Weigel

October 2012: Greta Van Susteren excitedly posts a new press release from Team Romney.

Mitt Romney today announced the support of former Denver Broncos quarterback and NFL Hall of Famer John Elway.

October 2008:

"I know a thing or two about comebacks," said Elway, famous for his fourth-quarter heroics, in introducing McCain this morning to several thousand raucous partisans in a sports arena here.... Elway said he was absolutely confident McCain could stage his own fourth-quarter comeback. "Until we get to that vote November 4, I don't care what the polls say," he said, saying the race was closer than the polls suggest. "I think he needs a field goal," Elway said. "That's all he needs. He needs a field goal."

September 2004:

John Elway's appearance at a campaign rally for President Bush Tuesday wasn't his first venture into the political spotlight, but it may have been his most prominent.

And yet this leads the Drudge Report, for some reason.

Belatedly we notice that Greg Sargent's been patiently explaining why Obama's otherization of Romney stings so damn much.

Gallup notes that more think middle income Americans will be better off in four years if Obama is reelected than if Romney becomes president, 53-43. All of this suggests the 47 percent remarks — which are airing in a brutal Obama ad in the swing states — continue to take their toll on Romney.

“The thing that people are always inclined to believe about him is that his economic policies will help the wealthy get richer,” Geoff Garin, the pollster for the Obama-allied Priorities USA, told me the other day. “The 47 percent comment falls much more in the category of confirmation rather than revelation.”

Over in Politico, former Rep. Tom Perriello goes for the same point. "Rural, white men, they don’t like Romney," he said. “That’s not a demographic shift, that’s as old school Virginia as they get." You read this, and you think of the way Republicans talk about Barack Obama's various associations. Dinesh D'Souza takes it for granted that Obama is a socialist who makes decisions that'll weaken America, and looks at his biography to explain this. Obama, Priorities USA et al give voters Mitt Romney's biography, and expect voters to take for granted that he'll redistribute their wealth to the rich. They never convinced enough voters than Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush was doing this. Finally, they win a "character" battle.

Molly Ball files from Ohio's coal country, whose TV stations are being steadily enriched by "war on coal" ads from the Romney campaign. She finds voters who, demographically, probably should go for the Republican candidate. Darn it, though. They just can't bring themselves to like him.

The Obama ad is called "Not One of Us," and that was another theme of my conversations with voters about Romney. (It's an insidious title -- can you imagine Romney making an anti-Obama ad called "not one of us" without getting shouted down for implicit racism?) Those opposed to Obama cited various reasons, from disappointment to anger to being convinced he's a Muslim. But the impressions of Romney were remarkably consistent: He's for the rich.

"I think Obama's more for the regular working class people, and Romney's for the big business and the well-to-do," said Eric Burkhead, the road and cemetery superintendent for Kirkwood Township, working on a truck in the gravel driveway of the local garage. The 66-year-old didn't like what he saw happening with coal and wasn't wild about Obamacare, but he planned to vote for Obama.

We hear a lot about "otherization" -- I mean a lot, proportionately, because it's not really a word -- in the context of Republicans attacking Barack Obama. But the stunningly successful class warfare that's hurting Romney is surely a kind of otherization. Obama and liberal PACs have been relentlessly telling voters that Romney isn't like them. Voters, who had already kind of decided that Obama isn't like them, either, buy into it. The get-Romney strategy was telegraphed more than a year ago, in a Politico story about Obama's goal of exploiting his rival's "weirdness." At the time, the Romney campaign basically trolled back, accusing Obama advisers of exploiting Romney's religion -- Mormon = "weird." But Obama and Democrats haven't even touched the religion stuff. (Remember the freak-out over one lone Democratic activist who posted on the Obama campaign site about Mormonism? That's how rare this is.) They've focused on Romney, the uncaring cartoon character. And it worked, somehow! Or it will work, pending the debates.

Ohio's full of Democrats trying to pull this off. Check out Sen. Sherrod Brown's hit on Josh Mandel, which both makes a substantive scandal argument while exploiting Mandel's youthfulness and his colleagues' bro-ishness... and ends with Brown's chewed-gravel rumble of a voice.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- I got into this area at 6:45 local time on Sunday. The car radio went on. I flipped through my options. Suddenly I heard the familiar voice of "Kris," taking calls about voter ID laws. Was it Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach? Indeed, it was. Kobach, the Bush DHS veteran who has helped Arizona and Alabama write strict immigration laws, has a two-hour radio show in which constituents can call in and vent.

