Encouraging signs

During and since the beautifully executive, wonderfully inclusive Democratic convention and the numerous fantastic speeches, I began to get excited again about our prospects of winning this election.

In that aftermath, the news continues to be encouraging.   Here are some of the signs:

1.  Obama got a bigger convention bounce than Romney did.  A CNN/ORC poll just released this afternoon gives Obama a 6% lead over Romney.  The poll is of likely voters, 52% to 46%.   This is doubly significant because Republicans had been doing better on likely voters, meaning there was more enthusiasm among theirs.  That seems to have changed with the convention.

2.  Obama raised more money in August than Romney did.

3.  Romney continues to make gaffes or incoherent explanations for his continuing flip-flops on issues.   And the media is actually reporting them with some fact-checking.

4.  The fact that Romney's positions (when he actually has one) often contradict ways Ryan has voted in the past.   The media is noticing.

5.  The closer we get to the election, Romney is under more pressure to come forth with his plans in some detail -- his budget, his health care reform, how to increase jobs.   He can no longer get by on sound bites without any backing.

6.  In trying to explain his statements, Romney increasingly meets himself coming from the other direction.   Or even in the same paragraph, like the one today where he says that Obama deserves no credit for keeping the economy from getting worse.  It's just part of the natural cycle of recession and recoverery that happens due to market forces, so Obama can't take credit for what improvement there has been.  Then in the same paragraph, he tells how his policies would have been so much better to spark the recovery.   Which is it?  Either the president can influence the recovery and Obama deserves credit, or a president can't and that means that you can't either, Mittens.

6.  Even an unnamed member of Romney's political advisers has been quoted as saying, "We're losing."

7.  Nate Silver's prediction of Obama's chances of winning keeps going up:  as of 3:00 pm on September 10th it is 80.7%.

Ralph