President Obama and Mitt Romney are headed to Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida on October 22nd for the final presidential debate, and so is Morning Joe.

We will be live at Racks Downtown Eatery and Tavern in Mizner Park.

The address is: 402 Plaza Real Boca Raton, FL 33442.

The event is open, so if you're in the area, come on down and hang out with us starting at 5:30 a.m.

TIME TO PACK UP
EDITORIAL
NEW YORK TIMES

After more than a decade of having American blood spilled in Afghanistan, with nearly six years lost to President George W. Bush’s disastrous indifference, it is time for United States forces to leave Afghanistan on a schedule dictated only by the security of the troops. It should not take more than a year.... Americans are desperate to see the war end and the 68,000 remaining troops come home. President Obama has not tasked military commanders with recommending a pace for the withdrawal until after the election. He and the coalition partners have committed to remain engaged in Afghanistan after 2014 at reduced levels, which could involve 15,000 or more American troops to carry out specialized training and special operations. Mr. Obama, or Mitt Romney if he wins, will have a hard time convincing Americans that makes sense — let alone Afghans.

THE RADICAL IS ROMNEY, NOT RYAN
STEVEN RATTNER
NEW YORK TIMES

President Obama should use Tuesday night’s debate to press Mr. Romney to defend — or even just explain — these proposed cuts, which would be far more draconian than those advanced by his running mate, Paul Ryan. Mr. Ryan is widely viewed as the real fiscal hawk, but in key areas, his views on spending levels are actually closer to Mr. Obama’s than to Mr. Romney’s. ...with respect to nearly half the budget, Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan widely diverge from each other. Mr. Romney is calling for a huge increase in defense spending — roughly $2 trillion more over the next decade than Mr. Ryan wants to spend, which is only $400 billion above Mr. Obama’s budget — even though the military is not asking for such an increase. Such an increase would force giant reductions, about 40 percent, in everything that’s left.

There are many unanswered questions about the vicious assault in Benghazi last month that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. And Congress has a responsibility to raise them. But Republican lawmakers leading the charge on Capitol Hill seem more interested in attacking President Obama than in formulating an effective response. It doesn’t take a partisan to draw that conclusion. The ugly truth is that the same people who are accusing the administration of not providing sufficient security for the American consulate in Benghazi have voted to cut the State Department budget, which includes financing for diplomatic security. The most self-righteous critics don’t seem to get the hypocrisy, or maybe they do and figure that if they hurl enough doubts and complaints at the administration, they will deflect attention from their own poor judgments on the State Department’s needs.

ROMNEY THE PRODUCT
EJ DIONNE JR
WASHINGTON POST

As he tries to engineer a comeback in this week’s presidential debate, President Obama needs to recognize two things. First, when it comes to politics, Mitt Romney treats himself as a product, not a person. Second, Republicans cannot defend their proposals in terms that are acceptable to a majority of voters. ...There’s no other way to explain why a candidate would seem to believe he can alter what he stands for at will. His campaign has been an exercise in identifying which piece of the electorate he needs at any given moment and adjusting his views, sometimes radically, to suit this requirement. ... Obama doesn’t have to look angry or agitated in this week’s debate. He simply needs to invite voters to see that Romney, the product, will give them no clue as to what Romney, the person, might do as president. Romney keeps changing the packaging because he knows that the policies inside the box are not what voters are looking for.

DEMOCRATS AT THE DEEP END
GAIL COLLINS
NEW YORK TIMES

You have to calm down, Democrats. Romney hasn’t turned into some new supercandidate. You were just underestimating him during September. He’s the same old Mitt. This week in Des Moines, he told an editorial board that he doesn’t have any plans for pushing anti-abortion bills if he’s elected. ...Meanwhile, back at headquarters, his spokeswoman was assuring National Review that he “would, of course, support legislation aimed at providing greater protections for life.” Maybe this will come up in the vice-presidential debate. Do you remember how well Joe Biden did against Sarah Palin? Things haven’t really gone off the deep end for the Obama campaign. They’ve gone back to normal. You knew that the Obama-is-going-to-win-by-10-points euphoria wasn’t going to last.

PREMATURE DESPERATION
CHARLES M. BLOW
NEW YORK TIMES

Romney’s post-debate bounce essentially wiped out Obama’s post-convention bounce so we’re pretty much back to where we started: a tight race in which the president holds a narrow lead (when all polls are taken together), but also one in which he is still highly favored to win the electoral college.Those numbers could change, but they haven’t yet. I can understand a certain amount of unease in the Obama-supporting public in general, but within the left-leaning press it’s inexcusable. Only the laziest political commentators could look at the current state of play and see doom for Obama.

Must-Read Op-Eds for Oct. 10, 2012

Must-Read Op-Eds for Oct. 9, 2012

The purpose of Wednesday’s hearing of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee was to examine security lapses that led to the killing in Benghazi last month of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three others. But in doing so, the lawmakers reminded us why “congressional intelligence” is an oxymoron. ... Republicans were aiming to embarrass the Obama administration over State Department security lapses. But they inadvertently caused a different picture to emerge than the one that has been publicly known: that the victims may have been let down not by the State Department but by the CIA. If the CIA was playing such a major role in these events, which was the unmistakable impression left by Wednesday’s hearing, having a televised probe of the matter was absurd.

BOTCHED IN BENGHAZI
EDITORIAL
WALL STREET JOURNAL

Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa has forced the Administration to start to answer for this stunning and deadly assault on U.S. sovereign soil in Libya, but a lot of questions demand further investigation. Were warnings of an imminent threat ignored? Was incompetence or a systemic failure to blame for the security lapse? The most immediate question concerns the Administration's response, and this is where electoral politics deserves to come in. Ms. Rice has defended her false and misleading statements by saying she was reading off a script prepared by U.S. intelligence—apparently a script not shared with the State Department she formally reports to. It'd be instructive to know who provided her this script, and whether or not she spoke to White House political aide David Plouffe or the Chicago campaign office as she prepared for her Sunday TV show appearances on September 16.

BUMP OR CHANGE?
WES ANDERSON
POLITICO

Did last Wednesday’s debate give Romney a bump or did it fundamentally change the race? A bump will likely self-correct and probably quickly. A change in voter perceptions of Romney is obviously a different matter. That largely depends on whether last Wednesday was more about Romney’s or Obama’s performance. Specifically, did middle to lower-middle, blue-ish-collar voters, who had decided Romney didn’t like them, change their minds or did they simply see an Obama performance that reminded them of all the doubts they’ve had about him for the last four years? ... Anecdotally it feels like Romney may have convinced a lot of those voters that he doesn’t hate them and he’s up to the job. Or maybe they just saw their lingering doubts about Obama acted out live. I can’t tell from the polling yet, but I’m certain both campaigns are vigorously looking for the answer to that question right now.

IT'S NOT JUST ABOUT US
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NEW YORK TIMES

Mitt Romney gave a foreign policy speech on Monday that could be boiled down to one argument: everything wrong with the Middle East today can be traced to a lack of leadership by President Obama. If this speech is any indication of the quality of Romney’s thinking on foreign policy, then we should worry. It was not sophisticated in describing the complex aspirations of the people of the Middle East. It was not accurate in describing what Obama has done or honest about the prior positions Romney has articulated. And it was not compelling or imaginative in terms of the strategic alternatives it offered. The worst message we can send right now to Middle Easterners is that their future is all bound up in what we do. It is not. The Arab-Muslim world has rarely been more complicated and more in need of radical new approaches by us — and them.

OBAMA'S ROCKY MOUNTAIN HORROR SHOW
JOE SCARBOROUGH
POLITICO

...Is the 44th president no more than a mediocre political talent who’s had one of the greatest runs of luck in history? And did that luck begin to run out in Denver last Wednesday during the homestretch of his final campaign? A week later, many Democrats fear that it did. ... It is possible that the political class has overestimated Barack Obama’s talents for too long now. But I suspect Wednesday night’s outcome was more the result of an arrogant campaign underestimating a former Massachusetts governor. That proved to be a pretty dumb thing to do to a guy who breezed through Harvard, revolutionized Wall Street, saved a Winter Olympics, signed a landmark health care bill with Ted Kennedy by his side, raised five gifted boys, and retains the love and respect of a woman he first met in elementary school. Like every campaign that crossed swords with Ronald Reagan, Chicago’s arrogance blew up in their face. The question now is whether Barack Obama will suffer the same fate as Gov. Pat Brown and President Jimmy Carter. The answer to that question is anyone’s guess.

Must-Read Op-Eds for Oct. 9, 2012

Must-Read Op-Eds for Oct. 8, 2012

...Obama knows that he alone is responsible for his unfathomable retreat into his own head while 70 million people watched. He hadn’t been nailing it in debate prep either, taking a break to visit the Hoover Dam, and worried aides knew his head wasn’t in it. When the president realized what a dud he was, he apologized to flummoxed and irritated advisers. ... Even though Obama was urged not to show his pompous side, he arrived at the podium cloaked in layers of disdain; a disdain for debates, which he regards as shams, a venue, as the Carter White House adviser Gerry Rafshoon puts it, where “people prefer a good liar to a bad performer.” ... It is that distaste for salesmanship that caused Obama not to sell or even explain health care and economic policies; and it is that distaste that caused him not to sell himself and his policies at the debate.

