During the last week, many Democrats have succumbed to poll-induced panic syndrome in the wake off the first presidential debate. But Douglas E. Schoen and Jessica Tarlov have a soothing balm for the malady in their Daily Beast post, “Stop Panicking, Obama Supporters!” As the authors explain:

This has been a race of extreme narratives. Before last Wednesday’s debate, commentators were confident of an Obama victory. Now, the media have gone from riding high on Obama to previewing a Romney win. The Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan, for instance, is arguing that Obama may have forfeited the election with his debate performance.

Tarlov and Schoen review all the latest polls indicating trouble for Obama, including the Pew Research poll, which has caused so much weeping and gnashing of teeth among Dems. In addition, say the authors,

But while these numbers are painful for Obama supporters, the election is close to a tie overall. The Pew survey is just one poll, capturing one moment in time. Consider Monday’s Washington Times/Zogby poll, which showed Romney and Obama in an effective tie, with Romney slightly ahead by 45.1 percent to 44.5 percent. If you factor in libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, Obama is actually ahead by half a point, 45.5 to 45 percent.
Meanwhile, Rasmussen’s tracking numbers also show a tie, with both candidates at 48 percent. The Gallup numbers put Romney only slightly ahead at 49 to 47 percent. And yesterday, Rasmussen reported that 55 percent of likely voters still think Obama is probably going to win in November.
The electoral map also continues to shape up in the president’s favor. Although Romney is ahead by 1 in Ohio, according to the latest ARG survey, he trails by 3 in both Pennsylvania (PDF) and Virginia (PDF).

As Schoen and Tarlov conclude, “In other words, we are not looking at an assured Romney victory. We are looking at a very, very close race.” Greg Dworkin’s pundit round-up at Daily Kos reaches similar conclusions.
You really have to put alarming poll numbers into broader perspective. Dems should remember that the presidential race always narrows in October. If you absolutely must worry about polls, save it for the last couple of days before the campaign, when polls actually have some value in predicting the election outcome.
After all the spin is spun, and regardless of what the polls say, in a close race, it’s who shows up to vote that counts. Stay focused on what Democratic rank and file, as well as campaign workers need to do to get registered voters to the polls. With voter registration deadlines passed in most states this week, it’s time to get involved in preparing a GOTV mobilization of unprecedented proportions.
Residents of states that are pretty much decided should get involved in GOTV to either build and strengthen the Democratic Party in their own state, join in GOTV phone banking campaigns in other states or help out with fund-raising for Democratic candidates. For fund-raising, check out ActBlue. To get invloved in phone-banking and other GOTV action projects click here and/or here.

The following article, by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
In politics, as in sports, the psychology of a team matters at least as much as other factors — and usually more. In sports, something like this happens all the time: one team is kicking the other’s butt, breezing along to what seems like an easy victory, when all of a sudden something dramatic changes. One big play, one dumb mistake, one moment on which things turn. All of a sudden the team that was losing comes back hard and strong, and the team that had been winning freezes up and starts playing poorly. Now, that purely psychological momentum shift doesn’t mean the change is permanent, or that the team that was ahead loses in the end, but it is a critical moment in a contest. It needs to be dealt with aggressively, generally by taking a deep breath, calming down, and going back to what was working before.
As you astute readers probably guessed, that metaphor relates very much to the moment we are in right now in the presidential election. The Obama campaign had built a solid lead and had been running very smoothly, while Romney kept making dumb mistakes and had dug a hole for himself. When Obama had a bad night and Romney had a good one, it threw the Obama team for a loop and gave the Romney team confidence. Almost a week after the debate, what it feels like is that the Obama team still has not gotten its rhythm or confidence back. What they need to do is to go back to what was working for them before the debate. I have seen nothing in the polling I am looking at that makes me think the core dynamics in this race have changed, and we need to go back to what was winning before: contrasting the basic differences in philosophy, values, and economics — and driving home the 47 percent video which defines Romney so well.
What the Obama ads have been doing ever since the debate is to say, in a variety of ways using a variety of validators from the media, that Romney lied. It sure is true, but that isn’t convincing to swing voters. What is convincing is to show them Romney being two-faced. And the policy stuff is less important than the values piece. All you have to do is directly juxtapose a clip from the debate with the 47 percent video, as in:

You can’t have a starker contrast between someone saying one thing in private and something else completely different in public. It would be powerful and dramatic, and it would get you out of the he said/she said of who is a liar.
The Obama campaign has been consistently winning the debate in this election — on economic policy, on values and on philosophy. Romney gave us an incredible gift with the 47 percent video, because it shows as clear as a bell what his values are, and it powerfully reinforces the debate victory we were already enjoying. We need to shake off Obama’s bad night, stop playing defense and go back to the game plan that was working very well for us.
Oh, and keep using the Big Bird thing, because it really is fun. Here’s a great new ad:

If anyone has earned the right to advise President Obama on how to juice up his presentation in the next debate, it would have to be former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, who delivered the most energetic speech of the Democratic convention. In her HuffPo post, “Mr. President: Next Debate, Make Moral Choice Clear,” riffing from an earlier conversation she had with message strategist George Lakoff, Granholm explains:

Every one of the president’s most moving speeches — the speeches where he inspired and lifted our country up — had one thing in common. Speeches like his 2004 convention speech, the speech on race and the speech in Osawatomie, Kansas all spoke with moral clarity about who we are, about deep American values.
Yes, they talked about issues, but the issues were an outgrowth from the call to our character.
So, with respect, Mr. President, when you walk on stage in the next debate I would like to hear you say that the choice is not just about whose tax plan you like or who has the better health care strategy. It’s much more fundamental than that. This is a choice about our national character.

Obama’s problem has never been eloquence, but Granholm suggests a script for the President, the nut of which includes,

…That great small business owner that you talk about?
We all contributed to make sure she was educated at the public schools and public university. That we all participated doesn’t take anything away from her individual accomplishments. It’s okay, really. We’re proud to have helped. We all, together as Americans, invested to build the public libraries and the roads and the national parks. We have organized ourselves, as a country, in a way that allows us to pool our resources to make sure that we all have the chance to be successful and to exercise that liberty. It’s who we are as a nation.
My God, it makes me proud.”

Not bad. Passion, clarity and appeal to the higher citizen in every viewer– it hits some sweet spots. Granholm continues:

Say it at the start of the debate: “This election involves a moral choice. As an American family, will we force autistic children to simply be on their own? Will we force Uncle Ron, with a history of heart disease to go uninsured? We. Will. Not. ”
Say it strong, Mr. President. Say, “I’m determined, in this family, that all of the children will be fed, and have shelter. In our family, we insist that we honor those who have brought us along — the elders in our home, the veterans who have served us — and we make sure they don’t have to worry about health care or social security. Compassion as strength, not as softness. In our larger family, we take care of our own. That’s who we are; that’s what we do. This is a moral issue.”

Granholm concludes,

That’s the moral choice I’d like to hear about at the next debate, Mr. President. Sure, you could talk about the $716 billion in Medicare savings and the capital gains tax rate. But that’s not what I really want to hear. Those are the little things, I want the big things. I don’t want to hear about our smallness, I want to hear about our greatness. I don’t want to hear about lies; I want to hear great truths. Tell us about our great national heart, our compassion, our character as a nation.
Tell us that, sir, and we’ll follow you anywhere.

It’s about understanding that the moral vision is what energizes the presentation and connects with real, flesh and blood people. Romney can connect to some extent with animated body language, as he did in the first debate. He can blither on with glittering generalities about “freedom,” as Republicans like to do. It’s like sleight-of-hand that distracts from his lack of substance. That can work against someone who doesn’t bring his “A” game. But he can’t really touch the energetic appeal to the commonweal that Granholm is talking about. Lack of a compassionate moral vision is Romney’s Achilles’ heel.
Speeches and debates are like apples and oranges to some extent. But debates do offer opportunities for “mini-speeches.” The President does just fine in his speeches. He’s just got to bring that energy to the next debate and Granholm makes some good points about keeping centered on an energizing moral vision. View and hear Granholm’s lively editorial at The War Room right here.

In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot,’ TDS Co-Founder Ruy Teixeira makes it clear just who and what the American people think is responsible for our current economic problems — and shows that the public just isn’t buying a couple of treasured conservative myths. As Teixeira, author of America’s New Swing Region: Changing Politics and Demographics in the Mountain West, explains:

Conservatives are very sure of two things about our current economic problems. One is that these problems are mostly President Barack Obama’s fault. The other is that overregulation of the free market is preventing the economy from roaring back to life. A new ABC News/Washington Post poll finds the public disagrees vigorously with both of these conservative nostrums.
Take the idea that our current economic problems can be laid at President Obama’s door. Not so, says the public. Fifty-four percent of the poll’s respondents believed former President George W. Bush deserves the lion’s share of the blame, while just 32 percent thought President Obama is more responsible for these problems.

