Mitt Romney has made a lot of self-inflicted errors in this campaign. Sure, other recent failed campaigns have also tripped over their own feet: McCain had the “fundamentals of the economy” and his idea about suspending his campaign, while Kerry had the “voted for it before I voted against it” failure on Iraq.

But Romney has been screwing up since the primaries. Touching Rick Perry during a debate, making the $10,000 bet, talking about firing people, talking about not caring about the poor — it’s just been flubtastic.

People look at this and his success and wonder how he made a quarter billion plus dollars. But if you look at what Romney was doing when he made many of those flubs, and particularly his recent denigration of 47% of American voters, I think you see a pattern emerge.

I bet when Romney was in private industry he was pretty good at flattering people. Romney, throughout his time in politics – as a Senate candidate, a gubernatorial candidate, and twice now as a Presidential candidate – gets in trouble when he tries to tell the people in the room what he thinks they want to hear.

This works in business. People like that. They’re more likely to invest in you, sign a deal, allow you to purchase their company, if you just tell them something they want to hear. It’s very seductive to have someone in a position of power with a lot of money lean over and whisper in your ear and tell you sweet nothings.

When Romney was in that room with his big ticket donors he was trying to get into their pockets and purses. So you assume its just you and them, you get relaxed, and you trash half of America. It’s just between us, after all. We’re smarter than them. We’re not dependent like them, I’m appealing to people like… you and I, right?

That’s what Romney was doing. That’s what Romney’s always done. When he needed to be a Massachusetts moderate, that’s what he was. When he needed to be a “severe conservative” to woo Republican primary voters, he was that too.

With his big ticket donors he needed to be Mr. 1%, denigrating the 47% hordes. Now that he’s caught he’s got to keep guys like Limbaugh and Hannity in his corner, so he’s Mr. Social Darwinian.

When you’ve got no core convictions and you don’t really know why you’re running for president, all you’ve got is the idea of running for president and winning. So you say what you need to say to win, and wish for the best.

The problem is, when you run for President, this stuff sticks. It’s not just on to the next factory to load up on debt and fire the union guys. People notice you say different things when you think you aren’t being listened to. They notice that you conduct yourself in a different manner for different audiences. They realize you’re inauthentic, craven, and even for a politician you’ve got a little too much naked ambition.

And then you lose.

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For a bunch of people who have acted as if they are Constitutional scholars since America elected a black, Democratic president, conservatives have shown a stubborn ignorance of just what the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution means.

First a refresher of the text:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

As amendments to historically consequential documents go, it’s amazingly simple. Within very wide parameters, the government cannot regulate your speech. This includes the exercise of religion, actual speech, the press, the right to assemble and protest (like those Tea Party rallies conservatives don’t seem to hold anymore) and the right to petition the government.

There are, occasionally, challenges to this concept in one form or another – Bong Hits for Jesus, Citizens United – but the concept has stayed in place mostly unchanged for over 220 years.

So why are conservatives so confused now? Witness formerly influential conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds – who is a law professor for Christ’s sake – calling for Obama’s resignation because he condemned the anti-Islam video. Others are claiming that White House communication with Google over the video is somehow a death knell for free speech.

These are the same people who insisted that protests against advertisers bankrolling Rush Limbaugh’s misogyny were somehow against free speech.

Except — we’ve got no government actions here to squelch speech. We don’t have a rehash of the Alien & Sedition Acts, or past U.S. government offenses that were in retrospect actual violations of the Constitution.

You have – to varying degrees – representatives of the government voicing their disagreement with some speech. But both President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have made quite clear that in America we don’t have the power nor interest in using the government to censor speech.

It’s just not what we do.

So why the conservative freak out? In addition to America having a black, Democratic president, there’s a good chance now that America will re-elect that black, Democratic president. In large part this is thanks to the dud of a candidate the Republican party has selected yet again.

With a month and a half left to go, the right is not where it wants to be. The economy isn’t hurting Obama to the point of disqualification and the first major foreign policy test in a long while has shown their candidate to be almost as panicked and erratic as their last nominee.

Things aren’t going well, so now we have the hysteria induced by a poor understanding of our Constitution.

Quick, everyone panic.

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In case you wondered for a second that the right could try to value country over party for a minute or two, we were reminded where their priorities lie after Fed Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced the third quantitative easing program.

