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Thursday's VP debate in Louisville - Muhammad Ali's old home town - promises to be riveting TV, even if the absence of Sarah Palin means that, unlike in 2008, it's unlikely that the VP debate will outdraw the presidential debates for ratings. On the Republican side, expectations are running high: Paul Ryan is a master of verbal combat, and hopes are high that he can build on Mitt Romney's TKO of President Obama in the first debate. On the Democratic side, the pressure is on Vice President Biden to break the Romney-Ryan ticket's recent momentum. Here's what to watch for.

Who's Ready For Prime Time? Ryan has a long record of winning debates on the cable networks, disarming hostile interviewers and even dressing down the President face to face; he won't be shy about going after the VP. But a stand-up one-on-one debate with canned topics and time limits is a new format for him, and may not play to his strengths the way a more free-for-all format does, plus he needs to look presidential. Biden, on the other hand, is a highly experienced debater, a veteran of two presidential runs who came to the Senate during the Nixon years. But he may be rusty (as noted yesterday, Ryan has done 197 interviews since joining the ticket; Biden has done just a lone print interview in that time and hasn't answered questions on camera since the spring Meet the Press interview where he went off-script and ended up forcing President Obama prematurely to state a position on same-sex marriage). His propensity for gaffes and extravagant fabulism is legendary. And Biden will be 70 next month; he may not be as quick on his feet as he used to be. We'll get a sense early on of which of them is on their game.

Playing Two Different Games: Jonathan Last aptly describes Biden as "an asymmetric opponent" - i.e., he may not even try to engage Ryan on Ryan's turf of arguing on a macro level about the budget, taxes, the operation of entitlement programs and economic growth and competitiveness. Look for Biden to counter in two ways: go small, by emoting and telling individual voters' stories, and change the subject to social issues and foreign affairs (Ryan's no neophyte on the latter - he's been in Congress through the Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya wars and the many debates in between - but it's not his main area of expertise).

Ryan's district, and even his family, have often leaned Democratic, so he knows how to play on the turf of Biden's more-blue-collar-than-thou shtick. But he needs to stay on his message and not let Biden throw him completely off the subject of the unsustainable economic and fiscal picture under President Obama.

Bait and Switch? I referred to this in my preview of the first debate - Biden may well leave Ryan himself largely alone and force him to defend against personal and record attacks on Romney over his wealth, taxes, Bain, Romneycare, flip-flopping, etc. Then again, attacking the more conservative Ryan may be too tempting for Biden to pass up, especially if the Obama campaign sticks with its obvious view that this election is a base-turnout contest.

Tall Tale Time: Biden can also confound Ryan's intense preparedness on the facts by his facility for just plain making stuff up, as streiff has previously detailed. Bill Clinton may be the best liar in politics, but Clinton's lies - however brazen - were and are usually calculating enough that you could see them coming and try to prepare for them. Biden's a different animal completely; he gets rolling, and the next thing you know, the Germans have bombed Pearl Harbor. He makes up pure blarney with a free-flowing creativity that defies preparation, like this notorious piece of alternative history from his debate with Palin:

When we kicked -- along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, "Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don't know -- if you don't, Hezbollah will control it."

Now what's happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel.

If you're wondering when the U.S. and France joined forces to drive Hezbollah out of Lebanon, rest assured that you didn't miss something - nothing like that ever happened. But Biden's been in DC so long and says this sort of thing off the top of his head with such bravado, it could be easy for Ryan to miss the opportunity to debunk it if he's stuck scratching his head trying to figure out what Biden could possibly be talking about.

The Ghost of Biden Past: Biden has his own vulnerabilities, and Ryan may try to exploit them. Just in the past two weeks, we had Biden on the campaign trail saying that the middle class had been "buried" under Obama and that he and Obama were planning a trillion dollars in tax hikes after the election. There's also an under-exploited one, albeit a line that could be a double-edged sword: when Biden brags about getting Osama bin Laden, Ryan could drill him on the fact that Biden himself reportedly opposed the operation (the downside is that this makes the no-brainer decision sound like Obama actually had a hard choice to make), There's a much longer record there to work from, and while most of it seems like ancient history (especially since Biden's not the president), a choice shot or two at things Biden himself has said and done over the years could put him in an unaccustomed defensive posture.

