Garance Franke-Ruta

The president wins his rematch with Mitt Romney by knocking him off his game on Libya, of all things.

HEMPSTEAD, New York -- It was supposed to be a set-up for Mitt Romney's toughest gotcha. Instead it provided an opening for Obama up to give his best answer of the evening during a thrillingly feisty town-hall style presidential debate before an audience of undecided Nassau County voters. The questioners' rich Long Island and outer-borough accents served as a reminder of how unusual it is to see New Yorkers treated as politically relevant "real Americans," and their questions showed that -- when combined with the tough love of moderator Candy Crowley -- they'd been doing their homework. Kerry Ladka even got his "braintrust" in Mineola to help him out with a question on security in Libya.

Obama used his reply to take responsibility for the September 11 foreign-policy disaster in Benghazi. "I am ultimately responsible for what's taking place there because these are my folks, and I'm the one who has to greet those coffins when they come home," the president said. "You know that I mean what I say."

And then he ripped into Romney's suggestion that "his strategy is unraveling before our very eyes" and the Benghazi attack "calls into question the president's whole policy in the Middle East."

"Secretary Clinton has done an extraordinary job. But she works for me," Obama said. "I'm the president and I'm always responsible, and that's why nobody's more interested in finding out exactly what happened than I do. The day after the attack, governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people in the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened. That this was an act of terror and I also said that we're going to hunt down those who committed this crime.

"And then a few days later, I was there greeting the caskets coming into Andrews Air Force Base and grieving with the families.

"And the suggestion that anybody in my team, whether the secretary of state, our U.N. ambassador, anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we've lost four of our own, governor, is offensive. That's not what we do. That's not what I do as president, that's not what I do as commander in chief."

His eyes flashed. It was Obama at his most commanding. But he wasn't done yet.

CROWLEY: Governor, if you want to ...

ROMNEY: Yes, I -- I ...

CROWLEY: ... quickly to this please.

ROMNEY: I -- I think interesting the president just said something which -- which is that on the day after the attack he went into the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror.

OBAMA: That's what I said.

ROMNEY: You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, it was an act of terror.

It was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you're saying?

OBAMA: Please proceed governor.

ROMNEY: I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.

OBAMA: Get the transcript.

CROWLEY: It -- it -- it -- he did in fact, sir. So let me -- let me call it an act of terror...

OBAMA: Can you say that a little louder, Candy?

And that was that.

Between his boys and his body man, who needs the press?

The Romney pool reporters, shuttled from hold location to hold location, have nothing on the family and aides of the Republican presidential candidate when it comes to documenting his pre-debate moves. And boy do they like to document his evenings before big debates.

Matt Romney tweeted a pic from "Backstage before the debate."

From Mitt's body man, David Jackson, we got the view "On our way to the debate. Going to be a great night."

Tagg Romney ‏tweeted some "Pre-debate fun. Mom looks good in pink. Stuart wearing a tie -- somewhere pigs are flying."

Josh Romney was "Hanging out pre debate. You may notice that @CraigRomney is not a big crust eater," he tweeted.

It's not the first cycle we've seen this kind of candidate lifecasting, nor the first campaign in which the very social media-friendly Romney boys have been doing it. But the strange mix of inside glimpses and formal distance these snapshots provide is always striking.

Before you watch the foreign-policy portion of the presidential debate Tuesday, you must read the State Department's riveting tale of heroism in Benghazi.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday said the first line-of-duty death of a U.S. ambassador since the Carter Administration was on her. "I take responsibility," Clinton told CNN's Elise Labott during a brief trip to Lima, Peru. "I'm in charge of the State Department's 60,000-plus people all over the world, 275 posts. The president and the vice president wouldn't be knowledgeable about specific decisions that are made by security professionals. They're the ones who weigh all of the threats and the risks and the needs and make a considered decision."

"What I want to avoid is some kind of political gotcha or blame game," she said, adding: "I know that we're very close to an election."

While Republicans continue to charge administration cover-up and denial, the State Department's moves have repeatedly undermined both charges. Not only has Clinton taken responsibility for what happened on her watch, but senior State Department officials a week ago laid out for reporters in extraordinary detail what went down in Benghazi on the night of September 11 and morning of September 12. Posted online late last week, the on-background briefing makes clear that it might not even be adequate to call the assault on the U.S. consulate in Eastern Libya an act of terrorism -- the compound and a nearby American annex, according to State, came under sustained military attack by a non-governmental armed force.

But no one died in their sleep. Contained within the briefing is an amazing tale of heroism as a vastly outnumbered group of American diplomatic-security personnel and rapid-reaction forces fought back against attackers of uncertain affiliation and sought repeatedly to locate the American ambassador in a burning, smoke-filled building before retreating to a second location. There's even an armored-vehicle escape, under fire, on two flat tires, going the wrong way in traffic. One could say the account is self-serving given the extent to which Ambassador Chris Stevens's death has become a political football, despite his father's pleading that "it would really be abhorrent to make this into a campaign issue." But this isn't how you put out a self-serving account. And I have read no story so far talking about the heroism of the American forces, including of the two former Navy SEALs who gave their lives in combat to protect an American outpost. There are real and important diplomatic-security strategy questions to answer going forward (such as why there's been no mention so far of emergency filter or other masks in the consulate's safe haven of the sort homeland-security officials once recommended for all Americans at home). But that doesn't negate that what Clinton said is right: The ambassador and the others on the ground in Benghazi signed up for a dangerous job, and we should all be so lucky as to have the courage they showed on September 11 and 12.

"Chris Stevens understood that diplomats must operate in many places where soldiers do not or cannot, where there are no other boots on the ground and security is far from guaranteed," Clinton said Friday in a speech at the "Maghreb in Transition" conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "And like so many of our brave colleagues and those who served in our armed forces as well, he volunteered for his assignments."

Before you watch the debate tonight, read the State Department account of what happened in Libya. And then weigh the words you hear against this full account.

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL NUMBER ONE: All right. Let me proceed. I'm going to give you as much information as possible about the events of that night, but I am going to start with a scene-setter.

So let me set the stage. On April 5th, 2011, a small Department of State team headed by Chris Stevens arrives by chartered boat in Benghazi. They set up shop in a hotel. This is at a time when Benghazi was liberated, Qadhafi was still in power in Tripoli, the war was going on, our Ambassador had been expelled from Tripoli by Qadhafi, the Embassy staff had been evacuated because it was unsafe. So Chris Stevens coming back into Benghazi -- coming into Benghazi on April 5th, 2011, is the only U.S. Government people in Libya at this time.

They set up shop in a hotel, as I mentioned. A few weeks later in June, a bomb explodes in the parking lot in front of the hotel. The group in Benghazi makes a decision to move to a new location. They move to a couple of places, and by August they settle on a large compound which is where the actual activity on 9/11 took place. So they're in a large compound, where they remain.

The compound is roughly 300 yards long -- that's three football fields long -- and a hundred yards wide. We need that much room to provide the best possible setback against car bombs. Over the next few months, physical security at the compound is strengthened. The outer wall is upgraded, its height is increased to nine feet. It is topped by three feet of barbed wire and concertina wire all around the huge property. External lighting is increased. Jersey barriers, which are big concrete blocks, are installed outside and inside the gate. Steel drop bars are added at the gates to control vehicle access and to provide some anti-ram protection. The buildings on the compound itself were strengthened.

The compound has four buildings on it, and you guys are going to have to get used to this, because I refer them to -- as Building C, Building B, Tactical Operations Center, and a barracks. So Building C is a building that is essentially a large residence. It has numerous bedrooms and it is -- it has a safe haven installed in it, and I'll talk more about that in a minute. Building C ultimately is the building that the Ambassador was in, so keep that in your heads.

Building B is another residence on the compound. It has bedrooms and it has a cantina. That's where the folks dine. The Tactical Operations Center, which is just across the way from Building B, has offices and a bedroom. That's where the security officers had their main setup, that's where the security cameras are, a lot of the phones -- it's basically their operations center. So I'll call it the TOC from now on.

