I'm paraphrased by Rush Limbaugh.

On the show today:

A lot of people in the media and some left-wing bloggers are starting to scratch their heads about the inability of Obama and other members of the campaign and the regime to stop talking about how badly he did in the debate.  "Okay, you had a bad night. Forget it; move on.  Why keep talking about it?  Why keep reminding people how badly Obama did?"  Ann Althouse in Michigan has an interesting theory about this, and I'll paraphrase her.

Paraphrasing me all the way to Michigan.

She said, essentially, that the reason the campaign will not let go of how poorly Obama did is that they want everybody to think that's what happened.  It wasn't that Romney was good; it wasn't that Romney was anything special. The reason that debate happened the way it did is because Obama had an off night. Obama was the shock and surprise. Obama was off his game. Obama was pathetic. Obama was pitiful.

You keep repeating it over and over and over again because you don't want people to realize how great Romney was.  That's her theory, and I like it.  It's unique. It's great thinking.

Here's the post, de-paraphrased. I got Rush Limbaugh's "great thinking" stamp of approval, which might get me in trouble out here in the vicinity of Lake Michigan.

My post was also linked in James Taranto's Best of the Web today. He says:

Saying that Obama had a stinkeroo of a night is a way of avoiding the possibility that Romney is simply the better candidate.

If the remaining debates make the latter conclusion inescapable, watch lefties shift their focus to what a stinkeroo of a politician Obama turned out to be (now they tell us!). This, too, would entail a degree of wishful thinking. If Obama is undone, it will be not only because his political skills are lacking, but also because his record is poor.

And his record is poor because his ideas are bad. But as Matt Bai observes in the forthcoming issue of the New York Times magazine: "Political partisans will go to extraordinary lengths to blame the messenger rather than question the orthodoxies of their message."

Here's the Matt Bai piece, which I haven't read yet but will.

"Even allies backpedal from Walker's extremism" says a headline in the Madison newspaper The Capital Times.

This is a political analysis piece written by the newspaper's editor Paul Fanlund, and I just can't figure out how the headline is justified. The piece begins with a cite to the NYT Magazine's profile of Chris Christie, which got me running over there to find out what Christie said about Walker. The author of that piece — Matt Bai — discusses Walker:

Now a new class of governors from both parties is promising to revisit union contracts in order to put their states on firmer fiscal ground. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker, an aggressive new Republican governor, just proposed legislation that would limit the rights of public workers to collectively bargain. “You can’t have one group who are the haves,” Walker told me recently, meaning government workers, “and one group, the private-sector workers, who are the have-nots.” Walker’s move led to protests in Madison, drawing President Obama into the debate and raising the prospect of French-style labor uprisings among public workers across America.

In part, the viral movement against public-sector unions is a result of political necessity. In states all over the country, balancing the budget has become an annual exercise in Copperfield-like illusion...

I don't see Christie backing away from Walker.

(And as for Matt Bai's "drawing President Obama into the debate" — I think Obama is keeping his distance!)

Matt Bai identifies "the central theme of Mr. Obama’s presidency: America’s faltering confidence in the ability of government to make things work."

He begins with the example of the the new get-naked-or-groped TSA policy and goes on:

From stimulus spending and the health care law to the federal response to oil in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Obama has continually stumbled...

I add my longtime blog tag "Obama stumbles" to this post.

... blindly, it seems — into some version of the same debate, which is about whether we can trust federal bureaucracies to expand their reach without harming citizens or industry....

Bai notes that during the Reagan and Clinton years, America turned away from "the era of big government," but then:

[T]he unraveling of the second Bush administration and the 2008 election... persuaded a lot of long-dispirited liberals that their philosophy, and not simply their party, had been restored. 

What a delusion!

"Is Obama the End of Black Politics?"

Asks Matt Bai in the NYT Magazine.

"You may have seen that some Hillary Clinton 'sock puppets' were recently outed on a New Hampshire blog, to the campaign’s great embarrassment."

