It’s good to be back on the Central Coast, and back to my iMac, which seemed to whisper to me as I booted it up: I warned you not to rely on that virus-plagued laptop.

Anyway, here are some final items of a reasonably active day:

* Romney rally in Sarasota spurs clashes, some very physical, between Move On and Occupy folk versus Mitt-supporting Tea Types. Lotta photos available from BuzzFeed.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates argues eroding respectability of racism making dog whistles harder to make and hear. Hope he’s right.

* Israeli paper reports U.S. warning Israeli government of destructive impact on treaties with Egypt and Jordan that would ensue from military strike against Iran.

* At Ten Miles Square, Aaron Carroll reports on startling out-of-pocket costs already being borne by Medicare beneficiaries.

* And at College Guide, Daniel Luzer reports on possible wave-of-dystopic-future development from California: for-profit schools targeting students being wait-listed by cash-strapped community colleges (designed as open-admissions institutions) encouraging them to earn credits while they wait for space.

And in non-political news:

* Jerry Sandusky now accused of being part of tri-state “child sex ring.” The horror just won’t stop.

Tomorrow I hope to confine blogging to one locale, or at least one state.

Selah.

Since I wrote about Sean Trende’s recitation of the case for predicting an Obama victory (conducted mainly by showing how things had changed since the beginning of the year) yesterday, I should note he’s performed a parallel exercise today in support of the strong possibility, at least, of a Romney comeback and victory.

I won’t go through it in detail, if only because it’s late in the day and you can read the whole piece at your leisure. But he places a lot of emphasis on (a) poll averages that do not indicate—at least yet—the kind of persistent Obama post-convention gains that are being shown by individual polls like yesterday’s bombshell from Pew and (b) a refutation of the “no one trailing in September has ever won” argument by counter-arguing that the late dates of the conventions this year are distorting the timeframe, making such comparisons premature. He also notes, accurately, that the marginally better economy is still only marginally better; that Team Mitt’s paid advertising blitz is just getting underway; and that the ultimate impact of Romney’s various gaffes may well be overstated, based on research concerning past gaffes.

Trende’s piece, along with yesterday’s, are useful reading for anyone bold enough to make hard predictions at this relatively early date. There’s not much doubt the last several weeks have provided a lot of good developments for Obama, but questions concerning how much any of them actually matter, and how actual voters absorb the “fundamentals,” provides enough suspense for me.

Greg Sargent calls attention today to a new study on the white working class from the Public Religion Research Institute that demonstrates two things of special interest in this election season. Here’s Greg’s succinct take:

On “dependency,” the study finds that large numbers of working class whites (46 percent) have received Social Security or disability payments over the last two years; more than a fifth have received food stamps; 19% have received unemployment.

Yet the study also finds that three quarters of working class whites believe poor people have become too dependent on government assistance. There’s obviously overlap there, which bears out what some have already pointed out — many of these voters simply won’t think Romney’s comments about the freeloading 47 percent, or about government “dependency” in general, are about them.

But the findings on “redistribution” are also revealing. White working class voters want to soak the rich, and they agree with key aspects of Obama’s views about capitalism and inequality.

So this demonstrates what we’ve all sort of figured out: this category of voters, considered “swing” (though leaning heavily Republican in recent cycles) is open to criticism of Romney, his record, and his agenda; but also to Romney’s more ham-handed efforts to get them to focus on people receiving “welfare” or who are otherwise deemed “dependent on government.”

More colloquially, their attitudes indicate they are willing to “kick up” at the undeserving rich and “kick down” at the undeserving poor. The question is which they decide to do, which is itself a function of which candidate and party is deemed more interested in middle-class prospects. Anyone watching the presidential campaign ads this year will have noticed a real battle on that front.

As Mitt Romney continues to flop in the verbal net of his own devising, the New York Times’ John Harwood produces a useful and entertaining list of the “top ten verbal misfires” by presidential candidates over the last half-century or so.

Most are famous and familiar, and range from Mitt’s father’s “brainwashing” comment back in 1968 to John McCain’s sunny comments about the “fundamentals” of the U.S. economy in 2008.

You can peruse the list yourself; all I’d add is that there is continuing controversy about whether any of these items had the kind of impact Harwood suggests. George Romney’s may be the clearest case, since his campaign went into an immediate death spiral from which it quickly expired. In a recent piece for the Washington Monthly, John Sides disputes another thought to be a killer, Gerald Ford’s Poland gaffe in 1976.

What most of them have in common, however, is that they illustrated a candidate characteristic or point of view already widely perceived, and widely perceived as damaging. And that could be how the Boca Moment is remembered down the road.