And then there was a barracks. The barracks is a small house by the front gate, the main gate of the compound. In that barracks is a Libyan security force which I'll describe in a minute. Security on the compound consists of five Diplomatic Security special agents and four members of the Libyan Government security force, which I will henceforth call the 17th February Brigade. It is a militia, a friendly militia, which has basically been deputized by the Libyan Government to serve as our security, our host government security. In addition to all those, there is an additional security force at another U.S. compound two kilometers away. It serves as a rapid reaction force, a quick reaction security team -- a quick reaction security team, okay?

Now we're on the day of, and before I go into this discussion of the day of the events of 9/11, I'm going to be -- I want to be clear to you all. I am giving you this -- you my best shot on this one. I am giving you what I know. I am giving it to you in as much granularity as I possibly can. This is still, however, under investigation. There are other facts to be known, but I think I'm going to be able to give you quite a lot, as far as I know it. I have talked to the -- to almost all the agents that were involved, as well as other people.

Okay. The Ambassador has arrived in Benghazi on the 10th of September. He does meetings both on the compound and off the compound on that day, spends the night. The next day is 9/11. He has all his -- because it is 9/11, out of prudence, he has all his meetings on the compound. He receives a succession of visitors during the day.

About 7:30 in the evening, he has his last meeting. It is with a Turkish diplomat. And at -- when the meeting is over, at 8:30 -- he has all these meetings, by the way, in what I call Building C -- when the meeting is over, he escorts the Turkish diplomat to the main gate. There is an agent there with them. They say goodbye. They're out in a street in front of the compound. Everything is calm at 8:30 p.m. There's nothing unusual. There has been nothing unusual during the day at all outside.

After he sees the Turkish diplomat off, the Ambassador returns to Building C, where the information management officer -- his name is Sean Smith, and who is one of the victims -- the information management officer -- I'll just call him Sean from now on, on this call -- and four other -- four Diplomatic Security agents are all at Building C. One Diplomatic Security agent is in the TOC, the Tactical Operations Center. All of these agents have their side arms.

A few minutes later -- we're talking about 9 o'clock at night -- the Ambassador retires to his room, the others are still at Building C, and the one agent in the TOC. At 9:40 p.m., the agent in the TOC and the agents in Building C hear loud noises coming from the front gate. They also hear gunfire and an explosion. The agent in the TOC looks at his cameras -- these are cameras that have pictures of the perimeter -- and the camera on the main gate reveals a large number of people -- a large number of men, armed men, flowing into the compound. One special agent immediately goes to get the Ambassador in his bedroom and gets Sean, and the three of them enter the safe haven inside the building.

And I should break for a second and describe what a safe haven is. A safe haven is a fortified area within a building. This particular safe haven has a very heavy metal grill on it with several locks on it. It essentially divides the one -- the single floor of that building in half, and half the floor is the safe haven, the bedroom half. Also in the safe haven is a central sort of closet area where people can take refuge where there are no windows around. In that safe haven are medical supplies, water, and such things. All the windows to that area of the building have all been grilled. A couple of them have grills that can be open from the inside so people inside can get out, but they can't be -- obviously can't be opened from the outside.

The agent with the Ambassador in the safe haven has -- in addition to his side arm, has his long gun, or I should say -- it's an M4 submachine gun, standard issue. The other agents who have heard the noise in the -- at the front gate run to Building B or the TOC -- they run to both, two of them to Building B, one to the TOC -- to get their long guns and other kit. By kit, I mean body armor, a helmet, additional munitions, that sort of thing.

They turn around immediately and head back -- or the two of them, from Building B, turn around immediately with their kit and head back to Villa C, where the Ambassador and his colleagues are. They encounter a large group of armed men between them and Building C. I should say that the agent in Building C with the Ambassador has radioed that they are all in the safe haven and are fine. The agents that encounter the armed group make a tactical decision to turn around and go back to their Building B and barricade themselves in there. So we have people in three locations right now.

And I neglected to mention -- I should have mentioned from the top that the attackers, when they came through the gate, immediately torched the barracks. It is aflame, the barracks that was occupied by the 17th February Brigade armed host country security team. I should also have mentioned that at the very first moment when the agent in the TOC seized the people flowing through the gate, he immediately hits an alarm, and so there is a loud alarm. He gets on the public address system as well, yelling, "Attack, attack." Having said that, the agents -- the other agents had heard the noise and were already reacting.

Okay. So we have agents in Building C -- or an agent in Building C with the Ambassador and Sean, we have two agents in Building B, and we have two agents in the TOC. All -- Building C is -- attackers penetrate in Building C. They walk around inside the building into a living area, not the safe haven area. The building is dark. They look through the grill, they see nothing. They try the grill, the locks on the grill; they can't get through. The agent is, in fact, watching them from the darkness. He has his long gun trained on them and he is ready to shoot if they come any further. They do not go any further.

They have jerry cans. They have jerry cans full of diesel fuel that they've picked up at the entrance when they torched the barracks. They have sprinkled the diesel fuel around. They light the furniture in the living room -- this big, puffy, Middle Eastern furniture. They light it all on fire, and they have also lit part of the exterior of the building on fire. At the same time, there are other attackers that have penetrated Building B. The two agents in Building B are barricaded in an inner room there. The attackers circulate in Building B but do not get to the agents and eventually leave.

A third group of attackers tried to break into the TOC. They pound away at the door, they throw themselves at the door, they kick the door, they really treat it pretty rough; they are unable to get in, and they withdraw. Back in Building C, where the Ambassador is, the building is rapidly filling with smoke. The attackers have exited. The smoke is extremely thick. It's diesel smoke, and also, obviously, smoke from -- fumes from the furniture that's burning. And the building inside is getting more and more black. The Ambassador and the two others make a decision that it's getting -- it's starting to get tough to breathe in there, and so they move to another part of the safe haven, a bathroom that has a window. They open the window. The window is, of course, grilled. They open the window trying to get some air in. That doesn't help. The building is still very thick in smoke.

And I am sitting about three feet away from Senior Official Number Two, and the agent I talked to said he could not see that far away in the smoke and the darkness. So they're in the bathroom and they're now on the floor of the bathroom because they're starting to hurt for air. They are breathing in the bottom two feet or so of the room, and even that is becoming difficult.

So they make a decision that they're going to have to leave the safe haven. They decide that they're going to go out through an adjacent bedroom which has one of the window grills that will open. The agent leads the two others into a hallway in that bedroom. He opens the grill. He's going first because that is standard procedure. There is firing going on outside. I should have mentioned that during all of this, all of these events that I've been describing, there is considerable firing going on outside. There are tracer bullets. There is smoke. There is -- there are explosions. I can't tell you that they were RPGs, but I think they were RPGs. So there's a lot of action going on, and there's dozens of armed men on the -- there are dozens of armed men on the compound.

Okay. We've got the agent. He's opening the -- he is suffering severely from smoke inhalation at this point. He can barely breathe. He can barely see. He's got the grill open and he flops out of the window onto a little patio that's been enclosed by sandbags. He determines that he's under fire, but he also looks back and sees he doesn't have his two companions. He goes back in to get them. He can't find them. He goes in and out several times before smoke overcomes him completely, and he has to stagger up a small ladder to the roof of the building and collapse. He collapses.

At that point, he radios the other agents. Again, the other agents are barricaded in Building C and -- Building B, and the TOC. He radios the other agents that he's got a problem. He is very difficult to understand. He can barely speak.

The other agents, at this time, can see that there is some smoke, or at least the agents in the TOC -- this is the first they become aware that Building C is on fire. They don't have direct line of sight. They're seeing smoke and now they've heard from the agent. So they make a determination to go to Building C to try to find their colleagues.

