DENVER, COLO. — Forget expectations. Both President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney walk into their first debate with several significant vulnerabilities that the right question and right answer will either expose or cover. These are domestic policy vulnerabilities, not characterological ones, but they speak to character and mien. We'll start with Obama's trouble spots. 

1. Mortgages. Why didn't he do more to make whole the nation's record number of delinquencies? Why did he bail out the banks and not force them to use the money (because, you know, he did force them to use the money in certain ways) to settle with homeowners?...  More»

DENVER, COLO. — Tomorrow night, the extent to which Mitt Romney's policy vulnerabilities are plucked at by the moderator and Barack Obama may depend on whether the media gets over its obsession with Romney's relatively unknowable inner essence. The two are, of course, related.

1. So what's he going to do? He has a five-point plan to revive the economy that he cannot pay for using any mathematical system available to homo sapiens. He has given conflicting signals on how much of ObamaCare he'll keep and how much he'll throw away. He has no answer about how he might deal with a Democratic Senate....  More»

It's on page A9 of The New York Times. "Netanyahu Appears To Be Shifting Israel's Iran Policy Toward More Sanctions." The story appears to confirm a policy shift. It begins by noting that the Israeli Prime Minister plans to visit Europe late in the year to press for tighter EU sanctions against Iran. And it suggests that the time-frame for a possible Israeli strike against the country is not in the cards until at least mid-2013. That is, as the article notes, well after the U.S. election. 

This means two things. Netanyahu lacks either the political credibility to strike Iran right now, that he lacks the resolve to do it without U....  More»

Mitt Romney won this first debate, judging by style, by his ability to get the message out, and by substance. Whether he did well enough to swing the polls back to parity is questionable. The Republican echo-chamber is likely to cheer loudly and their enthusiasm will tick up. Democrats will mutter about why Obama didn't mention Romney's "47 percent" gaffe, and campaign outsiders will mumble about the campaign's alleged insularity and arrogance.

Maybe the bar was set too low for Romney. He proved himself, yet again, in case you didn't watch the GOP debates, to be a strong competitor in full command of his brief, and importantly, he was able to articulate...  More»

Mitt Romney's rousing debate performance gave his campaign a much-needed shot of, well, "chance-to-win" serum. And the unemployment rate fell to 7.8 percent as the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised estimates from previous months. Here, President Obama, is your not-so-anemic recovery!  

Ron Fournier of National Journal tweeted that the latter is better than the former and Obama won the week. It plays to Obama's "trajectory argument," he wrote. And voters know that "7" is better than "8." NBC's First Read team notes that the positive press coverage from the news will help guide the news coverage over the next 24 to 48 hours, and since the first real polls ...  More»

In the 2008 presidential campaign, some of Obama's top advisers would use a thought experiment to project how important the election of someone like Obama would be for the furtherance of American interests in the world. It went something like this:

There is a youth bulge in the Middle East and North Africa. Imagine you are one of those young men, born into a lower middle class family in Egypt or Pakistan, are educated by a combination of poor state institutions and local Islamic influences. You grew up and noticed as America launched two wars against mainly Muslim countries, and if you lived in Pakistan, you may even have experienced terrorism and...  More»

It would be tempting to assume that, because the political class is obsessed with the vice presidential debate, that Americans will transmute their feelings about the relative debating skills of the vice presidential candidates onto their mental projections of the presidential candidates. Beyond one basic threshold — that of competence — that hasn't happened.  

The reason why Joe Biden's debate with Sarah Palin mattered so much last cycle is that Palin had yet to cross the competency threshold. She did not appear to be ready to be on stage with three other national political figures who could plausibly be president....  More»