Give Paul Ryan credit -- he knows from dystopian fiction. As a Rand-acolyte, he's essentially been steeping in dark, howling visions of America transmitted to his amygdala from the funhouse mirror in his eyeballs' lenses all his life. And while much of his speech last night was designed to set up Mitt Romney's performance tonight, and thus contained rhetorical flights that I'm not certain Ryan really felt comfortable saying aloud (though, let's face it, it killed with the audience), there were definitely more than a few moments where Ryan found his true voice and delivered the sermon he's probably been delivering since his dorm-room days.

None of us have to settle for the best this administration offers -- a dull, adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us.

Listen to the way we’re spoken to already, as if everyone is stuck in some class or station in life, victims of circumstances beyond our control, with government there to help us cope with our fate.

Keep in mind that this came in the same speech in which Ryan blamed President Barack Obama for the 2009 closure of a Janesville General Motors Plant. And Ryan, to his credit, didn't just consign those General Motors workers to their fate and call it some new exciting adventure that they were on with their lives -- he rushed to save the plant, using the levers of government planning to serve these "victims of circumstance."

But, as they say, it gets better:

It's the exact opposite of everything I learned growing up in Wisconsin, or at least college in Ohio. When I was waiting tables, washing dishes, or mowing lawns for money, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life. I was on my own path, my own journey, an American journey where I could think for myself, decide for myself, define happiness for myself. That's how we do it in this country. That's the American Dream. That's freedom, and I'll take it any day over the supervision and sanctimony of the central planners.

Esquire's Charles Pierce, who has been working the Paul Ryan shift so long that I briefly worried that Ryan's oration would finally be the thing that activated an aneurysm, writes today: "The central planners? Really? Are there tanks in Budapest again? Are Quemoy and Matsu in peril?" He goes on to describe the way Paul Ryan's public professions of Galtian ecstacy are essentially at lifelong war with Paul Ryan himself:

More to the point, during the whole time Paul Ryan was on his own path, his own journey, the American journey where he could think for himself, decide for himself, and define happiness for himself, every rough road was made smooth by his reliance on Social Security survivor's benefits that came to his family upon the death of his father. At least Chris Christie had the self-awareness to mention the G.I. Bill on Tuesday night, when he was talking about his father. The assistance that young Paul Ryan got from "the central planners" as he rose from Janesville, through Miami of Ohio, and to a career in which he never has had a job that wasn't inside, or very close to, the national government was not even acknowledged. He knows, in his Randian soul, that he once was a moocher, that in many ways he remains a moocher, and perhaps it galls him just a bit.

The condensed version of the Paul Ryan speech is this: Supervision and sanctimony of the central planners for him, tiny American flags for everyone else.

READ THE WHOLE THING:
Paul Ryan Is the Newest New Nixon, a Moocher Belied [Charles Pierce @ Esquire]

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With the first night of the Republican National Convention scuttled by Hurricane Isaac, this year's uninvited and ultimately never-present guest, Tuesday night's rejiggered festivities had one consistent theme: softening. A parade of GOP all-stars, from Nikki Haley to Ted Cruz to Scott Walker, softened up President Barack Obama for the attacks to come. Ann Romney gave a florid speech about her husband, in order to present his softer side. And Chris Christie attempted much the same, though he left many with the impression that his speech was the soft launch of a future national campaign.

Ann Romney and Christie presented an interesting contrast. Romney spent her entire time on the stage talking about her life with her husband and the love they shared from the instant they first met. She promised a speech "not about politics and not about party" but rather, "about love," and that's precisely what the audience got. Christie, on the other hand, provided the speech about party and politics, with conspicuously fewer references to Mitt Romney, and this declaration: "I believe we have become paralyzed by our desire to be loved." Which was, frankly, one of the more improbable things I've ever heard at a political convention. "Paralyzed By Love" is, like, the name of an Erasure song, not a Chris Christie talking point.

But most of the topics of conversation were well within the probable, ranging from the sorts of things you always hear at Republican National Conventions -- paeans to hard work and family and personal responsibility and smaller government and no taxes ever -- to the sorts of things you always hear at any political convention.

For instance, did you know that every single speaker at the Republican or Democratic Conventions has definitely came from hardscrabble, humble beginnings? It's terrifically true, according to the people touting these origin stories. Everyone's poppa or grandpappy was a mill worker or a dust herder or a stevedore or spent some significant amount of time pursued by revenuers. And look at you now! You're at a huge expensive convention, being wined and dined by industry lobbyists at a swank party at an aquarium with human beings swimming around, dressed as mermaids.

Looks like you made it! But one can't help but feel that if the current political culture stands, and income inequality continues its steady divergence, that we may be witnessing one of the last conventions of the humblebrag era. Pretty soon, no one in this culture will be able to tell a story of having risen from the working class by hook and ladder to success and societal prominence. Instead, you should look forward to the way they describe their gated communities and chic academy education and brokerage house careers and lifetime presence in the Beltway petri dish (a la Al Gore, for example) in ways that make them sound folksy. "My father started out working entry-level at an artisanal hedge fund. My mom slaved over slow-poured white papers at Brookings." Everything will be sepia-toned -- the rise of the Rich Kids Of Instagram.

Last night, Rick Santorum talked about hands. A lot. He knows a lot about hands, and how they work, and what they feel like, in ways that make him better suited to discuss handsiness than, say, Herman Cain. During the primary season, Santorum was the most adept at discussing his beliefs through a sort of working-class prism, what with his grandfather's fabled coal-mining beginnings and his semi-relentless focus on the decline of manufacturing jobs in America. Last night, he revived those aspects of his campaign, delivering an oration on the virtue of hard work on behalf of a candidate who likely hasn't had a callus in a few decades.

The "hands" metaphor did get a little strained -- had Santorum cut, say, the last seventeen references to digits, he wouldn't have had Twitter making Jewel jokes all night -- but he was nevertheless the ideal speaker on the night themed around "We Built That." Santorum was preceded by a handful of hand-picked (now I'm straining) small-business owners who testified to the crowd about how aggrieved they were to hear President Barack Obama say something he never actually said about the businesses they had help from the government building.

(Ann Romney did create a very strange moment, however, when she described her husband as "the man who will work harder than anyone so that we can work a little less hard." I'm not sure to whom she was directing that promise. It was presumably not intended for the faux mermaids.)

The relentless focus on these small business owners is one of the things that has kept this convention -- and frankly, the larger campaign "debate" -- at a far remove from what's actually happening in America. All of these slighted owners may take issue, perhaps even legitimate issue, with the policies advanced by the Obama administration. But in the great scheme of things, these are still people who are coming out ahead in these post-crash years. Their businesses may not be as prosperous as they'd like, but they still wake up each morning with a place to go and a future unfolding in front of them on the calendar. The forgotten people in the political debate are those who wake up unemployed, foreclosed upon, and with the vanishing point of their imagined futures defined by weeks and days.

But this is, as David Frum has pointed out, what Romney has yoked itself to in picking Paul Ryan as his running mate. "Paul Ryan's various plans and road maps," Frum writes, "contain many interesting elements for the reduction of government in the decades ahead. They do not respond to the most immediate and urgent problem: prolonged mass unemployment caused by heavy household debt." (One would imagine that if this short-term crisis had been solved, all of the RNC's small-business orators would be feeling much more sanguine about their circumstances today.)

As the Democrats fondly hoped to bind Romney to Ryan (along with keeping one eye on the missteps of the Bush administration), you can expect the conversation at both conventions to continue to stray away from the present calamity and its victims. Like Hurricane Isaac, they too, are uninvited guests at these proceedings, though less influential by far.

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Mitt Romney's made it pretty clear that he intends to keep making hay over the trumped-up claim that the Obama administration is tacitly weakening welfare-to-work requirements by granting states waivers that facilitate greater "flexibility administering it so they can experiment with ways to improve the number of people making the jump from government assistance to jobs."

The GOP is playing this as a cynical, election-year move intended to rally Obama's base. Yesterday, House Speaker John Boehner enunciated this, telling reporters, "Why would he do it, you know, 90 days, 85 days before the election? I'll let you answer that one."

The Democrats -- and Chris Matthews -- counter that the GOP is demagoging this issue in a racially tinged way to rally its base. If you're looking for a referee's call, consider the fact that the Obama campaign has not actually gone out of its way to tout these waivers -- which Republican governors sought, by the way -- as a campaign issue, whereas the Romney campaign joyfully enthuses about their welfare ads being their "most effective ad."

But for all the effectiveness, Romney's attempts to paint Obama as a dismantler of welfare reform have famously run afoul of the fact-checking industry, to which Romney isn't paying a scintilla of mind. As Ben Smith reported earlier today, Romney ad strategist Ashley O'Connor pollster Neil Newhouse told an ABC/Yahoo News forum today, "Fact-checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers."

In many ways, this dovetails with a previous pronouncement from the Romney campaign on what everyone should expect from it, in terms of ads. As "a top operative in Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign" told the New York Times' Thomas Edsall back in December 2011:

“First of all, ads are propaganda by definition. We are in the persuasion business, the propaganda business…. Ads are agitprop…. Ads are about hyperbole, they are about editing. It’s ludicrous for them to say that an ad is taking something out of context…. All ads do that. They are manipulative pieces of persuasive art.”

At the time, that was offered as justification for an ad in which Romney's team took a 2008-era statement from Obama, “Senator McCain’s campaign actually said, and I quote, ‘If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose,’” truncated it to "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose," and made it look like Obama was speaking contemporaneously, about the 2012 campaign.

Then the Romney campaign waited to see if anyone figured out what it had done. (It was not a long wait.) All in all, 'twas a keen bit of "agitprop," fitting all the descriptors cited to Edsall, especially the "ludicrous" and "manipulative" parts.

Surveying the landscape today, Greg Sargent notes that Romney wants to play by a different set of rules than his opponent:

Reading this brought to mind Romney’s own remarks about fact-checking and political advertising not long ago. Needless to say, he has a different standard for the Obama campaign:

“You know, in the past, when people pointed out that something was inaccurate, why, campaigns pulled the ad,” Romney said on the radio. “They were embarrassed. Today, they just blast ahead. You know, the various fact-checkers look at some of these charges in the Obama ads and they say that they’re wrong, and inaccurate, and yet he just keeps on running them.”

Sargent says that this insistence on a double-standard is going to "pose a test to the news media and our political system." (And it cuts both ways -- Team Obama Re-Elect*, having tried to hang the death of a woman around Romney's neck, drew understandable fire from the media for its obvious exaggerations.) One recommendation, for reporters: Stop citing fact-checkers and their verdicts. Familiarize yourself with the facts, keep your sources at the ready, and make this policing part of your job.

*DISCLAIMER: I have taken the position that ads created by candidate-affiliated super PACs are not distinct from the ads created by the campaign itself, and I explicitly reject the notion that the super PACs and the campaigns are not coordinating with one another.

[CORRECTION: This post has been edited to reflect that a statement by Romney pollster Neil Newhouse was mis-attributed to Ashley O'Connor. I regret the error.]

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Let's take a moment to consider what the world was like on Aug 8, 2012. That morning, Missouri Representative Todd Akin woke up and greeted the day as the survivor of a grueling three-way battle to earn the GOP nomination for the Senate seat currently occupied by Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill. Akin had prevailed over Sarah Palin's favorite, Sarah Steelman, ending the sometime-Alaska Governor's hot streak as a 2012 endorser. He'd also bested Vi-Jon CEO John Brunner, who in his first foray into electoral politics, edged out Steelman for second place in the primary.

Hours after his primary win, there are a couple of things that Todd Akin -- or at the very least his advisors -- should have fully understood as political reality. First and most important: Akin was the candidate that McCaskill most wanted to face. The various head-to-head polls that were conducted in the lead up to the primary spoke to why that was -- of the three major contenders, Akin's head-to-head numbers were the closest. He led McCaskill 49-44 percent in the late July Mason-Dixon poll (which had a 5 percent margin of error), while Steelman led 49-41 percent, and Brunner -- who was thought to be the frontrunner -- led 52-41. McCaskill had done everything she could to get Akin the support he needed. Her ads, which touted Akin as being "too conservative," were basically an attempt to pull an "Inception" on Missouri conservatives.

But Akin should have understood that while Democrats were cheering his victory, his own primary competition had nevertheless demonstrated that there was more than enough anti-McCaskill sentiment to bring those that might have preferred Brunner or Steelman into his corner. Which leads to the next thing he should have understood -- what was keeping him close in those head-to-heads was probably something Todd Akin-esque, and not something Claire McCaskilly.

And for what quality is Todd Akin best known? Well, he's best known for the often daffy noises that pass, unedited, through his word-hole to the awaiting ears of constituents and reporters. Stuff like opposing an easing of student loan interest rates because the alternative was "stage three cancer of socialism." Stuff like his declarations that "liberals hate God" and "Medicare is unconstitutional" and "I'm against the minimum wage, whatever that is." (We are paraphrasing here.) Also, he advocated impeaching President Barack Obama because he was "a complete menace to our civilization."

Had we been the ones advising Todd Akin, then, our advice would have been pretty simple. And it definitely would not have been, "Now is the perfect time for you to give voice to your weird ideas about vaginas." Nor would it have been, "Now that you've gone and done that, for some reason, let's not have you making a whole bunch of defensive statements about it." And we definitely would have said, "Why are you constantly reminding everyone in the nation about this dumb thing you just said? Are you complete bonkers-sauce?"