All of this after many months and millions of dollars spent to convince the public it is mostly President Obama’s fault. Regarding public attitudes toward economic inequality and regulation:

In the same poll, 56 percent of respondents thought unfairness in our economic system favoring the wealthy is a bigger problem for our country. Just 34 percent saw overregulation of the free market as a bigger problem.

As Teixeira concludes, “Conservatives can insist all they want that President Obama and interference with the free market are the root of all evil. But the public clearly disagrees.”

Gerald F. Seib’s column “Key to Victory? Who Has the Best Ground Game,” at The Wall St. Journal doesn’t really answer the question in the title. But it does provide some clues.
Seib argues that turnout prospects for Obama-favoring Latinos and youth are dimmed by indications of low voter enthusiasm among these groups. But efforts are underway to correct a pending shortfall, including:

The Obama campaign knows full well that it needs to amp up these voting blocs, so it is trying to catch up with its 2008 standard. It will get some help from its labor allies, and months ago set in place a social-media strategy to reconnect with young voters, as well as a separate outreach operation for Hispanics.
…State statistics now show registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in five of the six battleground states that register voters by party. In most of them, Democratic registration advantages still aren’t as large as in 2008, but they are widening. Crucially, the Obama camp says voters under 30 make up more than half of new registrants.

Seib acknowledges the problem of turning out the evangelical vote when a Mormon and a Catholic are atop the Republican ticket. But, overall, Seib seems more impressed with GOP GOTV efforts thus far:

…In a recent conversation, Mr. [Ralph] Reed walked through the turnout math and how his organization is trying to affect it…White evangelicals and born-again Christians made up roughly a quarter of all voters in 2008. Yet Mr. Reed estimates that perhaps 17 million evangelicals didn’t vote or weren’t registered, including roughly a million who voted for George W. Bush in 2004.
That big bloc includes heavy representation in such swing states as Virginia, Ohio, Iowa and Florida. So Mr. Reed’s organization will spend some $12 million trying to get them to the polls.
Mr. Reed’s group has files with cellphone, email or other contact information on 17.3 million potential voters in 15 key states. All those voters will be contacted, many of them multiple times. Two million will get personal visits from volunteers. The message: Mr. Romney shares evangelicals’ values on matters such as gay marriage, abortion and religious freedom.

Reading between the lines, it appears that Seib may not have enough inside information about the scope and scale of Democratic GOTV to make a solid evaluation one way or the other. If reports that the Obama campaign has significantly beefed up it’s on-the-ground presence in Swing state communities are accurate, that could be the edge that makes a mockery of all the talk about the importance of the debates and monthly jobs figures. In that case, at least Seib’s call that “this year’s election may well hinge on a decidedly unsexy factor: voter turnout machinery” will be on target.

Given Mitt Romney’s disastrous foreign policy forays to date, you might think that his handlers would put some some serious statesmanship, along with original and creative thought into his big foreign policy speech for the closing weeks of the presidential campaign. Alas, that would not be the case, as Ed Kilgore explains in this excerpt of his Washington Monthly post on the topic:

What’s most interesting about Romney’s foreign policy rap, other than its belligerant emptiness, is that it is so remarkably close to the underlying foreign policy principle of the Bush-Cheney administration, which treated the entire world as composed of small and unruly children whose most important need was for “resolve” and “discipline” from Big Daddy. I thought we abundantly learned in those years that “resolve” was a poor substitute for skillful diplomacy and a foreign policy/national security strategy a bit more complicated than “cross us and we’ll blow you up.” Romney does talk a lot, though not with any clear connection to the Middle East, about free trade. At a time when Americans are more than a little ambivalent about free trade, does he really think that is going to be our triumphant, self-evidently attractive formula for addressing the world’s or the Middle East’s problems?

Kilgore concludes that “it just brings back bad memories of The Decider and his sinister Vice President. Read the rest of Kilgore’s post here.