Thanks, Matt Bai, NYT Magazine writer who is now also blogging on the NYT website. I'm extremely interested in that story, which I missed. I see you have created a link on those words "a New Hampshire blog," but when I click on it, I just get the whole blog! If you're going to blog, Matt, you have to link to the relevant posts. And he's written a book on blogging. Come on, Matt, links are key. Now, I'm forced to Google for the damned story myself, which is not a very bloggy experience.

Easiest to find is this, from the WaPo:

[R]eaders of Blue Hampshire -- about 800 a day, a relatively small but consequential group that includes party activists and state Democratic leaders -- recommend "diaries" that visitors should read. Yesterday, four readers who created new accounts and recommended pro-Clinton postings were traced back to Clinton's campaign. And those readers, Blue Hampshire noted, didn't disclose their relationship with Clinton. In the blogosphere, there's a word for this frowned-upon behavior: "sock-puppeting."

WaPo links to the relevant post at Blue Hampshire, which shows the ineptitude of the puppetry:

Recently, we admins noticed this comment thread on a recommended diary, and the oddities it posed made us look a little deeper than we normally would.

As the comment thread revealed, users pinballwizard, elf, shley24, MTAY all registered in succession to recommend the diary. A further look by us revealed that:

* they had registered within minutes of each other, including another user a bit later, janbaby, who was not among the recommenders,

* the same IP address was used by all of them, and is registered to the Clinton campaign,

* two other recommenders, blues and kmeisje, also registered from the same IP address.

Surely, there must be much more puppetry that escapes attention if this is how dumb it is when it's caught.

Meanwhile, here's how Matt Bai begins his most recent post: "I’m still trying to get used to blogging...." Please. Spare me the neophyte posing. You wrote a whole book about blogging! You should be demonstrating the art of master blogging.

ADDED: Speaking of Matt Bai not linking, I was just reading (and linking to) this essay he wrote about Stephen Gilliard — who died this past year. Look at how it ends (with my boldfacing):

[T]he few dozen mostly white bloggers who came to Harlem for the funeral saw for the first time the stark urban setting of Gilliard’s childhood, while his parents and relatives groped to understand what kind of work he had been doing at that computer and why scores of people had come so far to see him off. They must have been confused when Gilly’s online pals, sickened by the way some right-wing bloggers were gloating over his death, advised them not to disclose where he was buried, out of fear that someone might deface the site. The grave, like Gilliard himself, is known only to a few.

What right-wing bloggers? What did they say? Were "Gilly's online pals" correct in their characterization, or were they out of line? This just hangs there. NYT readers are left to think ill of the right wing of the blogosphere. Why, they're a bunch of monsters who want to piss on a young man's grave! Did any significant blogger gloat over Gillard's death?

AND: Speaking of inadequate linking at the NYT... Glenn Reynolds notes a NYT book review that has a hyperlink on N.R.A., where the reference is to Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration, that takes us to a list of articles about the National Rifle Association. The mistake is still there 2 hours after Glenn conspicuously shamed them about it. The NYT should be making a conspicuous show of its professionalism and superior resources on the web, but instead it is making mistakes that would mortify me — in my little one-person operation.

"Is Bill a loyal spouse or a subconscious saboteur?"

The Bill and Hillary psychodrama.

Is Bill torn between resentment of being second fiddle and gratification that Hillary can be first banana only with his help? Their relationship has always been a co-dependence between his charm and her discipline. But what if, as some of her advisers suggest, she turned out to be a tougher leader, quicker to grasp foreign policy, less skittish about using military power and more inspirational abroad? What if she were to use his mistakes as a reverse blueprint, like W. did with his dad?

When Bill gets slit-eyed, red-faced and finger-wagging in defense of her, is he really defending himself, ego in full bloom, against aspersions that Obama and Edwards cast on Clintonian politics?

Maybe the Boy Who Can’t Help Himself is simply engaging in his usual patterns of humiliating Hillary and lighting an exploding cigar when things are going well....

Hillary advisers noted that when Bill was asked by a supporter in South Carolina what his wife’s No. 1 priority would be, he replied: C’est moi! “The first thing she intends to do is to send me ...” he began.