The agent in the TOC, who is in full gear, opens the door, throws a smoke grenade, which lands between the two buildings, to obscure what he is doing, and he moves to Building B, enters Building B. He un-barricades the two agents that are in there, and the three of them emerge and head for Building C. There are, however, plenty of bad guys and plenty of firing still on the compound, and they decide that the safest way for them to move is to go into an armored vehicle, which is parked right there. They get into the armored vehicle and they drive to Building C.

They drive to the part of the building where the agent had emerged. He's on the roof. They make contact with the agent. Two of them set up as best a perimeter as they can, and the third one, third agent, goes into the building. This goes on for many minutes. Goes into the building, into the choking smoke. When that agent can't proceed, another agent goes in, and so on. And they take turns going into the building on their hands and knees, feeling their way through the building to try to find their two colleagues. They find Sean. They pull him out of the building. He is deceased. They are unable to find the Ambassador.

At this point, the special security team, the quick reaction security team from the other compound, arrive on this compound. They came from what we call the annex. With them -- there are six of them -- with them are about 16 members of the Libyan February 17th Brigade, the same militia that was -- whose -- some members of which were on our compound to begin with in the barracks.

As those guys attempt to secure a perimeter around Building C, they also move to the TOC, where one agent has been manning the phone. I neglected to mention from the top that that agent from the top of this incident, or the very beginning of this incident, has been on the phone. He had called the quick reaction security team, he had called the Libyan authorities, he had called the Embassy in Tripoli, and he had called Washington. He had them all going to ask for help. And he remained in the TOC.

So at this point in the evening, the members of the quick reaction team, some parts of it, go to the TOC with the Libyan 17th Brigade -- 17th February Brigade. They get him out of the TOC. He moves with them to join their colleagues outside of Building C. All the agents at this point are suffering from smoke inhalation. The agent that had been in the building originally with the Ambassador is very, very severely impacted, the others somewhat less so, but they can't go back in. The remaining agent, the one that had come from the TOC, freshest set of lungs, goes into the building himself, though he is advised not to. He goes into the building himself, as do some members of the quick reaction security team.

The agent makes a couple of attempts, cannot proceed. He's back outside of the building. He takes his shirt off. There's a swimming pool nearby. He dips his shirt in the swimming pool and wraps it around his head, goes in one last time. Still can't find the Ambassador. Nobody is able to find the Ambassador.

At this point, the quick reaction security team and the Libyans, especially the Libyan forces, are saying, "We cannot stay here. It's time to leave. We've got to leave. We can't hold the perimeter." So at that point, they make the decision to evacuate the compound and to head for the annex. The annex is about two kilometers away. My agents pile into an armored vehicle with the body of Sean, and they exit the main gate.

Here it's a little harder to understand because I don't have a diagram that you can show -- that I can show you. But in a nutshell, they take fire almost as soon as they emerge from the compound. They go a couple of -- they go in one direction toward the annex. They don't like what they're seeing ahead of them. There are crowds. There are groups of men. They turn around and go the other direction. They don't like what they're seeing in that direction either. They make another u-turn. They're going at a steady pace. There is traffic in the roads around there. This is in Benghazi, after all. Now, they're going at a steady pace and they're trying not to attract too much attention, so they're going maybe 15 miles an hour down the street.

They come up to a knot of men in an adjacent compound, and one of the men signals them to turn into that compound. They agents at that point smell a rat, and they step on it. They have taken some fire already. At this point, they take very heavy fire as they go by this group of men. They take direct fire from AK-47s from about two feet away. The men also throw hand grenades or gelignite bombs under -- at the vehicle and under it. At this point, the armored vehicle is extremely heavily impacted, but it's still holding. There are two flat tires, but they're still rolling. And they continue far down the block toward the crowds and far down several blocks to the crowd -- to another crowd where this road t-bones into a main road. There is a crowd there. They pass through the crowd and on -- turn right onto this main road. This main road is completely choked with traffic, enormous traffic jam typical for, I think, that time of night in that part of town. There are shops along the road there and so on.

Rather than get stuck in the traffic, the agents careen their car over the median -- there is a median, a grassy median -- and into the opposing traffic, and they go counter-flow until they emerge into a more lightly trafficked area and ultimately make their way to the annex.

Once at the annex, the annex has its own security -- a security force there. There are people at the annex. The guys in the car join the defense at the annex. They take up firing positions on the roof -- some of them do -- and other firing positions around the annex. The annex is, at this time, also taking fire and does take fire intermittently, on and off, for the next several hours. The fire consists of AK-47s but also RPGs, and it's, at times, quite intense.

As the night goes on, a team of reinforcements from Embassy Tripoli arrives by chartered aircraft at Benghazi airport and makes its way to the compound -- to the annex, I should say. And I should have mentioned that the quick reaction -- the quick reaction security team that was at the compound has also, in addition to my five agents, has also returned to the annex safely. The reinforcements from Tripoli are at the compound -- at the annex. They take up their positions. And somewhere around 5:45 in the morning -- sorry, somewhere around 4 o'clock in the morning -- I have my timeline wrong -- somewhere around 4 o'clock in the morning the annex takes mortar fire. It is precise and some of the mortar fire lands on the roof of the annex. It immediately killed two security personnel that are there, severely wounds one of the agents that's come from the compound.

At that point, a decision is made at the annex that they are going to have to evacuate the whole enterprise. And the next hours are spent, one, securing the annex, and then two, moving in a significant and large convoy of vehicles everybody to the airport, where they are evacuated on two flights.

So that's the end of my tick-tock.

Whatever was said by senior administration officials in the immediate aftermath of the attack, a few things are clear now. There is no cover-up. There are lingering questions about security strategy. And there is one hell of an amazing tale of heroism and bravery on the part of the diplomatic security personnel and rapid reaction forces on the ground during the attack.

His use of a very restricted "we" in talking about Libya sure seemed to point a finger at Foggy Bottom.

Reuters

Everyone loves Hillary Clinton these days. She's got an approval rating way higher than that of Joe Biden or of President Obama, who can barely muster 50 percent on a good day.

But what if the most politically significant foreign-policy failure of Obama's presidency is actually due to a failure of the diplomatic-security strategy at the Clinton-run State Department?

That's certainly what all the evidence suggests.

Charlene Lamb, deputy assistant secretary for international programs at the State Department's Bureau of Diplomat Security, told a House committee Wednesday that she personally rejected a request for additional diplomatic security in Libya, though what she rejected was not a request for Marines (as Paul Ryan mistakenly appeared to suggest during in the vice presidential debate last night in Kentucky) but extending the presence of a different kind of military personnel specifically detailed to the State Department, as Foreign Policy's Josh Rogin makes clear. As well, the forces were requested for the U.S.'s Tripoli outpost, not the satellite consulate in Benghazi U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens so fatefully was visiting on September 11. The U.S. Embassy to Libya is based in Tripoli, the nation's capital.

There were five members of the State Department's Diplomatic Security forces at the four-building, 30,000-square-yard compound in Benghazi on Sept. 11, Lamb testified, as well as three members of the Libyan 17th February Brigade. Confronting them were "dozens of attackers," she said. One of those American security officers attempted to evacuate Stevens from the main building's safe haven after it was set on fire with diesel fuel but lost him and information officer Sean Smith in the thick smoke. As the attack continued, the American security agents regrouped and searched the building, locating Smith's body before having to call off the search when the team of approximately 40 Libyans from the 17th February Brigade who had provided reinforcements "advised they could no longer hold the area around the main building and insisted on evacuating the site." The Americans retreated to a nearby "annex" which was most likely a CIA outpost. A U.S. team arrived from Tripoli, Lamb testified, and proceeded to this second location, which came under assault as well. It was during this confrontation at the second location -- not the consular compound -- that former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed and two other America security personnel "critically wounded," according to Lamb and others. Stevens's body was located later that morning at a local hospital, where he had been taken by Libyans at some point.