No, no. Our advice, from the get-go, would have been more like, "Hey, Todd, do you have a home where you can go to? Because you should just go there for a while. Go there, sit yourself down in a comfortable chair, and give us a few weeks of you just shutting the hell up."

If there had been anyone with the minimal competence necessary to define this obvious "shut the hell up" strategy, none of what has happened this week would have happened. And Todd Akin would probably be slowly climbing in the polls.

Shutting The Hell Up -- it's not what most career politicians think to do when they start that last slog toward election day. And it certainly wasn't the strategy that propelled the GOP to major victories in the off-year election. Two years ago, vocal Tea Party discontent dominated the discourse and firebrands were encouraged to spit flames on the stump. But even back then, the rage strategy showed limitations, most notably in the GOP's failure to win a Delaware Senate seat, and oust Harry Reid from his perch -- a supposed panopticon of total Romney tax return awareness.

So in 2012, Shutting The Hell Up is sort of becoming the hot new underground trend in American politics. We say "underground" because it hasn't fully caught on yet. In Ohio, Franklin County GOP Chair Doug Preisse got quoted in the Columbus Dispatch saying, “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban (read: African-American) voter turnout machine.” No, no, Preisse! You're not supposed to say that part out loud, in public.

But elsewhere, politicians are learning about how to make Shutting The Hell Up work for them. Take Virginia Senate candidate George Allen. Back in the day, you couldn't hope to find a more cocksure politician. The son of gregarious Washington Redskins coach of the same name, Allen loved nothing more than strutting around the state, running his mouth, and projecting his own trademarked version of gunslinger swagger. But then came the fateful day he said the word "Macaca," out loud, in front of a video camera. That torpedoed a career that many thought might bend in the direction of a White House run.

Now, he's learned the virtue of Shutting The Hell Up and has kept the lowest of profiles as he tries to wend his way back to the U.S. Senate. Bacon's Rebellion blogger Peter Galuszka profiled the new-look Allen back in June, and Allen comes off as a Shutting The Hell Up early-adopter, now dispensing his "trademark folksiness" in "carefully measured doses," and keeping himself to the task of "watching himself carefully." So far, so good. As Gaulszka relates, Allen prevailed against his Tea Party opponent Jamie Radtke, by mainly keeping mum:

During her well-run campaign, Radtke took shot after shot at Allen, proclaiming him to be just another budget-buster who voted relentlessly for spending for entitlements and special interests that has led to unsupportable deficits. “Both political parties have created this mess that we have to get out of,” Radtke told me at a Election Day stop at a nearly empty polling place in a Chesterfield church.

But Radtke’s criticism didn’t stick. Allen let her accusations roll off his back and quietly watched as Radtke was cut out of debates. His overriding goal clearly was to avoid giving the campaign of his Democratic opponent, former governor Timothy Kaine, a target as the real contest heats up.

And the Allen-Kaine race remains tight as a tick today. Shutting The Hell Up: it can work for you.

And at the national level, it's catching on. Take RNC Chair Reince Priebus, for example. No one expects Priebus to lead the party as some sort of oratorical leader. And that's good, because when Priebus does allow himself to get wound up, he comes off more operatically aggrieved than inspirational. That's okay, though. The reason he's the head of the RNC today is because the RNC wanted someone who wasn't a spectacular public doofus, like his predecessor Michael Steele. Here's how he described his tenure as RNC chair to our own Jon Ward: "I think I've been mission-driven, we've raised record amounts of money, and I've watched my mouth and stayed on message."

Priebus' candidate, Mitt Romney, hasn't always been successful at following in his chairman's footsteps, but the compelling evidence that Shutting The Hell Up is a technique he, too, should endeavor to employ is stacking up. Back during the primary season, it seemed pretty clear that Mitt Romney understood that the thing that annoyed people most about Mitt Romney was Mitt Romney. So, Mitt Romney worked hard to downplay his essential Mitt Romneyness. At the debates, faced with competitors striving to out-do each other in the field of criticizing Mitt Romney, Romney mostly sat back and let his opponents fight amongst themselves.

Once he'd notched the primary win, he didn't rush out and make a bunch of proclamations about policy specifics or plans. He kept those under wraps. It proved to be something of a risk -- Romney grew to be so good, in the late spring and early summer, at Shutting The Hell Up, that he allowed the Obama campaign to successfully tee off on his record and his biography. The early battle to "define Romney" went to Team Obama Re-Elect. Romney, however, seemed largely content with this -- after all, he had his super PACs on hand to do his talking for him. This did, of course, unnerve the conservative establishment pundit set, who expected Romney to fight back.

However, it's become clear that Romney's major setback wasn't the way he spent June letting the Democrats spend money attacking his record. Rather, it was the month of July, when Romney and his campaign deviated from the plan, and went on a mad tear of Saying Things Out Loud. In London, all Romney really had to do was walk around, like a bog-standard biped who is also handsome and has a firm handshake, and trust that at some point, Boris Johnson would get himself stuck on a zip-line, making Romney look statesmanlike by comparison. Instead, he blurted out some unnecessary and ungentlemanly criticism of the city's Olympic effort, and went on to brag about how he'd met with the head of MI-6, which, as any Brit will tell you, simply isn't done.

Then, back in the States, his spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, accidentally Said Stuff Out Loud while responding to a howlingly dishonest Priorities USA ad. In that instance, all she had to do was stick to the script and point out the ad's factual flaws -- as the campaign had already done. But Saul got a little too clever and accidentally spoke favorably of Romney's health care reform. Four years ago, that would have been smart. But in the age of Shutting The Hell Up, it was a disaster. By the end of the day, Ann Coulter -- repping the methed-out id of the GOP base -- was bellowing for Saul's head.

The lesson? Shut The Hell Up. And credit Romney for finding a way to reintroduce the tactic -- by selecting Paul Ryan as his running mate, he bought himself two weeks worth of news cycles in which his identity would be reduced to a tertiary fixture on the campaign trail. For two Sunday mornings in a row, now, all anyone has wanted to talk about was Paul Ryan. That's perfect. People treat Ryan as the most serious man in Christendom. He is one of the few people that actually has a license to talk out loud.

Obviously, Mitt Romney cannot remain a background figure for long. Next week, he'll give a speech at the Republican National Convention. In short order, he'll have to appear at a series of debates, at which he'll likely actually have to speak things aloud. But even in the stretch run, Shutting The Hell Up will probably remain an important offensive play.

Richard Rushfield, the co-editor of The Native Angeleno and author of "Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost," an absolutely delightful joy-buzzer of a memoir, has posited that the 2012 election is the first one to occur in what he calls "The Backlash Era," in which "the best thing" a Presidential candidate can do "is to try and make it so voters can barely remember his name when they go to pull the lever."

It is critical for politicians to recognize that public appearances, interviews touting yourself, rallies stoking your fires and the like will only engender resentments and create rallying points to gather your haters; that whatever enthusiasm your presence can drum up will only provoke the greater Backlash.

Rushfield points to this Aug. 17 report from the Associated Press, which suggests Romney might be fully aware of these new, Backlash Era conditions:

Obama's campaign is running [a Medicare-themed] ad in eight states: New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada.

This comes while Romney is campaigning in Alabama, South Carolina, Massachusetts and New York. He plans visits next week to Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico.

To be sure, Obama attends numerous fundraisers of his own. And Romney has spent significant time at public campaign events in swing states, and he will do so many times again before Nov. 6.

But the amount of time Romney is devoting to private fundraisers in noncompetitive states is notable. Even when he is in swing states, he sometimes attends only a fundraiser, without mingling with non-donors or appearing before local TV cameras, as he did Wednesday in Charlotte, N.C.

Rushfield predicts that "the candidate we are thinking of the most in November will lose."

Romney is already messing this up.

FLORIDA SENIORS NOT BEHAVING AS CONFIDENT DEMS PREDICTED: Seems like only last week we were warning that those immediate predictions made by Democratic party consultants and campaign surrogates -- the ones who suggested Paul Ryan's selection as Romney's running-mate was definitely going to move Florida into Obama's electoral college column -- were not as likely to pan out as everyone was intimating.

Let's see how our warning is doing! Here's Greg Sargent, over at The Plum Line:

Today’s big New York Times/CBS/Quinnipiac poll found some good news for Barack Obama: In Ohio, Wisconsin, and Florida, voters think Obama would do a better job than Mitt Romney handling Medicare by margins of eight to 10 points. Blowback against Paul Ryan?

Well, I’ve got the breakdown of these numbers among seniors, and they are far less encouraging for Obama: In two out of the three states, voters over 65 prefer Romney on Medicare, and in the third, Obama leads, but by a smaller margin. The breakdown sent over by CBS:

*In Florida, 48 percent of seniors say Romney would do a better job on Medicare, versus 44 percent who say that about Obama (the Ryan pick was supposed to be particularly problematic in this state).

Now, Sargent goes on to note that there are peculiarities here, including the fact that "big majorities of seniors in all three states support leaving Medicare as it is." But the fact of the matter is that "in two of the three states -- ones that could decide the presidency -- seniors support Romney over Obama on the issue." Here's how Sargent bottom-lines it:

The Romney/Ryan plan would drive costs up for seniors; repealing Obamacare would take expanded benefits away from some of them; and Ryan’s changes would, over time, transform the core mission of the program that seniors say in overwhelming numbers they want left untouched. If that message isn’t getting through, that should concern the Obama campaign.

Let's say it again: It's swell that, in Ryan, the Democrats got the opportunity to stage the great debate and the argument on the key issues that they wanted. But you still have to argue that argument successfully! (In recent years, Democrats have had a strange tendency: once they believe they've stumbled onto a "winning issue," they sit back and trust fate to win them elections.)

A PERIODIC REMINDER THAT THE ECONOMY IS STILL TERRIBLE: Most economists agree: The recession, as economists tend to define such things, is over. One problem here, if you are Barack Obama, is that winning a majority of economists' votes actually doesn't get you any votes in the electoral college. A second problem is that the voters that can get you electoral college votes aren't experiencing the economy in the same way economists are. Here's Bloomberg's Jeff Kearns:

Real median annual household income fell to $53,508 from $54,916 during the 18-month recession from December 2007 to June 2009, according to the firm’s study of income data for the 36-month period ended in June 2012. Incomes kept falling during the 36-month period since then, dropping to $50,964 in June 2012.

And this is why "a majority of swing state voters don't think they're better off." They aren't.

THE FIRST CASUALTY OF THE SUPER PAC ERA IS THE MEDIA: Did you read that Politico story about just how much your local TV station loves super PACs? Because they do: "Political ads are expected to account for as much as 7 cents of every dollar broadcasters earn during the 2012 election, according to credit rating agency Moody’s, which is expecting record-breaking political ad spending this election -- up to 18 percent more compared to 2010."

The folks over at 1115.org raise a simple query: "How can we trust the media to accurately report on Citizen’s United if their continued existence is now being financially backed and guaranteed by the very same policy that they are claiming to be reporting impartially?"

You can't. And they won't.

DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS WEREN'T SO MEAN AND NASTY? If you answered yes, then you've really excelled at kidding yourself.

GOP WON'T LET RON PAUL SUPPORTERS TAMPA WITH THEIR CONVENTION: We've spent a considerable amount of time admiring the way Ron Paul's minions dedicated themselves this year to a thorough study of the primary process -- especially the importance of state party conventions, where delegates are minted. Well, it was fun while it lasted. Jon Ward has the skinny on the moves undertaken by the GOP today to limit the effectiveness of future insurgent campaigns. These changes will obviously not impact those candidates that curry favor with powerful political insiders and deep-pocketed donors, obviously! (This is bad news for future Rick Santorums as well.)

HOW DARE YOU SAY WE'RE WINNING THIS ELECTION! In case you missed it, here's Mark Blumenthal and Ariel Edwards-Levy on the really strange part of the Akin-McCaskill race. Both sides are working very hard to dispel the notion that the polls that predict their own candidate's success are in any way legitimate. Rasmussen came out with a poll, for example, that found McCaskill to have a double-digit lead, and the McCaskill camp freaked right the heck out. Why get mad? Well, they want to be up ten on Akin, for sure. But they don't want to be up ten on Akin while there's still a chance he'll drop out of the race. This is a rare opportunity to take in a campaign that doesn't want anyone to think that they're a runaway success.

ELECTORAL PROJECTION: And now, it's time once again for your Speculatroners to end their week with our trademarked Electoral College projection, which is -- as always -- a mix of careful poll study, analysis of prevailing economic trends, pundit speculation, and making the sort of snap judgments that one makes when one is about to get on a plane and fly into the teeth of a hurricane.

This week, we've seen the race continue to tighten. And we're now going into the period when each candidate will expect a "bounce" from their convention. Taken as a whole, it may not matter -- we wouldn't be surprised to see both convention bounces cancel each other out. In terms of swing states, there has been a lot of vacillation and an imbalance on the signal-to-noise ratio. But there's been more of a palpable bounce for Paul Ryan this week in Wisconsin. Things get really tricky for Obama if he cannot keep Wisconsin. At the same time, we're a little bit fascinated with Obama's oddball firewall in Ohio, where he's doing a better job holding off Romney than he is in other states. We'll honor that for the time being, but will be monitoring it closely.

