An artful bit of spin that’s both true and deceptive. The truth: The fundamentals really haven’t changed much. The deceptive part: O’s touting that as a good thing when in fact the fundamentals have always worked against him, not for him. That was the point of Sean Trende’s terrific piece yesterday at RCP, that Obama’s campaign strategy has been carefully crafted to counter the effects of electoral “gravity” — high unemployment, sluggish economic growth, and massive deficits, all fundamental to the quadrennial question of whether you’re better off now than you were four years ago. Trende’s thesis is that The One’s best/only way to neutralize “gravity” is to nurture a perception in the media and, by extension, in the electorate that victory is inevitable. The more Romney’s seen as a flailing loser, the fewer donations he’ll get, the more depressed the GOP base will be, and the less interested right-leaning undecideds will be in voting. That was the game plan as of last Wednesday, until Romney shattered it by destroying Obama at the debate. The fact that Mitt now looks like a plausible winner to the press is the one and only way in which the fundamentals really have changed, and that’s why you see O here desperate to recapture a sense of inevitability. The debate was just a blip, you see; the “fundamentals” will carry him inexorably on to victory. The more he can convince people that that lie is true, the greater the chance that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Lest you had any doubt about how nervous his team really is, though, here’s something tasty from The Hill. The One has but two pastimes, but that’s one too many given the new problems Romney’s debate triumph has created for his campaign:

President Obama will attend his last fundraiser of the 2012 campaign Thursday and then shift into top gear following his disastrous recent debate performance that vaporized his polling lead over challenger Mitt Romney.

With momentum in the race flipping to the Republican, sources have told The Hill the president will spend the rest of the campaign at swing-state rallies or preparing for the next two debates instead of attending more private fundraisers…

They acknowledge that they could be outspent, as Obama warned donors in July, but take comfort from their belief that they have a better get-out-the-vote operation in the swing states.

I don’t think he’s in panic mode yet, but if Biden goes “full Biden” tomorrow night and O craps the bed again at the upcoming town-hall debate, things may turn desperate. And that could mean … suspending the weekend golf game. If/when it happens, expect a Humpbot cameo. Exit question: He seems pretty excited here about the non-troversy over Romney’s abortion legislation comments yesterday. (Romney has since clarified them.) Who wants to be the one to tell him that his own VP once voted for a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade?