Quotes of the day

“I don’t crow about bad polls, I don’t crow about good polls. I just want trends,” said Ron Kaufman, a top Romney adviser. “And the bottom line is the trends are kind of good for us. That’s all that matters at this point. There’s a long way to go.”

“It’s been an enjoyable journey,” he added. “I think we’re having more fun right now than they are.“

Obama won [Ohio] in 2008 largely because of a healthy lead among independents and a highly enthusiastic base’s turning out votes. Right now Romney is leading big with independents, has a more enthusiastic base, and is drawing crowds in Ohio that rival Obama’s. While he is down 2.5 points in the polls, the average poll is assuming 2008 turnout which is unlikely to repeat itself this year. Adding the fact that early voting is trending more Republican than in 2008, there is a lot of reason for optimism that this race is much closer than the current polls suggest. Not bad for a candidate who was declared dead in the state just a few weeks ago.

Among Keystone State voters in our poll who say the economy and job creation is the most important issue that will influence their vote, voters prefer Romney over Obama by a 54% to 40% margin. This is clear evidence Romney is winning the jobs argument. Voters in Western Pa, who tend to be blue collar, working class Democrats, care about jobs and resent the President’s war on coal. In the Pittsburgh market, Romney is on track to run up huge margins. In the vote-rich Southeast collar counties around Philadelphia, Romney is neck-and-neck with Obama because these more affluent, better educated suburban voters identify with Mitt Romney and a lot of what he stands for. They know he’s not an extremist, know he cares about kids and women, saved the Olympics and wants deficits under control…

This is why our statewide polling was the first to show Romney with an improved image in the Commonwealth after the first debate – 48% now view him favorably, a huge reversal from pre-debate polling. And this is a clear indication even in a “blue” state like Pennsylvania voters are smart enough to know that having a leader in the White House who understands job creation is more important than having the letter “R” or “D” posted outside the Oval office door.

The psychology of the race has shifted, a prospect that advisers to Mr. Obama had long fought. They sought to define Mr. Romney as an unacceptable choice, hoping to keep enough voters who supported Mr. Obama in 2008 from seeing Mr. Romney as a plausible alternative…

Here in Florida, the largest competitive state with 29 electoral votes, supporters of Mr. Romney say they have noticed a drastic change since the Oct. 3 debate in Denver, where his strong performance came as he stepped up his advertising in Florida.

“For a long time, the Republican rationale was ‘I just want Obama to lose,’ ” said Brian Ballard, a co-chairman of the Romney campaign in the state. “He opened people’s eyes at the debate. It moved the needle for the pro-Romney vote, not just that we can’t have four more years of the same.”

[Obama supporters] at the George Mason University event described various means used to cope with political panic, whether prompted by a poor debate performance or a particularly gnawing poll…

“I felt like I was going to cry [after the debate],” said Nancy Aboulmouna, of Arlington. “I have not yet. Not yet. I just wanted to. I talked to my parents and friends. But then I found out that some of them were Romney supporters and it got worse from there.”

Faced with a campaign narrative not to their liking, some Obama supporters simply tuned out. Johana Posada, 25, of Arlington, said she stopped paying attention to the polls when they began to go south for Obama after that first debate.

The Republicans are now the ones offering ideas of progress or reform, while the Democrats fiercely fight to protect the established order of entitlements, tax hikes, and obeisance to unions, greens, and feminists. Even when Obama and Biden have been highly caffeinated, they have not stated their plans and goals for a second term. They are too busy painting a socialist-realist mural of Romney and Ryan as maniacal reactionaries. They are too preoccupied with protecting subsidies for Big Bird, Planned Parenthood, and windmills.

Four years ago, President Obama and Vice President Biden were bursting with plans. Obama said he would cut the deficit, middle-class taxes, and health care premiums, while also creating a new entitlement to health insurance. He said he’d revamp America’s energy, education, and immigration policies for the 21st century. He delivered a speech in the early months of his term saying he’d put America on a “new foundation.” His 2011 State of the Union address was devoted to “winning the future.”

