Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: More bounce in Obama's step today

Above chart is Gallup, Ipsos/Reuters, Rasmussen trackers only, during the convention weeks.

There have been a pretty large number of political reporters who think the August jobs number is an election game changer (it's not) and are just flat out wrong about the story.

Here's WSJ:

Obama Convention Bounce Looking Less Likely

Here's the NY Post:

Flat job stats kill Obama's bounce after convention

Oh, really? They must have been shocked by these:

Reuters:

President Barack Obama, picking up support following the Democratic National Convention, widened his narrow lead over Republican U.S. presidential challenger Mitt Romney in a new Reuters/Ipsos poll [Obama 47-Romney 43] released on Saturday.

Rasmussen:

The president is enjoying a convention bounce [Obama leads 46-44] that has been evident in the last two nights of tracking data. He led by two just before the Republican convention, so he has already erased the modest bounce Romney received from his party's celebration in Tampa. Perhaps more significantly, Democratic interest in the campaign has soared. For the first time, those in the president's party are following the campaign as closely as GOP voters. Interest in a campaign is typically considered a good indicator of turnout.

I think the Rasmussen poll has flawed methodology, but there it is. In a storm, all reeds bend the same way, even the thin ones.

As for interest, remember Pew from August:

Jonathan Bernstein (the poli sci brother):

What was the biggest difference between the Tampa Republicans and the Charlotte Democrats? That's easy: substance. Policy substance, that is. Bill Clinton's tour de force on Wednesday night was a substantive defense of Barack Obama's accomplishments and attacks on Mitt Romney's proposals. Obama, too, got a little on the wonky side; the first half of his speech reminded people of a State of the Union, with a laundry list of programs to defend and propose. In Tampa? Not so much. Lots of effect, but a lot less policy.

Paul Ryan, we were all told when he was selected, was a wonk; his selection meant that we were going to have a big ideas debate. And yet his vice-presidential speech was anything but, and what substance he did include was blasted by the fact checkers.

Ron Brownstein:

Perhaps because of Romney's own multiple degrees from Harvard, Republicans last week didn't stress another strand of traditional conservative populism: the portrayal of Democrats as the champions of a cultural elite contemptuous of average Americans. But with that exception, the race now features each side wielding the classic populist argument encapsulated in those dueling three-word jabs: 'doesn't see it' versus 'not for us.'

'Going all the way back through the 20th century,' notes Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University historian who has written extensively on populism, 'conservatives try to rally the middle-class against the liberal [intellectual] elite and the poor on the bottom, while liberals try to rally the poor, the middle-class, and the working class against the economic elite.'

Occupy vs Tea Party? How can that be? Everyone knows Occupy failed. Oh, wait...

Pew:

Nearly six-in-ten adults (58%) say that upper-income people pay too little in federal taxes. One-in-four (26%) say upper-income people pay their fair share in taxes, and 8% say they pay too much in taxes.

Ed Kilgore, building on that:

Without question, big parts of this campaign have revolved around [pleas] for middle-class folk to 'kick up' against wealthy predators demanding still more tax cuts or 'kick down' towards those people and their union-thug and bureaucrat buddies...

So the 'kick down' efforts of the GOP are not just based on mischaracterizations of Obama's record as part of the obsessive drive to make the election a 'referendum' on the last four years, but also on the powerful beliefs of conservative activists about the period prior to 2009. Because these beliefs are not that widely shared beyond Tea Folk circles, Republicans are vulnerable to the very counter-argument Democrats are seeking to make: we know wealthy predators like Romney and the people financing his campaign are to be feared and avoided because they got us into this mess in the first place. And so the GOP appeal to 'kick-down' class resentment has had to get cruder and more racial as the campaign has proceeded, with Obamacare and 'gutting welfare reform' presented as a new threat to white middle-class families, even as they represent continuations of the assault on America building for years to the 'base.' That's one reason GOP efforts to half-heartedly suggest they think Obama is feckless rather than evil are not very convincing: to big elements of 'the base,' the terrible things he's done since taking office are exactly what they expected, and will be read into everything he says and does whether or not it makes sense to the non-initiated.

David S. Bernstein (the journo brother) on Romney's major fail on the C-in-C thang:

Let's pick our jaws off the floor and review the three arguments that Romney  employed here, to counter the charge of insensitivity to the troops at war by omitting them in his big speech.

1) I would have gotten away with it if you would all just shut up about it.

2) It was a conscious decision that the troops at war are not important.

3) I consider soldiers to be no different than any other military asset.

I'm flabbergasted.

How, how in the world, in a Presidential campaign at this stage, with this candidate, on this issue, can his team send him out with that rank idiocy to say in response to a known question coming?

The answer is glaringly simple: he and his campaign are not up to the job.

Matt Bai on Kasich vs Obama in Ohio, explaining the stimulus and its lack of popularity:

Obama's first remedy of choice, the stimulus package worth more than $800 billion, remains unpopular. This is partly because three years later, the stimulus doesn't really seem to have stimulated much real growth. But it's also because a lot of the short-term assistance that came to states during that time wasn't really visible to the public; it was used to maintain existing commitments to social programs and capital projects, the kinds of things that would have been noticed only had they suddenly disappeared ' which could well have happened without federal intervention.

Speaking of Ohio, even Politico can't slant them all Romney's way:

President Barack Obama heads out of the national political conventions with a much clearer path to winning, top advisers to Mitt Romney privately concede.

The Romney campaign, while pleasantly surprised by Obama's lackluster prime-time performance, said the post-convention bounce they hoped for fell well short of expectations and privately lament that state-by-state polling numbers ' most glaringly in Ohio ' are working in the president's favor.

Ross Douthat writes about losing.  Not his intent, maybe, but that's what he is doing.