Moderation In Moderation? Democrats were vocal after the first debate about Jim Lehrer's failure to protect Obama from Romney - and himself - by (1) not cutting off the candidates when their answers ran long and (2) not asking tough followups to Romney. There will be intense pressure on moderator Martha Raddatz to go after Ryan, or at least cut him off. My own view is that the main jobs of a debate moderator are to prevent the candidates from interrupting each other, ask questions pointed enough to get them to disagree with each other, but otherwise "let 'em play." We'll see if Raddatz tries to make herself more of a story than the aging Lehrer did.

When conservatives and Republicans talk about media bias, this is one of the things we have in mind. It happens on both sides, of course, but far, far more frequently with Democrats.

This is a must-read Sean Trende column on why Obama's bandwagon strategy has demanded that he remain in the lead at every point in the campaign. I've been saying for months now that Obama's fundraising in particular - and even moreso, his ability to deter Romney from raising money from business - was hugely dependent on convincing business interests that Obama's regulators would still be calling the shots after the election and they should not feel safe about going all-in to be rid of him. This is also why Obama's team has gone nuclear in its attacks on individual polls that show cracks in his armor, moreso even than usual for political campaigns and much, much moreso than usual for campaigns that are ahead in most of the polls. The same goes for Obama's ability to draw huge turnout from young voters and other traditionally low-turnout groups.

Today's battery of good polling news for Romney (including a boost from Gallup switching from a registered-voter to likely-voter model) is far from proof that Romney will win the election, but it is a blow to the overwhelming narrative leading into the first debate that the race had already been won by Obama, and that any skepticism of polls assuming an overwhelmingly Democratic electorate was conspiracy-level crackpottery. At last check, the liberal-run TPM polling average had Romney up by 2.8 points, a wider lead than the 2.5 point lead Unskewedpolls.com was showing. The state-by-state polling may not be entirely caught up yet, but it usually lags; John McCain was clinging to swing-state polling for weeks after he fell behind for good in the big national trackers.

Republicans have been saying for weeks that this was still a close race. Today, the polls caught up to that. Obama may yet win, but he can no longer do so just by projecting inevitability, running out the clock and letting the media bury any story that threatened to help Romney under horse race coverage. Obama and Biden have been ducking tough questions - Obama does interviews on The View and music and sports radio, while dodging the White House press corps; since joining the ticket, Paul Ryan has done 197 interviews, while Biden in the same time has done 1. You can run like that when you're way ahead; you can't if you actually need to get a positive message of your own out.

There are three debates left to go (including the VP debate), which will let a national audience judge the campaigns for themselves, and despite Democratic dissatisfaction with Jim Lehrer's refusal to act as a gatekeeper running interference against Romney, it's unlikely that the moderators of the remaining debates can protect Obama and Biden from having to win those debates on their own.

Once every four years, I have a little fun crossing the baseball and politics streams by writing a post noting that the Hated Yankees have prospered far better in the World Series under Democratic than Republican presidents - in fact, they haven't won a World Series with a Republican in the White House since 1958. Counting since 1921 (their first pennant), the Yankees are 20-3 in the World Series in 42 postseasons of Democratic Administrations, but just 7-10 in the World Series in 48 years of Republican Administrations. On the whole, the Yankees under Democratic presidents have won the World Series (20 times) more often than they've missed the postseason (14 times), compared to 7 championships and 26 Octobers at home during Republican presidencies. They've gone 0 for the last five GOP Administrations while failing to bring home a championship on the watch of only one Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson.

