But if three years ago you had told me that the October unemployment rate would be in the high 7s and (slowly) dropping, that growth would be very slow but positive, and that gas would be between three and four dollars, I would have said I projected a narrow Obama win unless the Republican candidate was really well suited to the moment (I think Bob McDonnell, Mitch Daniels and Bobby Jindal would have been in slightly different ways. Debate aside, I still don’t think Romney is the guy. It isn’t really a prediction, just a best guess that I hope is wrong.

Carl, with me the effect comes and goes. The first twenty minutes were brutal. But they were probably intended to be. He was trying to get the audience not to listen. But when he was talking Medicare and health care policy he was a lot easier to listen to. His answers could have been tighter and, if you listen closely there sounds like an implied argument for Soviet agriculture, he made a case for the centralized finance of health care and an argument against the Ryan-Wyden version of premium support.

You’re quite reasonable about this. Want a wilder theory?

There’s something about the man’s discourse that dissolves into mush once the mind has been subjected to it too many times. It takes liberal minds, potemkin moderate minds, and real moderate minds longer than conservative minds, but eventually for everyone, Obama winds up sounding like Charlie Brown’s teacher. Even the lies and the arrogance no longer tickle the passions of the hearer, so par for the course they become. An irreversible process.

But, so far, the fundamentals have remained the same: If Romney wins ALL the states that are currently the softest, Colorado, Iowa, Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, he will still fall 5 EV short of an electoral victory. With all this, Romney has to win both Nevada and New Hampshire to win. Of these, he is leading only in North Carolina.

This translates into a popular vote shift of about 5-6% for a win. Why so high? Because a 2% shift in New York, California, or Illinois will not help him in the least.

I mentioned that by Thursday we would know who won this week’s news cycle and it clearly was Romney. Monday should tell us what % of popular vote shift he has gained. He needs a shift of 1.5% to stay level. Anything less and he has lost ground.

He has three more news cycles to go.

Curiously, Lehrer seemed to be doing that. As it turns out, President Obama had a 4-minute advantage at the end of the debate.

See, e.g., http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/03/politics/debate-main/index.html:

“Moderator Jim Lehrer of PBS, at times, tried without success to keep the candidates within time limits for responses, especially Obama, who ended up speaking four minutes longer than Romney.”

Lets say you lean Obama, but you are professionally vested in the importance of what I denigrate broadly as “copyright”. (say you are a debate coach)…do you say, Romney has respected my “culture” and my profession, while Obama has brought dishonor?

What if the “undecideds” or the independents are just a bunch of sophisticated “micro”-cultures/trends, more vested in certain broad forms and structures of intellectual property…commited to the pagentry/business of the whole thing so to speak? What if the Obama bubble got so big in 2008, because we had a lousy economy, and everyone wanted a narrative to prop up narratives, copyright and trademark for copyright and trademark sake. History for the sake of the history major? You bother actually investing/wasting time in what constitutes objective criteria of debate performance… you sort of have to defend that “trademark” (the brand of the good, the good being the objective methodology)…even if it means voteing for Romney over Obama.