And boy, do they vent. "Voter ID, it's just a tool for them use," said one caller. "It's divide and conquer. They want all their people watching MSNBC and CNN and say, oh, did you see that Republicans don't want you to vote!"

"Yeah," said Kobach, who described his 2010 campaign for SOS as a way to fight ACORN. "They're trying to rile up the base by creating a paper tiger."

Over the course of an hour, I heard one semi-skeptical call and a bunch of "God bless you"-type encouragement. One caller suggested that John Roberts had become a modern Pontius Pilate, and that other courts might take a dive and defend Obama because Roberts had done so. Kobach didn't agree, but wondered whether "the Justice Department might be boldened by the Chief Justice's accomodation, and willingness to keep Obamacare afloat." Another caller beseeched Kansans to vote for Romney, even though their state seemed safe GOP. Kobach agreed.

"It's got to be not just a Romney victory, but a landslide," he said. "If we have another four years of Obama, let me tell you, the quality of the judiciary will change. If he gets four more years of judicial appointments, oh, help us. It's going to be horrible, and our Constitution's going to suffer, because you need originalists."

Near the end of the show, a caller asked Kobach for an update. What was happening with those challenges of Barack Obama's eligibility for office? Could the president pass the Kansas citizenship test?

"He presumably could," said Kobach. "I assume he's got a passport. We've seen his birth certificate on the web, so he's got one of those. Yeah, he could certainly qualify as a U.S. citizen. I don't think he'd be coming to Kansas any time soon to vote, but we'd be happy to make him prove his citizenship to register."

I'd tried so hard to ignore the latest of the Obama conspiracy theories. As Michelle Goldberg writes, it's "tempting to ignore Dreams From My Real Father because it’s so preposterous." The documentary, by Joel Gilbert, claims that Barack Obama was sired by Frank Marshall Davis -- a bowlderization of Obama's actual relationship with Davis, a Communist poet whom his grandparents sought out as a mentor for the young future president.

Like the best Obama conspiracy theories, the pretense is that the president is hiding something in plain sight. In Dreams From My Father, Obama makes many references to "Frank." The "old poet" tries to convince his mentee that white America will find a pathetic little role for him if he tries to compromise with it. "They'll train you so good," says Davis, "you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opporunity and the American way and all that shit."

In our reality, Davis was a radical voice who influenced the young Obama. The president's admitted that. In the "Real Father" universe, Davis's hammer-and-sickled DNA turned Barack Obama into a Communist agent, and hey, maybe one of the women in Davis's nude photos was the future president's mom! Never mind that 1) she wasn't, and 2) when Obama Jr was born, Davis was 56 years old, 29 years older than Barack Obama Sr. In the "Real Father" universe, obviously, this guy must have shacked up with 18-year-old Ann Dunham, because if you put a picture of Obama next to one of Davis it looks like a lame version of an old Spy magazine "Separated at Birth" sidebar.

Like I said: The kind of thing you should be able to safely ignore. Except that a mystery donor is helping Gilbert ship DVDs to swing states.

Gilbert claims that more than a million copies of Dreams From My Real Father have been mailed to voters in Ohio, as well between 80,000 and 100,000 to voters in Nevada and 100,000 to voters in New Hampshire.

There's even a video of the DVD being printed en masse, to prove this.

Funny thing: The comment section for the video is starting to attract Ohioans who got the DVD and tossed it. "Thanks for the free DVD, moron!" says one of them." I'm passing it around family and friends here in Ohio, and it's like Mystery Science Theater." Says another: "I'm in Ohio and just received 3 of these DVDs in today's mail. And they are going directly in the trash. Well done."

Could hundreds of thousands of Ohioians get these unsolicited DVDs, watch them, and decide that new questions about Barack Obama's DNA make them suddenly hate the auto bailout. Anything's possible! But I'm reminded of another 2004 campaign to convince Ohioans. In 2004, the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper asked readers to send letters to Clark County, the best bellwether in the state of Ohio. It was an unmitigated disaster.