During the lively opening round of the vice presidential debate, Biden said the issue of diplomatic security in Libya never reached his desk. "We weren't told they wanted more security. We did not know they wanted more security there," he said. Rogin has confirmed Biden was speaking only for himself and the president, and not using "we" to include other parts of the Obama administration.

The Cable asked Deputy National Security Advisor for Communications Ben Rhodes whether Biden was speaking for the entire Obama administration, including the State Department, which acknowledged receiving multiple requests for more Libya security in the months before the attacks. Rhodes said that Biden speaks only for himself and the president and neither of them knew about the requests at the time.

The State Department security officials who testified before House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa's panel Wednesday never said they had made their requests to the president, Rhodes pointed out. That would be natural because the State Department is responsible for diplomatic security, not the White House, he said. Rhodes also pointed out that the officials were requesting more security in Tripoli, not Benghazi.

The Bureau of Diplomatic Security at the State Department is its "security and law enforcement arm" and is overseen by Eric J. Boswell, who earlier served at State under President Clinton and was the Assistant Deputy Director for Security in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for the final three years of George W. Bush's presidency. Lamb is a former police officer and Medal of Valor awardee who has been with Diplomatic Security since 1987, when she became a special agent in San Francisco. She later oversaw a huge team in Beirut during the Civil War in Lebanon, and served in a wide variety of front-line diplomatic security posts overseas before rising through the ranks to her current position under Clinton.

At the House Oversight Committee hearing convened by its chairman, Darrell Issa of California, Lamb defended her decision-making.

"We had the correct number of assets in Benghazi at the time of 9/11 for what had been agreed upon," she said.

"To start off by saying you had the correct number and our ambassador and three other individuals are dead and people are in the hospital recovering because it only took moments to breach that facility, somehow doesn't seem to ring true to the American people," Issa retorted.

How could it? The death of the U.S. ambassador is a res ipsa loquitur failure of the diplomatic-security apparatus. The thing explains itself: If the ambassador is dead, there was a failure of the security set-up.

That's an administration failure. But more than that, it's a failure of the diplomatic-security strategy at Hillary Clinton's State Department. As Ernesto Londono reported of the Benghazi compound in The Washington Post in late September, "They had not reinforced the U.S. diplomatic outpost there to meet strict safety standards for government buildings overseas. Nor had they posted a U.S. Marine detachment, as at other diplomatic sites in high-threat regions."

Biden's statement last night was the first administration one I've heard so far to acknowledge that some people were more responsible for that set-up than others.

A man elected to the U.S. Senate at age 29 should be quite familiar with the young vice presidential contender's unique mix of cockiness, competence, ambition, and nerves.

C-SPAN

Joe Biden, 69, was elected a United States senator when Paul Ryan was not yet three years old and first took part in a presidential debate in 1987, when he was older than Ryan, 42, is now. The vice presidential showdown in Kentucky Thursday night is going to feature a difference in years greater than the age of your circa-2008 Obama-voting college student, even four years later.

Pouring into this gap in experience will be all the standard tropes about whippersnappers and graybeards, callow youth and bumbling age. It's not every day you get a contest featuring a Gen X guy proud of his pecs and his PowerPoints going head-to-head with a senior-citizen model of pre-Baby Boomer vitality and old-school political glad-handing. Biden's taken part in 18 presidential or vice-presidential debates in his lengthy career; Ryan has debated only a handful of times, during his first congressional race in 1998, when he faced off against a Democratic alderman, a woman 19 years his senior, for his Wisconsin district. He even has less experience debating before a major audience than Sarah Palin, having never run a statewide race before being plucked for the vice-presidential slot by Mitt Romney, who saw in him a kindred spirit.

Biden, meanwhile, is a gaffe machine. From BFD to his recent -- and not inaccurate -- statement that the middle class has been "buried for the last four years," he says what he's thinking, whether it's politic or not. His style of speaking is so mannered that the New Yorker recently hilariously reimagined his tropes as a waiter's pitch for the evening specials.

Where Biden is loquacious and even a little sloppy around the edges, Ryan is studious and fastidious, and like a diligent student has been boning up on Biden's debate history. But Biden has something going for him Ryan can't get out of a briefing binder, and that belies the difference in their ages: the memory of his own younger self, the hot-shot senator who won his place in that august body at the ripe age of 29 and was even more ambitious than Ryan in his early 40s. I mean, look at this 1987 clip of then-Senator Biden during his first presidential run:

What a brittle, arrogant mess -- and what a compelling case he made that the Democratic Party needed someone with the charisma and narrative abilities to compete on a Reagan level, instead of getting stuck in the weeds of policy debates that go above the heads of the American people (which is exactly what Obama did in his debate with Romney). It's always been Biden's fate, however, to not be that person, even as he could see the need for him. It's what -- along with the ticket-balancing experience he brought to Obama's 2008 campaign -- made him so perfect for the vice presidency.

Now compare that to Ryan's interview with ABC12 in Flint, Michigan just recently:

Where young Biden responded with bombast and boasts when feeling defensive, Ryan's impulse is to shut things down. But emotional tendencies aside, there's a remarkable similarity to their journeys. Paul Ryan, the wunderkind elected to the House at 28, is on a journey few men can appreciate like Joe Biden.

The Democrat from Missouri has enlisted three survivors to help press her case against Todd Akin.

In the final weeks of the hard-fought battle to keep her U.S. Senate seat from Missouri, Claire McCaskill's campaign today released a Web video touting her record as a prosecutor of "predators," along with three ads featuring rape survivors talking about their opposition to her challenger, Rep. Todd Akin, because of his stance against the provision of emergency contraception to victims of rape.

"I've never voted for Claire McCaskill, but because of Todd Akin, I will now," says a woman identified as Diana in one of the spots. She described herself as "a Republican and a pro-life mother and a rape survivor," and, like the other women featured, does not give her surname.

Joanie, who describes herself as a "pro-life mother and a survivor of an extremely violent sexual assault" say that her faith means she must forgive Aikin for what he said, but that it's not something she can forget:

And Rachel says she took emergency contraception after being "brutally raped in a home invasion." Todd Akin's policies "would criminalize emergency contraception for women who are raped," she adds.

McCaskill has a small lead over Akin in the contest, according to recent polling, but RealClearPolitics still ranks the state a toss-up.

The former president laid into Mitt Romney in a humorous take-down of his debate persona during an appearance in Las Vegas Tuesday.

As ever, Bill Clinton on a roll is a thing to behold. Maybe Obama should call him in as his debate coach. Via The Daily Dish.

Republicans seem thrilled the president's reelection campaign keeps bringing up Big Bird and the debate that bounced Romney into the lead in polls.

Bird Bird can't vote, and Sesame Workshop, which produces the show that features him, is not interested in being any more of a political football than it has to be.

"Sesame Workshop is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization and we do not endorse candidates or participate in political campaigns," it said Tuesday in a statement after the Obama campaign released an ad that features the eight-feet-tall bird. "We have approved no campaign ads, and as is our general practice, have requested that the ad be taken down."

The Obama ad is reportedly only airing on national cable, not in any swing states, and has already been roundly mocked by team Romney as a sign of desperation and lack of ideas.

Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki was having none of it. "We understand that when your policy plan is a vapid collection of dusting off the Bush playbook on economic policies that would lead us to the same crisis we just have been going through, and embracing the extreme, out-of-the-mainstream foreign policy positions that have also caused us problems, as the Romney-Ryan team has, that you don't have a lot to talk about, you're going to attack us on Big Bird," she told Politico. "But you know, we're going to go back, and you'll hear the president today continue to lay out the choice and talk about all the substantive policy issues that we think people are making their decisions about."

Still, the timing on the spot is a bit off. Big Bird -- a topic Romney introduced into the conversation, not Obama -- was the story of the day after the debate, but by now attention has turned to Romney's foreign-policy speech. Which just goes to show that it's Romney who is still driving the debate, even this many days after it.

