The reviews of Jim Lehrer's performance as last week's debate moderator, you might have noticed, weren't so hot. The 78-year-old semi-retired newsman has come under fire for, among other transgressions, letting the candidates (well, Mitt Romney, mainly) walk all over him, focusing on too narrow a range of topics, asking questions that were too broad, and shying away from obvious follow-ups.
The Commission of Presidential Debates, which selected Lehrer, defended his performance by essentially arguing that the moderator who moderates less moderates best.
The goal of the debate, the CPD said in a statement, 'was to have a serious discussion of the major domestic and foreign policy issues with minimal interference by the moderator or timing signals. Jim Lehrer implemented the format exactly as it was designed by the CPD and announced in July.'
But this raises a question: If the moderator's job is to get out of the way, why have a moderator '" and a tightly regimented format '" in the first place?
The findings from Gallup released Wednesday afternoon seemed logical enough: Voter reaction to the news of Mitt Romney's secretly recorded disparagement of Obama supporters was decidedly negative.
According to Gallup, 36 percent of voters said Romney's comments made them less likely to support him, while 20 percent said they were more likely. Among independents, the spread was 29-15 percent '" a clear sign, it seemed, that the video was hurting Romney with voters he badly needs to win over.
But a new study today casts doubt on this interpretation. According to a survey conducted by the Vanderbilt/YouGov Ad Rating Project, the video is enraging many Democrats and rallying some Republicans around Romney, but having essentially no impact on actual swing voters.
'I'm not suggesting Romney is benefiting from this,' John Geer, the Vanderbilt political scientist who is overseeing the project, told me a few minutes ago. 'It's just further evidence that the fundamentals of this election are unchanged.'
Just when Democrats were beginning to doubt her, Elizabeth Warren has now received the best polling news of her campaign. Two new surveys put Scott Brown's Democratic challenger in the lead, one by 6 points and the other by 2.
This represents a significant shift from a few weeks ago, when Brown seemed to be opening a healthy lead, and suggests that the Democrats' successful Charlotte convention '" which featured a prime-time appearance by Warren '" has helped energize the Democratic base and brings traditionally Democratic voters home. As PPP, whose survey puts Warren up 48 to 46 percent, explains on its site:
Warren's gaining because Democratic voters are coming back into the fold. Last month she led only 73-20 with Democrats. Now she's up 81-13. That explains basically the entire difference between the two polls. There are plenty of Democrats who like Scott Brown- 29% approve of him- but fewer are now willing to vote for him.
There was a big problem with Elizabeth Warren's prime-time convention address, and it had nothing to do with its content, her delivery or the audience's reaction. It was counter-programming that undermined her '" the Giants-Cowboys NFL season opener that was in the third quarter and a Red Sox-Mariners game that was about to start as Warren took the stage in Charlotte.
Warren's opponent, Scott Brown, has forged a powerful cultural connection with blue-collar and middle -class voters in Massachusetts that is to a striking degree rooted in sports. He talks frequently of his affinity for the state's four professional teams, has campaigned with famous athletes, and aired ads in which he sings the praises of the Celtics, Red Sox and Fenway Park. He's also made regular appearances on a Boston sports radio station.
Barack Obama has settled on a standardanswer whenever he's asked to grade his economic performance: 'Incomplete.'
That's what he told a local television reporter yesterday in an interview that Republicans are now playing up aggressively. Obama explained his self-grading this way:
'What I would say is the steps that we have taken in saving the auto industry, in making sure that college is more affordable, in investing in clean energy, science and technology and research '" those are all things that we're going to need over the long term.'
Before going any further with this post, it would probably be a good idea to point out that Mitt Romney currently trails President Obama by less than 1 point in the Real Clear Politics polling average and that '" even after the whole chair thing '" he's likely to get some kind of post-convention bump in the next few days. In other words, Romney will probably be ahead when the Democratic convention opens next Tuesday. And even though Obama will probably then get a bump of his own, Romney figures to be tied or within striking distance as the general election phase formally begins.
All of this is a long way of saying: We may end up looking back at this election and realizing there was nothing Romney and his team could have done to lose it.
That said, wow '" they sure do have a knack for making a mess of things that should be impossible to screw up.
Clint Eastwood's prime-time colloquy with an empty chair is a perfect example. Apparently, the Romney team enlisted the octogenarian actor/director in the hopes that he would deliver the same remarks he offered at a private Romney fundraising event last month.
I wrote last Friday about the Romney campaign's efforts to neutralize Medicare as an issue. The idea isn't that the Romney team actually think they can run and win on Medicare, even though, for obvious reasons, they have to claim this; it's that they recognize the political poison that Paul Ryan's 'premium support' plan represents and will consider it a triumph if they can keep it from costing them significant support.
The plan that they've settled on is to make claims about Obama's own handling of Medicare that, to the casual voter, sound just as alarming as anything Democrats are saying about Ryan's plan. So it was that the GOP ticket spent much of last week denouncing Obama's 'raid' on the program '" the $716 billion in non-benefit cuts that are part of the Affordable Care Act. That the cuts are also part of Ryan's budget plan are beside the point, at least as far as Romney's campaign is concerned. The idea is to force Obama onto the defense and to prompt swing voters to throw up their hands in confusion or exasperation and move on to another topic, like the economy.
There are probably Democrats having flashbacks today, as an effort by some Republicans to push Todd Akin out of Missouri's Senate race builds.
Ten years ago, there was a similar sense of panic among national Democrats. Their party had pulled even in the Senate in the 2000 elections, then grabbed control six months later when Vermont's Jim Jeffords defected from the GOP. But now with the 2002 midterms approaching, their tenuous hold on the chamber '" their only slice of power in George W. Bush's Washington '" was in grave danger, thanks in no small part to the senior senator from New Jersey.
Robert Torricelli, whose political career began with charges of 'gross ethical misconduct' in a Rutgers student election that was eventually invalidated, was reeling from claims by a Korean-American businessman, David Chang, that he'd plied the senator with tens of thousands of dollars in cash and expensive gifts. Federal prosecutors declined to indict him, but in the summer of 2002 the Senate ethics committee 'severely admonished' Torricelli, who was seeking a second term that fall.
It's hard to believe it's come to this if your memory of Artur Davis extends back more than, say, two years.
The news today is that Davis, a 44-year-old former congressman who cut his ties to the Democratic Party after losing a 2010 gubernatorial primary in Alabama, will speak at the Republican convention in Tampa later this month. This will essentially make Davis the 2012 equivalent of Zell Miller, the Georgia Democrat who fired up the GOP's 2004 convention with a blistering attack on John Kerry, although it doesn't appear that Davis will enjoy the same prime-time speaking slot that Miller was given.
Mitt Romney and Nancy Pelosi have something in common: They both see Paul Ryan as the key to shaking up a campaign that wasn't going the way they'd hoped it would. But instead of worrying about the presidential race like Romney, it's the battle for control of the House that's foremost on Pelosi's mind. And up until now, things haven't looked promising for her side.
Democrats need a net gain of 25 seats this fall to win back the lower chamber. There was a moment last year when pulling it off seemed plausible, but several developments since then have drastically diminished the Democrats' odds.
The first involves the economy, which hasn't gotten worse since the spring and summer of 2011 but hasn't exactly roared back to life, either. This has made it very likely that the presidential race will be close; and the closer the race is, the weaker President Obama's down-ballot coattails figure to be.