As Jack Bianchi, managing editor of local paper the Springfield News-Sun said of the letters: "At the end of the day you get two responses."

And the main one, he ventured, was a "direct result of the 'Guardian Effect' - a 3% turnaround in the vote from the 2000 to 2004 election.

"Republican party county chairman Dan Harkins thinks they lost it for John Kerry," he told the BBC.

Mr Harkins, however, has said the paper did not cause a xenophobic reaction, but did mobilise people by reminding them of the election's importance. The state enjoyed a higher than normal 76% turnout.

Voters who weren't inclined to agree with the patronizing advice got pissed off and remembered to vote. As my colleague Sasha Issenberg reports in The Victory Lab, any little reminder of an upcoming election is likely to drive up turnout, irrespective of what it says. Imagine the swing voter who likes Obama personally, isn't sure about how to go, and gets a DVD telling him to be scared of the president because his real dad was a Communist. Does that flip him over to Romney? Or does it have the precise opposite effect?

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- I'm in this state for a few days before I head on to the first presidential debate in Denver. Lots of driving, lots of interviews, possibly a little bit less blogging. Be warned; be prepared.

And read the transcript of Paul Ryan on Fox News Sunday, where, in the space of 30 seconds, he refers to a "consensus" that he has backed away from, and says he can't explain how his tax plan is revenue neutral because "it would take me too long."

RYAN: And every time we've done this, whether it was Ronald Reagan working with Top O'Neill, the idea is from Bowles-Simpson commission on how to do this. There's been a traditional Democrat and Republican consensus lowering tax rates by broadening tax rates works, and you can.

WALLACE: But I have to --

RYAN: Let me just -- let me just --

WALLACE: You haven't given me the message.

RYAN: Well, I don't have the -- it would take me too long to go through all of that, but let me say it this way. You can lower tax rates by 20 percent across the board by closing loopholes and still have preferences for the middle class for things like charitable deductions, for home purchases, for health care.

Lori Montgomery writes that Paul Ryan prefers to build "an emerging consensus on tax reform and Medicare reform" to compromise. Well, yeah. But the drama I'm interested in occurs if the election ends up the way the polls suggest it'll end up -- President Obama, re-elected with Ryan's home state in his pocket, and Ryan in the position to either run for president himself or work on tax reform.

Eli Lake gets the talking points behind the administration's early "terrorism? What terrorism?" analysis of the Benghazi attack.

Shikha Dalmia sees unions turning the campaign for collective bargaining into a ballot initiative. Remember how well that worked in Ohio, compared to how poorly the message worked in Wisconsin, when "save collective bargaining" was part of the campaign against Scott Walker generally.

This morning, NPR reporter Sonari Glinton ran a story about the battle for the coal vote in southeastern Ohio and talked to one of the Democrats trying to separate himself from Barack Obama. Charlie Wilson, a two-term Democrat who lost in 2010, is trying to beat Rep. Bill Johnson, in part, by talking up his vote against cap and trade and his support for the coal industry. After running some of the GOP's messaging against Obama -- "fire Obama," "war on coal" -- Glinton quoted Wilson, sarcastically mocking the slogans.

"We don't need to fire Obama and we don't need to stop the war on coal," says Charlie Wilson, the Democrat running for Congress in Ohio's 6th Congressional District. He says one thing he and his opponent, Republican Rep. Bill Johnson, agree on is coal.

Within hours, the NRCC grabbed that quote and turned it into a short audio clip, implying that the comment wasn't sarcastic and Wilson really meant this. I asked Wilson's spokesman J.R. Starrett if the clip was fair.

"Is this real?" he asked. "It's the farthest thing from the truth. Charlie has fought against both administrations, both the Bush administration and the Obama administration in the battle for coal. We were just at a forum this afternoon where Congressman Johnson said he and Charlie have the same position on coal."

So I suggested to NRCC spokesman Paul Lindsay that the Wilson quote was probably sarcastic. "I never said we were FactCheck," said Lindsay.

As a Sarcastic-American, I'm hoping that re-interpreting wry comments as deadly serious comments isn't some new campaign trend.

