'Math, not momentum, gets you the big house, the bulletproof car, the cool plane'

[bigtree]

from Mike Allen at Politico:

MORNING MINDMELD: As an antidote to the (perhaps) irrational Republican exuberance that seems to have seized D.C., we pause for the following public-service announcement. To be President, you have to win states, not debates. And Mitt Romney has a problem. Despite a great debate and what The Wall Street Journal’s Neil King Jr. on Sunday called a polling “surge,” Romney has not put away a single one of the must-have states. President Obama remains the favorite because he only needs to win a couple of the toss-ups. Mitt needs to win most of them. A cold shower for the GOP: Most polling shows Romney trailing in Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire and Iowa – by MORE than Obama trails in North Carolina. Glenn Thrush and Jonathan Martin reminded of us of the 2008 primary analogy: Whatever else Hillary Clinton had, Barack Obama had the math. And math, not momentum, gets you the big house, the bulletproof car, the cool plane. We now resume our regularly scheduled Playbook.


read: http://www.politico.com/playbook/

[BlueStreak]

1. Thank you. One of the MSNBC talking heads last night said ...

This is the worst period for the media. Now that the debates are done, there is really nothing newsworthy. The candidates just do a blizzard of events using exactly the same stump speech over and over. The only thing to report on is the polling and how well each candidate's voice is holding up. So that's the excuse at this stage.

There isn't much excuse for that horse race obsession for the past 90 days though. There were lots of weighty issues that didn't get covered sufficiently. That is just laziness -- and the desire for the media to, above all else, create the illusion of a tight race in order to maximize their advertising revenue.