While some of them expressed concerns that it might not work, the biggest fear in the wake of a 200 point bounce in the Dow, was that enacting the policy so close to November could improve the economy which by the way means Obama could benefit politically.

As others far more versed in this have explained, QE3 is something of a gamble, and Bernanke himself said it couldn’t do a whole lot on its own to rev up the economy. That said, they’re trying something.

The idea here is you should hope for the best for these things, never mind who is in the White House. The global economy may have reached near-collapse on Bush’s watch and as a result of conservative-leaning economics, but I’d much rather have global and American prosperity rather than something I can say “a-ha!” to Republicans and conservatives over.

My loyalty to country always comes before the fact that I am a liberal or a Democrat, but as they showed us when they cheered America losing an opportunity to host the Olympic games, the prime directive for the right is Obama be damned, no matter what.

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Mitt Romney is currently in the process of losing the presidential election. Right now he trails President Obama in practically ever major national poll, including Republican-leaning ones like Rasmussen. The election map continues to narrow, with states like Pennsylvania and New Mexico slipping out of his grasp. It’s still close, but I don’t think he can win Ohio.

And then he stepped into it on Wednesday, making it even worse.

The embassy attacks were a 3AM call and Romney hit the snooze button. His hastily arranged press conference was all over the place, and rather than looking like a statesman in light of the death of an American ambassador, he came across as the guy behind in the presidential election desperate for a game-changer. It was a strange combination of McCain’s suspended campaign and picking Sarah Palin. One of Romney’s assets going into this campaign is that issues aside, he really does “look” like a President. That wasn’t the case today.

His party effectively left him out there to dangle. Rather than back him, many Republicans for a change realized that an attack on America isn’t a time to win a few points in swing states.

What hurts Romney even more is that we’re past the days of the public viewing Democrats as weak on these issues. While I would personally argue that that hasn’t been true since at least the Kosovo War, the presidency that got Bin Laden and many top Al Qaeda leaders will go a long ways towards cementing that in America’s minds. This used to be a gimme issue for the right. But Romney now has a foreign policy/national security deficiency that may be lower than Bill Clinton’s was in 1992.

Romney can’t afford to fumble national security. He’s already losing in an environment where he should be ahead. And then he gave in to the Bush-style cowboy diplomacy impulse and blew it.

I think it was enough to fatally wound his already injured candidacy.

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September 11, 2012 is the second time we have marked the anniversary of the worst terror attack in U.S. history since the death of Bin Laden.

His death at the hands of the U.S. military doesn’t do anything to bring back the lives of those who were lost, and it doesn’t restore the sense of security we lost on that day and the years after. But the death of Bin Laden and the continued apprehension and elimination of Al Qaeda terrorists is justice being served.

These men, and the people who help them, are evil in its most unadulterated form — the sort of malice that targets innocent people for no rational reason.

And justice has now been served against them, thank God.

Never forget.

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Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the 2012 Democratic convention is not the best speech he has ever given, but when you’re Barack Obama that is always a high bar to meet. By any standard it was a very good speech, laying out the way forward for his presidency while also highlighting his accomplishments.

I’ve always described myself as a “National Security Democrat.” It isn’t that I don’t think domestic policy is important — it surely is — it’s just that national security is a key element in America continuing to re-assert its leadership role in the world. For the bulk of the Bush presidency it was also the greatest single point of failure for America.

Difference on the key foreign policy issue of the time — the Iraq War — was key to my support of Obama back in 2007. His presidency hasn’t disappointed. Bin Laden is dead, Al Qaeda is smashed, and we are out of Iraq.

It’s amazing how the Republican party has effectively ceased to be of serious influence on national security. Their nominee was an Iraq War supporter and his entire group of advisors would be at home in the Bush regime, but at least John McCain had a strong (wrong) stance on these issues. Like everything else about him, Romney is just a Generic Republican.

Here’s President Obama from tonight:

In a world of new threats and new challenges, you can choose leadership that has been tested and proven.  Four years ago, I promised to end the war in Iraq.  We did.  I promised to refocus on the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11.  We have.  We’ve blunted the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over.  A new tower rises above the New York skyline, al Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and Osama bin Laden is dead.

Fact check: it’s all true.