It’s been safe, not to say superstitious, to discount the occasional happy-talk from Democrats this year about the possibility of retaking control of the U.S. House. After all, GOPers were able to do some significant work via redistricting to strengthen the marginal seats they won in 2010, and with a very close presidential election, there’s only so much juice Dems could get from “over-exposure” of recently won seats and changes in turnout patterns (which regardless of the presidential horse-race numbers, naturally switch from strongly-pro-GOP in midterm elections to a much better situation for Democrats in presidential years).

But now comes Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium with a careful and credible analysis projecting that if the election were held today, Democrats would win back the House by a 16-seat margin.

The main issue with this analysis is that it does not use district-level data. In the coming weeks, those surveys will become more abundant. In 2008, district polls did a very good job of estimating the outcome - on Election Eve. Six weeks out, the generic ballot preference is the week-to-week indicator that is available….

It should be noted that current conditions emphasize the post-convention bounce, which could be transient. Conversely, if the Democratic lead increases, that would take House control out of the knife-edge territory that I defined previously.

Wow. November 6 is still more than six weeks away, and as Wang notes, generic ballot numbers are not always precisely predictive. But gotta ask, if you think conservatives are going to be insanely frustrated if Barack Obama is re-elected, how freaked out will they be if John Boehner has to hand the gavel back to Nancy Pelosi? Talk about blame-shifting and endless recrimination!

About to head to an airport to go home, so there will be a blogging gap at some point this afternoon. But here are some midday munchies to tide you along:

* TPaw leaves the Romney campaign a bit early to take lobbying gig. Maybe he’s pessimistic about election, maybe he doesn’t want minor Cabinet post.

* Claim that there’s a suspicious gap in MoJo’s Boca Moment tape shown to be spurious.

* Michael Mandel shows that real earnings for young college grads have dropped over 15% since 2000.

* WaPo reports Iran trying to create own version of Internet to increase information “security.” That ought to work real well.

* E.J. Dionne asks question of Romney that ought to be asked of all super-patriots who rage at half the population: Do you dislike America?

And in sorta non-political news:

* New unemployment claims down last week, but not by much.

Back maybe soon, maybe in a bit.

At TAP today, Jamelle Bouie nails a point I’ve been kicking around for a while: the connection between the GOP’s voter-supression drive and the very common conservative belief, reified by Mitt Romney in his Boca Moment, that “dependent” people are subverting democracy:

If you want a sense of what motivates the politicans and activists who push for voter identification laws, look no further than this quote from Pennsylvania State Representative Darryl Metcalfe:

“I don’t believe any legitimate voter that actually wants to exercise that right and takes on the according responsibility that goes with that right to secure their photo ID will be disenfranchised. As Mitt Romney said, 47% of the people that are living off the public dole, living off their neighbors’ hard work, and we have a lot of people out there that are too lazy to get up and get out there and get the ID they need. If individuals are too lazy, the state can’t fix that.”

As always, it’s worth noting the extent to which the “47%” meme has penetrated the right-wing consciousness. It’s why Romney immediately doubled-down on the statement; he’s echoing many conservatives when he says that Obama’s supporters are people who won’t “take responsibility for their lives.”

When it comes to Metcalf, he alludes to another view that has taken hold on the Right. Namely, that democracy requires independence from government benefits, and that self-governance is threatened when too many are “dependent” on federal aid. This isn’t a fringe belief; it was echoed by anchors on Bloomberg—who worried that the 47% will somehow subvert democracy by voting their financial preferences—and has its roots in the founding of the country.

Bouie then briefly reviews the common eighteenth- and nineteenth-century view that only white male property owners had the “independence” necessary for self-government, meaning the right to vote. And yes, it was a view generally accepted by the Founders before whom contemporary conservatives have recently been burning incense while demanding a strict and immediate return to their schemes of governance as divinely and permanently ordained:

The Founders were preoccupied with something called “republican virtue.” As they saw it, a democratic society required a citizenship with the ability to act with enlightened self-interest. For them, white male landowners were capable of achieving this state—Africans were subhuman, and women were governed by passions and sentiment.

While today’s conservatives have obviously upgraded their opinions of African-Americans and women, the notion that power in a democracy should vary proportionately to one’s “virtue” as measured by “success” (e.g., privately generated wealth) has survived almost intact. It’s reflected not just in voter suppression efforts and alarums about lucky duckies who don’t pay income taxes, but in all the idolatrous rhetoric about “job creators” that’s gone hand-in-hand with the revived idolatrous cult of the Founders. (I am using “idolatrous” in a theological, not rhetorical, sense, because idolatry is often what it is).