THE MUPPET IN THE ROOM
DANA MILBANK
WASHINGTON POST

At the Denver debate, Romney said he would eliminate Obamacare (doing so would actually increase the budget deficit, because of related tax hikes) and the public-broadcasting subsidy, which is $445 million a year — or little more than one one-hundredth of 1 percent of federal spending. But Romney proposes to cut federal spending by trillions of dollars — more than $5 trillion over the next decade, assuming he follows the sort of blueprint laid out by his running mate, Paul Ryan. That threatens much more than Muppets and monsters. Human lives are at stake.

I WAS RIGHT ABOUT THAT STRANGE JOBS REPORT
JACK WELCH
WALL STREET JOURNAL

...The the 7.8% unemployment figure released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) last week is downright implausible. And that's why I made a stink about it. ... The possibility of subjectivity creeping into the process is so pervasive that the BLS's own "Handbook of Methods" has a full page explaining the limitations of its data, including how non-sampling errors get made, from "misinterpretation of the questions" to "errors made in the estimations of missing data."Bottom line: To suggest that the input to the BLS data-collection system is precise and bias-free is—well, let's just say, overstated.

In association with the National Book Foundation, Morning Joe is happy to announce the 2012 National Book Award Finalists.

Fiction

Head of Fiction Panel
Lorrie Moore, author, most recently, A Gate at the Stairs

Finalists

Junot Díaz
This Is How You Lose Her
Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Diaz’s second collection of short stories featuring the alter ego “Yunior”, who as a boy and young man was the central character in his first collection “Drown”. His voice is distinctive, mixing popular and high culture, comic books and literature.

Dave Eggers
A Hologram for the King
McSweeney’s Books

In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter’s college tuition, and finally do something great, with mixed results.

Louise Erdrich
The Round House
Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe.

After a ferocious firefight with Iraqi insurgents at "the battle of Al-Ansakar Canal"—three minutes and forty-three seconds of intense warfare caught on tape by an embedded Fox News crew—has transformed the eight surviving men of Bravo Squad into America's most sought-after heroes, the Bush administration has sent them on a media-intensive nationwide Victory Tour to reinvigorate public support for the war, including being featured as part of the halftime show at a Dallas Cowboys game, alongside the superstar pop group Destiny's Child. First Novel

Kevin Powers
The Yellow Birds
Little, Brown and Company

In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year-old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. First Novel

Nonfiction

Head of Nonfiction Panel
Woody Holton, Professor of History, University of South Carolina, former NBA Finalist

Finalists

Anne Applebaum
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956
Doubleday

Iron Curtain describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete, how political parties, the church, the media, young people’s organizations―the institutions of civil society on every level―were eviscerated, how the secret police services were organized, how ethnic cleansing was carried out, and how some people were forced to collaborate while others managed to resist.

Katherine Boo
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Random House

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope: Individual stories of courage set against the backdrop of tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy.

Robert A. Caro
The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4
Knopf

The fourth installment in Robert Caro’s monumental work on President Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power follows Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career: 1958 to 1964

Domingo Martinez
The Boy Kings of Texas
Lyons Press, an imprint of Globe Pequot Press

Domingo Martinez lays bare his interior and exterior worlds as he struggles to make sense of the violent and the ugly, along with the beautiful and the loving, in a Texas border town in the 1980s. First Book

Anthony Shadid
House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In the spring of 2011, when Anthony Shadid—one of four New York Times reporters captured in Libya as the region erupted—was freed, he went to his ancestral home, Marjayoun, Lebanon…to an ancient estate built by his great-grandfather, a place filled with memories of a lost era when the Middle East was a world of grace, grandeur, and unexpected departures, and tells the story of the house’s re-creation, revealing its mysteries and recovering the lives that have passed through it. Shadid died on February 16, 2012 from an asthma attack while on assignment on the Syrian border.

 
Poetry

Head of Poetry Panel
Laura Kasischke, Chair (pronounced kuh-‘zish-key; winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry this year)

Finalists

David Ferry
Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations
University of Chicago Press

The passionate nature and originality of Ferry’s poems modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century

Cynthia Huntington
Heavenly Bodies
Southern Illinois University Press

In this blistering collection of lyric poems, Cynthia Huntington gives an intimate view of the sexual revolution and rebellion in a time before the rise of feminism.