Here's a chart - I classified the postseasons by who was President in October (Nixon resigned in August, Harding and FDR died in the spring, JFK was killed in November) and left out 1994, when Buck Showalter's Yankees had the best record in the American League when the strike hit, and 2012, since the postseason's just started:

POTUS	P	Years	WS W	WS L	LCS W	LCS L	LDS W	LDS L	Post	No Post
Harding	R	2	0	2	-	-	-	-	2	0
Coolidge	R	6	3	1	-	-	-	-	4	2
Hoover	R	4	1	0	-	-	-	-	1	3
FDR	D	12	6	1	-	-	-	-	7	5
Truman	D	8	5	0	-	-	-	-	5	3
Eisenhower	R	8	3	3	-	-	-	-	6	2
Kennedy	D	3	2	1	-	-	-	-	3	0
Johnson	D	5	0	1	-	-	-	-	1	4
Nixon	R	5	0	0	0	0	-	-	0	5
Ford	R	3	0	1	1	0	-	-	1	2
Carter	D	4	2	0	2	1	-	-	3	1
Reagan	R	8	0	1	1	0	-	-	1	7
HW Bush	R	4	0	0	0	0	-	-	0	4
Clinton*	D	7	4	0	4	0	4	2	6	1
W Bush	R	8	0	2	2	1	3	4	7	1
Obama**	D	3	1	0	1	1	2	1	3	0
ALL	R	48	7	10	4	1	3	4	22	26
ALL	D	42	20	3	7	2	6	3	28	14

The Mets, sadly, have not even appeared in enough postseasons to be worth doing a similar analysis- their total is a World Championship (1969) and a World Series loss (1973) under Nixon, a World Championship (1986) and an LCS loss (1988) under Reagan, a Division Series loss (1999) and a World Series loss (2000) under Clinton, and an LCS loss (2006) under George W. Bush. But if you compare regular season records:

POTUS	P	W%
Kennedy	D	0.283
Johnson	D	0.375
Nixon	R	0.525
Ford	R	0.508
Carter	D	0.401
Reagan	R	0.536
HW Bush	R	0.505
Clinton	D	0.505
W Bush	R	0.503
Obama	D	0.463
ALL	R	0.517
ALL	D	0.431

A pretty clear inverse of the Yankees pattern, although much like the GOP, while falling short of the big prize the Mets had a good second half of the Clinton years under Bobby Valentine (the Newt Gingrich of baseball managers), and like the GOP the Mets had terrible months in October 2006 and September 2008.

How important was last night's Romney-Obama debate, which nearly everyone agrees was a lopsided win for Romney? Time will tell. But one thing we can know for sure is that it was, by far, the most-watched event of the 2012 campaign.

The importance of debates is itself endlessly debated, and you can't really tell the role of the debates in a race except with hindsight. We can watch the polls, but of course there will also be other factors at work on those - more debates, ads, external events. Certainly the conventional wisdom that Romney won had the immediate impacts of (1) breaking the media narrative that everything was going against Romney and (2) giving Republicans something to cheer for and cause for optimism, and that alone is worth something in a business where perceptions can become realities. (One of the most consequential debates was the Ford-Carter debate in 1976 that featured Ford's Poland gaffe; veterans of the Ford campaign believe to this day that the gaffe broke momentum that might have carried a surging Ford to victory in a close race).

But unlike perceptions, the size of the TV audience is a hard fact. More than 58 million people watched last night's 90-minute debate on the broadcast TV networks and cable news networks, a number that "does not include coverage on PBS, Univision, C-SPAN, the cable business networks or online." (UPDATED: the final number is actually 67.2 million). That compares to the 130 million people who voted in the 2008 election (120 million in 2004) - an audience roughly half the size of the electorate. That's way, way more people for more time than any TV ad can reach. And it's much, much larger than the audience for the conventions: Obama's convention speech drew 35.7 million viewers, compared to 30.3 million for Romney's speech, 26.2 million for Michelle Obama, 25.1 million for Bill Clinton, and 21.9 million for Paul Ryan.