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No better way to launch our list-obsessed chronicle of politics than with TV ads, the most embarrassing, least informative but, let’s admit it, most riveting circus acts in our no-longer-fact-based democracy. Here’s our reverse-order ranking of the best/worst recent spots: “best” because they are cynically effective (even funny); “worst” because they are somewhere between Colbertian “truthiness” and flat-out lie.

OBAMA WANTS TO TAKE AWAY YOUR GUN. With all of the production values of a Ginsu knife demonstration and all of the paranoia of someone in Adderall withdrawal, this spot -- airing on cable in small markets -- has a breathless announcer declaring that the president is secretly in league with the United Nations to confiscate all the guns. This is a twofer: late-night cable-watching conservatives hate and fear the U.N. (one-world guv'mint!) and worship the Second Amendment. The ad is, sadly, quite wrong. If anything, President Barack Obama has been as soft on guns as his recent GOP predecessors. But there aren’t many votes in the spot, either. It seems more designed to raise money for the fringe group that is airing it.

COMMANDER-IN-LEAKS. Swift Boats sail again as a flotilla of special operations veterans accuse the Obama Administration of leaking information about successful operations in a way that compromises U.S. security and threatens soldiers’ lives. The real aim is to try to undercut the president’s considerable (and for a Democrat, unusual) credibility as commander-in-chief. It’s true that criticism of leaks has been bipartisan, so the topic is fair game. But the ad doesn’t accuse Obama of knowing about the leaks and the spot feels like the lame flanking maneuver that it is. Oh, and not surprisingly, one of the founding members of this group, Larry Murphy, is a Birther, so ... thanks but no thanks, Special Commander Loony Loony Bean Dip.

OBAMA LOVES DEADBEATS. Reviving a rancid meme -- Dems love welfare cheats -- the Mitt Romney campaign aired an ad accusing Obama of abolishing the “workfare” requirement that President Bill Clinton and the GOP put in place in 1996. But surprise! It’s not true. At all. What the president did was offer waivers to states that came up with their own programs to increase employment among welfare recipients. But point that out to the Romney campaign, and they’ll still tell you that “Obama, like, totally gutted welfare, you guys.” Even surrogate Newt Gingrich admitted to Anderson Cooper that there was “no proof” of the ad’s claim. And yet the Romney campaign presses on, while the rest of us die a sad, slow, death.

BAIN INTRUDER: HIDE YO KIDS, HIDE YO WIFE. Breaking: Mitt Romney is the leading cause of cancer in swing states! At least, according to an ad by pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action. By now, everyone knows the tragic tale of Joe Soptic, the steelworker who lost his wife to cancer -- because Bain Capital cost him his job, his health insurance, and ultimately his wife. Though ... funny thing: turns out wife Ilyana had her own health insurance and was diagnosed with cancer in 2006, five years after Bain ruined everything. And according to his campaign his records, Romney had already left the company. But so what? Details, schmeetails. The ad got people talking, Mittsters howling and most importantly, it forced the Romney campaign to finally acknowledge the existence of such a thing so pure, good and simple as Massachusetts health care.

OBAMA WILL “CUT” MEDICARE. Trying to make a virtue of necessity, Romney and the Republicans went on the offensive with spots accusing the president of wanting to “cut” Medicare by $716 billion. But they're buying tons of time for a serious distortion -- it’s not a “cut,” it’s slowing of growth. Savings are from new efficiencies and leaning on suppliers; what marginal effects to benefits ensue are traded against eight more years of solvency. Oh, and Paul Ryan’s own Medicare plans propose roughly the same savings. Confused? Never fear, Romney's whiteboard is here! Doesn't any old crap just look more credible on a whiteboard? (Because if you're not convinced there's always PowerPoint.) But no matter. The aim isn’t accuracy -- it's Pavlovian repetition, specifically, the repetition of an exact-sounding number from a government source. Expect to hear “seven hundred and sixteen billion” until November. (And probably never know that what Romney calls "cuts" actually improved Medicare's long-term fiscal health.)

PAUL RYAN WANTS TO KILL YOUR GRANDMA. Remember that time someone flung Granny from a cliff? Well, allow Romney's running-mate selection to remind you. A year after targeting the Paul Ryan plan for turning Medicare into a voucher program, the Agenda Project Action Fund is back with Granny Off The Cliff, Part Deux. Though, this is more like an instance where George Lucas jazzes up his old movies than a true sequel -- from the admaker's perspective, not much has changed in terms of their opinion on Ryan's plans for Medicare. But details are not the point. Rather, viewers are supposed to remember the worst case -- literally the worst case -- scenario. And that's your elderly, wheelchair-bound grandma being pushed off a cliff by a Paul Ryan doppleganger. In a droll note at the bottom, the sponsors aver that “no senior citizen was harmed in the making of this ad.” (Actually, could someone check this? For real?) For sheer cynical chutzpah, and for making an ad worthy of inclusion in the movie “The Campaign,” the granny ad tops The HUFFPOSTLIST.

Romney's decision to do his big Paul Ryan reveal last Saturday morning was one of those deft, media narrative-clinching maneuvers guaranteed to ensure all the Sunday morning conversation that followed centered on the conclusion of the "Veepstakes" and What It All Meant. Indeed, the conversation lockdown on the ensuing Sunday was so total that there really wasn't any need for more than one Sunday morning talk show. Everyone should have just agreed to merge resources, like they do with the presidential pool report.

Nevertheless, with so much sudden interest in Paul Ryan, Sunday's pundits offered up a wealth of quickly surmised assertions, snap judgments, and glib assumptions. Now that we're a few days on from the breaking news, let's see what's standing up to scrutiny, and what needs to be better thought through.

1. The pick was a bold pick from Romney. There are definitely a few ways in which Romney's decision to pair himself with the Wisconsin representative and putative author of the GOP's long-term policy offerings are, indeed, bold. The most obvious way: Compare Paul Ryan to Rob Portman and/or Tim Pawlenty. This is a choice between a pair of wallflowers and the King of the Disco, obviously. Additionally, for everyone who didn't see the Ryan pick coming or otherwise predicted that Romney would go another way (we're implicating ourselves here), it's convenient to think of the pick as "bold," because hey, who could have predicted it, right?

But even if we allow that Ryan was a bold pick, it's pretty hard to attribute the boldness to Romney himself. The GOP establishment has long been inserting themselves, publicly, into the decision-making process. In general, Marco Rubio was the primary beneficiary of their affection and insistence, but in the days leading up to making the pick, Bill Kristol had once again been driving the herd behind picking Ryan.

Romney had also just finished a July in which his campaign was suffering misstep after misstep, driving up concern among his putative allies that he was on his way to bungling away the election. Let's also recall that one week before the Ryan pick was made, Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul put the entire right-wing blogosphere onto a war footing when she praised Romney's Massachusetts health care reform, culminating in Ann Coulter bellowing on Sean Hannity's eponymous Fox News show that Romney should be abandoned entirely if he refused to fire Saul from the campaign.

The long and the short of it is this: Had Romney not had a July in which his campaign strategy had become an epic misadventure, nobody would have batted an eye if he'd kept to his plan to just bring on a serviceable, bland partner like Rob Portman. But all of that midsummer mishegas caused everyone's faith in Romney to recede. Picking Ryan helped Romney put all of that in the rear-view mirror and make things jake with everybody.

Still, it's proper to think of the decision as a necessary cave to pressure, and not some example of personal "boldness." But hey, Romney's not crying about it. And no one is happier about the turn of events than Andrea Saul.

2. Ryan can't possibly provide additional enthusiasm to the ticket. Let's explain this strange argument, which is founded on this premise: the GOP base is already raring to vote out President Obama, so while it's nice that they have a vice presidential candidate that the base admires, wouldn't it have made more sense to pick a running mate who could add appeal to a wayward ethnic group (Rubio) or give Romney a better shot at winning a swing state (Portman, also Rubio)?

It's useful, however, to think of "enthusiasm" in a few different ways. Yes, the GOP base is excited to cast a vote against Obama. And if you're among the young CPAC set, fresh out of college and ready to lend a hand to the effort, you're going to work hard. But it's hard to deny that there's a dearth of affection among the base for Romney himself. Our big takeaway from talking to CPAC activists was that everyone was down for the cause, but it wasn't because anyone particularly though Romney was a rock star.

So if you're looking beyond the CPAC striver set, you're faced with a voter base that, by and large, is looking ahead to a "lesser-of-two-evils" election this November. The good news for Romney is that even on his own, the base looks at the "lesser-of-two-evils" equation and discerns a clear winner. That gets them to the polls. But what gets them to donate money? Paul Ryan.

More importantly, the proper way to measure the impact Ryan is going to have on "enthusiasm" is whether or not affection for Ryan is going to bring more people to phone banks, more people to campaign offices, and more people going door-to-door working on get-out-the-vote efforts than Romney would have managed on their own.

Also, have you heard about that whole phenomenon where Mitt Romney was "terrible for traffic" and how "no one wants to read stories about Mitt Romney" online? Well, trust us on this -- based on what we've seen so far, the same can't be said of Paul Ryan.

3. Picking Ryan is definitely going to cost Romney Florida's electoral votes. Of all the things political thought-havers have had to say in the wake of the Ryan decision, we were most dumbstruck by the overconfidence that everybody seemed to have about how Romney had taken Florida off the electoral map.

Look, we understand the thumbnail sketch of the argument. Florida: it's full of old people. Old people: they are on Medicare. Ryan: he wants to deconstruct Medicare into a system where participants get a stack of Ryan Fun Bucks that may or (probably ... in fact pretty much definitely) not keep up with inflation and the rising costs of healthcare (we presume that Romney and Ryan would undo the Affordable Care Act's cost-curve bending). All of which equals old people in a panic.

Take a breath and consider some fundamentals. The argument Ryan will make is that if you are over 55, you will not be impacted by the Ryan Fun Bucks regime. He will couple this with a paean to everyone's grandchildren -- they will be saved from future indenturement to China by lowering the deficit (it's easy to realize savings when you just stop paying for something).

That argument could be enough to settle the fears of Florida's elders. (Ryan's plans for Medicaid, admittedly, might be another story entirely.) That said, it's very possible to overstate how likely it is that Florida retirees will be fearful of Ryan's approach. Ryan is going to The Villages this weekend to "defend" his Medicare policy, but The Villages is a steadfast GOP stronghold. Heck y'all, frankly, it is possible to overstate the predominance of retirees in the Florida electorate -- as Nate Cohn points out: "It turns out that Florida isn’t a giant retirement community worth 29 electoral votes: 78 percent of Florida voters were younger than age 65 in 2008."

Beyond that, let's do a little Carnac The Magnificent bit. Hmmm. I'm thinking of a guy whose health care company, under his watch, famously bilked the Medicare system and earned themselves the largest fraud settlement in the history of the United States. The answer inside the envelope? Rick Scott, the current governor of Florida.

4. Ryan's entrance into the race is going to encourage the candidates to take positions on a number of huge issues, and create a more interesting debate with tons of clarity. Hey, there's no doubt that the Ryan selection has been food for wonks. And that's great. Who doesn't love parsing the particulars of fifty-year projections on discretionary spending. Lots of you, right? And as Curtis Brainard of the Columbia Journalism Review documented, there was renewed interest in a variety of subjects -- he notes that energy policy, in particular, quickly became a rich vein for reporters to mine.

But the candle that burns bright burns short, as Brainard points out: "Valuable background articles like these quickly gave way to superficial stump-speech coverage, however, as the Obama and Romney campaigns spent Tuesday taking potshots at the other side’s energy platforms." As Dave Weigel notes, when Obama went to Iowa to talk about wind power, locals got a lot of good coverage on the substance. But if you aren't a subscriber to an Iowa newspaper, you probably remember that appearance as "that time Obama made a Seamus joke."

Beyond that, to make the "big issues" more "clear," it would really help things if Romney and Ryan would get their stories straight. (If such a thing is possible.)

5. Ryan's presence on the ticket will ensure substantive coverage that shakes off the silly season and ends all the negativity. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, oh my: No.

MITT ROMNEY, NOW AND THEN: While we're on the subject of the negative tone of the campaign, let's consider how the Romney campaign has reset its stance in that regard. Via Andrew Sullivan, here's Romney, one week ago:

"You know, in the past, when people pointed out that something was inaccurate, why, campaigns pulled the ad,” Romney said on the radio. “They were embarrassed. Today, they just blast ahead. You know, the various fact checkers look at some of these charges in the Obama ads and they say that they’re wrong, and inaccurate, and yet he just keeps on running them."

The campaign's prior position?

“First of all, ads are propaganda by definition. We are in the persuasion business, the propaganda business ... Ads are agitprop ... Ads are about hyperbole, they are about editing. It’s ludicrous for them to say that an ad is taking something out of context ... All ads do that. They are manipulative pieces of persuasive art.”

YES, THE ECONOMY IS STILL OBAMA'S GREATEST VULNERABILITY: We know everyone's really excited about the fun debate we'll be having over the long-term policy trajectory of the country, but it's still the present day crisis that really matters, and continues to drag on the incumbent. Per Gallup:

Three months before the election, President Barack Obama gets good marks from Americans for his handling of terrorism, fair marks for education and foreign affairs, but poor marks on immigration and three big economic issues: the federal budget deficit, creating jobs, and the economy generally.