Tim Seibles
Fast Animal
Etruscan Press

The newest collection from one of America’s foremost African-American poets threads the journey from youthful innocence to the whittled-hard awareness of adulthood

Alan Shapiro
Night of the Republic
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In Night of the Republic, Alan Shapiro takes us on an unsettling night tour of America’s public places―a gas station restroom, a shoe store, a convention hall, and a race track, among other locations―and in stark, Edward Hopper-like imagery reveals the surreal and dreamlike features of these familiar but empty night spaces.

Susan Wheeler
Meme
University of Iowa Press

A meme is a unit of thought replicated by imitation. Occupy Wall Street is a meme, as are internet ideas and images that go viral. But what could be more potent memes than those passed down by parents to their children? Susan Wheeler reconstructs her mother’s voice—down to its cynicism and its mid-twentieth-century Midwestern vernacular—in “The Maud Poems,” a voice that takes a more aggressive, vituperative turn in “The Devil—or —The Introjects.”

 
Young People’s Literature

Head of Young People’s Literature Panel
Gary D. Schmidt

Finalists

William Alexander
Goblin Secrets
Margaret K. McElderry Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing

Rownie, the youngest in Graba the witchworker's household of stray children, escapes and goes looking for his missing brother. Along the way he falls in with a troupe of theatrical goblins and learns the secret origins of masks.

Carrie Arcos
Out of Reach
Simon Pulse, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing

Rachel has always idolized her older brother Micah. He struggles with addiction, but she tells herself that he’s in control. And she almost believes it. Until the night that Micah doesn’t come home.

Patricia McCormick
Never Fall Down
Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

When the Khmer Rouge arrive at his hometown in Cambodia, Arn is just a kid, dancing to rock 'n' roll, hustling for spare change, and selling ice cream with his brother. But after the soldiers march the entire population into the countryside, Arn is separated from his family and assigned to a labor camp. One day, the soldiers ask if any of the kids can play an instrument. In order to survive, Arn must quickly master the strange revolutionary songs the soldiers demand. This will save his life, but it will also pull him into the very center of what we know today as the Killing Fields.

Eliot Schrefer
Endangered
Scholastic

When Sophie has to visit her mother at her sanctuary for bonobos in Congo, she’s not thrilled to be there. It’s her mother’s passion, and Sophie doesn’t want to have anything to do with it. At least not until Otto, an infant bonobo, comes into her life, and for the first time she feels the bond a human can have with an animal.

Steve Sheinkin
Bomb: The Race to Build―and Steal―the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon
Flash Point, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press

In December of 1938, a chemist in a German laboratory made a shocking discovery: When placed next to radioactive material, a Uranium atom split in two. That simple discovery launched a scientific race that spanned three continents. This is the story of the plotting, risk-taking, deceit, and genius that created the world's most formidable weapon. This is the story of the atomic bomb.

BUYING THE ELECTION?
JOE NOCERA
NEW YORK TIMES

This election season, Mitt Romney and President Obama could end up spending more than $1 billion each. They seem to spend more time fund-raising than pressing the flesh with voters. ...And that doesn’t even account for what’s truly different about this election: the rise of the “super PACs” and 501(c)4s, which are essentially a form of campaign money-laundering, allowing wealthy people to contribute millions toward supposedly “independent” spending on campaign advertising, polling and other expensive campaign goodies. Sheldon Adelson, the casino mogul, whose main political interest appears to be Israel, has pumped $10 million into Restore Our Future, the biggest Republican super PAC. Although individual contributions to a particular candidate remains severely restricted — no more than $5,000 — the amount someone can pour into a super PAC is limitless. The means by which the country finances its campaigns is utterly broken.

IN SEARCH OF ANSWERS FROM MR. ROMNEY
EDITORIAL
NEW YORK TIMES

[Romney] seems to consider himself, ludicrously, a leader similar to the likes of Harry Truman and George Marshall, and, at one point, he obliquely questioned Mr. Obama’s patriotism. The hope seems to be that big propaganda, said loudly and often, will drown out Mr. Obama’s respectable record in world affairs, make Americans believe Mr. Romney would be the better leader and cover up the fact that there is mostly just hot air behind his pronouncements. ... One new element is Mr. Romney’s assertion that the threats have “grown worse.” He desperately wants to undercut the edge that voters have given Mr. Obama on foreign policy, even before he ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden. But he offers no real evidence to back up that particular claim, and if it were true that the threats have been so much worse for so long, it’s odd that Mr. Romney hasn’t really talked about them before.

Must-Read Op-Eds for Oct. 8, 2012

Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom famously predicted that the candidate would use an Etch-a-Sketch approach in the general election to erase his previous positions. But nobody predicted that the entire exercise would occur in the space of one week — and just a month before the election. Stranger yet, Romney hasn’t been shifting all his views to the center in recent days. While his domestic policies are moderating, his foreign policy is moving to more of a neocon hard line. The only consistency is inconsistency: Whatever Romney’s positions were, they are no longer.