The first 2008 debate between Obama and McCain was watched by 52.4 million people, but that debate was on a Friday night; the second debate drew an audience of 63.2 million. The most-watched debate in 2008 was actually the vice presidential debate, owing to the ratings draw of Sarah Palin, 69.9 million viewers, the largest audience since 70 million people watched one of the Clinton-Bush-Perot debates in 1992. While the Kennedy-Nixon debate remains the most-watched by audience share, the single largest debate audience remains the sole Reagan-Carter debate in 1980, which drew 80.6 million viewers. That debate had an enormous impact, if you believe the polls showing that Reagan was all but tied going into the debate and won the race by 8 points; the debate was the only one that year, it was a week before Election Day, and the 80 million viewers compares to 85 million people who voted in that election, meaning that the overwhelming majority of the voters had seen the debate.

A good showing in the debates is important to Romney because October is typically the month when the race tightens, and depending how you read the polls (a whole separate story), this race is already pretty tight by historical standards. Jay Cost looked at this yesterday, using the Gallup polls going back to 1968. (Gallup's may not be the most accurate polls, but they are rarely way off base and usually good for spotting trends, plus they have the advantage of a much longer historical track record to compare than any other pollster's). Even with growing polarization and early voting, he noted that exit polls showed anywhere from 22-31% of voters in the last 4 elections made up their minds after October 1, more than enough to swing a competitive race.

If you look at the numbers Cost cites comparing the latest Gallup poll at the start of October to the final result, of the 9 races he examines (7 of which featured an incumbent on the ballot, and two a sitting vice president; his chart excludes 1988 and 2008, neither of which involved an incumbent but one of which involved a sitting VP*), Cost found October swings for the incumbent party (which was trailing in the polls in each case) in 1968, 1976 & 1992, an average swing of 11.7 points. He found October swings against the incumbent party (which was leading in the polls in each case except being tied in 1980) in 1972, 1980, 1984, 1996, 2000, and 2004, an average swing of 8.7 points, and of course two of those (Carter in 1980 and Gore in 2000) lost the election. The five incumbents since 1972 who led or tied in the start-of-October Gallup poll went from an average lead of 17.5 points to an average margin of victory of 8.3 points, dropping 9 points in the polls. Obama has led by 4-6 points in the Gallup polls the first few days of October (it's four points as of today). If he suffers something on the order of the 9-point average loss that hit other incumbents who led entering October, he loses. This is why it's whistling past the graveyard for spinning Democrats today to note the bad initial debate showings by Reagan in 1984 and George W. Bush in 2004 - Bush had an 11-point lead and won the election by 2 points, while Reagan had a 26 point lead and even his final landslide victory was a good deal smaller than that. Obama's margin for error is much, much smaller.

The only incumbents who gained ground in October were George H.W. Bush in 1992 and Ford in 1976 - they made up average of 10 points by Election Day but still lost - and in both cases the voters had already given the somewhat nationally unknown Democratic challenger a big lead (Ford had been more than 30 points back at one point), and were getting a certain amount of buyer's remorse. But absent that, voters traditionally don't get more enthused about an incumbent in the last month of the race.

* - Those two races, unlike the other nine, featured a leader with a modest lead who pulled away down the stretch. Bush led Dukakis by 5, 47-42, but ended up winning by 7, 53-46; Obama led McCain by 3 with registered voters, 48-42, but also ended up winning by 7, 53-46.

There are still two more debates to go, plus the vice presidential debate. We don't know yet how they will play out, but we know that a lot more people watched the first one than anything else that's happened in this race. Given the historical trends, it's foolish in the extreme for the Obama camp to take lightly the possibility that a lot of voters can still turn against him before Election Day.

