Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Those few undecideds? They hate both candidates

Twitter Political Index

Twtter looks at positive vs negative conversation and chatter, not who is ahead. Still...

LA Times on yesterday's Pew poll:

The small number of undecided voters -- 7% in the survey -- agree with both sides in that regard, disdaining both men. By 57%-18%, the undecided have a negative view of Romney, the poll found, while only about a third of the undecided have a positive view of Obama.

National Journal (subscription):

Twenty women sat for interviews as part of a series of focus groups funded by Wal-Mart Stores and conducted by a bipartisan team of pollsters -- Democrat Margie Omero and Republican Alex Bratty. And all 20 interviewees are strongly skeptical of both candidates...

And it's clear the Obama campaign's efforts to define their opponent are working. Several women brought up Romney's time at Bain Capital; an incident in which he forcibly cut a classmate's hair while in school; Seamus, Romney's dog; and Romney's taxes.

"Anybody who pays 13 percent, it's because they either have an LLC business established and their routing their taxes through so they can get the lowest possible, and that's really not connecting," said Nicole, a Phoenix woman who works in the defense industry, referring to an interview Romney gave this week with ABC News's David Muir. "We're still in a recession, and so you really need to connect with people that have lost their jobs, and at the same time apply your business sense for future growth."

Those unfavorable impressions track with public polling, which shows that voters have an increasingly negative perception of both candidates. A poll conducted for NBC News and The Wall Street Journal in mid-July shows that 43 percent of voters view Obama in a negative light, the highest level of his presidency. Four in 10 voters have a negative view of Romney -- more than the 35 percent who view him in a positive light.

Greg Sargent:

A new poll out from Hofstra University, which dug deep into the opinions of suburban voters ' a key national swing consistuency ' is pretty interesting along these lines. It finds Obama and Mitt Romney exactly split among these voters. But on the questions of government spending and regulation, their verdict is clear: They are inclined against them in the abstract, but are adamantly opposed to cutting them when the talk turns to specifics.

Jared Diamond:

Mitt Romney's latest controversial remark, about the role of culture in explaining why some countries are rich and powerful while others are poor and weak, has attracted much comment. I was especially interested in his remark because he misrepresented my views and, in contrasting them with another scholar's arguments, oversimplified the issue.

Charles Krauthammer: No, no, you stupid people. Romney's Euro trip was a raging success.

Fareed Zakaria:

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once observed: 'The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change culture and save it from itself.' That remains the wisest statement made about this complicated problem, probably too wise to ever be uttered in an American political campaign.

Paul Krugman:

There has been plenty to criticize about President Obama's handling of the economy. Yet the overriding story of the past few years is not Mr. Obama's mistakes but the scorched-earth opposition of Republicans, who have done everything they can to get in his way ' and who now, having blocked the president's policies, hope to win the White House by claiming that his policies have failed.