More importantly, the story is still about the debate -- Obama's worst campaign moment all year.

Gallup polling shows that two in three Americans watched the first presidential debate -- and 72 percent of them think Mitt Romney won it.

Somewhere, Newt Gingrich is saying, "I told you so."

The man who premised his much of his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination on the idea of taking on -- and taking out -- President Obama in a debate may not have won the nod, but he nonetheless predicted the ground on which Obama could best be fought.

"The job of the president is supposed to be to be competent and to be able to stand up for what he believes in and to be able to articulate what's wrong," Gingrich said on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday. "Mitt Romney walked over him."

On that point, there is overwhelming consensus, according to a Gallup poll released Monday, which found that 72 percent of debate viewers believed Romney did a better job than Obama on Wednesday night. Only 20 percent gave the win to Obama. And while there was some partisan split in those numbers -- "Republicans were nearly unanimous in judging Romney the winner," the pollsters report -- Democrats also judged Romney the victor, 49 percent to 39 percent.

That's the strongest win Gallup has ever measured in its post-debate polling.

"Across all of the various debate-reaction polls Gallup has conducted, Romney's 52-point win is the largest Gallup has measured," the pollsters report. "The prior largest margin was 42 points for Bill Clinton over George H.W. Bush in the 1992 town hall debate."

Obama won the three 2008 debates against Senator John McCain, according to Gallup polling.

Big Bird is big. He is bigger than Mitt Romney. (Can you find No Apology near the check-out aisle at CVS? No? Well, you can find Bird Big DVDs there.) He is even, if you will, TOO BIG TO FAIL. Don't believe me? Check out some of the many, many images created by those whose love for the feathery Sesame Workshop character is as fierce as a three-year-old's attachment to a security blanket.

Birthers and truthers, meet the new kids in town: defenders of Big Bird.

I like Sesame Street... the trees are the right heights

-- Big Bird (@FiredBigBird) October 4, 2012

Move over birthers and truthers. There's a new constituency alighting on the colorful fringes of the presidential contest, and taking up a seat on its stoop. Defenders of Big Bird, the giant yellow costumed character from Sesame Street, are up in arms over Mitt Romney's remarks about this beloved feathered friend of small children, who has been entertaining and teaching Americans since today's middle-aged creative-class types were corduroys and turtlenecks. I say we call these defenders birders.

"I'm going to stop the subsidy to PBS," Romney proclaimed at the debate. "I'm going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. ... But I'm not going to -- I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it. That's number one."

The Twitterverse immediately coughed up the first big meme of the evening, a parody account called @FiredBigBird. On Thursday, @FiredElmo and @FiredOscar joined the pack, though all were subjected to Twitter suspensions.

The super PAC American Bridge, which is supporting Obama, quickly turned to Oscar the Grouch (R) to make a point about housing policy, while over at The Washington Post's "She the People" blog, writer Suzi Parker predicted the remarks about Big Bird would haunt Mitt Romney. "A survey in 2008 noted that 77 million Americans had watched Sesame Street as children. That's a lot of potential voters to woo. Nostalgia runs deep, trust me," she noted. "Big Bird, an iconic image, could serve as a bright yellow reminder that the Romney administration is keen on deep cuts to beloved institutions."

Obama quickly integrated a reference into his stump speech, telling supporters in Denver: "I mean, thank goodness somebody is finally getting tough on Big Bird. It's about time. We didn't know that Big Bird was driving the federal deficit."

Though shown on public television, Sesame Street is produced by the Sesame Workshop, which is primarily funded by non-government sources.

"Sesame Workshop receives very, very little funding from PBS," the Sesame Workshop's Sherrie Westin, executive vice president and chief marketing officer, told CNN's Soledad O'Brien Thursday. "So, we are able to raise our funding through philanthropic, through our licensed product, which goes back into the educational programming, through corporate underwriting and sponsorship. So quite frankly, you can debate whether or not there should be funding of public broadcasting. But when they always try to tout out Big Bird, and say we're going to kill Big Bird -- that is actually misleading, because Sesame Street will be here."

Did the Drudge-driven brouhaha over Obama's "Quiet Riot" speech unsettle him before the debate? One conservative considers the question.

Reviewing the president's debate performance Wednesday night, David Frum asks:

Obama's performance was so disengaged that I was left to wonder: had that Daily Caller/Fox News tape got inside his head? Was he so determined not to look like an angry black man that he ended up looking ... kind of like a wimp?

Though he doesn't use the phrase, what Frum is really asking is whether or not Obama was reacting to something social scientists call "stereotype threat." The concept was laid out in 1999 in the pages of The Atlantic, in an article that discussed why black college students often struggle in academic environments more than would be predicted by their economic or educational background alone. Wrote Stanford University professor Claude M. Steele:

Some time ago I and two colleagues, Joshua Aronson and Steven Spencer, tried to see the world from the standpoint of these students, concerning ourselves less with features of theirs that might explain their troubles than with features of the world they see. A story I was told recently depicts some of these. The storyteller was worried about his friend, a normally energetic black student who had broken up with his longtime girlfriend and had since learned that she, a Hispanic, was now dating a white student. This hit him hard. Not long after hearing about his girlfriend, he sat through an hour's discussion of The Bell Curve in his psychology class, during which the possible genetic inferiority of his race was openly considered. Then he overheard students at lunch arguing that affirmative action allowed in too many underqualified blacks. By his own account, this young man had experienced very little of what he thought of as racial discrimination on campus. Still, these were features of his world. Could they have a bearing on his academic life?

My colleagues and I have called such features "stereotype threat" -- the threat of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype, or the fear of doing something that would inadvertently confirm that stereotype. Everyone experiences stereotype threat. We are all members of some group about which negative stereotypes exist, from white males and Methodists to women and the elderly. And in a situation where one of those stereotypes applies -- a man talking to women about pay equity, for example, or an aging faculty member trying to remember a number sequence in the middle of a lecture -- we know that we may be judged by it.

Like the young man in the story, we can feel mistrustful and apprehensive in such situations. ...

With time he may weary of the extra vigilance these situations require and of what the psychologists Jennifer Crocker and Brenda Major have called the "attributional ambiguity" of being on the receiving end of negative stereotypes. To reduce this stress he may learn to care less about the situations and activities that bring it about -- to realign his self-regard so that it no longer depends on how he does in the situation. We have called this psychic adjustment "disidentification." Pain is lessened by ceasing to identify with the part of life in which the pain occurs. This withdrawal of psychic investment may be supported by other members of the stereotype-threatened group -- even to the point of its becoming a group norm. But not caring can mean not being motivated. And this can have real costs. When stereotype threat affects school life, disidentification is a high price to pay for psychic comfort. Still, it is a price that groups contending with powerful negative stereotypes about their abilities -- women in advanced math, African-Americans in all academic areas -- may too often pay.

This concept -- disidentification -- is a fascinating one to consider in light of the question Frum posed. Applying this lens to Obama's debate performance, it's not just that a political figure was psyched out by the evening-before-game-day release of a potentially damaging mystery video, but rather that the release's power lay in the way it reintroduced the topic of race into the political contest. As Steele and his colleagues reported, in carefully designed psychological tests, stereotype threat was so powerful that it even "impaired intellectual functioning in a group unlikely to have any sense of group inferiority" -- young white men.

The tests also found that stereotype bias most impacted high-achieving minorities. "In all our research," wrote Steele, "the most achievement-oriented students, who were also the most skilled, motivated, and confident, were the most impaired by stereotype threat. This fact had been under our noses all along--in our data and even in our theory. A person has to care about a domain in order to be disturbed by the prospect of being stereotyped in it. That is the whole idea of disidentification -- protecting against stereotype threat by ceasing to care about the domain in which the stereotype applies."

Stereotype threat could also make students risk-averse, and overly focused on facts at the expense of concepts.