It’s an internally consistent point of view, all right, and a dangerous one.

A lot of this is just a frantic effort to generate some sort of counter-example to Mitt’s Boca Moment for the benefit of other conservatives and of MSM types looking for “balance,” but it’s striking how much wind is in the air today regarding “revelation” about Barack Obama’s words and deeds of the distant past.

Most prominently, of course, is the 1998 Obama speech that positively mentions “redistribution” (and also, in a section nobody on the Right is talking about, praises “markets” and “competition” and “innovation”), which Romney is talking about and will soon, I gather, be featured in ads. But we’ve also got a mammoth Washington Examiner “expose” of “Obama’s past” its reporters have been beavering away on for four months. And I guess you know that the Breitbartian wing of the wingnutosphere has as its foundation the belief that Obama’s past is the key to all his nefarious schemes to rob us all of our priceless birthright of freedom.

That all this digging around is being done for a Romney/Ryan ticket that exhibits vast amnesia about its own past words and deeds should be discussed a bit more often. At what stage of his ideological evolution or devolution or whatever you want to call it was Mitt Romney at in 1998 when state senator Obama was speaking at Loyola? I sure don’t know, other than being aware that this was after his fighting-Republican-liberal campaign against Ted Kennedy yet before his let’s-have-universal-health-insurance stint as governor. Do we need journalists to vet him a bit more?

And then there’s young Mr. Ryan, who would have us believe his famous 2005 speech at the Atlas Society’s “Celebration of Ayn Rand” was in a distant era, presumably before he became a student of St. Thomas Aquinas (just today the Catholic magazine America reported on un-transcribed portions of that speech which turn Ryan’s admiration of Objectivism into a practical agenda for dismantling the “collectivist” heritage of the New Deal).

In any event, it’s increasingly laughable for our friends on the Right to hold Barack Obama strictly accountable for everything he’s ever said (along with everything said by anyone he ever associated with), while Romney and Ryan shouldn’t be held accountable for what they’ve said the day before yesterday (or more accurately, in May, when Mitt played Boca). The Wayback Machine is not very friendly to their case.

As I’ve often observed, more nonsense is written about voter “enthusiasm” or the lack thereof than most any aspect of American politics. The need for it is cited as a justification for all sorts of polarizing political strategies and tactics that might or might not make sense otherwise, particularly negative advertising and catering (or to use the more loaded term, pandering) to organized identity or advocacy groups which are thought to be enthusiasm brokers.

It’s fairly well understood, of course, that highly visible efforts to generate partisan voter “enthusiasm” run the risk of backfiring by (a) repelling undecided voters and/or (b) helping the partisan enemy motivate its own troops. It seems less-well understood that any “enthusiasm” beyond that necessary to get voters to the polls is a costly waste. Part of the problem is that us Political Animals instinctively mistrust voters who aren’t as passionate about it as we are, and often tend to view “undecideds” as either stupid, ignorant or anti-social. So we tend to forget that “good” and “bad” voters have and should have equal weight.

Now and again, however, you have an election or a cycle in which opinion is so pre-polarized and the contending forces are so equal in size that “enthusiasm” is a much bigger deal than it usually is. We’re in one right now. And for all the disagreement (nicely summarized by TNR’s Nate Cohn today as “Gallup and Rasmussen v. the World”) about the exact status of the presidential horse-race, there’s broader agreement that the “enthusiasm gap” Republicans were counting on this year has disappeared or even been reversed.

That’s true even according to Gallup, whose polls (at least in the last few cycles) are usually an oasis of relative comfort for the GOP. A new analysis of voters in 12 “swing states” based on the latest Gallup/USAToday survey by Gallup’s Lydia Saad and Jeffrey Jones shows that the percentage of self-identified Democrats in these states calling themselves
“extremely” or “very” enthusiastic about this election has grown from 49% in June to 68% today; Republican “enthusiasm” over the same period has grown more modestly, from 52% to 62%.

Now in looking at this and other measurements of “enthusiasm,” which are all pretty much showing the same trends, it’s important to understand that this Democratic advantage or parity in willingness to vote is being measured prior to the application of much of Team Obama’s much-vaunted GOTV program. And while some GOTV efforts involve enthusiasm-boosting, GOTV is most basically understood as “harvesting” marginal voters, thus improving the “yield” beyond anything that you might predict from polls measuring “enthusiasm.” These GOTV efforts, moreover, are largely “under-the-radar,” which reduces the potential backlash from helping Team Mitt get its troops all lathered up. The ad-heavy pro-GOP strategy suffers from a relative lack of stealthiness, though presumably whatever early-voting and Election Day voter suppression plans the GOP has in store for us will be relatively stealthy and perhaps not that well comprehended until it’s too late.