RA Dickey this season finished 20-6 for a 74-88 team: 14 over .500 for a team that was 14 under. How unusual is that accomplishment? I ran through the past century looking for examples, focusing on pitchers who (1) won 15 or more games and (2) finished 5 or more games over .500 (3) for a team that was below .500 when they didn't pitch. I came up with 73 75 examples; I'm sure there are more I missed, but I think I got the major ones. The chart below is ranked by multiplying the pitcher's number of games above .500 by the team's number of games below .500 the rest of the time ("x"); the "TOT" column adds the two:

Read More »

Allow me to remedy the nation's critical shortage of advice for the participants in the presidential debates that kick off with Wednesday's Obama-Romney debate. Below, a few suggested do's and don'ts for each of the two candidates.

Advice for Romney

I've watched Romney debate a lot (although this will be the first presidential debate where I'll be rooting for him rather than against him - it's kind of like the feeling I had when Tom Glavine joined the Mets, hopefully with a better ending). On the whole, Romney is about average as a debater. On the plus side, he's smart, aggressive and basically shameless - a little like John Kerry without the pomposity (aggressiveness in debate was one of Kerry's few positives as a candidate) - and not easily rattled. On the negative side, he's not very flexible/improvisational (he tends to stick to his game plan, other than the time he offered Rick Perry a $10,000 bet) and he will never be Mr. Empathy. Which leads to...

Get Obama's Goat: The first rule of presidential debates is that how the candidates come across usually ends up mattering a lot more than what they say (absent a colossal gaffe; the only debate gaffe that may arguably have swung a presidential race was Ford's Poland gaffe in 1976). The most famous example is JFK winning the televised debate with Nixon when the people who listened on the radio thought Nixon won. But there are many others: Dukakis' cold-fish affect when answering the death penalty question in 1988, George H.W. Bush looking at his watch in 1992, Al Gore's audible sighs in 2000.

And one of the first corollaries of that rule is that the first guy to get mad loses. Obama has lived in a bubble most of his political career, and never moreso than the past two years, avoiding any venue where he might be challenged with difficult questions or forced to discuss subjects he doesn't want to address. And historically, he gets prickly when he's challenged. Romney should do everything he can to get under Obama's skin, from communicating subtly and unsubtly his lack of personal respect for Obama to challenging his knowledge and truthfulness. It's more important to puncture Obama's cool than for Romney to pull his punches trying to look friendly and agreeable.

Debate Like A Boss: Let's face it: Romney's not a particularly likeable, relatable guy, and he's not going to become one 34 days from Election Day. I've long thought that Romney's closing argument about himself had to be kind of a cross between Hyman Roth's boast that he always made money for his partners and Danny DeVito's speech in Other People's Money ("I'm not your best friend...I'm your only friend...and you might make a few bucks for yourself."). He's the guy who knows how business works, who takes charge and makes the tough decisions, and he should send the message that he came to do just that.

Here's a point from The Transom that Ben Domenech and I had kicked around as a suggestion for a way for Romney to tie together that attitude with an approach that would be guaranteed to get under Obama's skin:

"In the private sector, one of the things I did was invest in companies. I learned a lot about how jobs are created, but I also learned a lot about leadership. One of the things I had to do when we got involved with a company was evaluate its leadership and see if it needed a change. And let me tell you, if I got involved with a company that was losing money and jobs hand over fist and piling up debt like there was no tomorrow, and I found out the CEO had been in the job four years and still spent most of his time blaming his predecessor and his co-workers, I'd fire him and get somebody in there who could get results." A response like this, besides being one virtually guaranteed to tick off Obama, makes the whining look petty and small. But it would also do something else, too: workers of all types, but particularly blue-collar workers, resent the idea of the incompetent senior management which survives pain while they bear the brunt of it. Romney should do his utmost to speak for those who demand accountability and turn his negative role as one of the suits into an advantage.

Don't Get Mad, Get Even: Continuing in this vein, candidates who complain about negative ads come off as losers. But Romney also has an opportunity he needs to take to set the record straight as to some of the more outrageous falsehoods being thrown at him, ranging from the delusional fabulist claim that he intends to raise taxes on the middle class to the ads blaming him for things done at Bain Capital after he'd left to run the Olympics.