But all of these big dreams have crashed against the granite wall of reality. The deficit is up, the price of fuel and health care premiums has increased, incomes are down, and tax increases loom. Obama is exhausted. His political capital is spent. The boldest proposal he’s put forward recently is hiring another 100,000 teachers. That doesn’t even rise to the level of small-ball. It’s mini-golf.

Flash-forward to 2012 and all we’ve seen from the man who promised us hope, change, and a new kind of politics is a nakedly cynical divide and conquer crusade that’s only gotten worse in its closing days. While Romney focuses his closing argument on the future, his agenda, and the realities of governing, our president is literally going all in on Big Bird, contraception, Binder-gate, “Romnesia,” and aids flanking him at rallies holding signs that read: “Women’s Health Security.”

This smallness and naked desperation is not only apparent, it’s familiar. I don’t mean to pick at an old scab, but in the closing days of the ’08 campaign, we saw the same kind of behavior from John McCain. He knew he was losing and in a desperate bid to gain traction, his message became erratic (suspending the campaign) and small (Joe the Plumber).

Probably with good reason, Barack Obama is also not acting like a winner. So bad is his behavior, in fact, that he’s given Romney a massive opening to declare Obama’s behavior “unpresidential.” Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago that Romney was beaten senseless for his lack of substance? The secret’s out: Obama has no second-term agenda.

Sure, the Republicans still insist on bringing up trivial, peripheral distractions like Benghazi, Obamacare, multi-trillion-dollar debt, unsustainable entitlements, permanent long-term unemployment, and the looming January 1 “fiscal cliff.” But Democrats know that, if Romney gets his way, there’ll be nothing at the bottom of the fiscal cliff to break your fall except binders. In RomneyWorld, when the mullahs drop the big Iranian nuke, there’ll be nothing crawling out from the irradiated rubble except cockroaches and binders — or some hideous mutation of the two: bindroaches, vile creatures prowling the land on three pairs of jointed rings ready to snap shut on your daughters’ ankles as they attempt to access the last Planned Parenthood clinic in America…

Some years ago, the then–French defense minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, complained that the Americans were committed to “the organized cretinization of our people.” I’ve never accepted the thesis, but I have to say that, in the final weeks of his reelection campaign, the first man in history to spend $6 trillion and leave no trace is doing a magnificent job of cretinizing his own base. In the binders of history, this one will be worth its own tab.

Eileen touched her friend’s arm. “Most women I know, whether they’re for Obama or Romney, they feel the same thing,” she said. “[Abortion is] a distraction. That whole Gloria Steinem thing is old.”…

Romney’s “binders full of women” line, an awkward phrasing that inspired reams of mockery on the Internet, wasn’t changing any minds among the women I spoke to. Democratic partisans saw it as more evidence Romney was out of touch; Republican partisans saw it as of a piece with his business background. “Anyone who’s ever been a professional, ever, knows that’s how you get resumes: in a binder,”43-year-old Republican stay-at-home mother Michele Moss said, rolling her eyes. Only someone who’d never been in the business world — like Obama — would fail to understand that.

The “binders” line didn’t register at all among the undecided women.

Via Gallup.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) delivered a withering assault on President Barack Obama on Sunday, asserting that the president hasn’t laid out a concrete agenda for a second term and is instead making up catch phrases like “Romnesia.”

“That fires up his base, people who are going to vote for him anyway,” Rubio said on ABC’s “This Week.” “But for the rest of Americans who are trying to make up their mind who to vote for, what they’re wondering is, ‘Well, that’s very cute Mr. President, but what are you going to do for the future?’”

• Regarding Lois Lerner, who does the Bill of Rights protect?
• Bobby Jindal: Paternalistic, big-government liberalism is the biggest loser here
• Chris Christie: “I’ll be here to welcome” Obama when he comes to tour the NJ coast again next week

Blowback