Obama is underwater on "creating jobs" (37 percent approve, 58 percent disapprove), and the economy (36/60). The good news in terms of being underwater on the deficit is that it's not as key of an issue to anyone outside the Beltway media as are jobs and general economic dislocation.

Here's some insightful underscoring from Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice: "Meaning: the economy is still potentially THE issue with Americans -- a fact not evident in the currrent main subjects of the two parties’ current 'debate.'" Preach, Joe.

ABOUT THOSE "CUTS" OBAMA IS MAKING TO MEDICARE: If you hadn't imagined that the Romney campaign and its allies were going to resurrect an old, debunked notion that Obama had stolen money from the Medicare coffers, thus making him they real villain to retirees, well, this week has obviously had news for you. So, everyone's quickly had to run the reality train back a few stops. The Wonkbloggers at the Washington Post handled it well. Here's Sarah Kliff:

A bit of background here: Obama’s Affordable Care Act Medicare cuts reduce how much the program pays hospitals, private insurers and other providers. The $716 billion in savings helped free up funds to pay for other health programs, like the expansion of insurance to 32 million Americans.

That was the primary purpose, at least. There was also a really important side effect: The health care law extended the solvency of Medicare’s Trust Fund. If the program pays hospitals less, each dollar stretches a little bit further. Earlier this year, the independent Medicare Board of Trustees estimated that with these cuts the trust fund would remain solvent through 2024.

Buried here in the explanation, however, is an important aspect of political strategy that should be remarked upon. Romney is arguing that these "cuts" need to be restored. The argument against doing such a thing is that restoring the status quo ante puts the solvency of Medicare back in peril.

But that's the point! The actions taken by the Obama administration here demonstrate that the federal government can have a functional role in solving Medicare's long-term budget problems. This cuts against the story Romney and Ryan want to tell. It's a bad thing if someone proves that the federal government is functional -- Romney and Ryan want to emphasize that it's dysfunctional. And improving Medicare's long-term outlook is terrible for them! The "Ryan Plan" for Medicare only makes sense if Medicare is in crisis.

THE SEARCH FOR NEW OBAMA VOTERS: The Obama campaign has been spending a lot of time and money to register new Democratic voters ahead of the November elections. But as the Boston Globe reports, the investment is not yielding significant returns:

In stark contrast to 2008, when a strong partisan tailwind propelled Democratic voter registration to record levels, this year Republican and independent gains are far outpacing those of Democrats.

In Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Colorado, and Nevada -- tossup states where direct election-year comparisons could be drawn — the numbers are striking. Democratic rolls increased by only 39,580, less than one-tenth the amount at the comparable point in the 2008 election.

At the same time, GOP registration has jumped by 145,085, or more than double for the same time four years ago. Independent registration has shown an even stronger surge, to 229,500, almost three times the number at this point in 2008.

Team Obama Reelect's response: “The fact is, there are currently many more Democrats registered in battleground states now than there were before the 2008 primary campaign began, which means there are fewer eligible voters left to register because of the gains we made in 2008." More here.

WILL OBAMA DROP JOE BIDEN FROM THE TICKET? For the last time, no. Those who will tell you otherwise are only telling you that because they "think you are stupid."

HOW TO ASK THE RIGHT QUESTION: The Atlantic's Derek Thompson takes a deep dive into this week's on-air contretemps between CNN's Soledad O'Brien and Romney surrogate John Sununu, and decides the bout for Sununu, on points. Quibble with that, if you like! But we rather think you'll agree with the way Thompson bottom-lines the matter:

I'd rather O'Brien ask Sununu: Okay, if you want to cut the deficit by as much as Paul Ryan, but you're not going to raise taxes, and you're not going to touch Medicare, and you're not going to touch defense, and you have no plan for fixing Social Security, what exactly are you going to cut, considering most of the rest of the budget is Medicaid, income security programs, benefits for veterans and federal employees, and classic government services like road-building, science-investing, education-spending, and health-inspecting?

Debate moderators, take note.

HERE'S THE MOST FUN THING WE LEARNED ABOUT JOHN SUNUNU THIS WEEK: "'Wonder if Sununu's fired now' is both a legitimate question and a palindrome." [Hat tip: Philip Bump]

ELECTORAL PROJECTION: And now, it's time once again for your Speculatroners to end their week with our trademarked Electoral College projection, which is -- as always -- a mix of careful poll study, analysis of prevailing economic trends, pundit speculation, and what knowledge we can glean from history by getting Doris Kearns Goodwin high.

This week, Romney has been faring better in Florida and Virginia. Obama, on the other hand, has been looking stronger in New Hampshire. He's also made gains in Colorado, though signs are mixed in Ohio: Obama is up in one poll, down in another. We'll leave Ohio red, and give Colorado back to the incumbent.

Let's also note that CNN has moved Wisconsin back into "toss-up," by dint of Paul Ryan's presence in the race. We remain nominally inclined to keep Wisconsin blue, but we'll watch to see if a trend takes hold that reverses our thinking. Should Wisconsin swing to Romney and Ryan, it really complicates things for Team Obama Reelect.

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If there's one word that's become associated with Wisconsin Representative and vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan over his long tenure in Washington, D.C., it is "serious." Ryan is credited, up and down, with being a "serious" man. His reputation for seriousness precedes him in every fresh encounter on Capitol Hill and every booking on Sunday morning's political chat shows. And more amazingly, that reputation lingers long after those encounters have ended, despite each new pile of evidence to the contrary. He's as pure a product as the Beltway Bubble has ever produced.

A no less Serious man than Erskine Bowles has deemed Ryan worthy. "I'm telling you, this guy is amazing. I always thought I was okay with arithmetic. This guy can run circles around me, and he is honest, he is straightforward, he is sincere, and the budget he came forward with is just like Paul Ryan: It is a sensible, straight-forward, honest, serious budget, and it cut the budget deficit, just like we did, by $4 trillion," said the co-chair of the Simpson-Bowles commission, a panel so deadly serious that its mission was not even undermined by its other chair's repeated references to the tits on milk cows, the way kids wear pants today, or whatever else poured forth from Alan Simpson's mouth.

Ryan the Serious is so serious, in fact, that Bowles didn't risk offending by mentioning the needlesome fact that Ryan voted against Simpson-Bowles, dooming it to failure. Seriously. More on that in a minute.

But as the above example shows, Ryan has managed to establish this reputation and earn a disproportionate share of forgiveness by doing a lot of things right. For example, he is rare among congresscritters in that he does not behave like a jackass, and steers well clear of the sorts of behaviors that his colleagues evince on a regular basis. You won't catch Ryan sending out tweets that read as if a small child has smashed a Blackberry into pulp, a la Chuck Grassley. He's kind and self-effacing, and he presents himself humbly for approval. Unlike, say, Chuck Schumer, you don't get the sense that you're putting your life in any particular peril if you accidentally find yourself between him and an available teevee camera. And as so many of his colleagues -- Michele Bachmann and Allen West come immediately to mind -- earn attention by feeding the "What did he/she just say?" outrage machine, Ryan keeps to his quiet, wonky knitting. He raises his hand, waits to be called upon, has read the morning's lesson plan.

And if nothing else, people know precisely where Ryan stands. He's engineered the GOP's long-term fiscal gameplan and has positioned himself as its exclusive representative -- from a marketing standpoint, he's the creator, steward and face of the brand. And he's earned important buy-in: Let's recall that Grover Norquist sees the 2012 presidential contest as a battle to install Romney as Ryan's amanuensis: "We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget ... Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States." This is the strength Ryan brings to the Romney ticket -- he dispels the fear that Romney, left to his own devices, might lapse back into his moderate tendencies. Ryan is as planted as Romney is malleable. When you distance yourself from Ryan -- or run from him, as more than a few downticket GOP strivers are already doing -- there's no threat that he's going to pop up in the bushes behind you.

Ryan also has charts. And graphs. Which would be enough to make him serious without any of the other stuff. (And they're not charts about carbon emissions and surface temperatures, which could threaten one's serious credentials in Washington by branding one an earthy crusader.)

But if you've done any significant amount of time inside the Beltway, you've probably learned that the Bubble People have an altogether different set of standards for what qualifies as "serious." And if you're smart, you've learned to cross to the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue when you see "serious" people strolling up the sidewalk. Here in the Bubble, "serious" people thought that Iraq was an existential threat to civilization, and that (despite the fact that they were such an astounding danger!) taking them out would be a quick, orderly, cheap venture -- a few short weeks of combat followed by Paul Bremer copping the Usain Bolt pose at Sahat Al Tahrir while the locals swooned.

People who want to be thought of as Serious learn that what the Bubble People want is for someone to reaffirm their beliefs. Here in Washington, the Bubble People live in a constant state of deficit panic. They consider things like limiting the benefits packages of career civil servants to be a "lofty goal." Elizabeth Warren's campaign to alert consumers to the "tricks and traps" found in the fine print of credit card contracts and loan agreements is deemed to be "simplistic and hyperbolic." And those who would advocate for the end of New Deal entitlement programs, like Social Security and Medicare, are deemed to be "serious," because they are making "the tough choices."

It does take a certain amount of courage to advocate whole-heartedly to strip what few benefits the working class derives from the government and leave them with nothing, but it's hardly a "tough choice" to hurt vulnerable people who've no clout in Washington at the urging of those who do -- and who typically pay area homeless a meager allowance to stand in line for them ahead of congressional hearings.

At the risk of self-plagiarizing, let's run down what we know about Ryan's collection of Tough Choices. Ryan claims, as Romney recently has, that he can affect growth by closing loopholes, but he has never specified which loopholes, and as we're learning from the Tax Policy Center, there aren't enough loopholes to close to achieve the desired ends. (Hence, you're stuck raising taxes on the middle class, or scuppering the entire government, or both.)

His plan to balance the budget is to not balance the budget. He's considered a "deficit hawk" -- but as he's put his rubber stamp on all of the Bush administration's budget-busting initiatives, that's a lot like calling an arsonist a fire-fighter. As Jacob Weisberg learned, to some chagrin, Ryan's budget plan "projects an absurd future, according to the Congressional Budget Office, in which all discretionary spending, now around 12 percent of GDP, shrinks to 3 percent of GDP by 2050."

Beyond that, of course, no one has any idea what programs Ryan would eliminate to achieve his "3 percent of GDP" discretionary budget dystopia. That's probably because the correct answer to the question is "nearly everything" and providing that answer would probably lead to voters outside of the goldbug/tenther set to decide that he is insane.

But in Washington, Ryan gets a pass for never specifying what he would do. This leaves it to others to attempt to game out what might be brought about by his roadmap. Typically, they assume that Ryan's budget plan will reflect Ryan's various opinions on those government programs that he doesn't favor, so they might choose to zero out agencies like the EPA, or federally funded education programs, or the National Park Service. Or they may simply take Ryan's budget cuts and apply them in some sort of uniform fashion, and show the hits that various government services might take if Ryan's cuts were applied proportionally across the board.

When this happens, Ryan complains that his opponents are imputing things that he has never said. The Beltway media takes his side. His opponents never get a pass. That's the benefit of being thought of as a Serious man.

Of course, that's only one of the many ways Ryan has gotten a pass. As much as the Beltway media lionizes the "Chairman's Mark" that was produced by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles during their work on the "Simpson-Bowles Committee," the failure to get their supposedly meaningful deficit reduction plan to Congress, and thus to the president's desk, is widely seen as President Obama's fault.

In the Beltway Bubble's popular scenario, Obama "abandoned" a product that was never produced. After the Simpson-Bowles Commission foundered, Ryan reacted to criticism of his own plan by accusing the president of using "a rhetorical broadside to distract from the fact the president isn't proposing solutions." But Obama was the one who revived the entire idea of a deficit commission after the Senate's legislative attempt at creating one was undone by the GOP co-sponsors bailing on the idea. And it's not beyond the realm of reason that Obama would have endorsed the plan that the Commission was steaming toward, provided it tinkered with its prescriptions for Social Security. After all, as National Economic Council director Gene Sperling noted, Simpson-Bowles was set on levels of revenue-raising more generous than what Obama himself proposed. Sperling made the distinction between Ryan's roadmap and the cogitations of the Simpson-Bowles committee fairly legible:

"His budget has become the poster child for an extreme budget that puts all the burden on the middle class and the most vulnerable," Sperling said.

"It includes no revenue, when the core of Bowles-Simpson was a balance of revenue and entitlements savings, and a principle that you don't put much burden at all on the most vulnerable in our society."

Unfortunately for Sperling, the fact that Simpson-Bowles strove to not "put much burden at all on the most vulnerable in our society" is pretty much why it's deemed to be less legendary here inside the Bubble. These choices, they were not "tough" enough. Neither were the choices laid out in the "Grand Bargain" that was almost made between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner. Let's take care to remember what this "Grand Bargain" entailed:

Obama had proposed to Republicans a "grand bargain" that accomplished a host of individual things that are unpopular on their own, but that just might pass as a huge package jammed through Congress with default looming. Obama offered to put Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts on the table in exchange for a tax hike of roughly $100 billion per year over 10 years. Meanwhile, government spending would be cut by roughly three times that amount. It's no small irony that the party's dogmatic opposition to tax increases is costing the GOP its best opportunity to roll back social programs it has long targeted.

