Anyway, the bigger problem with Obama’s press conference was that there wasn’t any news in Obama’s prepared remarks. This really makes me shake my head. If you’re going to call a press conference, you have to give beat reporters something new. New is the root of news. If you don’t say something new, a misstatement is bound to dominate, or an answer to an off-message question. In this case, his response on the national-security leaks would have probably led the stories—as it did Daniel Stone’s Beast report. Not as bad as a gaffe, from the spin-room point of view, but also not what they wanted to put out there.

At bottom, then, the press conference reflected the general drift that Clift described. The White House doesn’t have an argument right now. Ever since the jobs report, Romney’s got all the momentum. The White House has tried but then dropped arguments, as I wrote earlier this week, and it sounds a little whiny and ineffectual when Obama urges Congress to pass something that everybody knows Congress isn’t going to pass. And by the way, he ought at least to say “Republicans,” not “Congress.” I’m sure there are risks associated with sounding too partisan, but to me, he has little choice but to lump Romney and the GOP Congress together.