a positive spin on Obama's record and restoring his credibility. The choice of North Carolina as the convention site was possibly also based on hubris. Most polls since May have put NC in Romney's column. The Democrats may have done better with a more defensive strategy and held their convention in states like Colorado or Virginia.

Looking ahead, the electoral dynamics are likely to change if for one reason alone: now that Romney is the official nominee, he can dip into the RNC's funds to add to his already formidable war-chest. He may yet be able to make up the advantage Obama enjoys in the electoral college map.

Post-Mortem on RNC Convention

The Republicans' convention bump for Mitt Romney appears to be muted. Why? There was a lot of bad luck. Going before the Labor Day weekend caused television viewership to go down by 30 percent, as did the competing and distracting news about Hurricane Isaac. The Clint Eastwood invisible chair was not a disaster, but a wasted opportunity that Romney's advisors should have vetted. Valuable time that could have been spent promoting Romney (such as the video of him that had to be played earlier) before he came out to speak on prime time was instead spent in a meandering critique of Obama.

Obama's first remarks about the convention was that it was something you would see on a black-and-white tv -- a new spin on the Republican Party as allegedly backward, as opposed to the Democrat's who lean "Forward." The most revealing thing about the convention was that President George W. Bush was not asked to speak. Instead, he appeared in a video with the older Bush, possibly in a bid to mollify the presence of the younger. Republicans are still divided over Bush, which is why they continued their hagiography of Reagan in the convention. For all of Jeb Bush's intonations for the Obama campaign to stop putting blame on the previous administration, the fact is that the convention conceded that George W. Bush was indeed a liability. "Forward" is a narrative that can work as long as the look immediately backwards isn't too satisfying.

On the other side, Bill Clinton will of course make an appearance in Charlotte in next week. The Democrats have also wisely flooded the speakers' list with women, to show that the Republicans' paltry presentation of just five women represent the tokenism narrative that Democrats are trying to paint. Women are America's numerically biggest demographic, and they are more likely to turn out than men (by 4 percent in 2008).

In this final stretch, the gurus are gunning straight for the demographics. Campaigning has become a science, albeit an imperfect one. The Romney campaign now knows that a generic refutation of the Obama's performance about the economy, jobs, the national debt -- which we've all been hearing about for nearly 4 years -- is not going to change the underlying tectonics of voter sentiment. This is why they tried to elevate the Medicare issue last week, and why they're trying the personalize Romney strategy this week. The latter is more likely to work, and it should be done quickly, because next week, the DNC intends to make America fall in love with Barack Obama again.