I’m in no position at the moment to measure the actual quality of each team’s strategy and resources for getting “its” vote to the polls (or in the case of Team Mitt, of potholing the road to the polls in unfavorable precincts). But it does appear Democrats no longer need to worry about an “enthusiasm gap,” and that the Obama campaign’s decision so many moons ago to invest an unusual high percentage of its money in GOTV could now pay off big time.

In a presidential campaign development that appears to have been thrown off for a week or so by the candidate’s own past and present utterances, Team Mitt is allowing as how it might be a good time to let voters in on the secret of what the man would do to turn the economy around if he wins—you know, other than brightening the sky, emboldening investors, and making the world a more peaceful, stable place by his very presence. Here’s what they are saying according to an O’Keefe/Rucker rundown for WaPo:

“We do think the timing is right to reinforce more specifics about the Romney plan for a strong middle class,” Romney campaign senior adviser Ed Gillespie told reporters Monday, saying the campaign has reviewed polling data that suggests voters are eager to hear more details from the campaign about what policies Romney would adopt as president.

Gillespie called the shift “more of a natural progression” than a campaign overhaul.

“There are a lot of Americans out there who are just really starting to lock in and starting to look for more information and now is the time for us to provide that for them,” Gillespie said.

Mighty nice of them, eh? The Romney campaign has actually spent the months since the primaries fighting with fanatical determination against any discussion of the domestic agenda Mitt committed to in order to talk conservative activists into accepting him as the GOP nominee. Its official line, day after day and week after week, was that the election was not a choice of policy agendas, but instead a referendum on the failed economic leadership of Barack Obama. Hell, it got to where conservatives were as upset about this Chance the Gardner message as progressives.

So nobody’s really buying the argument that the Romney campaign has decided that in the fullness of time and the natural order of things, it’s time to dumb down Mitt’s policy brilliance for the handful of swing voters who don’t fall neatly into the maker or taker camp. He hasn’t closed the deal with those voters; he’s under constant attack from the left and the right for his Nixonian stealth about his intentions in office; and he obviously hasn’t been doing that well just winging it over the last couple of weeks.

But the important thing to understand now, as I tried to explain earlier in the week before the Boca Moment took over all discussions, is that the “five-point plan” the Romney campaign suddenly wants to talk about right now is a Potemkin Village version of the agenda he practically signed onto in blood during the primaries. Sure, the stuff about abandoning any regulation of the fossil fuel industry, evil as it is, is a real policy specific, I’ll give them that. So, too, in theory, is the proposal to turn federal K-12 education aid into “backpack vouchers” (you know, you strap the money on the kid’s back and it follows him or her wherever the parents say), though there are all kinds of slippery details that depend on varying state laws, and there is zero chance the campaign will get to that level of details. Beyond that, you’ve got all kinds of self-contradictory demagoguery about expanding trade while launching a global trade war, and then the real guts of the “five-point plan,” described breezily as (a) attacking the budget deficit and (b) reducing the burden of taxes and regulations on small businesses. These little simple-sounding items happen to represent the Ryan Budget and the vast restructuring of national priorities it would involve.

Some of you might remember a scene in the old movie Moonstruck where the Cher character is in a confessional, and tells the priest: “I used the Lord’s name in vain twice; I-slept-with-my-fiance’s-brother; and I bounced a check at the liquor store.” The priest says: “That’s not a sin unless it was deliberate…what was that middle part, again?”

Any voters wanting to understand the Romney agenda had better emulate that priest and instead of agreeing the evaluate the candidates in terms of where they stand on the Keystone XL pipeline or trade sanctions on China, ask some follow-up questions about what Romney and his party actually think we need to do to create a smaller government and make life easier for small businesses. It’s basically what conservative activists have wanted to do, in good economic times and bad, since 1964: take America back to those salad days before the New Deal and Great Society turned the country in a dastardly, European direction.

Paul Krugman made a point late yesterday that really ought to be emphasized: in describing 47% of the U.S. population as hopelessly dependent “takers” during his Boca Moment, Mitt Romney was actually being pretty generous as compared to now-routine GOP rhetoric on economic life:

Ask yourself: when was the last time a Republican leader made a point of praising hard-working, ordinary families — as opposed to “job creators”? Think about what happened on Labor Day: on a day dedicated to celebrating workers, House majority leader Eric Cantor sent out a tweet praising … business owners:

“Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.”