He got so agitated with Charlie Rose — ranting that reporters were “stenographers” for Obama — that his aides tried to stop the interview...

Maureen Dowd sounds absolutely right to me. I note that she's reacting to the Matt Bai article that appears in this week's NYT Magazine. I reacted to it on Wednesday and said something similar:

If you were writing a novel about the 2008 presidential campaign, wouldn't you want Bill Clinton as your main character? What a complex situation he is in. He stands to gain power, but his time is also over. He can help his wife, but he can also hurt her. He is supposed to fight for her, but he's continually tempted to justify himself. He has the more creative mind, but he cannot outshine her.

This too. (About that priceless quote: "Everything I'm saying here is my wife's position, not just mine.")

So: Loyal spouse? Subconscious saboteur? Frankly, I think he's too smart for it to be subconscious. I think he's devoted to her, but he's a dominant male, and the situation is inherently complex. Perhaps he wants conflicting things, but he must primarily want her to win, and assuming that's so, he needs to get control of himself in public so that we never see the part of him that wants her to lose.

Exploiting Bill Clinton.

How can Hillary exploit Bill's popularity without opening up all the complexities of judging his Presidency? Matt Bai writes in the NYT Magazine:

When I asked Bill Clinton about this issue, during an informal meeting in South Carolina, he readily agreed to sit down for a longer interview on his legacy’s role in the campaign. A few weeks later, however, and at the last minute, Hillary’s aides canceled the interview. Famously controlling, they would not even allow the former president to talk about his record.

Interesting. You know, I was just watching the Charlie Rose interview with Bill Clinton, and I thought Bill Clinton seemed really angry about something. I had the impression that something was nagging at him that he couldn't talk about. I also noticed that he used the words "she" and "her" to great excess and rarely voiced his wife's name.

Here's Bai:

On those rare ocasions when the former president hasn’t been able to resist defending his wife or burnishing his own record, the results haven’t been especially helpful. Unlike Hillary Clinton and her team of advisers, who are relentlessly on message and disciplined, Bill Clinton is a more instinctual politician, given to improvisational moments that must torment his wife’s obsessive-compulsive aides. In November, Clinton suddenly asserted during a campaign appearance in Iowa that he opposed the invasion of Iraq from the beginning — an aside that he needn’t have offered and that clearly contradicted not only his wife’s Congressional vote but his own statements in the build-up to the war.

If you were writing a novel about the 2008 presidential campaign, wouldn't you want Bill Clinton as your main character? What a complex situation he is in. He stands to gain power, but his time is also over. He can help his wife, but he can also hurt her. He is supposed to fight for her, but he's continually tempted to justify himself. He has the more creative mind, but he cannot outshine her.

ADDED: You know, things like this — "Elder Bush nixes Clinton trip idea" — make me think Bill secretly wants Hillary to lose:

Former President George H.W. Bush has shot down his successor Bill Clinton’s idea of a diplomatic mission under a Hillary Clinton presidency that would send him and other notables abroad to assure other nations that “America is open for business and cooperation again.”

The move came one day after Bill Clinton made the suggestion on the campaign trail in South Carolina, in response to a question from a supporter about his wife’s “number-one priority” upon reaching the White House.

Why did Bill say that? It enlisted Bush 41 in what sounded like a plain insult to Bush 43.

MORE: Bill's way of talking about Hillary reminds me a bit of the way George Bush talked about Harriet Miers just before she withdrew:

Harriet Miers is -- is an extraordinary woman. She was a legal pioneer in Texas. She was ranked one of the top 50 women lawyers in the United States on a consistent basis....

Harriet Miers is a fine person....

More money is flooding into the presidential campaigns just as money is mattering less and less.

This is from Matt Bai (who has a book coming out called "The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics"):

The obscene costs of modern campaigning have been driven almost entirely by broadcast advertising, which consumes more than half of your average campaign budget. But even the people who make ads for a living now admit that they are losing their mystical hold over the electorate. This isn’t so much a political phenomenon as a societal one. As a New York ad executive recently told The New York Times, “The dirty secret is, people have been avoiding commercials, bad commercials in particular, for a very long time.”...