Republicans are now banking on a smaller deficit reduction deal that would still make major cuts, somewhere in the range of $2 trillion.

What was Ryan's role in all of this? The New York Times reported today that he was behind the scuttling of the deal:

Mr. Ryan's enormous influence was apparent last summer when Representative Eric Cantor, the second most powerful House Republican, told Mr. Obama during negotiations over an attempted bipartisan "grand bargain" that Mr. Ryan disliked its policy and was concerned that a deal would pave the way for Mr. Obama's easy re-election, according to a Democrat and a Republican who were briefed on the conversation.

Now, one might as well note that both Cantor and Boehner have denied the claims made by the Times' sources. But there's a larger point to be made here. That "Grand Bargain?" It was offered, and very nearly accepted. And yet the media has completely spaced on this, to the extent that Obama's role as a Grand Bargainer -- in which he signed onto increasing Medicare's eligibility age, among other things -- is consistently denied. Yet Ryan's plan, with all its undefined choices about where the budget axe is to fall -- the details of which, if they exist al all, remain locked with Ryan's cranium -- gets the credit for being the "serious" one.

All of the past benefits of the doubt that Ryan has received are going to serve him in good stead now that he's been selected to provide Mitt Romney with the core identity and policy specifics that Romney was unable or unwilling to provide himself. And already the media has proclaimed how "serious" and "brave" the political conversation to come will certainly be, now that Ryan's here to ensure it.

This is, in some ways, a fair assessment. To have a legitimate debate on the long-term policy direction of the nation, it surely helps to have Ryan in the mix, full-throatedly endorsing his vision of the future, even if its painted with the broadest brush. In turn, the Obama campaign will have ample opportunity to clarify its own. There's tremendous potential now for a debate to draw palpable lines and make clear contrasts between the two major party candidates.

But it comes at a cost: It means that very little time will be spent on the near-term economic crisis -- its rampant unemployment catastrophe, its continually unfolding foreclosure emergency -- or the widespread suffering that America is enduring. Yes, there will be sops to the current disaster: Romney will promise a brighter future ahead, Obama will suggest his opponents mean to return to the past. But contending directly with the present will likely be avoided in any way, save in the abstract. As far as the two competitors are concerned, the present-day suffering only speaks to whether or not one of them deserves to be president.

This is the biggest gift that Ryan has given the Bubble People. He's infused the race with a set of notions that extend to everyone a permission to look past and gloss over our present calamitous circumstances, and to do so with the assurance that they are really working hard to contend with all the 'substance-like substance' that Ryan brings to the race. To be sure, the Beltway Bubble media cut and run from the American people and their lingering suffering a long time ago. There's no currency, after all, in having access to poor people. Ryan's entry into the race, however, allows them to feel just as Serious and as Brave and as Tough as he is. As opposed to feeling like failed cowards. For that, their gratitude to Ryan will be fulsome, in every sense of the word.

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This post has been updated throughout to refine points about the so-called Grand Bargain, the Simpson-Bowles Commission and comments on the GOP candidate from Grover Norquist.

For as long as anyone can remember, mankind has yearned to see 10 consecutive years of Mitt Romney's tax returns.

And for nearly as long, Romney and his close associates have prevented the disclosure of said returns. It is possible that they have done so out of charity. Who knows? Perhaps the simple fact of the matter is that to gaze upon Romney's tax returns and fully assay the mis-angled perfection of his overall tax strategy causes the viewer to permanently lapse into some giddy, numbing coma, in the manner of James Orin Incandenza Jr.'s "The Entertainment" from David Foster Wallace's novel "Infinite Jest."

The general tug-of-war over Romney's tax returns might have remained a background issue in the 2012 campaign, had it not been for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who told our own Ryan Grim and Sam Stein that he knew a guy -- a "Bain investor" -- who'd seen Romney's taxes and could attest to the fact that he hadn't paid any taxes in 10 years. Reid has enthusiastically continued to underline his claim, despite the widespread skepticism that it (understandably) sowed. And so, Romney's tax returns have, as they say, remained "part of the conversation."

How reliable are Reid's claims? We'll rate them "plausible" -- here's a speculative explanation of how it could be that Romney paid no tax returns for an extended period of time -- but we'll back away from rating them "likely" -- if only because no one has been able to deduce Reid's mystery source. (The current hot speculation on that matter shines on Jon Huntsman Sr. He has denied this, but adds his voice to those who want Romney to be more transparent.)

But the focus that Reid's claims have forced back onto the matter of Romney's tax returns has been sustained, and now factor in to every occasion where the Romney camp declines to disclose them. Now, one might think that the simplest way out of this trap is for Romney to just suck it up and provide some more material. To get the answer to "Why not just do that?" Buzzfeed's Zeke Miller talked to some people with, at least, tangential association to the Romney campaign, and put the question to them. Their response to Miller's inquiries is two-fold: Their critics will never be satisfied, and the timing is bad for Romney's campaign:

With less than three months to Election Day, the Romney campaign has passed the "point of no return," as one Republican operative close to the campaign put it, beyond which there isn't enough time for the media to digest the tax returns before the public starts to pay attention to the race.

"The complaining for more and more returns and the stories about how rich he is get old after a few weeks, but there aren't a few weeks left," the operative said. "Now we've got to keep doing what we're doing and hope it isn't too painful."

[...]

One Romney aide who privately supported the candidate releasing the returns during the Republican primary is now convinced it won't help.

"If we release six, they'll demand seven," the aide said, expressing frustration that the returns were not put out earlier this year giving the issue time to settle.

Now, these explanations do have the faint aroma of a dodge, but let's put that aside for a moment, and treat these as the authentic and sincere concerns of the Romney campaign. We think the Romney campaign has figured this wrong.

Before we get into this, let's stipulate from the outset that Reid's claim is either baseless or it is (perhaps coincidentally) backed up by material facts. If Reid has this right, then the Romney campaign's course is clear: It must guard against the disclosure of those tax returns on pain of death!

But if Reid has this wrong, it makes no sense to come out now and prove it.

Let's begin with the contention that releasing any additional tax returns will -- no matter how many questions they put to rest -- inevitably lead to demands for more disclosures. This is not an entirely unreasonable worry. I do not think that the media would treat it that way. But birtherism: It exists. And what we've learned from it is that there are partisans crazed enough to shrug off any proof against their claim and continually retrench into their lunatic position. We don't think Romney's most fervent critics share those qualities, but we won't know for sure until Romney pulls the trigger.

So let's say for the sake of argument that it's a legitimate concern. We still think that releasing returns is the right idea, if for no other reason than we'll personally inveigh against further demands. The fact is, releasing 10 returns is on the generous side of precedent. It's absolutely been deemed sufficient to the task of "vetting" a presidential candidate. Right now, Romney's disclosures have been on the stingy side of precedent. We say, if he squares this with the other contemporary examples he could follow, then any further complaints and demands should be given the brush-off.

Again, if further disclosures prove Reid's prescience, you can't do it! But if the worry here is that further tax returns will reveal that Romney pays a staggeringly low tax rate, uses exotic tax shelters, or has money in Swiss bank accounts, well, that's stuff we already know. So we'll know it longer and harder, big deal. The worst assumptions already have been made about these details of Romney's tax history.

As for the "point of no return" argument, this makes even less sense. Certainly, if Romney releases tax returns, there will be an army of reporters dispatched to comb through them. But to suggest that it alters the dynamic of the media's drive to build narratives is to badly underestimate the media's ability to resist any new, shiny, bouncing thing.

Besides, you have to consider the back-side of the equation here: If Romney releases a bunch of tax returns and it doesn't bear out the claims that have been made against him, then we're not set for a long and drawn-out saga about Mitt's taxes. We're going to pitch headlong into a narrative titled "The Fulsome Public Humiliation Of Harry Reid." The Romney message from that point on can be, "We just proved that the Democrats will resort to anything -- including fraudulent, baseless claims -- to avoid running an honest campaign that they can't win." There is no political downside in Reid getting filleted in public. If you know your opponent is bluffing, you play your winning hand, always.

It really seems to us that most of the people who have reported on the Reid-Romney contretemps do not understand what's actually at stake here. Reid has climbed up into a noose, put his neck in the loop, and is daring Romney to strangle him. Reid's actions are abstruse. The source that could back his claim remains a puzzlement. But at this point, the real mystery here is why Romney doesn't simply stride over to Harry Reid and just kick the chair out from under him.

PANDERING FOR GOLD: Over the past year, the Obama administration has undertaken a series of actions and initiatives designed to address various agenda items and policy goals, such as the "Caution: May Contain DREAM Act-Like Substance Executive Order of 2012." The administration holds that these actions were in keeping with their "We Can't Wait" theme, and have been borne out of a frustration with GOP obstructionists in Congress. (They certainly don't help.) Critics have maintained that these actions are "small ball" and simply an election year gambit designed to pander to the president's base. (They certainly don't hurt.)

Because we are bog-standard Beltway cynics realists about these things, we remember that political science teaches us that presidents attempt to keep their campaign promises, and leave it at that. But a clear exception needs to be made on President Barack Obama's seeming embrace of Sen. Marco Rubio's proposal to exempt Olympic medalists from being taxed on their medals. It's clearly an attempt to pander, and a wholly inept one.

Leaving aside the pure stupidity of Rubio's proposal -- (and it is, for many reasons, purely stupid) -- Obama's support for this measure is a pure contradiction to one of his campaign's central arguments.

People who win prizes are subject to taxation. Game-show winners get taxed. Lottery winners get taxed. Nobel recipients get taxed. Indeed, the profits that are produced by successful ventures, in America, are subject to taxation. The Obama campaign's absolute, indisputable argument on this matter is that this process is virtuous; successful people pay back into the common weal kitty to provide the opportunity for future successful people. When Obama talks about business owners not succeeding wholly on their own, but with the assistance of an invested-in public infrastructure, he is reinforcing this argument. Because the Romney campaign has willfully deceived people about Obama's actual argument, Team Obama Re-Elect has to redouble its efforts to make their position clear.

Climbing on board with Rubio's proposal obscures this in profound ways, as Matt Yglesias elucidates:

Obviously the specific revenue implications of this bill are small. But the framing around it is deeply right-wing. The idea is that taxes are a kind of penalty, and that we shouldn't be penalizing these worthy athletes for their efforts. But by that token we shouldn't be penalizing the people who invented Gmail or founded Papa John's or earn a living driving a long-haul truck or making beds at the motel or designing marketing materials for Sabre printers ... The end point of this line of thinking is that basically nobody should be taxed for anything. Which is a fine conclusion for Rubio, but a bad one for Obama.

To our mind, the reason that Obama has come behind this proposal is that, unlike people who win the Showcase Showdown on "The Price Is Right," Olympic medalists stand on a podium and stare at the flag as it ascends into the rafters, occasionally to the strains of our national anthem. In this context, it becomes politically untenable to do anything that can be perceived as a slight to our American Exceptionalism. It's a pretty typical situation, we're afraid. If tomorrow, the consensus held that the only way a congressperson could prove their patriotism was to stand in front of the U.S. Treasury and copulate with a bald eagle, Pennsylvania Avenue would quickly become a Hitchcockian dystopia of hot-and-bothered raptors.

BEGUN THIS MISSOURI SENATE BATTLE HAS: The GOP primary for Missouri's Senate seat is over, and Rep. Todd Akin has prevailed over John Brunner and the Sarah Palin-endorsed Sarah Steelman. Good news for the incumbent, Claire McCaskill? Salon's Steve Kornacki says yes, because of his "tendency toward inflammatory rhetoric that pleases his base but that could alarm swing voters."

For instance, last year Akin caused a stir by declaring that “at the heart of liberalism really is a hatred for God and a belief that government should replace God.” And earlier this year, he argued that the federal government’s student loan program has helped push America toward “stage three cancer of socialism.” That he’ll make similar pronouncements this fall is very possible, maybe even likely, and under the general election spotlight the effect will be heightened.

This polarizing style helps explain why polls have shown McCaskill running better against Akin than the two Republicans he beat. A recent Mason-Dixon survey, for instance, gave Brunner an 11-point lead over McCaskill and Steelman, an 8-point edge. Akin’s lead was only 5 points.

So it's "good news" because McCaskill got the opponent she preferred. Now for the bad news -- as Mother Jones' Andy Kroll reports, McCaskill is one of this season's top targets of "dark money" donors:

As of July 17, outside groups had bought $12.75 million worth of ads attacking McCaskill. (Groups supporting her spent just $1.3 million.) Of that, $7.6 million came from groups that conceal their donors, according to a media-buying source in Missouri. McCaskill's dark-money foes include the heaviest hitters in Republican politics: Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS; David Koch's Americans for Prosperity; and the 60 Plus Association, billed as the conservative counterweight to the AARP. "I'm getting all the name brands," she told MSNBC's Chris Matthews in April. "I'm at the top of a lot of folks' lists."

Kroll goes on to note that "there's little chance progressive outside groups and donors will come to McCaskill's rescue," because "her relationship with liberal advocates has been rocky." So she'll largely depend on small donors to make a stand. If there's any comfort here, for McCaskill, it's that the forces arrayed against her wouldn't have minded if one of the better-positioned primary opponents had won.

