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.

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.

It’s not just Big Bird that Romney plans to fire; He will also try to screw America’s charitable nonprofits if he is elected. Brian Beutler explains at Talking Points Memo:

Mitt Romney’s big new tax reform idea — to cap the amount individuals can benefit from tax deductions in a given year — still lacks for hard specifics but the basic shape of the idea provides tax economists key clues about its potential incidence. And the biggest loser, if he were to implement the plan as president, according to an expert on charitable giving, would be one of the right’s favorite features of the tax code: the deduction for charitable giving.
“The effect on charitable giving is likely to be large for high income individuals, especially in the short run,” says Jim Andreoni, a UC San Diego professor of economics who studies the economics of charitable giving.
Under the current tax code, people are allowed to deduct scores of expenses from their taxable income. Mortgage interest is tax deductible. The cost to workers of their employer-provided insurance is excluded from their taxable income. And reflecting the long-held conservative view that private giving rather than government should be the main source of public welfare, charitable contributions are partially exempt from taxation.
If Romney were to impose a cap on the total amount individuals could benefit from these deduction, people would likely respond by shifting priorities, experts say. But some priorities are more easily shifted than others. While it’s very difficult to downsize a home, and a bitter pill to accept stingier health insurance benefits, cutting smaller checks to churches, universities, and ballet companies is a no-brainer.
…”[D]ata show that the tax deduction is very important to donations,” Andreoni adds. “So, high income donors will have two reasons to cut back on giving. First, they are losing after-tax income from deductions on things other than giving and that are hard to adjust, like mortgage interest. Second, giving itself will become far more expensive and is far easier to change than other deductions. It’s intuitive to me that charitable giving will take a big hit from the cap on deductions.”

Milton Friedman, sainted economic guru of libertarian Republicans, urged his fellow conservatives to give to charities as an alternative way to help the poor in preference to government public assistance programs. Ayn Rand, in stark contrast, condemned even charity for the poor as a misguided value worthy of contempt. Romney, like Ryan, clearly identifies more with Rand’s viewpoint, and that is not likely to sit well with most Americans.

Ace polling analysts Mark Blumenthal and Adam Carlson have an update on the battle for control of the U.S. Senate, and Republicans aren’t going to like it. Writing at HuffPo, Blumenthal and Carlson explain:

…With the exception of Connecticut, where a new poll released on Thursday indicates a very close race for the open Senate seat being vacated by independent Sen. Joe Lieberman, Republicans have seen few positive trends in their uphill battle to regain control of the U.S. Senate.
Currently, a combination of both returning senators and also candidates leading in 2012 contests would give the Democrats 48 seats, with 51 needed for a majority. One independent candidate likely to caucus with the Democrats continues to lead in polls in Maine. To retain control of the Senate, the Democrats would need to carry just two of eight races now considered toss-ups, a list that has been expanding in recent weeks.

The authors review competitive Senate races, now trending Democratic and conclude:

…In recent weeks, the Republican candidates appear to have lost ground in Senate races in Arizona, Indiana, Wisconsin and Missouri, while gaining only in Connecticut. With less than five weeks remaining before the votes are counted, the odds of a Republican Senate majority appear long.

That’s quite a change from a year ago, when a GOP takeover of the Senate was considered all but a done deal.