This all makes sense in the Ayn Rand intellectual universe, where a handful of heroically greedy entrepreneurs are responsible for all that is good. And if you live in that universe, your dividing line between makers and takers isn’t drawn at the point where people make enough to pay income taxes; everyone who isn’t John Galt should be grateful for what the Galts do, and we’re all takers by asking those heroes to pay any taxes at all.

Think about it. A large percentage of GOP economic policy thinking is based on the assumption that minimizing business costs is the alpha and omega of growth and competitiveness. Not only taxes and regulations, but also wages and benefits, need to be kept as low as possible. The whole idea of “human capital” being a national asset worth cultivating—a universally accepted notion in the 1990s—has all but been lost on the right.

Accordingly, if you don’t fall into the charmed circle of “job creators;” if you don’t own your own business, or have enough wealth to make significant capital investments; then your job, it appears, is to bear down, shut up, and do what you can to make life easier for your bosses. Abandon that union; stop asking for pay increases; gracefully accept that shift from defined benefit to defined contribution pensions, or from any pension to none; pay your taxes and stop worrying about the tax rates paid by your superiors—you’re lucky they pay them at all, given the fact you already owe them your daily bread, everything you own, and your very life.

It’s hard to figure out whether this attitudes is the product of a serious economic POV or just a long-building psychological backlash against “collectivism” by wealthy people who feel underappreciated and think they should enjoy a lot more wealth and freedom than is currently available to them. That their relative wealth has steadily increased for decades now, and has continued to increase even as all those wretched “takers” out there have been suffering through the worst U.S. economic calamity since World War II, seems immaterial.

So whatever else it represents, the Boca Moment provides a glimpse into the unsavory world view of people who look at their own employees, not to mention other folks with few capital assets, with what can only be described as contempt—as cannon fodder for the great competitive struggle in which they, the “job creators,” are the only fully human figures.

A while back I posted this for about 90 seconds and then took it down on a day when it turned out to be inappropriate. But now, after three days of watching battleground state ads, and with a very strong feeling about where the Romney campaign in particular is headed: here’s Lou Reed (in his brief blond phase) performing “Vicious” in Paris, 1974.

Interesting day if you like polling analysis, which as it happens I do. Here are some final items crossing the transom:

* Buzzfeed reports Boca Moment made front pages of 41 battleground state newspapers. If it doesn’t affect the race, it won’t be for lack of exposure.

* Scott Brown’s campaign has to put out statement reasserting his support for Romney after unhappy remarks about Boca Moment.

* Director of National Counterterrorism Center confirms deadly assault on Benghazi consulate was “a terrorist attack” with al-Qaeda involvement.

* At Ten Miles Square, Joshua Tucker provides hilarious Ted McCagg cartoon on what “the 53%” depend on.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer discusses the abolition of the journalism program at my alma mater, Emory University. They didn’t have one when I was there, which helps explain why I entered the profession very late.

And in non-political news:

* School lunches getting a makeover this year thanks to new USDA guidelines.

Time to end my laptop-hogging ways. Back bright and early tomorrow.

Selah.

In addition to the upcoming firestorm of negative ads, Team Mitt is also, of course, relying on some under-the-radar-screen hellfire aimed at stimulating maximum turnout by grassroots conservative foot-soldiers who are probably getting tired of Romney’s ambivalent attitude towards coming right out and telling the truth about the Kenyan Socialist Who Wants to Kill Babies and Persecute Christians.

I don’t know exactly what Rick Perry wants in a Romney administration, but he’s sure out there thumping the tubs, according to this report from RightWingWatch:

Texas governor Rick Perry spoke today on a conference call with extremist pastor Rick Scarborough as part of his “40 Days to Save America” campaign to motivate and organize Religious Right voters. Perry said that the separation of church and state, which he dismissed as a myth, is being used to drive “people of faith from the public arena.” Perry said that he believes Satan is using the “untruth” of the separation of church and state to remove Christians from public life: “The idea that we should be sent to the sidelines I would suggest to you is very driven by those who are not truthful, Satan runs across the world with his doubt and with his untruths and what have you and one of the untruths out there is driven—is that people of faith should not be involved in the public arena….”

Perry said that America is undergoing “spiritual warfare” and Religious Right activists who “truly are Christian warriors, Christian soldiers” need to stand up to “activist courts” and “President Obama and his cronies” whom he said are making “efforts to remove any trace of religion from American life.” He called on listeners to use such spiritual warfare against the “growing tide of secularism and atheism” that “preach[es] tolerance and diversity while they engage in oppression and bullying tactics.”

If there is a Christian Right buzzword and dog whistle Perry missed, I sure didn’t see it. Don’t know about you, but I feel spiritually stalked, and I go to church most every week.