That last comment was unfortunate in two ways. One is that it reminded a lot of people—well, me—of how then-Sen. Barack Obama, in 2008, was widely viewed as a blank slate, an empty canvas on which people painted their hopes and yearnings. He knew it; he admitted it was part of his mystique. So he was a kind of Etch A Sketch too, only he let the voters turn the knobs. The other is that it illustrated with a disheartening vividness the essential Romney problem, which has never gone away after all this time: that he’s making it up as he goes along, that he’ll be one thing today and another tomorrow.

Actually, the vibration he’s lately giving off is worse than that. He acts like a guy who can be captured. The world is full of mischief, full of groups, tongs clubs and cabals, and this one says you have to back a certain fiscal plan, that one an environmental approach, and this one says you’ve got to go to war. And they are almost never thinking of America Overall, they are always thinking of their issue, their thing, and telling themselves—and you—that doing it their way will be better for America, overall. And if they think you have a soft, chewy center, every day of your presidency will be a bloody struggle to capture the Mitt…

Hmmm. Some short term advice to all the candidates:

Get cable TV out of your head. All the campaigns are obsessed with and driven crazy by what the cable universe is saying. Ignore it. What you are having is a conversation with America. You are not having a conversation with MSNBC. You are not negotiating a relationship with the anchors of Fox News.