Nate Silver mulls over the latest presidential race polls at Five Thirty Eight, and says, “Mitt Romney remains in a considerably stronger polling position than he was before last Wednesday’s debate in Denver. But the polls released on Sunday did not tell quite as optimistic a story for him as those in the debate’s immediate aftermath…Based on the numbers that the tracking polls published on Sunday, however, Mr. Obama’s lead was down to just 1.7 percentage points on average — a net shift of 2 points toward Mr. Romney since the debate…If the polls settle in at showing something like a 1- or 2-point lead for Mr. Obama by this point next week, that would be reasonably well in line with where our model and others think that the election “should” be based on economic trends; it would no longer be as appropriate to think of Mr. Romney as being an underachieving candidate.”
Good to see MLK III stumping against voter suppression in Florida. King slammed “elected officials…who are trying to keep people from participating in the process. That is unconscionable” and urged the reelection of President Obama, adding “This really is the most important election for the next 50 years. It will set the tone for the next 50 to 75 years.”
At Politico, James Hohmann reports on the evidence in the Politico/George Washington University Battleground Tracking Poll of LVs that the “enthusiasm gap” favoring Romney is back. Chuck Todd has more to say about it right here.
But Jamelle Bouie reports at Greg Sargent’s The Plum Line that “Democrats steadily gain in Senate races nationwide.” Bouie explains “While most political observers have been focused on the size of Mitt Romney’s bounce from last week’s debate, something else has been happening at the state level — Democratic Senate candidates have begun to break away from their Republican opponents.”
Fox News Latino actually has a decent report on Dems’ prospects for a Senate seat pick-up in AZ: “Arizona’s Richard Carmona, Democrat, in Race to Replace Retiring GOP Senator.”
And at Salon.com, Alex Seitz-Wald’s post “Democrats really do have a shot at winning the House” offers this ray of hope for Dems, despite pundit skepticim: “…In early August, the Reuters/Ipsos poll House generic ballot test — which asks if respondents would vote for a generic Democrat or generic Republican — showed the parties tied at 46 percent. In September, this same poll showed Democrats leading by 6 points, 49 percent – 43 percent. An NBC/Wall Street Journal generic poll from July had similar movement since July, as did an An Economist/YouGov poll. The most recent generic poll comes from NPR, which shows Dems up 3 points. Another recent poll of exclusively battleground congressional districts, conducted by Politico and George Washington University, had Dems up 2.”
WaPo columnist Chris Cillizza is undoubtedly right in saying that “Foreign policy isn’t going to decide the 2012 election” in his post “Mitt Romney and the (foreign policy) vision thing.” But referring to the reportage of Romney’s clownish mess of a foreign policy trip as “decidedly mixed press coverage he received during his trip to Britain, Israel and Poland…” may merit Cillizza a nomination to the False Equivalency Hall of Fame.
Ron Rosenbaum asks the right question in his Slate.com post “Is the Republican Party Racist?” But if the Republicans take the white house next month, it will have more to do with the GOP’s embrace of the politics of racial resentment than with any particular region.
Also at Slate.com, Eliot Spitzer’s “Jack Welch’s First Stage of Grief: Denial of Strong Jobs Report” has this richly-deserved skewering for a once impressive-now ridiculous corporate ‘leader’: “Shame on you, Jack. The notion that the Department of Labor plays games with these numbers for political reasons is silly, ludicrous, and insulting to government workers who have reported new figures–good and bad–faithfully for many decades. It strikes me, Jack, that there have been more cases of corporate gamesmanship with financial numbers in the past few years than cases in which the government wasn’t honest. In fact, didn’t your company, GE, have an accounting issue that led to a big SEC settlement not so long ago? So, Jack, now that you have made this outlandish claim, where is your proof–your evidence, any facts–to substantiate your assertion? Or is it just a partisan screed? You might recall that when my office charged GE–then under your leadership–with a range of impropriety, we had the proof, and a judge forced your company to take out full-page ads admitting your wrongdoing…”
In case you were wondering about the answer to another good question, “Why Do the Sunday Shows Suck So Much?,” Paul Waldman has the answer at the American Prospect. “I live and breathe politics, yet I find these programs absolutely unwatchable, and I can’t be the only one. On a typical episode, there is nothing to learn, no insight to be gained, no interesting perspective on offer, nothing but an endless spew of talking points and squabbling.” Waldman sees a ray of hope in “Up With Chris Hayes” on MSNBC. Waldman says Hayes’s program “shows what the Sunday shows could be. Hayes doesn’t bother interviewing politicians or party hacks; instead, he brings on people who know a lot about whatever issue they’ll be discussing, aren’t constrained by the need to score partisan points, and might have something interesting to say.”