UPDATE: I ran the clip by Glinton, too. "When he said that to me," said Glinton, "he said it clearly to mock the ads."

Earlier this week, MSNBC's Morning Joe panel was subjected to a video of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan rallying in Ohio. Nobody much cared about the original Romney clip. What went viral -- oy, that word -- was Joe Scarborough's reaction. The former Republican congressman, an arbiter of all things partisan and non-partisan, buried his head in his hands as Romney appeared to try, and fail, a "Romney-Ryan!" call and response.

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But The Blaze has been investigating the video, asking why people at the rally didn't seem to remember a lame Romney #fail.

“I … [was] near the front of the crowd and Paul Ryan had just finished speaking,” Michele Jewett of Carlisle, Ohio, told TheBlaze in an email.

“He introduced Governor Romney and handed the microphone to him. Gov. Romney said, ‘What about that Paul Ryan’ and the crowd immediately started chanting, ‘Romney, Romney‘ not ’Ryan, Ryan’ like the closed captioning on the MSNBC video stated,” she adds.

Indeed, the MSNBC closed captions claims the was crowd chanting “Ryan!“ when attendees say they were actually chanting ”Romney!” Obviously, this changes a lot about the situation. Instead of awkwardly inserting his name into what sounds like a failed chant, Gov. Romney was actually including his running mate in a crowd chant of his own name.

I'm an MSNBC contributor, but I'm not speaking on anyone's behalf when I say: Yeah, what happened? I've asked, and I'll post any response that I get. But my milquetoast theory is this: Video ain't perfect, and the mics didn't pick up the crowd noise. See if you recognize this video.

Wait, no, you've probably seen the video from this angle.

If you miked the crowd you heard people screaming along with Dean, egging him on from state to state. No crowd noise, and he sounded like a crazy person. I'm blaming the same audio issue here. Romney had an excited crowd, it didn't come across on video, and the current, rote "lame Romney" narrative led people to mock him without checking other angles and audios.

UPDATE: A statement from the show:

This story is an attempt to generate a false controversy. The tape clip was untouched and was played as it was recorded. The panel was responding to Romney's playful response and having fun with it. Joe and the gang apologize for making people laugh in the morning.

Should've said, the conspiracy theory du jour is that the network actually doctored the tape to make Romney sound worse. But it looks like a pure sound issue.

Without tracking every bend and break in the race, I assumed that Rep. Allen West won a second term in Congress when he switched from a Democratic-leaning district to an adjacent swing seat. His opponent, Patrick Murphy, is a first-time candidate who's competitive because his father -- who founded the company Murphy works at -- bankrolls a Super PAC that runs anti-West ads. It's a bit of a mismatch.

Case in point:

How do you lose the resume battle to someone who retired during the threat of a court martial? This is how. To be fair, all of West's ads are this Michael Bay'd-up and intense.

Biden's unpopularity remains a mystery to me. Who doesn't like the goofy guy who can dime-turn into a schmaltzy story? But a poll's a poll.

A Bloomberg News National Poll released Wednesday has Bush receiving a favorable rating from 46 percent of those surveyed and an unfavorable rating from 49 percent. That’s compared to Romney’s 43 percent favorable and 50 percent unfavorable.

Bush also fared better than Vice President Joe Biden (42 percent favorable, 45 percent unfavorable) and the Republican Party as a whole (41 percent favorable, 46 percent unfavorable).

Two things. On: Bush, like his father, has avoided politics entirely since leaving the White House. He endorsed Mitt Romney in a statement. To find a picture of the two men together, you have to go back six or seven years. How much of this is necessity, given that Bush probably wants Republicans to win and knows that he can't help them? We can't know. But no Bush has spoken at a Republican convention unless he was seeking the presidency or vice presidency. If you stay out of the ring, people eventually stop associating you with politics. Pretty basic.

Two: Why don't more people think that Romney can fix this problem with one good debate? True, being the more soothsaying debater on a stage with Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry isn't the same thing as out-charming Obama. But Romney's in much the same position that John Kerry was four years ago, a dopey caricature who had a wash-out of a convention speech. How many of the people who don't like Romney now can warm to him if he comes off normal onstage with Obama?