THIS WEEK IN VOTER CAGING: Michael Tomasky, in plotting his "Romney has a narrow path" argument that portends future electoral college success for President Obama, says that in his estimation, "Obama can lose the big Eastern four—Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida: all of ’em!—and still be reelected." Well, Obama had better hope so, considering what election officials in Ohio are doing. Per Ari Berman:

In response to the 2008 election results, Ohio Republicans drastically curtailed the early voting period in 2012 from thirty-five to eleven days, with no voting on the Sunday before the election, when African-American churches historically rally their congregants to go to the polls. (Ohio was one of five states to cut back on early voting since 2010.) Voting rights activists subsequently gathered enough signatures to block the new voting restrictions and force a referendum on Election Day. In reaction, Ohio Republicans repealed their own bill in the state legislature, but kept a ban on early voting three days before Election Day (a period when 93,000 Ohioans voted in 2008), adding an exception for active duty members of the military, who tend to lean Republican. (The Obama campaign is now challenging the law in court, seeking to expand early voting for all Ohioans).

That is how the Romney zombie lie about Obama trying to keep military voters from voting, found its perch. But Ohio Republicans haven't stopped there. Early voting hours in Ohio are not in any way uniform, and the lack of uniformity follows a pretty precise pattern: in heavily Democratic counties like Cleveland and Columbus, voters are restricted to weekdays, between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., to cast votes. At the same time, "in solidly Republican counties like Warren and Butler, GOP election commissioners have approved expanded early voting hours on nights and weekends."

Wonkette calls the ball correctly: "Ohio Republicans are the Steve Jobses of Democrats not voting." Which makes Florida's Grifter-Governor Rick Scott the Bill Gates of Democrats not voting, because he stole the look-and-feel of many of Ohio's innovations (like limiting the African-American church-going folks) and added a bunch of things that even election officials from his own party found to be lacking in user friendliness.

But yeah, there goes Ohio and Florida, potentially.

SCOTT BROWN IS SAD HE'S NOT FROM OHIO: Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown (R) took some time to emote and gesticulate about how downright unfair it was that Massacusetts election officials were stepping up their efforts to comply with the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, and contact welfare recipients to offer them a chance to register to vote. These redoubled efforts have come as a result of a lawsuit against state election officials that held they were not in compliance, and as Josh Israel at Think Progress reports, Brown is "seizing on the fact" that the daughter of his opponent -- Elizabeth Warren -- is "chair of the board of one of the groups suing" and that this "amounts to a conspiracy to elect his Democratic challenger." In a statement, Brown said:

I want every legal vote to count, but it’s outrageous to use taxpayer dollars to register welfare recipients as part of a special effort to boost one political party over another. This effort to sign up welfare recipients is being aided by Elizabeth Warren’s daughter and it’s clearly designed to benefit her mother’s political campaign. It means that I’m going to have to work that much harder to get out my pro-jobs, pro-free enterprise message.

Leaving aside his aversion to ensuring that poor people are not disenfranchized, that last sentence is deeply strange. Getting out his "pro-jobs, pro-free enterprise message," is what a political campaign does. That is, in a nutshell, Scott Brown's "job" -- present an argument designed to get him to 50 percent-plus-1. Is it too hard a job because his argument is lacking? Then cut the boo-hoos and get a better argument. Seems like only yesterday Brown was some sort of truck-drivin', hard-workin' dynamo. Now he's acting like another career pol, chafing at the thought of having to put in the work -- which was, we remind you, the knock on the woman he defeated, Martha Coakley.

What can we say? It doesn't take long to feel entitled when you come to Capitol Hill.

SAUL FALLOUT: As you probably know, Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul drew wave after wave of condemnation from conservatives for daring to tout the positive impacts of Romney's Massachusetts health care law. Well, I don't know if this will square things with all the people who have been frenetically exerting themselves over this or calling for her firing, but as Aaron Blake reports, re-embracing Romney's health care innovation might actually be, or have been intended as, part of the campaign's strategy going forward.

Regardless of how you think this strategy will pan out, it's revealing to us that a woman who notes that her candidate provided his constituents with access to health care has elicited such a thunderous condemnation from the members of her own tribe, as compared to say, someone who made a cheap joke at the expense of people with intellectual disabilities.

POLITICAL MEDIA IS GETTING REALLY BORED, NOW: Dave Weigel did his level best to make the argument that August hasn't been as gobsmackingly inane this year, as compared to many of the other Augusts we've shared. Just today, though, we have fresh evidence to the contrary.

Today, Politico has a story about Republicans jockeying to get in line for the 2016 campaign season (The hook: Candidate types have traveled to Iowa and Iowa is where the Iowa Caucus is, ermahgerd!). The usually level-headed Matthew Dowd has written a Manifesto To Giving Up Entirely that essentially holds that if the 2012 race was different, somehow, then it would be different, somehow, but since it suffers from a lack of dissimilarities to itself, you should shoot yourself in the face. And here's the Mark Halperin piece where he finally surmises that all this money in politics is bad and that someone really ought to do something about it that caused Josh Marshall to quip that the Time magazine political Thought Cataloguist had finally "[thrown] down [the] gauntlet to [the] self-awareness gods."

On the plus side, we have Henry Blodget gamely attempting to explain insufficient aggregate demand, and the deleterious effect it has on middle-class wealth in particular and job creation in general. Still: Three more weeks of nonsense to come.

SO IT'S PAUL RYAN: Well, how about that, right? There's a lot to say about this. Like we discussed last week, Ryan being placed on the ticket means that the race can have some real stakes and a real debate -- will we continue to have the New Deal/Great Society programs, or won't we? How quickly does the working class feel the Panem pinch of Ryan's Randian "Hunger Games" budget plan? It also needs to be said that when the chips were down and the poll numbers weren't good and the GOP establishment demanded that Mitt Romney emasculate himself, Romney was a team player, and gladly chose Paul Ryan as his personal president. Hey, will Ryan debate Obama thrice, now, and Romney just match up the one time with Biden? So many questions!

But they will all be answered in time. What's important right now, given that your Speculatroners were very insistent that Ryan would not be picked as Romney's running mate, is that we fall on our sword and offer you this:

ELECTORAL PROJECTION: OK, time once again for your Speculatroners to make their trademarked Electoral College projection, which is -- as always -- a mix of careful poll study, analysis of prevailing economic trends, pundit speculation and a careful study of the automatic writing we produce after visiting each other nightly in our subconsciousness through the complicated process telepathic lucid dreaming.

In general, Obama has slightly expanded his already slight-yet-stable lead nationally, but the situation is crazy fluid because voters, they be all pessimistic up in this piece! We've already taken note of the extracurricular efforts being undertaken on Ohio and Florida to bounce large demographic slices of the traditionally Dem-leaning electorate from the rolls. Let's also note that last week's polls that had Obama hitting the magic 50 percent mark in some swing states have been matched this week by polls giving Romney the same threshold in the critical state of Colorado. (These also suggest an improving picture for Obama in Virginia.) So, let's go to the map.

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So, it's come to this. Today, a spokeswoman for Mitt Romney responded to an attack ad disseminated by a super PAC supporting President Barack Obama. The ad was a controversial broadside, worthy of a response. The spokeswoman spoke against the ad with conviction. She offered a counter argument that was precise and logical and fair. The spokeswoman cleanly invoked her candidate's greatest legislative achievement, in an eminently reasonable way, in her candidate's defense.

And that spokeswoman's response is being hailed as one of the 2012 campaign season's most colossal cock-ups.

Sigh. Here's what happened. This week, Priorities USA Action, a super PAC run by former Obama adviser Bill Burton (who is surely not "coordinating" his efforts with the Obama campaign, because that would be tsk-tsk illegal!) put out a brutal attack ad. It tied the activities of Bain Capital to the death of a woman who lost her health care coverage as a result of her husband losing his job at GST Steel, one of the celebrated casualties of Bain's business practices. As Alex Burns reported:

The commercial casts Mitt Romney’s business background in a severely negative light, but it's not a typical slash-and-burn attack ad. Instead, it features former GST Steel employee Joe Soptic speaking to the camera about what happened when the plant where he worked shut down.

"I don't think Mitt Romney understands what he's done to people's lives by closing the plant. I don't think he realizes that people's lives completely changed," Soptic said. “When Mitt Romney and Bain closed the plant, I lost my health care and my family lost their health care. And a short time after that my wife became ill.”

In 2006, Soptic's wife passed away, and a future attack ad was born.

In the immediate aftermath of the ad's deployment, the Romney camp issued a relatively standard response, referring to the ad as dishonest and accusing the president and his allies of using such attacks to distract from economic issues. And nothing more might have come of this had Romney's team stuck to that story.

But on Fox News this morning, Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul went "off-script," and amid a larger declaration about the ad being despicable and some pushback on the facts of the ad, she offered this statement in Romney's defense: "To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney's health care plan, they would have had health care."

After that came the deluge of conservatives savaging Saul for getting lost on the road to Damascus, essentially accusing her of giving away the election.

The thing is, though, Saul's logic in citing Romney's creation and implementation of CommonwealthCare in Massachusetts is impeccable. Her baseline argument: If you are going to hit Romney with the Bain practices that allegedly led to this woman losing her health insurance, you surely must credit him for his legislative accomplishments, which enabled thousands of uninsured people to obtain life-saving care. That is, for the most part, pristine reasoning.

The only problem, of course, is that this wasn't offered in 2008, when it would have been hailed as a brilliant defense. We've once again come face to face with the perplexing weirdness at the center of Romney's entire presidential effort: in 2012, Romney is not allowed to run on the singular achievement of his career -- Massachusetts health care -- that earned him a spot in the world of GOP presidential contenders in the first place.

I've said this before: for all of the grief that Romney has taken for his multitude of flip-flops over the years, those are not, collectively, as damaging to Romney's ambition as the way the Republican Party has flopped on him. In 2008, RomneyCare was held to be an accomplishment with edge -- he'd neatly co-opted a key Democratic Party plank, universal health care, and delivered it to his constituents, using the individual mandate concept dreamed up by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Coupled with his time spent rescuing the Salt Lake City Olympics, Romney had reason to brag about his managerial acumen and problem-solving ability.

But after Romney's idea got re-co-opted by the Obama administration, Romney became another victim of the vagaries of tribal politics, which dictated that anything that even vaguely resembled ObamaCare was now anathema. Romney has tried to manage this mess by explaining away his own accomplishment as something that he never envisioned being imposed by the federal government. That argument hasn't gained much traction, probably because people essentially remember that his health care accomplishment was front-and-center during his 2008 run.

And if the reaction to Saul's statement proves anything, it's that the tribe has only become less inclined toward Romney's health care law. The fury, in this instance, was led by Red State founder Erick Erickson, who earnestly tweeted: "OMG. This might just be the moment Mitt Romney lost the election. Wow." Ever since then, he's been blogging about Saul's statement as if it were a massive disaster, assuring his readers that "Mitt Romney’s ardent supporters are fit to be tied today." Rush Limbaugh has since piled on, telling his listeners that "Andrea Saul's appearance on Fox was a potential gold mine for Obama."

The sentiments being expressed by Erickson and Limbaugh, it should be noted, are not universal. Erickson himself has written about some of the negative reaction to his remarks, and while no one he cites defends Saul, there are apparently some who are giving Erickson grief about his outsized reaction. Erickson, however, haughtily dismisses these concerns:

Andrea Saul cited Romneycare approvingly, conservatives rightly piled on, and Romney supporters are defending the guy.

“You’re hurting him,” cried one.

“Thanks for making this the big story of the day, Jackass,” cried another.

Andrea Saul made this the big story of the day. She is hurting Romney. She is an official voice of the campaign. This was an unforced error of monumental idiocy and the blowback is deserved, appropriate, and -- most importantly -- absolutely necessary.

He goes on to approvingly cite the remarks tweeted by fellow RedStater Dan McLaughlin:

What conservatives are doing re Andrea Saul's comment is the same as how you housebreak your dog. Romney needs to know not to go there.

Tie Andrea Saul to the roof of a car and drive her to Canada, I guess!

At any rate, Saul's comment is now bound, inevitably, for the Kinsley Gaffe Hall Of Fame -- the "Kinsley Gaffe" being, let's recall, when "a politician tells the truth -- some obvious truth he [or she] isn't supposed to say." But I'm not sure people understand that this particular Kinsley Gaffe deserves an asterisk -- it's only a gaffe by dint of the fact that so much has changed between 2008 and 2012. And for that reason, I'm not sure people fully understand just how outrageous it would be for Saul to be subjected to "housebreaking" over this flap.

[CORRECTION: This piece has been edited to remove an inadvertent reference to René Goscinny's beloved comic book series, and replace it with the word "asterisk." Je suis désolé.]

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This part of the election year summer is a time when the people who write about politics should probably do more "getting drunk in a hammock" and less "gaming out electoral college scenarios," if only because most Americans have taken a break from political coverage and the most volatile part of the election season is yet to come. But whatever, people are bored! And what's the alternative? Have a national conversation about gun violence? Too hard, so electoral college scenarios it is.