In this new world, the most effective political ad makers may be amateurs like Phil de Vellis, the Internet consultant who recently took it upon himself to make a powerful pro-Obama ad, based on a famous Apple spot from 1984, that portrayed Hillary Clinton as Big Brother....

[T]he emerging high-tech marketplace may yet bring us closer to what decades of federal campaign regulations have failed to achieve: a day when candidates can afford to spend less time obsessing over the constant need for cash and more time concerned with the currency of their ideas.

Great.

But will the shift really be to ideas? What sorts of ideas will help you win under the new conditions? Blogs and YouTube chew over all sorts of cute little nuggets -- odd quotations, gaffes, images. It's likely to be just as shallow as old-style advertising, but wild and strange and completely uncontrollable.

"Framing."

Matt Bai has a new article in the NYT Magazine about Democratic Party politics. He wrote a terrific article in the magazine last October called "Kerry's Undeclared War." (The article can be read for a fee here, and my post about it here contains some substantial quotes.)

The new piece is called "The Framing Wars." Lots of Democrats these days trace their problems not to ideas or agendas but to "framing."

Exactly what it means to ''frame'' issues seems to depend on which Democrat you are talking to, but everyone agrees that it has to do with choosing the language to define a debate and, more important, with fitting individual issues into the contexts of broader story lines. In the months after the election, Democratic consultants and elected officials came to sound like creative-writing teachers, holding forth on the importance of metaphor and narrative.

Republicans, of course, were the ones who had always excelled at framing controversial issues, having invented and popularized loaded phrases like ''tax relief'' and ''partial-birth abortion'' and having achieved a kind of Pravda-esque discipline for disseminating them. But now Democrats said that they had learned to fight back. ''The Democrats have finally reached a level of outrage with what Republicans were doing to them with language,'' Geoff Garin, a leading Democratic pollster....

In January, Geoff Garin conducted a confidential poll on judicial nominations, paid for by a coalition of liberal advocacy groups. He was looking for a story -- a frame -- for the filibuster that would persuade voters that it should be preserved, and he tested four possible narratives. Democratic politicians assumed that voters saw the filibuster fight primarily as a campaign to stop radically conservative judges, as they themselves did. But to their surprise, Garin found that making the case on ideological grounds -- that is, that the filibuster prevented the appointment of judges who would roll back civil rights -- was the least effective approach. When, however, you told voters that the filibuster had been around for over 200 years, that Republicans were ''changing rules in the middle of the game'' and dismantling the ''checks and balances'' that protected us against one-party rule, almost half the voters strongly agreed, and 7 out of 10 were basically persuaded. It became, for them, an issue of fairness.

The amusing thing about that to a conlaw professor is that the sort of judges the Democrats try to appoint are the ones who don't bother to enforce structural safeguards (like checks and balances) and don't care whether something's been around a long time or not. So the successful framing, ironically, was to package the argument for liberal judges in the rhetoric of conservative judges.

Read the whole article. Most of it is about George Lakoff and his trendy book about political rhetoric called "Don't Think of an Elephant." I haven't read that book, but I've glanced at it long enough to see that it's a remix of his material from "Metaphors We Live By," -- an excellent book, which I have read -- and "Moral Politics" -- an okay book that classifies the rhetoric of the two parties (Democrats speak Mommy, and Republicans speak Daddy).

According to Lakoff, Democrats have been wrong to assume that people are rational actors who make their decisions based on facts; in reality, he says, cognitive science has proved that all of us are programmed to respond to the frames that have been embedded deep in our unconscious minds, and if the facts don't fit the frame, our brains simply reject them. Lakoff explained to me that the frames in our brains can be ''activated'' by the right combination of words and imagery, and only then, once the brain has been unlocked, can we process the facts being thrown at us.

Lakoff taps some subtle truths about how the mind works, but how do those minds taking in Lakoff's rhetoric work?

