ABC News has a new poll out, and for the most part it’s about what you’d expect. Obama has gained some ground since the Democratic convention and now leads Mitt Romney by a few points among registered voters and by one point among likely voters. But there’s also this rather astonishing result:

Additionally, there’s been a shift in preferences in the eight tossup states identified by the ABC News Political Unit: Registered voters in these states now favor Obama over Romney by 54-40 percent, vs. 42-48 percent in these same states before the party conventions.

That’s a shift of 12 points in a couple of weeks. WTF? Why did battleground state voters respond to the conventions so much more strongly than everyone else? That’s a gigantic swing. Was there something else going on at the same time that could explain this? Did advertising strategies change? Did Hurricane Isaac boost Obama for some reason?

There’s gotta be something. Even if the GOP convention was a dud and the Democratic convention was a barnburner, there’s no way enough people were watching in the first place to account for a change of this size. So what happened?

President Obama sits alone on the patio outside the Oval Office, following a meeting with his senior advisors.<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/5640486609/">Pete Souza</a>/Flickr

I don’t quite know why this Kelly Candaele interview with John Heilemann is suddenly making the rounds today, but it is. Here’s the bit about Obama the introvert:

JH: Obama is an unusual politician. There are very few people in American politics who achieve something—not to mention the Presidency—in which the following two conditions are true: one, they don’t like people. And two, they don’t like politics.

KC: Obama doesn’t like people?

JH: I don’t think he doesn’t like people. I know he doesn’t like people. He’s not an extrovert; he’s an introvert. I’ve known the guy since 1988. He’s not someone who has a wide circle of friends. He’s not a backslapper and he’s not an arm-twister. He’s a more or less solitary figure who has extraordinary communicative capacities. He’s incredibly intelligent, but he’s not a guy who’s ever had a Bill Clinton-like network around him. He’s not the guy up late at night working the speed dial calling mayors, calling governors, calling CEOs. People say about Obama that it’s a mistake that he hasn’t reached out more to Republicans on Capitol Hill. I say that may be a mistake, but he also hasn’t reached out to Democrats on Capitol Hill. If you walk around [the convention] and button-hole any Democratic Senator you find on the street and ask them how many times they have received a call [from the President] to talk about politics, to talk about legislative strategy, I guarantee you won’t find a lot of people who have gotten one phone call in the last two and a half years. And many of them have never been called.

You know what? I don’t really like people either. This probably explains why I like Obama.

What’s more, I think this is a perfectly fine trait in a president. I get that schmoozing is part of the job, and I also get that most politicians are insufferable egotists who get bent out of shape whenever someone doesn’t pay sufficient attention to them. That’s probably why most of them get along so well with the Wall Street crowd: They’re birds of a feather.

But honestly, I’ve seen very little evidence that schmoozing really helps presidents get more accomplished. All those extroverted politicians will tell you differently, of course, but they’re just talking their book. They like schmoozing—better known to most of us as BSing or goofing off—so they spend lots of time making up stories about how important it is. But you should take this for what it is: the special pleading of a bunch of permanent adolescents trying to convince us that drinking and gabbing are essential parts of running the country.

I’ve read enough about Obama’s personal style to believe that he should probably have a wider range of advisers and should spend a little more time on traditional political sucking up. Generally speaking, though, I’m delighted that we have a president who’s fundamentally more interested in actual work than he is in yakking on the phone with whichever senators need to be stroked that day. After all, introverted or not, Obama has somehow gotten a lot more accomplished than either Bush or Clinton ever did.

In fact, I think we should have a national introverts day. Unfortunately, none of us will ever do the schmoozing required to get one.

I’ve mentioned before that Paul Ryan’s budget plan includes enormous unspecified spending cuts to domestic programs, but I’ve never actually looked at his budget document to find out where all the cuts are hidden. Thomas Edsall, on the other hand, has more tolerance for pain than ordinary humans like you and me, so he dived into the fine print looking for the answer to one simple question: where’s the slush bucket where Ryan hides all the cuts he doesn’t want to fess up to in public?

Answer: Function 920. Over the next decade, this magic asterisk line item contains about $100 billion per year in spending cuts that are completely unspecified. So if you claim that Ryan’s budget would cut FEMA or veterans benefits or whatever, you can never prove it because the line items for those things don’t include any cuts. No matter what you say about his budget, he can say he’s not cutting it. He just dumps all the cuts into Function 920 and refuses to say what programs they’ll end up affecting.

We already knew all this, of course, but Edsall advances our understanding of the smoke and mirrors behind the Ryan budget by pinpointing the exact location of the slush fund for us. His whole piece is worth a read.

I was planning to be a good boy and avoid all discussion of convention bounces until at least the middle of the week, but I’ve decided to cave in. Is this irresponsible? Sure. But what good is a blog if you can’t be irresponsible once in a while?