If I had just 30 words to describe the state of the race, I would say, "Obama holds a narrow but not insurmountable lead, and the lousy state of the economy offers Romney a better than average chance to win a close race." That would leave me with three words, which I would donate to a worthy charity. But even if I had several hundred words to describe the state of the race, I probably would not describe it as an imminent "landslide." At least not in August of 2012.

But Dick Morris, who primarily exists as a counteragent to Clinton-era nostalgia, is doing just that, because he's seen "numbers" that are more "real" than other, less "real" numbers, and these hypothetically add up to a Romney "landslide":

On Friday, I saw the real numbers. These state-by-state polls, taken by an organization I trust (after forty years of polling) show the real story. The tally is based on more than 600 likely voter interviews in each swing state within the past eight days.

The trend line is distinctly pro-Romney. Of the thirteen states studied, he improved or Obama slipped in nine states while the reverse happened in only four. To read the media, one would think that Romney had a terrible month. In fact, the exact reverse is true.

I'm actually a little disappointed that Morris cited a hypothetical polling organization instead of a hypothetical "Bain investor," because how hilarious would that have been? But the point is this: Morris speculates that it's exceedingly likely that Romney will carry "Iowa, New Mexico, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey" as well as "Indiana, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Nevada, North Carolina, and Colorado," and -- because why not, at this point? -- "Florida, Ohio, and Virginia," for good measure.

Morris posits this scenario not because it's particularly well thought through (it isn't) but because he wants to counter "the garbage being put out by the media." Again, I sort of think the media consensus is "Obama holds a narrow but not insurmountable lead, and the lousy state of the economy offers Romney a better-than-average chance to win a close race," but Morris is basically conflating "the media" writ large with a single article written by Michael Tomasky over at Newsweek. (He sort of gives away the game in his first paragraph, where he says, "One benighted Newsweek reporter even speculated about a possible Democratic landslide.")

So, what of that Tomasky article? Well, Morris is absolutely right that the piece has ended up with this headline: "Michael Tomasky on the (Possible) Coming Obama Landslide." But I sort of think this is the work of a headline writer with an overactive imagination because a "landslide" -- "possible" or otherwise -- isn't what Tomasky really describes. In fact, outside of the headline, the word "landslide" does not appear anywhere in Tomasky's piece, which actually describes a pretty generic, caveat-laden scenario in which Obama wins a close election.

Let's go through Tomasky's brief. He begins by putting Pennsylvania into Obama's column. He goes on to posit that Iowa and New Hampshire will also be Obama pick-ups. (I don't feel like these states are done deals for Obama, by any means, but let's go with it.) Tomasky then places Michigan into the blue column, cites Obama's mortal lock on the West Coast states and Hawaii, and says that Obama now has 260 electoral votes. I don't know where he gets that, actually -- if I give Obama Minnesota and Wisconsin, this brings me to 252, with the seven states Tomasky wants to talk about next (Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and Virginia) still on the table.

But Tomasky's main argument is this: "Obama can lose the big Eastern four--Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida: all of 'em!--and still be reelected." That's true! If Obama loses all four of those states and wins the three Western states, then Obama wins the election, 272-266.

Now, Tomasky adds that "barring some huge cataclysm, he's not losing all four" of the Virginia/North Carolina/Florida/Ohio combination. I'm not sure, though, that the persistently terrible economy is not the "huge cataclysm" for which he's looking. But even here, this is not a "landslide" argument. This is another variation of the "Romney has a narrow path to win" argument that was in bloom in the late spring. It sounds pretty convincing, until you realize that the "narrow path" scenario is the same scenario that anyone seeking to unseat an incumbent president faces. (Here's Steve Kornacki on why you should treat the "narrow path" argument as a "red herring.")

But the salient point is that what Tomasky describes is ... not a landslide. Tomasky describes, in any and all events, a situation where Obama wins by a much narrower margin than his 365-173 win over Senator John McCain in 2008. You see what I mean about the headline writer sort of running away with this argument?

So the brief that Morris brings against Tomasky -- or by his reckoning, everyone in the media -- with his hypothetical polling firm and their magic numbers, is actually counterargument to a suggestion that no one, outside of a Newsweek/Daily Beast headline writer, is making.

For the time being, I recommend everyone just go with: "Obama holds a narrow but not insurmountable lead, and the lousy state of the economy offers Romney a better-than-average chance to win a close race."

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For many years, Americans learned whom their presidential nominees had chosen as their running mates the same, dreary way. The nominee would approach some guy and ask, "Hey, how's about you be the guy who steps in and does political stuff if, for some reason, I keel over and die?" And then that guy would be all, "Yeah, that sounds OK," and then they'd find some reporters and tell them about it, and then there would be news stories and trenchant analysis for a couple of weeks, and then people would go on with their lives.

Obviously, this system had its hiccups. Who can forget the New York Post banner headline -- "It's Gephardt!" -- hailing the Missouri representative as John Kerry's running mate on the day Kerry picked John Edwards. Seriously, Dick Gephardt being misidentified as Kerry's choice is perhaps the most memorable part of Dick Gephardt's career.

Still, it was, by and large, a pretty good system. But in 2008, the Obama campaign managed to get thousands of people to sign up to receive a "personal" text message that revealed his vice-presidential choice in super-cool, instantaneous "real time." So, one summer morning, all those people got a cryptic text message about Joe Biden, thought to themselves, "The hell?" and then remembered, "Oh, right, that text message thingy. Well, that was anti-climactic." (And it totally was, too -- the Obama campaign still leaked the news to reporters.)

This year, the Romney campaign has decided to re-invent this particular wheel, so now you can sign up for a mobile phone app that does what Barack Obama's text-message doohickey did four years ago. Ayo, technology! I mean, sure, you could just chill out and wait to hear about Romney's pick on the news or on Twitter. But you'd be missing an exciting opportunity to have your personal data mined by the Romney campaign.

When it comes to the quadrennial Veepstakes, it's easy to quickly get to the point where all the suspense-building feels phony. After all, the greatest impact a prospective vice-presidential candidate has on the world comes before the votes get counted on Election Day. In the run-up, there's lots to speculate on -- what state does the running mate help the candidate pick up, what ethnic group does the veep prospect offer a road into, what issues does this partner-in-campaign provide some cover on. Sometimes, the vice presidents "do the dirty work"; sometimes they donate a halo. Often, they just provide some flavor -- a new taste to freshen the ticket, long after the presidential nominee's personality has been chewed by the media into a bland marm.

What legitimizes all the hype, however, is that the vice-presidential pick is, essentially, the first "command decision" that a prospective president makes, and so it lends a certain amount of insight into how the candidate will approach policy and politics. So, without belaboring the matter, let your Speculatroners set the stage for Mitt Romney's impending decision.

The odds-on favorites, at this point, are Ohio Sen. Rob Portman and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty. There are some fairly obvious reasons: Both hail from purply states; neither has to sweat not having the necessary conservative bona fides. More importantly, Portman and Pawlenty are very boring -- their beigeness confers upon Romney's ecru a certain vividness and intensity. And neither is prone to the sort of comments or behavior that turns off independent voters, like some failed 2008 vice-presidential candidates we can name.

The knock on Portman, of course, is that prior to being Ohio's junior senator, he served as director of the Office of Management and Budget in George W. Bush's presidency. How fondly are Bush's budgets remembered? Not very -- and that lack of affection occasionally creeps into Tea Party rhetoric at the grassroots level.

Pawlenty's emergence as a short-lister is, if anything, extremely puzzling. He's not just the guy who coined the term "Obamneycare" -- his dig at Romney for providing the DNA of the Affordable Care Act -- while he was running against Romney for the nomination; he's also the guy who wussed out when given the chance to throw the term in Romney's face during the primary debates. A fervent critic and a knuckling-under wimp? It's hard to see what potency he brings to Romney's ticket.

And like Portman, Pawlenty doesn't do much in terms of leading the GOP out of its demographic cul-de-sac. Which is why Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio remain high on everyone's guesswork list. Rubio, in particular, seems to be the guy everyone not directly affiliated with Romney's campaign wants Romney to pick. Jeb Bush famously coupled his tepid endorsement of Romney with effusive praise for his fellow Floridian. And the conservative pundit class can't help but enthuse over how Rubio helps Romney with Hispanic voters and Florida's electoral votes.

It's less clear what Jindal brings to the table, other than some necessary diversity. Jindal was, famously, a Rick Perry backer. He's best known for his halting performance as a rebutter to one of Obama's State of the Union addresses. And for a Romney campaign that does not need a new dose of "weird," there's this whole "Bobby Jindal performed an exorcism in a dorm room" thing. But Jindal is the guy whom Grover Norquist wants, so that's probably why his tires continue to be kicked.

Right about now, according to tradition, we are supposed to offer up a "way out of left field" pick, because it's important to establish yourself as a savvy analyst of mostly breathless nonsense. So, OK, here's ours: New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte.

Ayotte's been serving as one of Romney's more dedicated surrogates for a long while now, and more often than most, she's risen to that occasion. She carries with her the promise of enabling a win in New Hampshire (and in a close election, New Hampshire could matter a lot), as well as offering a little bit of cover for the "war on women" charges that are sure to come Romney's way.

Would it be strange to see a GOP ticket emerge straight out of New England? Sure. But as the GOP's been more or less run out of the Northeast, a Romney/Ayotte ticket could be a morale-boosting statement. Let's also remember that Romney has run alongside a New England woman before -- during his gubernatorial race, he adopted prospective Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey as his de facto running mate.

That decision was one of Romney's earliest flip-flops. He initially promised to not play favorites between Healey and her GOP competitor, Jim Rappaport, and then went back on his word in record time. But that decision was one of the famously risk-averse Romney's few bona-fide gambles as well -- and one that paid off. So if Romney has a mind to take a risk with his running mate, there's a good chance he'll cast his lot with Ayotte, who'll remind him of his first electoral success. (Worth remembering: Romney and Healey ran the same sort of "outsider" campaign that Romney wants to run now.)

So that's where we see the vice-presidential possibilities lining up. As always, we are prepared to be very wrong. Speaking of being very wrong ... is there a name we're forgetting to mention?

PAUL RYAN IS THE NAME WE'RE FORGETTING TO MENTION

OK, so let's talk about Paul Ryan. Longtime readers know we have very strenuously pooh-poohed the notion that Ryan is going to end up on the ticket with Mitt. To us, it's simple: Ryan already wields enormous power and influence over the GOP caucus on both sides of Congress, and he's clearly the person who is dictating the Republicans' vision in terms of policy, which basically involves eradicating all of the New Deal and Great Society entitlement programs.

Moreover, he projects all that power from an easily defended seat in the House of Representatives, so it doesn't make sense that he'd undertake a lateral move to the vice presidency. Let's keep in mind that Mitt Romney might lose the election, and if he does, one thing Paul Ryan does not need is to get caught in the middle of the inevitable circular firing squad that would ensue. From a pure branding angle, standing pat in the House ensures that Ryan will not be tainted by a possible Romney loss.

Nonetheless, Ryan is persistently thought of as a prospective running mate, so lately we've been putting aside our assumptions and asking around about the possibility of Romney/Ryan 2012. Our conclusion? There's between a 1 and 10 percent chance we have this wrong.

Of course, the interesting thing about Ryan is that, sooner or later, he's bound to come up in the 2012 campaign. Jonathan Chait has written, compellingly, about the way he sees the latter stages of 2012, and in his estimation, we're all on a collision course with Ryan's budget road map, which the Republicans want to pass and on which they fear the window is closing. And Democrats would very earnestly like to tie Mitt Romney to Paul Ryan -- after all, Ryan's budget prescriptions are not popular at the polls. They do not believe Romney would benefit from being associated with Ryan.

But here's where things get interesting. Right now, the Romney campaign is at sixes and sevens with the media, who they feel are over-reporting various gaffes and missteps, while not engaging substantively with the key issues of the campaign. Of course, Romney's not setting a particularly great example, either. His campaign has decided that it's going to dine out on an inauthentic critique of President Obama as a stealth enemy of free enterprise.

Team Obama Re-Elect, of course, has been presented with the enviable gift of an opponent who refuses to define himself. So they pound away at Romney's core. And this week, they took advantage of the fact that the Tax Policy Center stepped up and filled Romney's vacuum with a whole lot of bad news about Romney's tax proposals, which Romney had steadfastly kept under wraps.

Altogether, this has made for an "all heat, no light" campaign. What can Romney do to alter that dynamic? Well, if he names Ryan as his running mate, he gets to put down a marker and let everyone know that he's prepared to have a specific debate on the long-term policy trajectory of the country. The press would be forced to cover the matter in a substantive way. And no one would be able to criticize Romney for not laying down priorities.

And the truth is, behind all the election year gloss, this really is the fight we're having. It's unfortunate that we're having this fight, because we'd all be better off if we could swiftly deal with the immediate, short-term crises (like unemployment) and then move to arguing about the future of America in an America where the present isn't a constant, dire emergency. But since everyone's averse to doing that, the next best thing is to actually put something real at stake and battle it out in public, as opposed to just keeping it all sub rosa.

