The Calm: No Drama Obama

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle 

Ryan Lizza, writing in The New Yorker explains why the strategy of the Obama team was high risk from the outset, and why Romney's "surge" is in a way, predictable.

What they did was to "front load" the campaign, with a ton of $ spent on attack ads in September to discredit Mitt Romney (not difficult), knowing there would be fewer dollars left at the end.  The same thing was done by Karl Rove to John Kerry, effectively.  The risk is that when Romney appears to be capable of rubbing two neurons together in the first debate, and when the Koch brothers start spending massively in October, the advantage will erode, and this may be the reason the advantage Obama had in the polls existed in the first place, and predictably would erode as Nov 6 approached.

So, it may not be the turning point was one poor performance in the first debate, but the tide was due to come in eventually.

That's grand strategy. 

The ground game is the worm's eye view and I'll be out there again, stepping around downed branches, this weekend.