That is why I voted for Obama. I agree with him on economics. I support his stances on social issues. But he promised and delivered on the safety of the American people. He put our eye back on the ball and made the right call. Like other Democratic presidents before him – Truman, FDR – Obama has shown that you don’t have to be a simpleton to address the threats to America and our allies. Sometimes complexity produces results. Sometimes the smart guy is the right guy.

We’ve learned again as a country how to use our heads to get this right.

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A VandeHarris Joint

The Democratic Convention in Charlotte isn’t even over yet, but some candidates are already working the playground in advance of the 2042 presidential election.

Democratic insiders say Timmy Godwin has already put out feelers to key donors and is quietly assembling his campaign team. “Timmy invited me to his tree fort,” a reliable source tells us, “and made me pinkie swear that I wouldn’t tell anyone about his campaign plans.”

Godwin is known in the Democratic party for his broad appeal to base voters. “Timmy always shares his juice box. He handed out gummy worms to the entire playground one time. That will be key,” another source close to Godwin told us.

The most likely rival for the Godwin camp is Jordan Belmont. Belmont has a reputation in kindergarten as a bit of a wonk. “Jordan went against his own party and said ‘not it’ when we were playing tag. It was kind of a game changer,” says Democratic strategist Suzy Kemp, age 6.

In the Republican camp, there is less of a consesus around the likely nominees. While Chuck Romney Bush IV has high name recognition, his role in last year’s Bunnygate could come back to haunt him.

Dave Monk has the power to get the base vote, according to some insiders, recounting a recent episode where Monk gave a detailed presentation on why “recess is socialist.”

Others cite Stewart Rennard’s innovative strategy to “build the dang fence” around the playroom which has been key to keeping out the boogeyman, though Democrats in the kindergarten class say they have “concerns” about the civil liberties implications.

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After all that time and money in Tampa, Republicans have left a major question unanswered: Why the hell is Mitt Romney running for President?

The “generic Republican candidate” continues to be just that. Just generic as heck, unable to articulate uniquely Mitt Romney vision of just what the heck he wants to do if he’s elected leader of the United States.

On the other hand, one of the bigger myths about Obama’s run in 2008 was that he simply mumbled the word “change” ten thousand times and was magically elected (some conservatives pushed a conspiracy that Obama used neuro-linguistic programming transmitted via TV in order to win).

In fact, Obama campaigned on an avalanche of substance. Sure, he wisely used his biography and oratorical skills to sell these ideas, but he offered detailed policies in the course of the election on issues ranging from health care to foreign policy to the economy. Obama also articulated the America he sought to lead: one that was more focused on the bottom and middle than the top, that conducted a humble but strong foreign policy, and an America just overall more in line with out traditional trajectory than the perversion of the Bush era.

With Romney, the right continues to play their version of the Kerry 2004 campaign. As a guy who hated George W. Bush, I can understand how partisans think that “not it” seems to be enough. They believe that Romney is generic enough as a Republican that their visceral hatred of Obama is enough to pull his robotic husk across the electoral finish line.

As a partisan who wants to be able to successfully vote for a two-term Democratic president for the second time (my first vote was for Clinton in ‘96), I’m okay with that. But as an American I find it lacking. I don’t want to just have the guy who I support versus the empty vessel on the other side. I want Mitt Romney to give us something, something real, something from the gut. He’s had his chance to tell us why he wants to run America, and the best he could seem to muster is “I have a lot of money and an equal amount of free time.”

Not good enough. Not good enough for America.

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Michael Jordan, at his height, in the playoffs. Michelangelo, painting the Sistine Chapel. Homer Simpson, pressing the button at the nuclear power plant. It is rare that you get to observe an expert at the top of their game, but today’s example of b.s. modern political journalism by Dan Balz in the Washington Post is a masterpiece that should hang in the Louvre of Excrement.

Balz is ostensibly writing a piece about the lack of bipartisanship during President Obama’s first term. An objective reading of the information at hand shows a Republican Party united since almost day one, clearly elevating the political upside of opposition over the benefit to America of being legislators first and Republicans second. The GOP has opposed Obama on stimulus, health care, taxes, debt, the deficit, foreign policy, national security, environmental issues, and judicial appointments — just to name a few things. They acted as if he was the first president to appoint czars, the first to address students on their first day of school, and on and on. Republicans responded to benign acts of the presidency by Barack Obama as if Hitler himself resided at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Balz knows this, and he reports it. But instead of laying out the facts and coming to a conclusion on them, he insists on going to Republicans to ask them how their opinion balances out the facts. Each section of the article lays out the issue, Republican intransigence, the Obama team’s habit of incorporating Republican ideas in order to attract Republican support (tax cuts in the stimulus, for instance), and instead of leaving the facts there each bit essentially also tells the reader “but Obama did not use his magical fairy dust that causes Mitch McConnell to care more about America than the Tea Party.”