ROMNEY'S BACK-SEAT DRIVING
EDITORIAL
WASHINGTON POST

After repeatedly fumbling on foreign policy during his campaign, Mitt Romney delivered Monday a coherent and forceful critique of President Obama’s handling of the upheavals in the Middle East. Arguing that a fateful struggle is playing out across the region, he said the United States is “missing an historic opportunity” because of Mr. Obama’s failure to more aggressively support liberal forces against dictators and Islamic extremists. ... So how would Mr. Romney remedy these errors? That’s where the weakness of his speech lay: It was hard to detect what tangible new steps the challenger would take. ... In all, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Mr. Romney, like Mr. Obama, is avoiding the embrace of a more robust Mideast policy out of fear of offending voters weary of international conflict or of dividing his own advisers. Mr. Obama’s campaign released a new ad calling Mr. Romney’s foreign policy “reckless.” In fact, this was a too-cautious response to a too-cautious policy.

ROMNEY'S WORLD
EDITORIAL
WALL STREET JOURNAL

...The man who took the VMI stage came off as serious, pragmatic and cautious, possibly to a fault. His broad strokes offered a welcome contrast to Mr. Obama's view that America must defer to other nations to win global favor. Mr. Romney recognized the electorate's understandable war fatigue, but he still made a case for the world's only superpower to reassert its leadership, most of all in the Middle East. A Romney Administration wouldn't "lead from behind" or defer to the United Nations. ... advocating a robust role for the U.S. overseas, Mr. Romney is placing himself in a long bipartisan tradition from Truman to Bush, while comparing Mr. Obama to Jimmy Carter in Presidential weakness. Foreign policy won't decide this election, but voters should be pleased that the Republican has forcefully made a case for renewed American leadership in the world.

The Pakistani film  “International Gorillay” (International guerrillas), produced by Sajjad Gul,  told the story  of a  group of local heroes—of the type that would,  in the  language  of  a later  age, come to be known as jihadis   or terrorists—who vowed to find and  kill  an author  called “Salman Rushdie.” The quest for “Rushdie” formed the main action of the film and “his” death was the film’s version of  a happy ending.

“Rushdie” himself   was depicted as a  drunk,  constantly swigging from a bottle of liquor, and a sadist.   He lived in what looked very like a palace on what looked very like an island  in the Philippines  (clearly all novelists  had second homes of this kind),  being protected by what looked very like the Israeli  army (this  presumably being a  service offered by Israel to all novelists),  and he  was plotting  the overthrow  of Pakistan by the fiendish means of opening chains of discotheques and gambling  dens across that pure and virtuous  land, a  perfidious notion for which,  as the British Muslim “leader”  Iqbal Sacranie might  have said, death was too light a punishment. “Rushdie” was dressed exclusively in a   series  of  hideously  colored safari  suits—vermilion  safari suits, aubergine safari suits,  cerise safari suits—and the camera, when- ever it fell upon the figure of this vile personage, invariably started at his feet and then  panned with slow menace up to his face. So the safari suits got a lot of screen time, and when he saw a videotape of the film the fashion insult wounded him deeply. It was, however, oddly satisfying to read that one result of the film’s popularity in Pakistan was that the actor playing “Rushdie” became so hated by the film-going public that he had to go into hiding.

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At a certain point in the film one of the international gorillay was captured by the Israeli army and tied to a tree  in the garden of the palace in the Philippines so that “Rushdie” could  have his evil  way with him. Once “Rushdie” had finished drinking from his bottle and lashing the poor terrorist with a whip, once he had slaked his filthy lust for violence upon the young man’s body, he handed the innocent would-be murderer over to the Israeli  soldiers  and uttered the only genuinely funny line in the film. “Take him away,” he cried, “and read to him from The Satanic Verses all night!” Well, of course, the poor fellow cracked completely.  Not that, anything but that, he blubbered as the Israelis led him away.

At the end of the film “Rushdie” was indeed killed—not by the international gorillay, but by the Word itself, by thunderbolts unleashed by three large Qur’ans hanging in the sky over his head, which  reduced the monster to ash. Personally fried by the Book of the Almighty: There was dignity in that.