For what is likely to be the best center-left case for President Obama’s reelection, read The New Republic’s endorsement, “Why Obamaism Must Live: The Case for Reelection,” part of which argues:

Health care reform, if it is properly nurtured, largely completes the social safety net. Financial reform, if the lobbyists don’t shred it, will curb maniacal risk-taking in the markets. The stimulus provided the seed money to launch Race to the Top–perhaps the most significant wave of experimentation in the history of public education–and to remake the energy grid. It created industries from scratch: biofuel refineries and plants that manufacture batteries for electric cars.
Obamaism itself is perhaps this administration’s most important innovation. The president has used New Democratic means to achieve Old Democratic ends. In pursuit of old liberal dreams, he has relied heavily on the insights of markets: spurring competition, reforming bureaucracies, and leveraging small investments to achieve big goals. Two of his signal programs–health care’s individual mandate and cap and trade–were tellingly conceived by conservatives.

While defending his moderate progressive policy agenda, The TNR editors fault the President for his inadequate salesmanship, particularly with respect to claiming due credit his “prescient” support for the Arab Spring and failing to strongly challenge the GOP’s wholesale government-bashing.
They also question his policy towards Afghanistan and Syria. But they give Obama due credit for his impressive foreign policy accomplishments:

The first term has a list of meaningful international accomplishments–chiefly his ruthless pursuit of Al Qaeda, the deft intervention in Libya, and the conclusion of the Iraq war. The president’s open hand to China and initial overtures to the Iranian regime have smartly been replaced by a new assertiveness. This willingness to change course has helped preserve American power in an era where it could easily have slipped away.

The President should also be credited, more specifically, with decisive leadership in ordering the raid that put an end to Osama bin Laden and hounding the al Qaeda leadership.
The TNR endorsement of President Obama scores sharply in directing readers to consider the dangerous alternative — “the virulence of the modern Republican Party”:

…Mitt Romney is the perfect avatar for a party in the throes of ideological convulsion. When he first considered running for president, in 2006, he seemed an archetype desperately missing from American politics. As a governor, he presented himself as a rigorous empiricist; his record formed a coherent pattern of bucking GOP orthodoxy on climate change, health care reform, and gay rights. But six years of pandering to Republican primary voters and donors will apparently distort even a first-rate mind. Far more than Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, he has promoted a libertarian vision filled with substantive and rhetorical hostility to the poor. His foreign policy is similarly wild, urging the escalation of military hostility with nations who pose no meaningful strategic threat.

In acknowledging the President’s shortcomings, the TNR Editors conclude:

…Over the course of this campaign, he has emerged as a different kind of politician–a populist bruiser capable of skillfully and passionately assailing his opponents, while remaining indifferent to the hand wringing of establishment opinion. Perhaps this is a style better suited for the next four years, in which his primary task will be managing a fiscal crisis that his opponents will cynically exploit. Having extended the safety net, he must now protect it. Without a second term, the accomplishments of his first would evaporate. This is not a poetic rallying cry, but there is human suffering to be minimized and a new foundation to defend.

There is more that can be said both in the President’s favor and about the frightening dangers of the alternative. But if you know any undecided political moderates, show them the TNR editorial.

The Republican echo chamber has shifted into high gear in denouncing the favorable jobs figures announced Friday, impugning the integrity of the Bureau of Labor Statistics by implying that the fix was in. The GOP’s cheap shot volley reeked, not only of being orchestrated, but pre-packaged.
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews did a solid job of outing Jack Welch’s partisan hackery. Also, Media Matters for America’s Joe Strupp has a revealing round-up, “Eight Veteran Economics Reporters Dismiss “Implausible” Jobs Numbers Conspiracy,” which includes this excerpt:

…Experienced financial journalists at outlets like The New York Times and The Economist say the contention that the new unemployment rate is fraudulent is not based on any valid proof.
“It is completely implausible to me that they would actively rig the thing to help Obama,” said Joe Nocera, New York Times business columnist. “The guys are green eye-shaded career bureaucrats who have no particular vested interest one way or another in who wins the presidential election.”…Nocera was referring to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiles the unemployment rates and has no political ties to the White House…”They come out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, if you are going to cook them, how exactly would you go about it, it is pretty implausible that the career bureaucrats at the Bureau would cook the books for Obama”…
Jesse Eisinger, senior reporter for finance at ProPublica and a former seven-year Wall Street Journal reporter, agreed…”This is complete fantasy,” he said about the claims of political influence. “It is yet another one of these right-wing denialist ideas. They’re perennial ideas that government statistics are manipulated…These are done by reputable civil servants. There is almost no way that these numbers could be manipulated for political gain. It doesn’t hold up in any way you think about it.”
Martin Wolk, executive business editor for NBC News Digital, also called such claims baseless…”They do the best to present those claims honestly. I have never seen a pattern where the numbers consistently favor one party or another. I would defy anyone to find a pattern in those numbers that is politically motivated.”
…Kevin Hall, McClatchy’s national economic correspondent and president of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, called Welch’s claim “mindboggling.”…”For him to say something as outrageous as this without any substantiation, is kind of, well, my first thought was maybe his [Twitter] account was hacked…Hall also said such claims against the Bureau of Labor Statistics impugn the reputation of a very trusted agency…”It is really unfortunate because people already have distrust of government and politicians, and to take something that has been done for 70 years and is pretty set in stone and allege without any substantiation that it is somehow corrupt is pretty bad,” Hall said. “If you understand how these statistics are compiled there is nothing new that is being done here. These are government economists.”
For Greg Ip, U.S economics editor for The Economist, manipulation of the statistics is not a valid claim…”I have been covering these reports for well over a decade,” Ip wrote in an email. “I cannot recall a single instance of the data being manipulated by anyone outside the BLS or even a credible accusation of it. The process, in my experience, is carried out with excruciating professionalism. BLS makes mistakes but they are of the nature of what happens when trying to measure a gigantic economy with precision. I would add that it’s funny to raise accusations of manipulation now. Where were they when the numbers the morning after Obama’s convention speech were horrible?”
Steve Pearlstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning business and economics columnist for The Washington Post, compared such claims to Nixonian paranoia…”Richard Nixon was the last person who would claim that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was a political organization, and he was president at the time,” Pearlstein said. “There is no evidence of it, these are just professional people who go to work every day, do their job and go home and are proud of the fact that they do their job and don’t take any political direction from people.”..He called allegations of manipulation “a slur and a libel on hardworking, dedicated and competent public servants.”

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the GOP, its string-pullers and media lapdogs want the economy to fail, so Romney can eradicate what’s left of federal regulations and worker protection.

Just in case you know anyone who bought the pro-Republican spin on the debates, Ed Kilgore sets the record straight in his Washington Monthly Post, “No, Romney Did Not ‘Move to the Center’ in Debate.” As Kilgore explains in this excerpt:

Before it becomes a kind of Fact-Made-Fact-By-Repetition, I’d like to challenge the much-assumed idea that in the first presidential debate Mitt Romney “moved to the center” in a real, substantive way. This seems to be the conclusion of many Democrats, many in the MSM, and of those few Republicans who occasionally object to the endless rightward drift of the GOP.
Sure, his rhetoric sounded more moderate. But when you look at the details, nothing changed.
Was it heresy to say healthy markets require regulation? Not unless you are the sort of person who wonders if we ought to privatize sidewalks…Did he back off on his tax-cut proposal? No, he’s always claimed his tax plan would not reduce the tax burden on the wealthy or boost the deficit. And he’s never accepted the $5 trillion price tag placed on his proposed rate cuts by the Tax Policy Center.
Was his solicitude for Medicare anything new? No, he’s been ranting about Obama’s “Medicare cuts” for ages, which is far less startling than hearing his running-mate do the same thing. Did Romney back down at all from his determination to dump Medicaid on the states with ratcheted-down funding (and yes, that’s what current-spending-plus-one-percent means unless you think medical inflation is suddenly vanishing), giving Republican governors eager to cut eligibility all the encouragement they need?

Kilgore continues the checklist covered in the debate and touches on a range of issues that were not mentioned in the debate, all of which add up to zero change. He concludes:

What we are seeing is the illusion created by a context-change wherein Mitt no longer has to pretend to be even more conservative than he’s been forced to be by his constant promises to the conservative movement…He hasn’t made a single substantive change in his policy proposals that should discomfit Tea Folk. So let’s all calm down a bit in hailing “Moderate Mitt.”

The ‘new’ Mitt is every inch as mendacious and evasive as the old Mitt, still wedded to the reactionary vision of a disempowered public sector and free reign for the ‘greed is good’ gospel of the worst one-percenters.