Check this one out, from the health care fight:

The president and several of his top advisers met in the Oval Office with six senators from the Finance Committee, the crucial body attempting to develop a bipartisan health-care bill.

Many Democrats, including liberal activists, were losing patience with the committee and its chairman, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.). But at the beginning of August, Obama still held out hope that he could win Grassley’s support and that the Senate committee could move forward on a bipartisan basis.

According to several people who were in the room that day, Obama posed a question to Grassley. If the White House were to agree to changes in the bill, was he in a political position to lend his support? Grassley said no.

“You realized at that point, yes, we had sort of crossed the Rubicon,” said Robert Gibbs, White House press secretary at the time. “Regardless of what we came up with, they just weren’t going to be for it.”

Grassley explains his decision differently, based on the experience of the stimulus debate. Obama “said to me would I be willing to be one of two or three Republicans to vote with Democrats to get health care passed,” Grassley said. “I said in front of the president and the other five senators, no. . . . I said no because this isn’t the premise that I went to the negotiating table with with Baucus. We were trying to get broad bipartisan support.”

So on one hand, what happened in the room according to multiple witnesses to the event. On the other hand, here’s what Chuck Grassley thinks. In Washington journalism, this is “fair and balanced,” but in the real world it’s best known as complete crap.

Journalists like Balz write junk like this because our media ecosphere is still not set up to reward honest assessments and the objective truth. As I predicted earlier, journalists really can’t take the heat of being so-called “truth vigilantes” because telling their readers/viewers/listeners the objective truth they obtained through investigation is:

1. Hard to do. At least harder than just cutting/pasting from a press release.
2. Not worth the hassle of being called out by Rush Limbaugh/Fox News/The Right-Wing echo chamber. There are emails, voicemails, the whole kit and caboodle (trust me, I’ve seen it first hand).

So the response mechanism here is to balance the objective reality with Opinions Of Important People. I’d similarly argue that I don’t get the point of quoting interviews with Democrats like David Axelrod or Rahm Emanuel in the story either. The actual actions of congressional Republicans are far more damning than what Axelrod or Emanuel — partisan Democratic activists and elected officials — think about those actions. I don’t need Axelrod to tell me that Mitch McConnell marshaled opposition to the Heritage Foundation’s health care plan… because he did.

I’m sure after Balz and his editor got to the final draft of this story they probably congratulated each other on a fair and balanced and well-reported piece. But what they’ve actually done is given us a master class in how access reporting sacrifices fact in favor of forced objectivity to give us poor journalism, and as a result a poorer republic.

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A few of the media outlets covering the election are breaking from the pack and becoming truth vigilantes. These dangerous mavericks are actually checking campaign claims against reality and rendering a verdict. If you are part of a Republican campaign or one of its defenders this is a bad thing.

So we’ve got the conservative pushback against fact checkers, because the most evil bias in the world is of course searching for the truth. This isn’t the world the right wants. They’ve laid the groundwork for the last 4 plus decades for an ecosystem in which all issues have two sides, objective facts be damned. For the media to note without equivocation that “water is wet” is a clear violation of the conservative-generated rules. The press must couch such assertions as “many Democrats and liberals say that ‘water is wet’” is the preferred construction. That way, Republican and conservative news consumers can simply dismiss what used to be objective fact as “Democrat talking points,” then turn to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to fill their thinkholes with ignorance juice.

The Romney campaign is a pioneer in post-truth. Even the Bush effort to massage the evidence for war in Iraq bothered to attach their lies to some kind of underlying truth. The McCain campaign also shaded the truth, but connected it – tangentially – to real things. No such compulsion for Romney-Ryan. They just make up positions and assert them as reality, whether that’s lying about an Obama initiative or pretending there are details to their one-page policy proposals that aren’t actually there.

I’m a pessimist about these sort of things, so I don’t expect for the media’s fact checking jones to last much longer beyond the next right-wing hissyfit. But it is worth noting that which side in our political discourse has fully embraced the idea that there is no objective reality or truth.

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