Free Falling

When President Obama gave his lackluster debate performance last week, I expected the fallout to last a few days.  But people are still talking about it.  Maybe that's why Obama's chances of re-election have decreased steadily in the last five days.  Don't take my word for it; check FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver's analysis.  Obama's chances of victory in November have gone from 80 percent just two days ago to 70 percent today, and Mitt Romney has pulled ahead in Florida while breathing down the President's neck in Ohio.  And the press - supposedly friendly toward Obama - won't stop talking about last week's debate.  Not even the lower unemployment rate helped him.  The next presidential debate is still six days away - too long for Obama to wait to try to regain momentum - so he has to do it now.  His strategy? To attack Romney's vow to eliminate federal funding for PBS by using Romney's line about Big Bird against him. 

I think Romney deliberately chose this as the one unpopular position to take in the first debate simply because, while most Americans support continued funding for PBS, no one votes on that issue.  There are more important issues, many of which are too important to let the right win on.  Besides, they already won the PBS fight back in the seventies, getting William F. Buckley on the non-network and forcing it to rely on sponsorship from oil companies.  The Obama ad attacking Romney has a clever way of saying Romney thinks PBS is a greater threat to the nation's financial well-being than Wall Street criminals, but the message is too sarcastic for the average voter to be effective.  It's not even airing in the swing states, so why is it even airing at all?  I was like, "Okay, I get it, you support PBS.  Now please move on to something else!"

If the Obama campaign is waiting for Romney's bounce to abate and level off before coming down hard on him, it has a long wait; Romney's standing in the polls seems to improve with each passing day, and he has yet to lose any momentum. "The forecast model is not quite ready to jump on board with the notion that the race has become a literal toss-up," Nate Silver wrote yesterday.  "Mr. Romney will need to maintain his bounce for a few more days, or extend it into high-quality polls of swing states, before we can be surer about that."  Based on the trends, I think Mitt will do just that.  He's already campaigning hard today in Ohio, the state that will likely decide the election.  And what is President Obama doing today? He's taking today off at the White House, with no appearances scheduled - this after he told his supporters that he can win if everybody is "almost obsessive."

Almost?

I'm not going to declare the race a toss-up.  I'm ready to call it for Romney.