Here, too, how you say it matters. The better approach is to acknowledge that he's a big boy and negative ads come with the territory - but that the voters deserve to be told the truth.

I Question Your Premise: Similarly, conservatives and Republicans - myself included - spend a lot of time beating up the media for bias, but it comes off poorly when the candidates themselves complain about it in general terms. But as Newt Gingrich demonstrated during the primary debates, it's another story when confronted with an obviously loaded/slanted line of questioning. Romney will never have Newt's facility for doing this, but he should enter ready to pick on a question or two that strike him as especially outrageous, and use it to force discussion of some issue Obama doesn't want to get into.

Four More Years? Romney this week has been hitting what I think has to be the core of his closing argument about the election as a whole, which is more about Obama than Romney: the country can't afford four more years of this. No matter what else Obama throws out there as a distraction, Romney needs to keep bringing it back to the actual record of the past four years and the extreme unlikelihood that anything's going to improve if we give Obama four more - and communicate a certain incredulity at the idea that anybody could consider the past four years a good record or something they'd want more of. He should not try to steal Reagan's "there you go again" line, which will look transparent - but he absolutely should ask Reagan's equally famous and perennially relevant question: are you better off now than you were four years ago? The beauty of the question is, the voters and not the politicians or the media get to have the final answer.

Advice for Obama

Obama's greatest weakness as a debater is the contrast to his soaring rhetoric on the stump, and of course he's rusty. That said, his debates with McCain were some of the better debates in recent memory. He may be full of silly ideas, but he's not stupid. Aside from the obvious need to keep his cool, stay on script and not have another "you didn't build that"/"spread the wealth around" moment that inadvertently reveals his actual thinking, here are some of the things he'd be wise to consider entering this debate.

Stick to The Issues: Obama has run much of his campaign away from the issues, in particular focusing fire on Romney's business career, taxes and wealth. But focusing on those points in the debate could be a disastrous error. First, as we saw throughout the Republican debates, Romney is at his weakest when debating public policy; he's at his strongest and most vigorous when defending his own business career. Second, Obama's invested a huge amount of money in unanswered negative ads on Romney's biography; it would be a colossal error to give Romney the chance to rebut those in free airtime in front of an audience of tens of millions of voters.

Tag Team: Romney is well-prepped to defend his business career and he knows what he wants to say about issues like Romneycare and the auto bailout. Paul Ryan will come well-prepared to defend his own plans in Congress. The wise approach is to switch: make Romney defend Ryan's plans, many of which he's not nearly as comfortable with or prepared to address, and have Biden make Ryan defend Romneycare, which he obviously loathes, and Mitt's taxes.

That said, the spectacle of Romney defending Romneycare is one that always puts a drag on GOP base enthusiasm, and is probably too tempting a target to pass up.

Leave The Straw Men Home: Obama has few more unappealing characteristics than his tendency to sneer at straw man caricatures of everyone who disagrees with him. "You didn't build that" and "bitter clingers" came out of that sort of thing, as have a number of his other gaffes. Romney's 47% line has given the most divisive partisan occupant of the Oval Office in memory a fig leaf to try to rebuild his tattered reputation as an above-the-fray guy, but the minute he starts painting everyone who criticizes him as racists, extremists, ignoramuses, etc., he'll remind people why they were so sick of him by 2010.

Forget George Bush: Everybody's opinions about Bush are cast in concrete by now. The excuse-making is unpresidential and opens up precisely the kind of rejoinder from Romney I noted above. At some point, it's just counterproductive.

Leave General Motors Alone: The Obama campaign has told a fairly compelling story about General Motors: Romney wanted it to go out of business, but Obama kept it out of bankruptcy and saved the company. The problem is, the narrative doesn't survive contact with the facts: Romney argued for a bankruptcy restructuring, Obama poured billions into the company and couldn't avoid a bankruptcy restructuring anyway: on June 1, 2009, the company filed one of the largest bankruptcies in American history. And the GM saga is right in Romney's wheelhouse - it lets him talk about business as a businessman. He's the son of a car-company CEO; he knows this stuff inside and out and should be ready to tear the Obama story to ribbons (recall that the bailout was unpopular, not because people wanted GM to fail but because the government picked winners and losers in the bailout and let a lot of other companies go without similar bailouts). Obama may be forced onto this turf, but it is not where he should want to go.