It's a long way from studies of undergraduates to theorizing about how the performance of the first black president of the United States might be affected by a right-wing push -- the night before his first re-election debate -- on a video of him speaking in a code-switching accent at a historically black university. (Do read this 2010 Slate piece on the topic, too -- it's really good). And there are plenty of other possible and plausible explanations for Obama's whiff. But if, like Frum, folks are going to ask the question, it's interesting to consider what we know from the social science literature on this topic, too.

Once again, the man who once captured the imaginations of millions delivered an emotionless appeal.

It was the most tweeted about political event of the year, and for once the insider tweets matched the television insta-polls: Mitt Romney was the decisive victor in the first presidential debate of this most contested and close of elections.

It was not so much that Romney was great, though he was smooth and personable, but that Obama was not. The president appeared snippy, his eyes flashing angrily during those infrequent moments when he looked at his opponent, his lips pursed and upturned when he looked down -- which was often -- as if he were trying to smile despite sucking on a particularly unpleasant hard candy. Republicans on Thursday morning were calling it a smirk, but it was more than that. There was, in the expression, a mixture of annoyance, impatience, and dislike. Either Obama couldn't stand looking at Romney, or he decided it was a better debating tactic to not even deign to consider him and to address hapless moderator Jim Lehrer and the audience instead of his challenger. The dynamic was set early on: Romney looked at Obama, and Obama looked down or at the moderator. His words appeared equally downbeat.

All of which made me wonder anew about Obama's convention performance, and to what an extent it was not anomalous but intentional and characteristic. I wrote then:

Barack Obama will never be that man again. Whoever he was in 2008, and 2004, Barack Obama will never have his easy swagger and rambunctiously playful enthusiasm ....

That is the truth at the core of his oddly flat convention speech, and at the center of his technically skilled but strangely bloodless reelection campaign. Whoever Obama was when he was elected president has been seared away by two active wars, the more free-ranging fight against al-Qaeda, the worst economic crash since the Great Depression, and the endless grinding fights with Washington Republicans -- and even, I am sure, activists in his own party.

It seemed even truer last night. Would Obama have gotten so significant a convention bounce if it were just about his own speech? His demeanor in Denver made me wonder if his was not in some important sense a borrowed bounce, bequeathed to him by Bill Clinton.

Many are writing this morning that Obama seemed unprepared, but that's hardly credible. He did not stumble over answers or forget his talking points. Rather, he appeared badly prepared by his handlers to pursue a strategy of non-engagement with Romney while aiming to deliver a passable, above-the-fray presentation. It was a classic frontrunner strategy -- first, do no harm -- but it flopped because Romney was so eager to engage, and chose the occasion of the first debate to showcase a classic Romney policy pivot.

If you reread the pre-debate expectations-setting coverage, it appears Obama did exactly what he was gunning to do:

Obama is not particularly fluid in sound bites, so his team is aiming for a workmanlike performance like his speech at the Democratic convention.

That New York Times piece mentioned something else important to consider:

As the candidates prepare, the first trick for Mr. Obama is finding time. His rehearsals have started late and ended early because of events like the tumult in the Middle East. He showed up at one practice just after speaking at a ceremony for the four Americans killed in Libya, and aides found that his mind was elsewhere.

I said it after the convention speech and I'll say it again: If there's something that seems shut down in our once ebulliently optimistic president, it most likely has to do with the wars. Obama is a naturally empathic individual, whose diverse, mobile, international background made him unusually able when it came to assessing new social situations and reading more than people say. Some observers have speculated that Obama needs a crowd, energy he can draw from. But he had that aplenty in Charlotte, and it barely helped. I suspect a more prosaic explanation: A person of his temperament cannot maintain the same open demeanor when he's dealing with war and death all the time. As, we must recall, Obama has been for years now. If Obama seems shut down, perhaps it is because he has to be to be who he is and do the job he needs to do day in and day out. If his heart didn't seem in it last night, I wonder if it's not in part because the last thing he needs to consider in his work on a day-to-day basis is his heart. It's a long way from being a community organizer, civil-rights lawyer and anti-war state senator to running a drone war that kills innocent civilians, ordering the death of militants, overseeing a policy that's led to an increase in American casualties in Afghanistan, and delivering funereal remarks at a ceremony honoring the returning remains of a slain American diplomat.

It's the only explanation I can come up with for why there is so much self-abnegation in Obama's campaigning. Does it do anything for any sort of voter to hear this, from Obama's closing remarks last night?

You know, four years ago I said that I'm not a perfect man and I wouldn't be a perfect president. And that's probably a promise that Governor Romney thinks I've kept. But I also promised that I'd fight every single day on behalf of the American people and the middle class and all those who are striving to get in the middle class. I've kept that promise and if you'll vote for me, then I promise I'll fight just as hard in a second term.

The emphasis on imperfection, the almost apologetic tone -- it's something that's come and gone in Obama's messaging since before the Republican take-over in 2010.

Romney has had the luxury of being able to campaign undistracted by a day job. More importantly, he's been able to campaign undistracted by dealing with anything substantive or difficult in recent years. Campaigns are physically taxing. But the toll of being president is something different again.

His supporters keep wanting Obama to be who he was in 2008. But that's not who he is anymore.

The first presidential debate will cover weighty matters. But it will also have a lot of predictable throat-clearing and posturing. Here are some examples.

Every great debate has its share of stock phrases and generic pleasantries that debaters trot out for the sake of politeness or as they stall for time and gather their thoughts. Don't be surprised tonight if you hear:

"That's a great a question, Jim..."

"With all due respect..."

"I'm so glad you asked..."

"During my time as governor..." (Romney)

"Let me be clear..." (Obama)

"An extraordinary...." (Romney)

"I'll answer the second part first..."

"But first, let me address what my opponent just said..."

"Let me finish..."

What are some of the other debating tropes and stock phrases you've noticed? What non-policy words and phrases do Obama and Romney always use (and we're not talking a/the/and/etc. here)? Leave your predictions for the most predictable ones in the comments, below.

A swing-state advertisement suggests Romney will get rid of the mortgage interest deduction, the child care tax credit and tax savings for college tuition.

ARLINGTON, Va. -- It was announced on Sept. 19 as another Obama television advertisement targeting women voters, and generated little notice. In reality, "Pay The Bills" is a devastating swing-state spot that memorably raises the specter of Romney taking away some of the most treasured -- and valuable -- tax perks of middle class voters, vastly raising their federal taxes every year and threatening their ability to save for their children.

"To fund his tax cuts for millionaires, Romney could take away middle-class deductions for child care, home mortgages, and college tuition," the spot says.

I came across the spot while grabbing a quick bite before teaching in Clarendon last week; it has been in rotation on the air in Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia, according to the Obama campaign.

And, boy, it is attention-grabbing. The mortgage-interest deduction is especially important to middle class families -- and singles -- in communities with high housing prices, such as Northern Virginia. So far the spot has also gathered more than 300,000 views on YouTube.

Politifact has evaluated the claims in the spot and rated them "Mostly False," mainly because Romney's proposals are too vague to evaluate thoroughly. Romney has rejected the conclusions of the Tax Policy Center, cited in the ad, that he would be unable to cut taxes for the wealthy and the deficit as much as he has promised without also getting rid of much-beloved middle-class tax perks. "They made an assumption that I would reduce the home mortgage-interest deduction," he's told Fortune. "I will not do that for middle-income taxpayers."

From a political standpoint, what's going on here is clear: We are watching the inversion of the tradition anti-tax script by Democrats, who are now casting the Republican GOP presidential nominee as the man who will increase middle-class taxes.

"Mitt Romney, he's so focused on big business and tax cuts for the wealthy, it's seems like his answers to middle-class America are just tough, tough luck," says the female narrator of the spot.

And Republicans are playing into the trap with a mixture of vagueness and complaints about the 47 percent who do not pay federal income taxes -- an echo of the Tea Party-fostered demand that all Americans begin to pay federal income taxes, even if only $10 a year, as Michele Bachmann proposed earlier this year.