On July 22, 1990, the British Board of Film Classification refused International Gorillay a certificate, on the fairly self-evident grounds that it was libelous (and because the  BBFC feared that if it were to license the film and the  real Rushdie were to sue for defamation, the board could  be accused of having become party to the libel,  and could there- fore  be  sued  for damages  as well). This  placed the  real  Rushdie in something of a  quandary. He was fighting a battle   for free speech and yet he was being defended, in this case, by an act of censorship. On the other hand the film was a nasty   piece  of  work. In the end he wrote  a letter to the BBFC formally giving up his right of  legal recourse, as- suring  the board that he would  pursue neither  the filmmaker nor the board itself  in the courts,  and that he did not wish  to be accorded  “the dubious protection of censorship.” The film should  be shown  so that it could  be seen for the “distorted, incompetent  piece of  trash  that it is.”  On August  17, as   a  direct  result  of  his intervention,   the board unanimously  voted to license the film; whereupon, in spite of all the producer’s efforts   to  promote   it, it immediately sank without  trace, because it was a rotten movie, and no matter what its intended  audience may have thought  about “Rushdie” or even Rushdie, they were too wise  to throw their  money away on tickets  for a dreadful film.

It was, for him, an object lesson  in the importance  of  the “better out  than in” free speech argument—that it was better to allow even the most reprehensible speech than to sweep it under the carpet, better to  publicly   contest  and perhaps deride  what  was loathsome  than  to give it the glamour  of taboo, and that, for  the most part, people could be trusted  to tell the good from  the bad. If International  Gorillay had been banned, it would  have become the hottest of hot  videos and in the parlors  of  Bradford  and Whitechapel  young  Muslim men would have gathered behind  closed drapes to rejoice in the frying  of the apostate.  Out in the open, subjected to the judgment of the market, it shriveled like a vampire in sunlight, and was gone.

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Frontline producer Michael Kirk joined us this morning to discuss the new documentary "The Choice 2012," which looks at how the personal histories of both Mitt Romney and President Obama have shaped their lives.

The two-hour long documentary airs Tuesday, October 9 at 9 p.m. ET on PBS.

IT COULD BE HIS PARTY
ROSS DOUTHAT
NEW YORK TIMES

...What [Romney] did was clarify, elevate and translate. He clarified what kind of tax reformer he would be, by promising that revenue neutrality would take priority over sweeping cuts for the rich — a premise that plenty of Republicans are already happy to accept. He elevated an argument that’s increasingly popular among conservative wonks — that the Dodd-Frank financial reform perpetuates “too big to fail” — and used it to make a populist case against the president. And he translated the basic free-market vision to a nonideological audience, by talking more about decent jobs than heroic job creators, and more about the struggling middle class than about the supposedly persecuted John Galts. This is the role that an effective party leader ought to play. Media fantasies notwithstanding, you can’t lead a party by repudiating its base or campaigning against its reigning ideology. But you can lead by channeling the base’s passions in a constructive direction, and by reinterpreting the party’s ideology to meet the challenges of the present day.

JOBS REPORT: COOKED OR CORRECT?
JOE NOCERA
NEW YORK TIMES

...There is something truly absurd about having the presidential race hinge on the unemployment rate. Even putting aside the reliability of the short-term numbers, the harsh reality is that no president has much control over the economy. That is especially true of President Obama, whose every effort to boost the economy these past two years has been stymied by Republicans. Again and again, they have shown that they would rather see the country suffer than do anything that might help Obama’s re-election. There is rough justice in the way things are playing out. Having spent the last year wrongly blaming the president for high unemployment, Republicans can only stand by helplessly as the unemployment rate goes down at the worst possible moment for them.

ROMNEY AT THE DEBATE: A SECOND LOOK
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
NEW YORK TIMES

If Mr. Romney had shown the courage of conviction to endorse these newfound policies during the Republican debating season, then I would have applauded the display of moderation, and the courage to stand up to the Tea Party orthodoxy. But now? It surely represents nothing, if not his total lack of courage of conviction. It does prove that the only thing “authentic” about Mr. Romney is his cynicism about the intelligence of his audience, as he plays to the crowd and tells it what he thinks it wants to hear. President Obama’s poor performance at the debate notwithstanding, can anyone in this country — either on the left or the right, or anywhere in between — truly believe anything Mr. Romney says from this day forth?

FRENEMIES: A LOVE STORY
THOMAS P. O'NEILL
NEW YORK TIMES

President Reagan knew my father treasured Boston College, so he was the centerpiece of a dinner at the Washington Hilton Hotel that raised $1 million to build the O’Neill Library there. When Reagan was shot at that same hotel, my father went to his hospital room to pray by his bed. No, my father and Reagan weren’t close friends. Famously, after 6 p.m. on quite a few work days, they would sit down for drinks at the White House. But it wasn’t the drinks or the conversation that allowed American government to work. Instead, it was a stubborn refusal not to allow fund-raisers, activists, party platforms or ideological chasms to stand between them and actions — tempered and improved by compromise — that kept this country moving. I don’t blame Mr. Obama or Mr. Romney for getting nostalgic about that.