Anyway, apparently all the tracking polls are suggesting that Obama got a convention bounce, and this morning Sam Wang posted his latest campaign meta-analysis, the first that incorporates post-DNC polls. (I’ve added the labels in red, so don’t blame Sam for that stuff. It’s just my interpretation.) It looks to me like Romney did indeed get an anti-bounce from his convention. I put Obama’s baseline at 300 EV before the convention and 309 EV after the convention. That’s an anti-bounce of -9 EV for Romney. Conversely, Obama has jumped from 309 before the DNC to 320 as of Monday morning. By the end of the week the dust should have cleared and we’ll have a better idea of whether this holds up and what the new baseline is. But early returns sure suggest that the RNC was a bust and the DNC was a hit. Either that or the press corps and the electorate are finally waking up to just how comically deceptive and calculatedly nebulous the Romney/Ryan campaign is. I guess it could be either one.

Via Reddit, here’s an epic comment responding to my post yesterday about Mitt Romney’s endlessly evasive positions on guaranteeing health coverage for people with preexisting conditions. Enjoy:

Vote Romney! He’ll repeal Obamacare, the whole thing, but he’ll keep some parts, like preexisting conditions, but actually he won’t, he’ll keep it but not in the law.

He likes Roe v Wade, but is pro-life, but he won’t pass a law against abortion, but he supports laws against abortion, but not if it’s rape, but only if it’s not secretly not rape. And he’ll nominate pro-life judges, but he won’t ask judges if they’re pro-life before nominating them.

Also he’ll cut taxes on rich people (sorry, “job creators”) and raise taxes by eliminating loopholes, but not loopholes on “job creators,” but also not loopholes on poor people or the middle class, and not loopholes on corporations (who are people (actually let me clarify, they’re not people (except for purposes of campaign contributions))). He’s not going to get into details because if he did his opponents would just use them to attack him.

He’s in favor of a strong dollar, so he’ll stop China from manipulating the currency to maintain a strong dollar, which is causing a big debt, which he’ll make smaller by cutting taxes and cutting spending, except on military, Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare which he’ll spend more on. He’s against cutting Medicare, because that’s what Obama is doing and he’ll repeal Obama cutting Medicare, but he’ll cut Medicare (sorry, “entitlement reform”), but not Obama’s cutting Medicare different cutting Medicare. And the older generation is running up the deficit at the expense of younger people, which he’ll fix by cutting benefits for younger people (it’s not cutting Medicare, it’s just having Medicare give out less money than before). And he’s in favor of the individual mandate, which is why he’ll repeal it once in office. And he didn’t want to bail out GM, because he secretly did want to bail out GM. But three things he’ll NEVER DO are “apologize for America,” let cancer patients smoke weed, and release his tax returns.

Vote Romney!

A friend of mine, who reads First Read so I don’t have to, passes along the following item about Bob Woodward’s new book on the debt ceiling debacle last year:

What’s particularly striking about the new Bob Woodward book is that, unlike his past works, he’s making an argument rather than trying to recreate and report on a past event and letting others draw the conclusions. Woodward’s argument here: Obama didn’t lead in the debt-ceiling debate. Woodward told ABC, per Political Wire: “President Clinton, President Reagan. And if you look at them, you can criticize them for lots of things. They by and large worked their will,” Woodward said. “On this, President Obama did not.” He added, “Now, some people are going to say he was fighting a brick wall, the Republicans in the House and the Republicans in Congress. Others will say it’s the president’s job to figure out how to tear down that brick wall. In this case, he did not.” Does the Woodward book on such an ugly inside the Beltway fight have legs in the swing states in these final days? We’ll see.

This prompts the following question: what’s up with Bob Woodward, anyway? Woodward is more conservative than me, but I don’t really get the sense that he’s especially in the tank for either Romney or Obama. He was certainly plenty critical of George Bush. So how can he say stuff like this? How can he seriously entertain the idea that anything could have persuaded Republicans to deal with taxes as well as spending?

I have no idea, really, but my theory is that he’s just stuck in the past. He’s never really internalized the Gingrich revolution and what it’s done to the GOP over the past couple of decades. This is peculiar in the extreme since Woodward, more than almost anyone, has been reporting on this stuff in agonizing detail the entire time. If anyone should know what’s going on here, it’s him.

And yet, he seems to still be living in some nostalgic past where Tip and Ronnie sat down to hash things out over a beer or two and always ended up saving the world. I’m not quite sure what else it could be.

You can criticize Obama for his performance in the debt ceiling fight. You can pick out specific offers and counteroffers and withdrawn offers and say that Obama misplayed things. That’s fine. But at the end of the day, there’s really no question about two things. First, Obama was willing to make some fairly substantial spending cuts, including cuts to entitlement spending, that would have enraged his base. Second, John Boehner was completely and absolutely unable to get his caucus to agree to so much as a dime in tax increases. Like Woodward, I’d like to think that there was some way for Obama to tear down that brick wall. But is there any evidence that such a way existed? Any evidence at all?

