The most important week of the campaign?

The pressure is squarely on the president Tuesday night, given his performance in Denver. But Romney, too, needs a strong evening to cement the first. He cannot afford any backsliding. His advisers know that if, as expected, the president does a better job Tuesday, stories will inevitably be written about his bounce-back. No one expects a second mismatch…

Romney will be ready to field those attacks in the context of the two broad themes that Ryan hewed to Thursday night. The most important is the argument that the country cannot afford another four years of Obama’s economic policies. The second is that the recent attacks in Libya that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, and the administration’s changing stories about what happened, are symptomatic of broader weaknesses in Obama’s foreign policy…

There’s one other weakness in Obama’s message: the question of what his second-term agenda actually is. He has been vague about this throughout the campaign, preferring to focus on criticisms of Romney and defense of his first-term achievements. If he has something important to say about a second term, Tuesday night affords him the opportunity to say it.