When I asked Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, the minority whip and one of Lakoff's strongest supporters, whether Lakoff had talked to the caucus about this void of new ideas in the party, Durbin didn't hesitate. ''He doesn't ask us to change our views or change our philosophy,'' Durbin said. ''He tells us that we have to recommunicate.'' In fact, Durbin said he now understood, as a result of Lakoff's work, that the Republicans have triumphed ''by repackaging old ideas in all new wrapping,'' the implication being that this was not a war of ideas at all, but a contest of language.

Apparently, there are frames deeply embedded in the minds of Democratic politicos that "simply reject" the parts of Lakoff's message that don't fit.

And what of all the Americans who sit around watching the politicians on TV? I think their most basic frame is the one my father used in response to nearly any political argument: "It's all semantics!"

"Kerry's Undeclared War."

A fascinating article by Matt Bai in the Sunday NYT Magazine:

Kerry seems to find presidential politics in the era of Karl Rove as treacherous as riverine warfare, and he has run for the presidency in much the same way. From the beginning, Kerry's advisers said that the election would be principally a referendum on Bush, whose approval ratings, reflecting public anxiety over Iraq and a sluggish economy, were consistently low for a president seeking re-election. All Kerry had to do to win, the thinking went, was to meet a basic threshold of acceptability with voters and avoid doing or saying anything that might be fatally stupid. The riverbanks were lined with hostile Republicans and reporters, lying in wait for him, and Kerry's goal as he sailed upriver was simple: Stay down. Exercise caution. Get to November in one piece.

Which is exactly what it's like to interview Kerry as he runs for the presidency; he acts as if you've been sent to destroy him, and he can't quite figure out why in the world he should be sitting across from you. When I met him for our first conversation, in his cabin aboard the 757 that shuttles his campaign around the country, Kerry didn't extend his hand or even look up to greet me when I entered, and he grew so quickly and obviously exasperated with my questions about his thoughts and votes on Iraq that he cut the interview short. ...

Kerry's guardedness has contributed to the impression that he does not think clearly or boldly about foreign policy. ... Kerry's adversaries have found it easy to ridicule his views on foreign policy, suggesting that his idea of counterterrorism is simply to go around arresting all the terrorists.

In this light, consider the quote, also in the NYT article, from Richard Holbrooke, who seems to be the most likely candidate for Kerry's secretary of state:

"We're not in a war on terror, in the literal sense. The war on terror is like saying 'the war on poverty.' It's just a metaphor. What we're really talking about is winning the ideological struggle so that people stop turning themselves into suicide bombers.''

Bai confronts Kerry about this, and Kerry does not directly agree with the Holbrooke statement, but ultimately, Bai concludes:

One can infer ... that if Kerry were able to speak less guardedly, in a less treacherous atmosphere than a political campaign, he might say, as some of his advisers do, that we are not in an actual war on terror. ... If Kerry's foreign-policy frame is correct, then law enforcement probably is the most important, though not the only, strategy you can employ against such forces, who need passports and bank accounts and weapons in order to survive and flourish. ... [Kerry] may well be right, despite the ridicule from Cheney and others, when he says that a multinational, law-enforcement-like approach can be more effective in fighting terrorists. But his less lofty vision might have seemed more satisfying -- and would have been easier to talk about in a political campaign -- in a world where the twin towers still stood.

UPDATE: I'm looking at the paper version of the NYT Magazine now. The cover photograph is quite striking. Possibly the picture is completely neutral and you just project your own opinion of the candidate onto it, but if so, the opinion I'm projecting is: blankness. A willfully blank facial expression fits with the thesis of the article: Kerry is withholding his real plan for how to deal with the war on terror. This thesis, I note, would account for his continued use of the phrase "I have a plan," which is frustrating to some people, who perhaps find themselves yelling at the TV screen: Yeah, what is it? Maybe Kerry really does have many plans, wants to be seen as a man who plans things quite carefully, but is also trying very hard to avoid revealing what his plans are. It may well be that our uneasiness with him is that we sense that he's doing this. Interesting that the NYT, who I assume strongly supports Kerry, is printing this article. Maybe the NYT thinks that most of its readers really would like to see terrorism reconceptualized as organized crime.