The knock on Romney, from the perspective of conservatives, is that he's a mere tinkerer. He's going to find efficiencies, sand off rough edges, fiddle at the policy margins, and fine-tune everything with strategic audits and corporate management techniques. But conservatives want big, bold, permanent policy changes. Their hope for Romney has been best expressed by Grover Norquist, who wants Romney to check his brain at the door and keep his bill-signing hand healthy, so that he can sign Paul Ryan's plan into law. If Romney wants to send a message, putting Ryan in his hip pocket would send one, and it would read, "From now on, we're calling it the Romney plan."

Again, the Democrats show every indication of savoring such a fight. But it's easier to savor a fight you don't think you'll end up having. Romney embracing Ryan would be a critical test for the Democrats, to see if they're truly ready to contend with what the GOP really wants to do. If they prove themselves, then sure, Romney might lose the election. But if Romney picks Ryan, there's not going to be any more magazine covers calling him a "wimp" anymore.

SCENES FROM THE INAUTHENTIC ECONOMIC ARGUMENT THAT WE'RE STILL HAVING: The Romney camp has one trick that it seems content to keep on using: "You didn't build that." And as we noted last week, this fake economic argument is still spawning fake stories of John Galt-ian bootstrappery, with protagonists who fall down and bleed everywhere the minute you poke at them.

This week's highlight failures include Melissa Ball, who gets picked apart by Business Insider:

Melissa Ball, the owner of Ball Office Products, appears in the Romney campaign's web ad. Her Virginia company, though, has been the recipient of a $52,000 contract with the General Services Administration. And it has an exclusive contract with Virginia Commonwealth University, a public university.

And here's Tanya Burns, getting the same treatment from ThinkProgress:

But like so many of the small businesses that the Romney campaign has trotted out in recent weeks, Tanya L. Burns & Associates, an insurance brokerage firm in Florida, is yet another beneficiary of federal spending. And not just any spending: Burns' firm has helped clients reduce their health insurance premiums thanks to the Affordable Care Act, which Mitt Romney has pledged to repeal.

In a 2011 article in the Orlando Business Journal, Burns appears dumbfounded -- and pleasantly surprised -- at the lower premiums some of her clients received when they renewed their insurance contracts.

Only time will tell if You Didn't Build That Summer 2012 will end up being penny-wise or pound-foolish for Romney, but more and more we're seeing a consistent tradeoff: Sign up to play-act as one of Obama's victims, and you end up looking like one of Romney's knaves.

TRUMPING ROMNEY: Donald Trump, for whatever reason, has been allowed to be one of Mitt Romney's unfiltered surrogates. Naturally, the Obama campaign has taken advantage of this: its latest attack ad on Romney includes the famous photograph of Romney being dwarfed by Trump's ostentatious private jet.

But Trump's association with Romney really gets fun for everyone when and if Romney swings full-square behind Paul Ryan's budget plan (or if he names Ryan as his running mate). The Donald has been pretty keen on everything Romney's been doing, but he's an outspoken critic of Ryan. Way outspoken -- he's called Ryan's budget "catastrophic" and a "death wish" for the GOP. (We'll readily admit that we doubt he came to these conclusions through some sort of rigorous analysis.)

THE SECOND SPOILER: Time magazine's Elizabeth Dias wonders if Constitution Party presidential candidate and former Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode could "cost Mitt Romney the presidency." There's only one factor that allows for that possibility -- the Commonwealth of Virginia's new status as a state that swings elections. Dias reports that a mid-July Public Policy Polling survey found Goode pulling "fully 9% of Virginia's vote." That's a danger for Romney, especially if he doesn't take the time to campaign in the state's rural communities, where familiarity with Goode is high and affection runs strong.

Of course, Goode cannot do anything unless he gets on the ballot in Virginia, and his campaign will likely be skint from pillar to post: Goode "forgoes fundraisers and declines PAC donations, caps individual contributions at $200," and "says he’s lucky to raise $1,000/week."

TED CRUZ'S RISING STAR: Former Texas state solicitor general Ted Cruz prevailed in his run-off election against the Rick Perry-endorsed David Dewhurst, and a million story lines have thus bloomed -- he's another Palin fave, another Tea Party insurgent striking against the establishment, and (most importantly) he's going to be Texas' next senator. But as Dave Weigel notes, the most important way of thinking about Ted Cruz is recognizing how well-suited he already is to play a role in the GOP's long game:

Cruz could theoretically serve in the Senate for six or seven terms, chairing the [Judiciary] Committee when President George P. Bush needs some lawyers put into robes. Or he could be picked, in his 40s, as the first conservative Hispanic on the Supreme Court. There is an inescapable logic to nominating Cruz, just as there was logic for the 2004 Illinois Democratic primary voter to pick charismatic, black Barack Obama over drab, white machine candidate Dan Hynes.

So Cruz is no mere Dick Mourdock. This is a future GOP franchise player being called up from the minors.

ELECTORAL PROJECTION

OK, time once again for your Speculatroners to make their trademarked Electoral College projection, which is -- as always -- a mix of careful poll study, analysis of prevailing economic trends, fortune cookies and whatever intel we can uncover whilst wandering around Washington, D.C., carrying Stonehenge-era divining rods.

This week, President Obama lucked into a sustained period of favorable news from the various polls -- he scored 50 percent or better in three swing states in the Quinnipiac surveys, took a gaudy double-digit lead in a Pew poll, and gets the apparent benefit of both an uptick in personal income growth and a decent August jobs report.

Of course, the peril of reading too much into these results (which are also totally the result of that time Mitt Romney criticized the London Olympics, right?) is that this good jobs report may be the last good jobs report between now and November. Even if that's not the case, there's no getting around the fact that it would have been better to have the August jobs report's numbers every month this year. Plus, as Steve Kornacki points out, "Pew's numbers have, for whatever reason, tended to be more favorable to Obama than those of other polling outlets."

Worth thinking about: If Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is bluffing Romney with his tax returns charge and Romney actually nuts up, shows his returns and claims Reid's scalp, can Obama win Nevada?

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A second source, said to be "close to Senator [Harry] Reid," has told CNN's Dana Bash that Reid's original source for the claim that Mitt Romney "didn't pay any taxes for 10 years" exists, is a "Bain investor" and a "credible person." Dana Bash reported on this source, and the person's willingness to corroborate the allegation to which the Senate majority leader repeated on Thursday's airing of CNN's AC360.

As Bash told the show's host, Anderson Cooper:

I did speak to one source who is very close to Senator Reid who claims to also know who the Bain investor is that Reid spoke with, and insists that it is a credible person and this person if we knew the name we would understand they would have the authority and the ability to know about Romney's tax returns.

"Whether we'll find it out ever," Bash added, "who knows? They're doing it on purpose, so this is the discussion."

Indeed, in the days since the Huffington Post first reported on Reid's claim, Reid has done nothing to back down. The Romney camp on Thursday responded by insisting that Reid "put up or shut up." Reid, on the other hand, has made it clear that the burden of disproving his claim lies with Romney.

This was reinforced in a statement from Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson, which Bash read on the air: "Senator Reid stands by his comments. Governor Romney's continued refusal to release his tax returns raises legitimate questions about what he is hiding and whether he paid any taxes at all. Governor Romney can easily end this debate by following the precedent set by his father and releasing tax returns."

Bash offered her take on the matter, based on her years of covering Reid:

There are times [Reid] says things off the cuff that make his aides wince, like talking about smelly tourists in the Capitol -- I'm not making this up. This is not one of those times. This is one of those times he knows exactly what he's doing. He's doing it on purpose, he is doing it for political reasons, because he wants this issue -- Romney's taxes -- talked about on programs like yours, wants it to be headlines in newspapers and wants Mitt Romney to respond on this issue which they think is a negative for Romney, as opposed to issues Romney wants to talk about.

Bash called Reid's decision to get into this fight to be "very personal" and "very Harry Reid."

"When Harry Reid doesn't like somebody, he goes for the jugular."

So to recap: Dana Bash's anonymous source says Harry Reid's anonymous source is right, and it's yet to occur to Romney that he could easily end all of this and claim Harry Reid's scalp just by releasing his tax returns.

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I don't know who, exactly, thought that Sen. Joe Lieberman was somehow destined to play a major role at one or more of the 2012 political conventions this year, but The Hill's Alexander Bolton is reporting that the fact he hasn't been extended an invitation to either the Republican National Convention in Tampa or the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte is a "major snub."

Why? Because he "played prominent convention roles in the past."

Oh, right! Who could forget that time he was chosen by then-presidential nominee Al Gore to be the vice president, thereby ensuring that he would play a "prominent role" at the Democratic convention? In the years since, of course, Lieberman became a huge supporter of the Iraq War, fell out of favor with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, lost a primary as a result of that falling-out, re-emerged as an Independent, and returned to the Senate. He ended up at the 2008 Republican Convention because he was best buds with John McCain, who was running against Obama, the candidate who had emerged from the crowded field of Democratic contenders because of his specific opposition to the very war Lieberman fervently supported.

All of that practically requires both parties to invite him to their convention this year, right?

Because you can find a strategist to say almost anything for a story, Bolton reached out to a former Gore adviser, in order to make the argument that not being invited to this year's Democratic National Convention is some sort of mistake:

“Even though he’s no longer a member of the Democratic Party, he caucuses with the Senate Democrats and provides a vote for their majority. It would be a good thing to invite him,” said Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist who served as a senior adviser to Gore’s campaign. “He doesn’t have to be invited to give a speech. He doesn’t have to have Clinton’s time slot.”

Yes, why not invite a non-Democrat who openly opposed President Barack Obama and who to this day contends that the Obama administration's foreign policy is lily-livered to come to the convention and participate in the renomination of a guy he doesn't like? It almost makes too much sense.

Meanwhile, The Hill reminds us that back in 2008, when he appeared at the Republican National Convention, Lieberman said, “I am here tonight because John McCain’s whole life testifies to a great truth: Being a Democrat or Republican is important, but it is nowhere near as important as being an American.”

If you think about it, that statement is precisely why he's not being invited to this year's Republican National Convention. That's not a truth that anyone in the GOP wants to testify to, and no one wants to be reminded of McCain's 2008 campaign and its maverick ways.

But beyond these perhaps hard-to-discern differences in philosophy, another reason Lieberman is not going to be welcomed at the Republican National Convention is because Lieberman cast a deciding vote to repeal "Don't Ask Don't Tell" (one of the few ways in which he differs from McCain on military policy). No one at the Republican Convention is going to want a guy who helped upend "Don't Ask Don't Tell" hanging around, let alone playing some sort of "prominent role."

A political science professor from Rutgers shows up in The Hill's piece to allege that, "Lieberman is a victim of polarization" and is "another person cast aside by people who aren’t interested in centrist views." But Lieberman's not a victim of polarization at all. He was reelected by a majority of Connecticut residents who preferred his "centrist views" to the views of the other candidates in that election -- Democrat Ned Lamont and Republican Alan Schlesinger.

And beyond not being cast aside by voters, he was not cast aside by the Democratic leadership in the Senate, who have allowed him to retain his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, rather than a bona fide Democratic senator.

From there, Lieberman has basically been allowed to do and say and support whatever he likes. That's included praising Michele Bachmann, opposing a bill to ban insider trading among members of Congress, and constantly annoying progressive Democrats, for fun.

Give Lieberman some credit. The only peep out of him on this convention issue is this quote: “This is one of the benefits of being an Independent -- you don’t have to go to either convention.”

So, he doesn't sound as though he even wants to go to one of the conventions. He's also pointedly declined to endorse a presidential candidate, which is the most basic prerequisite for any kind of role at any kind of convention. So why are we pretending this is some sort of snub?

I'm guessing it's because everyone is bored.

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The folks behind Secure America Now -- a neoconservatve 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization dedicated to giving you a bunch of irrational anxiety attacks between now and Election Day -- brings us this new ad, complaining that the Obama administration hasn't been Dick Cheney enough in their pursuit of terrorists. This comes despite the fact that by many accounts, the Obama administration has exceeded Cheneyism in ways that even trouble writers at the National Review. (In case you've missed out on current events, the Obama White House has this super-cool club that meets on Tuesdays to decide who shall be killed to death, with drones. These occasions are literally called "terror Tuesdays," in the same way that your kids' high school cafeteria has "taco Tuesdays.")

"Ugh, whatevs!" thinks the lady in this new ad, as she smashes her laptop shut and then does the whole, "Oh, hey, I didn't see you there! Do you have time for an impotent rant about how scared I am?"

This bedraggled suburban lady is terribly aggrieved at the way the Obama administration briefly wanted to try terrorists in (the vastly more effective) civilian courts. Also, President Obama wanted to close Guantanamo and stop torturing people, as recommended by General David Petraeus, one of those "generals on the ground" to whom Commanders-in-Chief are perpetually supposed to be listening.

This might be the only ad you'll ever see that complains aloud, "He shut down the black sites!" This both presumes the formerly CIA-run torture farms were a) preferable and b) actually shut down -- as the Associated Press reported back in April of 2011, the shuttered network of secret prisons ran by the CIA were replaced by a network of secret prisons run by the military's Joint Special Operations Command. This was by design -- as Scott Horton reported for Harper's, "Recall that when Barack Obama was inaugurated, he issued an executive order designed to shut down secret prisons. When the order was finally released, initially expansive language had been narrowed to cover only secret prisons run by the CIA."

But, hey, one shouldn't let facts get in the way of some good old-fashioned fearmongering.

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