IS AMERICA MAN ENOUGH TO VOTE?
VICTORIA BASSETTI
NEW YORK TIMES

In 2008, scientists from Duke University and the University of Michigan analyzed the biological effects of voting on more than 150 voters. On Election Day, more than 150 test subjects chewed sugar-free gum after they’d voted and again at regular intervals after learning the election results. When the scientists analyzed the testosterone in the saliva generated by all that gum chewing, they noted a dramatic pattern: men who had voted for the losing presidential candidate, John McCain, suffered a big drop in their testosterone after hearing of his defeat. The scientists reported that the male McCain voters “felt significantly more controlled, submissive, unhappy and unpleasant.” The testosterone effect was “as if they directly engaged head-to-head in a contest for dominance” and lost, one researcher told a reporter when the study was published in 2009. The men who voted for Obama fared better. The researchers speculated that there might be an Obama baby boom.

BETTER NEWS ON JOBS
EDITORIAL
NEW YORK TIMES

The share of jobless workers out of work for six months or more remained extremely high, at 40 percent, or 4.8 million people, of which more than half had been out of work for more than year. And finding a job remains difficult: in July, the latest month for which data on job openings was available, nearly 13 million jobless workers were competing for 3.7 million openings. Long-term joblessness is largely a measure of the depth of employment loss during the recession from the end of 2007 to mid-2009. Its persistence means that a top priority now is to extend federal jobless benefits, which kick in when state unemployment insurance benefits run out, generally after 26 weeks. Federal benefits are now phasing out and are set to expire at the end of the year. If they are not extended, two million workers will be cut off during the holiday season. ... a delay in extending those benefits, or worse, allowing them to be cut off entirely, would be a mistake; it would remove crucial spending from the economy and cause real suffering for a vulnerable population.

AN UNHELPFUL DEBATE
EDITORIAL
NEW YORK TIMES

The Mitt Romney who appeared on the stage at the University of Denver seemed to be fleeing from the one who won the Republican nomination on a hard-right platform of tax cuts, budget slashing and indifference to the suffering of those at the bottom of the economic ladder. And Mr. Obama’s competitive edge from 2008 clearly dulled, as he missed repeated opportunities to challenge Mr. Romney on his falsehoods and turnabouts. ... There are still two more presidential debates, and Mr. Obama has the facts on his side to expose the hollowness of his opponent. But first he has to decide to use them aggressively.

ROMNEY TAKES THE STAGE
EDITORIAL
WALL STREET JOURNAL

Mitt Romney met the challenge of appearing Presidential, showed a superior command of fact and argument than the incumbent, and made a confident, optimistic case for change. ...This was easily his finest performance as a candidate, and the best debate effort by a Republican nominee since Ronald Reagan in 1980. ... Mr. Romney kept reminding Americans about the unpleasant facts about where we've been as a way of casting doubt on what four more years of Mr. Obama would be like. But significantly, and for the first time, he didn't merely criticize the Obama record. Mr. Romney went further and explained with some specificity how his policies would improve the lives and economic prospects for middle-class Americans. ...The President seemed off his game overall, verbose as he often is but with his famous restraint seeming more diffident than cool as Mr. Romney bore in with details about his record. It's clear Mr. Obama isn't used to someone challenging the attack lines that he uses to describe Mr. Romney's various proposals on the stump.

Must-Read Op-Eds for Oct. 3, 2012

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MITT SEIZES HIS CHANCE
DANA MILBANK
WASHINGTON POST

His chances slipping away in Ohio and other key points on the electoral map, Romney needed something — anything — to change the trajectory of a race that has turned against him. It was his last, best chance to alter the narrative of the contest and, with tens of millions of Americans watching, Romney gave one of the strongest performances of his campaign. ... While Obama’s answers were often lengthy and ponderous, Romney went a long way to defeat the impression that he is wooden and awkward. His attacks on the president were respectful but deft. He joined Obama deep in the weeds of policy and demonstrated a command of substance — even if he didn’t divulge much new about his policies. At times he sounded downright human — and even (can it be?) funny.

ROMNEY'S PERSONALITY SHIFT
E.J. DIONNE JR
WASHINGTON POST

The strangest aspect of Wednesday night’s debate was Mitt Romney’s decision to change his tax policies on the fly. Having campaigned hard on a tax proposal that called for $5 trillion in tax cuts, he said flatly that he was not offering a $5 trillion tax cut. ... Romney’s willingness to remake himself one more time brought into sharp relief a central flaw of his candidacy: Having campaigned as a moderate when he ran for governor of Massachusetts, he veered sharply to the right to win the Republican presidential nomination. Now, with the election just weeks away and polls showing him falling behind in the swing states, he has decided that he needs once again to sound moderate, practical and terribly concerned about the middle class — and that is the person he sought to be in Denver.