On CBS's 60 Minutes last weekend, Romney was pressed on the issue and gave up an opportunity to be clear with voters.

"What are we talking about, the mortgage deduction, the charitable deduction?" Scott Pelley asked.

"The devil's in the details. The angel is in the policy, which is creating more jobs," Romney replied.

"You have heard the criticism, I'm sure, that your campaign can be vague about some things. And I wonder if this isn't precisely one of those things?" Pelley pressed.

Instead of using the interview to say no, he would not eliminate the popular mortgage-interest deduction, Romney made a process point: "It's very much consistent with my experience as a governor which is, if you want to work together with people across the aisle, you lay out your principles and your policy, you work together with them, but you don't hand them a complete document and say, 'Here, take this or leave it.'"

Nor did he do himself much good when he told a presumably middle-class audience in Kent, Ohio, Wednesday, "By the way, don't be expecting a huge cut in taxes, because I'm also going to get rid of deductions and exemptions."

The Obama campaign, meanwhile, has stuck to its message.

Romney would "[r]aise taxes on the middle class by cutting deductions like those for mortgage interest, children, and charitable contributions to pay for $250,000 tax cuts for multi-millionaires," Obama campaign spokesman Danny Kanner reiterated in a statement earlier this week.

It will be interesting to see if this argument comes up -- and how it's handled -- during the first presidential debate next week.

Presidential elections are decided in the first-person plural and the second person. Anyone operating in the third person is in trouble.

Mitt Romney's campaign on Wednesday released an ad featuring the candidate speaking straight to the camera, all by himself: It's not the most polished video in the world. But you can see the thinking behind it. The candidate will directly address the voters, making a spare, authentic, heart-to-heart appeal that he cares about how "too many Americans" are suffering.

And then he says it.

"President Obama and I both care about poor and middle-class families. The difference is my policies will make things better for them."

Them.

Mitt Romney keeps talking about the people whose votes he needs as "them."

In the 47 percent video, it was "those people."

"I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives," Romney said.

But presidential elections are always about the grand national us. They are about we, the people. And when it come to a candidate, they are about me and you.

As Bill Clinton famously said, "For too long we've been told about 'us' and 'them.' Each and every election we see a new slate of arguments and ads telling us that 'they' are the problem, not 'us.' But there can be no 'them' in America. There's only us."

That statement elides a lot of social divisions, but Clinton was right that as a matter of politics that's how you have to talk win. Even George W. Bush ran as "a uniter, not a divider."

The problem with Romney's campaign is not just a secret video, or media- and PAC-hyped candidate gaffes. It's an approach to talking to and about people in a way that is othering, rather than empathetic -- so much so that in direct appeal to middle-class voters, Romney doesn't think to say (or, rather, no one on his campaign thinks to have him say), "The difference is my policies will make things better for you."

The vast majority of Americans identify as middle-class or working class.

If Romney wasn't talking to them in this spot -- and by his language he made clear that he was not -- who was he talking to?

The Republican presidential candidate joined the former president in New York to extol the power of free trade and private investment to defang radicalism abroad.

NEW YORK -- It was definitely one of the stranger moments in Campaign 2012. Bill Clinton, the man who more than any other helped turn the presidential contest away from Mitt Romney, welcomed him on the stage Tuesday morning at the Sheraton New York Hotel for his annual Clinton Global Initiative conference, where Romney was the featured morning speaker.

Was it going to be a set-up? And if so, for whom? Was Romney going to make a dig at President Obama at the conference hosted by the Big Dog himself? Or would Clinton deftly use the appearance to create a contrast between the former governor and the president, as well as media anticipation for his own moment on the stage with Romney? In many ways, it seemed a natural audience for Romney -- the wealthy former corporate leader, come to talk to a community of his own -- and the appearance drew so many members of the New York and national press the ballroom reached capacity and spilled out into overflow press rooms.

In the end, it turned out not to be that awkward. The wizened, lean, former president, a few inches shorter than Romney, warmly welcomed the robust former Massachusetts governor, barely a year his junior, thanking him for his support for the nonprofit City Year program, a public-private partnership that began in Boston and which the Clinton Administration used in the early 1990s as a model for the national AmeriCorps youth service program.

Calling Clinton's introduction "very touching," Romney quipped: "If there's one thing we've learned in this election season, by the way, it is that a few words from Bill Clinton can do a man a lot of good."

The audience laughed appreciatively.

"All I gotta do now is wait a couple of days for that bounce to happen," Romney continued. "... One of the best things that can happen to any cause, to any people, is to have Bill Clinton as its advocate."

Romney's remarks hit three major points. The main one, and most obvious reason for his appearance, was a discussion of how to do public-private aid ventures in the third world through something he called "Prosperity Pacts." It sounded in many ways like Romney's prescription for the U.S. economy -- free enterprise and free markets and private investment would all lead to job creation overseas, he said, strengthening developing nations. Along with humanitarian aid and the pursuit of strategic diplomatic and military interests, it was the major justification for U.S. foreign assistance, Romney said.

The heart of his remarks was a paean to the power of work to defang fanaticism, especially in the Middle East, where, he said, youth unemployment was a major problem:

Work has to be at the heart of our efforts to help people build economies that can create jobs, young and old alike. Work builds self-esteem. It transforms minds from fantasy and fanaticism to reality and grounding. Work does not long tolerate corruption nor will it quietly endure the brazen theft by government of the product of hard-working men and women. To foster work and enterprise in the Middle East and other developing countries I will initiate something I will call Prosperity Pacts, working with the private sector the program will identify the barriers to investment and trade and entrepreneurship and entrepreneurialism in developing nations. And, in exchange for removing those barriers and opening their markets to U.S. investment and trade, developing nations will receive U.S. assistance packages focused on developing the institutions of liberty, the rule of law, and property rights ....

The aim of a much larger share of our aid must be the promotion of work, and the fostering of free enterprise. Nothing we can do as a nation will change lives and nations more effectively and permanently than sharing the insight that lies at the foundation of America's own economy, and that is that free people pursuing happiness in their own ways, build a strong and prosperous nation.

Romney also found time to zing Obama on his handling of the tumult in the Middle East, saying that America has found itself "at the mercy of events rather than shaping events."

"A lot of Americans, including myself, are ... troubled by developments in the Middle East," he said, listing four examples: "Syria has witnessed the killing of tens of thousands of people. The president of Egypt is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Our ambassador to Libya was assassinated in a terrorist attack. Iran is moving towards nuclear-weapons capability."

The administration had hesitated to call the attack a terrorist one.

And Romney appeared to be walking away from an analysis of the causes of difference between nations that had been a part of his stump speech since at least 2007. That take got him into trouble during a visit to Israel this summer, when he attributed Israel's economic strength when compared to Palestinian Authority-governed areas to its culture, offending some Palestinian leaders. Romney's new version of his historic riff also excised references to authors Jared Diamond and David Landes, whom Romney had been citing for years as the source of his thinking on the comparative wealth of nations; Diamond objected to Romney's interpretation of his work in August, writing in a New York Times piece that Romney "misrepresented my views." Said Romney in New York:

When I was in business, I traveled to a number of other countries. I was often struck by the vast difference in wealth among nations that were sometimes neighbors. Some of that was of course due to geography. Rich nations often had natural resources like mineral deposits or access to waterways for transportation. But in some case, all that seemed to separate a rich country from a more poor one was a faint line on the map. Countries that were physically right next door to each other were in some cases economically worlds apart. You can think of North Korea and South Korea. I became convinced that the critical difference between these countries wasn't geography. I noticed that the most successful countries shared something in common: They were the freest. They protected the rights of individuals. They enforced the rule of law. They encouraged trade and enterprise. They understood that economic freedom is the only force in history that has consistently lifted people out of poverty, and kept people out of poverty.