Here is Mitt Romney on Meet the Press yesterday, responding to criticism that he failed to say even a single word about Afghanistan in his acceptance speech:

I find it interesting that people are curious about mentioning words in a speech as opposed to policy. And so I went to the American Legion the day before I gave that speech. I went to the American Legion and spoke with our veterans there, and described my policy as it relates to Afghanistan and other foreign policy and our military. I’ve been to Afghanistan, and the members of our troops know of my commitment to Afghanistan and to the effort that’s going on there. I have some differences on policy with the president. I happen to think those are more important than what word I mention in each speech.

And here is the sum total of what Romney said about Afghanistan in that speech:

Of course, we are still at war in Afghanistan. We still have uniformed men and women in conflict, risking their lives just as you once did. How deeply we appreciate their sacrifice. We salute them. We honor them. We respect and love them.

That’s why I refer to this as a “secret plan,” to go along with Romney’s secret plans about taxes and budgets and preexisting conditions. Romney wants us to believe he’s got some kind of detailed, deeply-considered plan to change our course in Afghanistan, but if he does, he’s refusing to let any of us know about it. Apparently it’s a secret.

Via Josh Gerstein, who has more.

Officially, I think we should all be more focused broadly on deception by politicians, not narrowly on lies. However, as many of you have pointed out, for fundraising purposes Mother Jones is pretty clearly focused on lies. And why not? If you got your facts from Fox News or the GOP, you’d think President Obama was raiding grandma’s Medicare in order to give welfare to illegal immigrants who came to destroy America through same-sex marriage.

Luckily, you don’t have to get your facts from the conservative noise machine. Mother Jones is here to fact-check the politicians, and when we expose lies, our stories are picked up and amplified by mainstream media outlets across the nation. As you know, however, MoJo is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and our journalism is mostly funded by donations. So if you happen to know any billionaires and can persuade them to throw us a million or two during this week’s fundraising drive, that would be great.

But if you’re not on a first-name basis with any billionaires, how about tossing ten or twenty bucks to the Mother Jones Investigative Fund instead? That’s what we’re really after anyway. Or even a C-note if you can swing it. It helps keep Mother Jones going, and that means that it helps keep this blog going too. Here’s how to donate online:

• Via credit card: Click here
• Via PayPal: Click here

Thanks! Every dollar helps.

Did you know that NASA has a Planetary Protection Officer? Well, they do, and her name is Catharine Conley.

Unfortunately, she does not have superpowers, and the planet she’s in charge of protecting is Mars, not Earth. Also unfortunately, NASA seems to have ignored her during the preparation for the launch of the Curiosity lander, in the process violating its Prime Directive and possibly introducing terrestrial microbes to Mars. We just don’t do a very good job of protecting planets, do we?

On national TV on Sunday morning, with millions of people watching, Mitt Romney told David Gregory that there were parts of Obamacare he actually liked. In fact, he said, one of the goals of his health care plan “is to make sure that those with preexisting conditions can get coverage.” A few hours later, with approximately zero people listening, a spokesman quietly “clarified” what he meant:

In reference to how Romney would deal with those with preexisting conditions and young adults who want to remain on their parents’ plans, a Romney aide responded that there had been no change in Romney’s position and that “in a competitive environment, the marketplace will make available plans that include coverage for what there is demand for. He was not proposing a federal mandate to require insurance plans to offer those particular features.”

As it happens, we already have a competitive market for individual insurance. In addition, we already have demand for coverage of preexisting conditions. And yet, the marketplace doesn’t make policies available to people with preexisting conditions.

Why? Because policies that cover preexisting conditions are big money losers unless you charge premiums high enough that no one could afford them. Because of that, nobody bothers to offer them in the first place. That’s how the free market works. It would be nice if Romney could explain how he intends to square this circle.

It would also be nice if the mainstream press reported the fact that Romney doesn’t plan to make sure those with preexisting conditions can get health coverage just as loudly as they reported his original misstatement. I’m not holding my breath.

UPDATE: BuzzFeed passes along yet another clarification. According to an aide, “Gov. Romney will ensure that discrimination against individuals with preexisting conditions who maintain continuous coverage is prohibited.”

This has long been Romney’s position, and it’s not clear if it’s meaningful or not. This kind of protection has been the law of the land since 1996 for people with group coverage. And people who lose group coverage already qualify for individual COBRA coverage for 18 months. So the only way Romney’s statement means anything is if he’s saying he would pass a law that requires insurance companies to offer permanent individual coverage at a reasonable price to people who lose their group coverage. Needless to say, Romney has never actually committed to that particular detail.

UPDATE 2: And keep in mind that even if Romney did commit to this detail, it’s still far, far less than Obamacare’s preexisting conditions provision, which is what Romney originally implied he supported. Obamacare simply guarantees that you can get health coverage, full stop, no matter what preexisting conditions you may have.