It's Not How McCain Said It; It's What He *Said*

As you will no doubt be aware, last Wednesday Senator John McCain called a press conference to denounce the Obama Administration's lack of forthrightness on the subject of the Benghazi attack, at the same precise moment that the Obama Administration was briefing the senate on the subject of the Benghazi attack. At the end of the press conference the senator did not take questions, but the following morning CNN producer Ted Barrett managed to catch up with him and ask why he would express outrage over an apparent cover-up by the White House, instead of attending a meeting in which the facts as we know them were being presented by the White House.

As you will no doubt be aware, the senator's reaction was blistering and profane. McCain refused to comment about why he missed the briefing -- which was conducted by top diplomatic, military and counter-terrorism officials -- instead becoming increasingly testy when pressed to explain why he wasn’t there. “I have no comment about my schedule and I’m not going to comment on how I spend my time to the media,” McCain said. Asked why he wouldn’t comment, McCain grew agitated. “Because I have the right as a senator to have no comment and who the hell are you to tell me I can or not?” When CNN noted that McCain had missed a key meeting on a subject the senator has been intensely upset about, McCain said, “I’m upset that you keep badgering me.”

This story has been all over the political news, from mainstream outlets to amateur bloggers and back again, with withering coverage of McCain's once-again-proven inability to contain his emotions. Comment threads below the various stories about this incident have described Mr. McCain as a sore-headed old crank, and even some members of his own party have apparently wondered aloud at his judgment, with Senator Susan Collins referring to the proposed formation of a special investigative committee by noting that the existing Select Committee on Intelligence is already co-chaired by "Senator Carl Levin, who was at the White House briefing on Wednesday, and by Senator John McCain, who was not."

The admittedly unflattering narrative of this event, we are to believe, is that Mr. McCain is too short-tempered for either his own good or that of his party.  It's a fun story to see covered this way, not least because journalists are finally beginning to wonder -- albeit implicitly, at least for the most part -- what the Administration would stand to gain by misrepresenting what it knew and when it knew it regarding an attack on one of our consulates. Mostly, however, the coverage has been conspicuously confined to the emotional temperature of McCain's reply to Barrett. There's only one small problem with journalists covering the McCain outburst in this fashion, which is that is misses the point as completely as if they'd reported on a show-jumping competition instead.
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Final Predictions, Part One

In my most recent post I observed that the state-level polling data seems to be lagging the actual condition of the race on the ground, and yesterday's and today's polling data has done nothing to disabuse me of that intuition. Survey USA has the President up in Colorado (without which Romney can't win), Marist has him up in Florida (without which Romney can't win), and PPP has him up in Ohio (without which Romney cannot win). With these new polls emphasizing the short shelf-life of any supposed insights, and allowing that the lid isn't exactly 'on' between now and Tuesday, it seems to me that the time is right to make a few predictions.
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Mitt Romney's Really, *Really* Bad Week

Seven days ago, the 2012 Presidential election was close -- to be sure closer than it should've been in the absence of the Denver debate -- with Barack Obama leading on the rail by a neck. He was up by about two points in Ohio and about three points in Nevada, with Iowa, Colorado and Virginia tied. Mr. Romney was narrowly ahead in Florida and North Carolina, but the dynamics of the race in these two places were suggesting to some pretty smart people (Nate Silver, among them) that things weren't really that close. Romney's path to electoral college victory was simple, if not enviable: Close the gap in Ohio, hold in North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, and Colorado.  Doing so would have been an upset, but a mild one, mostly involving a gotcha pickup in the Buckeye state.

Seven days later the map isn't really all that different, or at least doesn't immediately *sound* all that different in laundry-list form like this: Mr. Romney is narrowly ahead in North Carolina and Colorado, with Florida and Virginia more-or-less tied, and Mr. Obama leading in Iowa and Nevada and Ohio. Why is it, then, that the state-of-the-race feels so completely different?

The easy answer is that the week Mr. Romney just had is one of the worst of his entire campaign -- and after London and 47%-gate, that's definitely saying something -- and the polls really haven't caught up yet. State-level polling is notoriously slow to respond to the changing realities on the ground, since polls have to be in the field over multiple days, then regressed, then scrutinized for math errors, then written-up, then published by the polling firm, and then re-published by political news sites, all before any of us get a chance to begin factoring them into our sense of where things stand. The data is often over a week old, and even some of that data will itself display a conspicuous lag, as individual respondents in the process of changing their mind will often exhibit more stubbornness about it than they really feel, just to avoid having to re-reverse themselves a day or two latter.

The slightly less easy answer, though, is that while the two lists of swing-state standings I've digested in the opening two paragraphs sound cosmetically similar, the new list actually describes an electoral map in positive *shambles* for Mr. Romney -- even before the effects of this past week can fully manifest there. The only way, then, to accurately report in real time on the question of just how much things have  turned, is to begin with a recap of the seven days that Mr. Romney has just had. And oh my goodness, what a week it was.
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