Groan

Maybe it's watching the White Sox stumble down the stretch and blow the Central Division crown.  Or seeing the A's rebound from 16 games back at the end of June to overtake the Texas Rangers.  Or watching Barack Obama toss away the first debate.  But sure things don't seem so sure anymore.  Of course Obama will win, he is too far ahead in too many battleground states.  But things seem less comfortably certain now.

What a dispiriting debate performance by Barack Obama.  Three things tear at me.  First, Mitt Romney's performance - which was all smoke and mirrors, lies and evasions - nevertheless seemed more assured and confident than Obama's.  And that changes the dominant narrative of the last few weeks.  Romney's campaign was a campaign in free fall, stumbling from one gaffe to another, a comedy of errors.  Commentators were trying to position just how bad Romney was.  As bad as Dukakis?  Or Dole?  Worse, most seemed to say.  Even reliable Republicans like MSNBC's Joe Scarborough saw a candidate and a campaign as inept and clueless as any he could recall.  Now that reliable storyline, which had been so inescapable, that even Romney's staff had to admit he was a stumbling nincompoop on the campaign trail, has been pushed aside.  Romney is the comeback kid.

Second, as long as he was stumbling, Republican Senate candidates were racing to get away from him. Like survivors who didn't want to get pulled down by the Titanic as it sank, Scott Brown and Tommy Thompson and Linda McMahon were distancing themselves from Romney.  Creating dissent and discord in the Party, putting a wedge between these candidates and true-blue ideological donors and tea party leaning voters.  Brown and Thompson and McMahon's numbers dropped as Romney's did. What now, with Romney back on his feet?

Third, why didn't Obama discuss the auto industry?  In the long discussion about jobs, Obama could have taken back the momentum of the debate.  Here's what he needed to say.  Romney wanted the auto industry to fail.  As a captain of the investment class, Romney views the world as a simple landscape of winners and losers.  You bet on the winners, and cut your losses on the losers.  Walk away from them.    That's how Romney saw the auto industry, and that's how he viewed home-owners underwater on their mortgages.  Losers.  Walk away.  But that's not how responsible public officials should see things.  Unless you are the most rigid Randian Objectivist, public officials seek to mediate the impact of business cycles, cushion the fall, provide aid.  That's just what Obama did when the auto industry was teetering on the edge of collapse.  He engineered aid, and saved the industry, and all the jobs it provides.  General Motors is alive because of that.  Why didn't Obama tell that story?