Wrapping his remarks, Romney took a swipe at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who'd appeared at the United Nations just across town on Monday and raised hackles by saying that Israel would be "eliminated" in the long run because it lacked the regional roots in the Middle East that Iran has.

"We should not forget, we cannot forget, that not far from here a voice of unspeakable evil and hatred has spoken out, threatening Israel and the entire civilized world," Romney said. "But we come together knowing that the bitterness of hate is no match for the strength of love."

And with that, and a bit of boilerplate, Romney concluded.

Clinton shook Romney's hand. The governor left the stage. Clinton turned back to the podium, saying to the audience flatly, "Thank you, governor." He looked down at the podium and shuffled his notes.

Obama's post-convention bounce showed what could happen if the national campaigns addressed the entire nation as a matter of course.

Detail from "The Apotheosis of Washington," U.S. Capitol rotunda (GreatSeal.com)

One of the less outrage-generating turns of phrase in Mitt Romney's secretly recorded May remarks in Boca Raton involved his campaign's state-by-state strategy.

"Florida will be one of those states that is the key state," he told the assembled big-dollar donors at the fundraiser. "And so all the money will get spent in 10 states, and this is one of them."

It's a remark that's gotten almost no attention, because it fits so perfectly with the conventional wisdom of this election cycle: Only nine or 10 key swing states matter. "The 2012 election is likely to go down in history as the one in which the most money was spent reaching the fewest people," the New York Times' Jeremy Peters aptly summarized the campaigns' approach in June, discussing their effort "to reach just 1.4 million registered voters" in nine states.

But as anyone with any sense of American media today knows, this is not how culture and opinion get created in a massive, populous, and networked country. Sure, if you want to sell regional futon ads, you go to your local community paper or alternative weekly. But if you want to promote a major cultural happening, you make damn sure thought leaders in the major creative capitals of the country buy in to what is going on.

The American people may be separated by geography, but they're not nearly as isolated from each others' opinions as they were even a dozen years ago. They have Facebook friends across the country, even the world. Social sharing and online video sites mean that nothing stays isolated for long, and the distinctive worldviews of specific micro-communities can crash against wildly different ones with shocking rapidity. That's what happened when a group of mysterious filmmakers in California put together an anti-Muslim flim clip -- which went on to roil the Middle East once it was translated and shared online in Egypt and elsewhere. Negative local news stories become national and even international ones with a speed and power that have upended the old rules of politics. This has been going on a while now.

The opinion-creation complex goes the other way, too. Many of those who read newspapers read the Washington Post and the New York Times online rather than their faded regional publications; the vast majority of online news audiences for these major publications lives outside the traditional geographic boundaries of the papers. "The Washington Post circulates in print only around Washington, D.C., but way over 90 percent -- I think over 95 percent of our Internet audience is outside Washington, D.C.," Washington Post Company CEO Donald Graham told a technology conference in July.

Obama can move his base from Washington, the Pew Forum on Religious Life found in August. While there was little evidence that the president was able to change public opinion around the country by coming out for gay marriage, there was a strong suggestion in the polling data that he was able to move Democrats since announcing his newly "evolved" position in May:

Obama's announcement may have rallied the Democratic base -- particularly liberal Democrats -- to the issue. Democrats supported gay marriage by a 59% to 31% margin in April -- that stands at 65% to 29% today. Most of this shift has come among liberal Democrats, 83% of whom now support gay marriage, up from 73% earlier this year. Attitudes have not shifted among any other segment of the public following Obama's announcement ....

Similarly, the well-programmed three-day Democratic National Convention in Charlotte earlier this month seems to have taken care of the Democrats' problem with its base, successfully firing up the rank-and-file. Nate Silver reported that polls since the convention show a decline in the enthusiasm gap between the parties. As the Daily Caller described a Fox News poll showing the same:

Asked in August how important it was that the candidate they supported won the election, 64 percent of Romney supporters called it extremely important, compared to just 54 percent of Obama supporters. Thirty-seven percent of Obama supporters called it "very important," as did 28 percent of Romney supporters. Ads by Google

But in the days following the convention -- Fox News polled from Sept. 9 through Sept. 11 -- 62 percent of Obama supporters said it was "extremely important" that the president be re-elected. The percentage of Romney supporters saying his victory was "extremely important" didn't budge.

The latest numbers suggest that Obama supporters were excited enough by the Democratic convention to help close the enthusiasm gap that has existed for several months.

It sounds obvious to say it, but Obama's blue-state base can be reached through blue-state communications channels. His base is the people who live in cities and who live in cultural communities that talk to each other, Chicago to New York to Charlotte to Miami to Los Angeles. And its enthusiasm can be infectious, transforming the narrative of the contest. If Obama can call his one-time supporters off the sidelines in blue states, and get them donating and chattering and creating free media and signing up to volunteer at near 2008 levels, he can change perceptions of his candidacy in purple states -- and even red ones. Romney could benefit as well from targeting blue voters in blue states -- because if he can get some of them on his side, he can use their cultural power to woo that central, centrist 5 to 10 percent he needs to win and which has continued to elude him.

But it means recognizing that we are not a conservative America and a liberal America, but a United States of America. Obama knew that in 2004. He knew it in 2008.

But this year, somehow, neither side of the aisle seems to remember.

At Harvard Law School, the first black editor of the law review struggled with what he called "frustrating" arguments about language.

PBS's "Frontline" news show is previewing a series on Barack Obama and Mitt Romney online right now, and as part of that posting what they're calling "'The Artifacts of Character,' a series of rarely seen objects that elucidate key moments and experiences in the candidates' lives." One fascinating entry is a 1994 speech by the then-young attorney Obama on the importance of community organizing. The whole thing is worth a read, but this passage -- about political correctness and editing -- in particular will seem familiar to anyone who has worked at a university publication in the past 20 years:

I know that at Harvard, one of the most frustrating things about student life at Harvard was, I guess, what's called political correctness in the media. Now political correctness, I tend not to -- I tend not to be that sympathetic to people who cry about political correctness and complain about, you know, the liberals and the minorities who are giving conservatives a hard time. You know, I think that there's nothing wrong with giving somebody a hard time if they're being insensitive to other people's feelings, if they're being rude, if they're telling racist jokes, if they're telling sexist jokes. I don't think that there is anything wrong with telling them where they're wrong.

But I do think that what's happened in a place like Harvard and maybe happens less so here, is that young people tend to jump with both feet on a whole lot of symbolic issues. I remember when I was organizing at Harvard, when I was the manager of the Law Review at Harvard, I had a young black woman come in to me and complain vehemently about the fact that the word "black" was not capitalized in an article. Whereas she felt that "black" should be capitalized because that would show more respect for the black community.

And then, you know, a white editor came in. He started complaining, "Why should black be capitalized when white is not capitalized?" Now this seems like a ridiculous argument, but this is the kind of thing that a lot of students, groups, a lot of well-meaning idealists spend their time on. I think there are a lot of academics that spend their time on it. I'm not sure that's really useful. I think it's a matter of symbols and not substance. And I think it indicates our willingness to try to, instead of making the sacrifices that are required to really bring about changes, I think it's an indication of our sense of powerlessness, that we just complain about things, that we pick at small issues, instead of taking on and really engaging the major issues that face our country right now.

When people can speak and assemble as they choose, anything can happen -- in our country, and in others.

So let me get this straight: A washed up softcore porn director and an Egyptian Coptic Christian emigre on probation for financial crimes after becoming a federal informant put together a movie trailer in California that gets translated into Arabic, sparking a firestorm of anti-Western protests in more than a dozen nations and leading to the death of a U.S. Ambassador and two former Navy Seals, as well as widespread assaults on U.S. embassies, all the while the election to be the most powerful man in the world hangs in the balance. And the film is initially blamed on the Jews.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

The big questions that remain: Who put up the money for the movie? And how does the U.S. get out of this mess?