90 MINUTES OF EVASION
EDITORIAL
WASHINGTON POST

...Both candidates studiously maintained the evasions and omissions at the heart of their policies. The debate was wonky without being especially honest. ... Mr. Obama, slightly ahead in the polls, was more policy professor than point-scorer. Mr. Romney, who needed more from the debate, talked at a somewhat higher elevation but also steered clear of personal attacks.  Mr. Romney effectively indicted the president for the weak state of the economy four years after his election. ...But the two candidates were strikingly complicit in failing to confront the magnitude of the fiscal challenge the winner will face immediately. The overriding feature of the debate was a tacit conspiracy of avoidance.

COOL HAND BARRY
CHARLES M. BLOW
NEW YORK TIMES

The passion that the president exhibits on the campaign trail never showed up on the debate stage. To my mind, that was a mistake. This is the closing argument of a campaign. The jury has heard all the evidence that it’s going to hear. The candidates needed to deliver a strong, moving summation. We all know that Obama is capable of stirring oratory, but in the first debate he failed to deliver. The guy with the weaker case made the stronger statement, falsehoods and all, and that is a dangerous thing to allow so close to Election Day. The Obama campaign must learn from this blunder: stronger is better. The last phase of the campaign is about impressions more than it is about policy. It is unfortunate, but at this stage, for the undecided people in the middle, substance is a casualty of style. By that measure, Romney outshone the president at this debate.

SILENCE OF THE CANDIDATES
EDITORIAL
WASHINGTON POST

Now that the campaign has reached its first debate and, possibly, its final pivotal moment, we hope the candidates will devote more attention to the future: specifically, to what they hope to accomplish over the next four years. ... Both candidates portray this election as a stark choice between radically different governing philosophies, and we tend to think that is true. But each has been more eager to scare voters about his opponent’s worldview than to explain how his own could cope with 21st-century problems. Slow economic growth, rising inequality, uncapped entitlement spending, suffocating debt: None of these is inevitable for the nation. But they are the endpoint of our current path. Voters have a right to hear how their leaders would avert these outcomes.

THE ZINGER CANDIDATE
DANA MILBANK
WASHINGTON POST

At a time when even his fondest supporters are pleading for more substance, Mitt Romney is giving them the political equivalent of junk food. His has been the Zinger candidacy — all sugary platitudes, no protein. ... Wednesday night’s debate offers Romney his best chance to change the trajectory of a race that seems to be favoring the incumbent. But Romney’s inclination was to stick with the zing thing. ...A well-landed zinger can be memorable, such as Reagan’s promise not to exploit Walter Mondale’s “youth and inexperience,” Mondale’s “Where’s the beef?” or Lloyd Bentsen’s “You’re no Jack Kennedy” to Dan Quayle. But for each of those, there are many failed attempts in which a candidate’s line sounds forced and canned — a risk increased by Romney memorizing zingers fed to him by aides.

Must-Read Op-Eds for Oct. 2, 2012

Voters should know all they need to know about Obama — including the possibility that he isn’t the leader that a majority hoped he would be — yet there’s still a chance he may reveal something that tips the scale toward Romney. Will he gaze down his nose at Romney the way he did Hillary Clinton? We want to see. Romney enters the ring with a tattered campaign dragging behind him like tin cans on a rusted-out honeymoon coupe. His once-sterling reputation has been tarnished by the perception that he is awkward and callous. ... The conventional wisdom is that Romney has to slay his opponent or the election is really, really over, this time for sure. Even a slight bounce for Obama is viewed as certain victory in five weeks. By contrast, according to this same wisdom, a Romney victory guarantees only that he’s in the game until the next debate.

A REFERENDUM ON ROMNEY
MARGARET CARLSON
BLOOMBERG VIEW

How could someone whose stock in trade was his very CEO- ness let things get so bad? Romney has probably been thinking about running for president for more than four decades, since his father’s defeat in 1968. He has spent the better part of the last six years actually running for president. Yet he has managed to bungle the main message of his campaign. Now this election is a referendum not on the incumbent, but on the challenger. And Romney has to show that he is more competent than his campaign. ...He has to show that he understands the lives of the people he would lead (or is “likeable enough,” as Obama said of Hillary Clinton), and that he is the better person to run the country.  Romney brought this burden on himself. As for Obama? All he has to do is show that Romney may be a nice guy, but he just isn’t up to the job.