The following excerpt, by political strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
There’s no spinning this one, babe:… Obama was off his game, and Romney was so much better than usual he looked almost lifelike. But the real story…reinforces the fact that Democrats are winning the overall debate in this race, because the way Romney won…was by acting like a Democrat — and by being a stunningly blatant bald-faced liar. [The] debate will not change the basic dynamic of this race because Romney is playing on our turf. The biggest question.is ..not whether the election dynamic is different, it is whether the press corps does its job and calls Romney on his lies. Having lived through the Al Gore debate where a couple of tiny exaggerations set off a media firestorm over whether Al Gore was a serial liar, if the media doesn’t nail Romney on his BS, it would be a moment of shame. Based on a video I got sent this morning by the Obama campaign, it looks like…reporters started to dip their toes into the water on a Romney Pinocchio routine, so we’ll see if they do their job and that keeps building.
Whether the media does its job, though, Romney’s strategy…was remarkable: after years of thoroughly sucking up to the right wing base of his party in every conceivable way, Romney…sounded more like a Democrat than a great many Democrats I have seen over the years. He talked about how important regulations were to a market economy. He decried Too Big To Fail banks. He said he wanted to lower the tax burden on middle income people but didn’t want the wealthy to pay any less than they currently pay. He emphasized that our society needs to take care of poor people and seniors. He passionately disparaged cuts to Medicare. He talked about the importance of helping the middle class and how we needed rising wages and incomes, not just more jobs. He emphasized the importance of high quality teachers and schools. He said he wanted to keep people from losing their health insurance because of preexisting conditions.
Romney’s policies put the lie to all these things, and the rhetoric is the precise opposite of what he said during the Republican primary and his remarks on the infamous 47 percent video. But no matter: we still have the Etch-A-Sketch device. And we have a candidate who is willing to say absolutely anything if the moment calls for it.
The most fascinating thing about all this isn’t that Romney is so willing to say anything, even if it contradicts his policy stands and past rhetoric, because he has been doing all that for quite a while. The fascinating thing is how the Republicans are walking away from their own arguments about the economy. For years now, we have been hearing from Republicans that we have to cut taxes and regulations for the wealthy so that they can create more jobs. We have been hearing that since 47 percent of Americans pay no income tax, we will need to tax lower and middle income people more. We have been hearing that we need to cut programs that help poor and middle income folks because people were growing too dependent on government, that we had too many “takers” and not enough “makers.”
…In his most blatant lie of a night that was chock full of them, Mitt even tried to frame his and Ryan’s budget proposal, which openly lowers taxes for the wealthy and massively slashes funding for virtually all domestic programs, as a budget that would do the opposite of what it does. What we heard from Mitt.is ..that you should vote for him because he really is a Democrat.
The only good news from the night was that, while polls show voters thought Romney won, the debate really did not change the nature of this race at all. Whether the press corps does its job or not and calls out Romney for all the lies, this election is being fought on our turf. In the campaign ads and speeches, in the next three debates, the Obama team needs to clearly and definitively show, as all the evidence makes obvious, that Romney really is not a Democrat and does not share the values or support the policies he said he did…If we stay true to ourselves, we will show that Romney and Ryan are definitely not true to what they believe, or being honest with the American public.

Ed Kilgore’s Washington Monthly post, The Audacity of Mendacity addresses the question of how long Romney can get away with piling up outrageous lies with little accountability. As Kilgore explains:

Can the president and his forces (with some possible help from MSM types who are probably embarrassed they didn’t mention Mitt’s factual challenges in awarding him the overwhelming victory last night) bring swing voters up to the level of informed cynicism that just about every regular political observer, D and R, felt while watching Mitt reinvent himself? I don’t see why not, though it would have been vastly more efficient to have done so during a debate being watched by 50 million people.
The more difficult question is how Mitt Romney follows up this reprieve and deals with the inevitable blowback. Sure, he’ll take a victory lap now, and you can expect his people to become an endless fount of upbeat chatter about Momentum and Enthusiasm and all that psych-ops jazz. Perhaps having now laid out his “vision for the country,” he’ll go right back to the old game of calling the election a referendum on the president and refuse to deal with all the questions about his agenda, which were increased, not resolved, by his debate performance….
…At some point, the blatant and continuing contradiction between what Mitt’s been telling “the base” and what he’s telling swing voters now will matter, even if, as seems far more likely today, the representatives of “the base” are willing to go along with the game, believing deeply that it’s voters, not they, who are getting zoomed.

As Kilgore concludes, “Mitt Romney negotiated a fine highwire act last night, but he’s still up there teetering, with a long way to go to safety.”