A sure sign of political silly season: seeing a whole lot of Obama supporters reflexively pushing the same attacks on Romney with the same overheated rhetoric at the same time on points that don't stand up to even the most modest logical scrutiny. You'd think, given the clear and obvious points of disagreement between these two tickets on some issues, that would be the focus, but no...

Here's Romney on 60 Minutes the other night:

[W]e do provide care for people who don't have insurance ... if someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and - and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.

Romney in 2010:

It doesn't make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility

NPR characterizes this as "Romney said almost exactly the opposite," but it's exactly the same point: Romney's been arguing for years that his health care mandate plan in Massachusetts was designed in large part to deal with the issue of hospitals getting stuck with the bill for emergency room care that federal law (EMTALA) requires them to provide, but for which they are often unable to collect payment from the uninsured. Romney in 2007, defending his plan on Glenn Beck's show:

When they show up at the hospital, they get care; they get free care paid for by you and me...If that's not a form of socialism, I don't know what is.

"Socialism" here is typical of Romney trying too hard to pander to his audience; he's never been a good political communicator, and if anything he was even worse in 2007, one reason why he lost in the primaries that year. (I'll set aside the issue, which will be the subject of a much longer post in the works, over how we distinguish socialism from other forms of collectivism). Plainly, though, what he's describing is a form of redistribution, i.e., some people receiving services and others getting the bill.

NPR argues that Romney is wrong because uninsured people do get stuck with large bills for emergency room services, but this completely misses his point, which is that (1) uninsured people do go to emergency rooms for care because they know it has to be given regardless of insurance or ability to pay and (2) hospitals are frequently unable to collect these bills, and end up passing on the costs to other customers and/or taxpayers.

You may agree or disagree with Romney's preferred solutions to this - which, in Massachusetts, were essentially identical to Obamacare. You may even think he's unduly concerned about the wrong problems. But what you can't do is attack him for saying this stuff without mentioning that Obama has been saying the exact same thing for years, and indeed has made it a central theme of his policy and legal arguments for his own health care policies. Here's Obama in June 2012:

First, when uninsured people who can afford coverage get sick, and show up at the emergency room for care, the rest of us end up paying for their care in the form of higher premiums.

Here's Obama in July 2012:

And the only people who may have a problem with this law are folks who can afford health care but aren't buying it, wait until they get sick and then going to the emergency room and expecting everybody else to pick up the tab. That's not responsibility. That's not consistent with who we are.

Basically, Obama is calling people who go to the emergency room for care irresponsible and un-American. You have a problem with Romney saying this kind of thing, you also have a problem with Obama. Here's White House Press Secretary Jay Carney in June 2012:

You have a choice to buy -- if you can afford health insurance -- and you can, I assume, Jared. So if you don't buy it, and you can afford it, it is an irresponsible thing to do to ask the rest of America's taxpayers to pay for your care when you go to the emergency room.

You can find more examples of this with a simple Google search of the White House website.

Now, I wish we had a Republican candidate who was not burdened by the legacy of Romneycare, as its aftermath in Massachusetts illustrates the folly of the Obamacare solution to the EMTALA "free rider" problem; we have to settle for Romney pledging to repeal a law that does things he evidently still believes in. A more robust debate on the issue would benefit everyone. But it's a sign of the intellectual bankruptcy of Obama's defenders that they can find nothing better to do than beat up on Romney for making the exact same arguments as Obama in defense of the exact same policy solutions to the exact same problems. If it offends you to see this sort of thing said about people who go to emergency rooms to get EMTALA-mandated care they will not end up paying for, I have one simple answer for you: don't vote for President Obama.