Today, David Axelrod announced that the election issues were set. “In my view we have got the lead and the ball and now it is a matter of executing the final ten days of the campaign,” he told the Obama-lackey Huffington Post. He continued:
Governor Romney profited from that first debate primarily by recouping those voters who he had lost in his dismal month of September when they had such an uninspired convention and when the 47 percent tape came out. But that is all that happened. We’ve had two debates since. I haven’t seen — in the things that I have looked at — I haven’t seen momentum since that time. I think the race has settled in, and it has settled in with us with a small but durable and discernable lead in these battleground states both in the aggregate and individually. The question is how does he change that dynamic now? There is no big intervening event.
According to Huffington Post, Axelrod and the Obama campaign see Obama’s fading numbers in the national race as “largely irrelevant noise.” Instead, they’re focusing on state races:
Nothing that they are doing makes me particularly nervous other than the pure force of it in terms of money. I am cognizant of the fact that there is more money being spent against us in the last ten days of this race — or there will be — than has ever been spent against a candidate before … it has diminishing returns, but it is something to monitor.
Axelrod did say that the Obama campaign will maintain its message that Romney is some sort of extremist. “I don’t think he is coreless. The issue is not that he doesn’t believe what he is saying. It is that he doesn’t want to say it in the last two weeks of the campaign. As the president said in one of the debates: My concern is not that he won’t keep his promises. My concern is that he will.”