New York Times poll analyst Nate Silver said Tuesday night on The Rachel Maddow Show that President Obama still has an edge in the 2012 election, but has lost the significant he held during the period between the Democratic convention and the first debate.

"It's become clear that Romney got a three or four point bounce from the debate," Silver said. The race is as close as it has been all year, he added. (Romney is widely regarded to have won the debate, a position borne out by recent polling.)

---

Furthermore, Republican enthusiasm to defeat Obama, combined with Democratic despondence after the debate, could make the president's prospects even gloomier. The enthusiasm gap "might be enough to push Romney over the top," said Silver.

Liberals shouldn't panic, though—yet. "I'm a little skeptical that it's actually tied right now, based on the fact that Obama still has a lead in the majority of the swing state polls that we've seen," Silver said. If polls continue to show a Romney surge, however, "panic will be an appropriate response."

Richard Carmona believes he will win a Senate seat in Arizona, where no Democrat has been elected in 18 years.

"The people know me, they consider me one of their own, and they're very proud of me stepping up to serve my country once again," said Carmona, explaining his appeal on Tuesday's Hardball. Carmona is a medical doctor, professor, former Surgeon General, and Vietnam veteran who served in combat.

---

Carmona suggested that the extremism of the Republican Party might drive more Arizona voters back to the Democrats. "I really think" the moderate Democratic tradition in the state can make a comeback, he said, "and what's helping us most is this extremist rhetoric that has been happening not only in Arizona but throughout the West."

Polls show Carmona to be competitive with Republican incumbent Jeff Flake. Former President Bill Clinton will hold a rally for him on Wednesday. "If you pull this off you'll be a man to watch for years and years," said host Chris Matthews.

According to Politico, reports have surfaced that, right before the first debate, the Romney family held an "intervention" with Mitt to tell him that his campaign strategy wasn't working. Campaign insiders told Politico's Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei that the candidate's image was in need of softening, and that his strategists had privately acknowledged that they were too focused on the news cycle.

"When the history of this campaign is written, the family intervention will be among the most important turning points in the Romney saga," wrote Allen and Vandehei.

Not everyone believes the reports. "I don't buy this whole idea that his wife and family swoop in and bring out the real Mitt," Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank said Tuesday night on PoliticsNation.

---

Ultimately, the public has no way of knowing whether the Romney who shined at the first debate is the "real" Romney, Milbank said. What happened to the Romney from weeks ago, from the primaries, or from the 2008 race?

"He changes positions the way you and I take neckties," Milbank quipped. He speculated that Romney's campaign was sputtering and the rumors of an "intervention" were simply a way to signal a reset, to interest the media in a new narrative, and to fire up the disaffected Republican base.

Early voting began in Ohio on Tuesday morning. Obama supporters camped out overnight at polling stations around the state, as part of state Democrats' "sleep out the vote" effort. Early turnout bodes well for the president because, as Ed Schultz pointed out on Tuesday's The Ed Show, "early voters tend to favor Democrats."

In Lucas County, in the north part of Ohio, turnout on the first day of early voting nearly doubled from 2008's numbers. Of Tuesday's 928 voters, 696 were Democrats, while only 40 were Republicans. The Obama campaign has 96 field offices in the state, while Romney's team has just 36.

---

Early voting tends to be hugely important in Ohio. In 2008, 30 percent of voters got in their ballots before Election Day. This year the number could total 40 percent, said Schultz. According to the auditor of Ohio's Johnson County, a whopping 55 percent of voters in that region voted early in the last presidential election. He says "demand for early ballots so far is up significantly from 2008," according to CNN.

Schultz cautioned against excessive optimism, however. "Beware: Michael Dukakis had the lead before the election in 1988," he said. "This is a long haul."

The latest poll conducted jointly by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal shows President Obama maintaining his lead over Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Obama leads Romney by three points among likely voters, 49% to 46%.

"Forty-nine puts you in 'the reelect zone,' as our pollster put it," NBC political director Chuck Todd said Tuesday night on Hardball. What's more, among registered voters, the president is ahead of Romney by seven points, 51% to 44%.

"The president obviously has consolidated his base very well," said Howard Feinman, MSNBC political analyst.

---

Obama is benefiting from the perception that the economy is improving. Forty-four percent expect the economy to improve in the next year. That’s an increase of two points from the last NBC/WSJ survey, released two weeks ago. In fact, the percentage of Americans believing the economy will get better is up eight points since August and 17 points since July.

 

Not all the news is good for Obama, however. The poll's numbers are slightly worse for him than a similar poll conducted by NBC/WSJ two weeks ago, which showed that Obama’s lead was five points, 50% to 45%.

The poll also showed that "the Republican vote is more enthusiastic," said Todd.

The margin of error is three points, enough to cover the spread among likely voters.

Democratic Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill appeared Tuesday night on The Last Word for an exclusive interview regarding her race against Republican candidate Todd Akin. Asked by host Lawrence O'Donnell about Akin's infamous remark that most women cannot get pregnant from what he called "legitimate rape," McCaskill said this: "I don't think the problem is what Todd said; the problem is what Todd believes."

Akin's comments, McCaskill suggested, were only one manifestation of his hard-right ideology.

McCaskill pointed to a number of extremist comments Akin has made, including his claim that Medicare is unconstitutional, his assertion that the minimum wage should be abolished, his admission that "didn't like" social security, and his stated desire to eliminate federal funding for student loans.

The senator has just released a new ad hitting Akin on these positions, including the "legitimate rape" comment. "What will he say next?" the ad asks.

---

"It's not that Todd and I are that far apart, on opposite ends," McCaskill said. "I'm in the middle, and he is on the very edge."

Akin was also among a handful of Members of Congress who voted against a sex offender registry, against a child nutrition program, and against the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, she said.

McCaskill charged that Akin has never possessed good relations with other Republicans. "This is someone who has always operated on the fringe of his party," she said. To drive that point home, her campaign will be unveiling "Republicans for Claire," a group which includes prominent conservatives, such as former Republican Senator Kit Bond's former chief of staff.

"We're going to have a lot of Republicans helping us in this race," McCaskill said.

Mitt Romney has been strongly criticized for his lack of policy specifics, and his plan for education is no exception. But the Romney campaign has offered a few details. As host Ed Schultz put it on Tuesday's The Ed Show, "One of his big solutions for education reform is a new one we've been talking about for some 70 years: parental involvement." The rest of his plan is characterized by support for charter schools, vouchers, and deep cuts to public education.

Here's what Romney would do if he were elected president:

• Cut Pell Grants for More than 9 Million Students
• Eliminate Head Start for More Than 2 Million Children
• Cut Nearly $5 Billion for Low Income and Special Needs Students

---

There's more. “Romney wants to dial it back further and really gut the provisions of [No Child Left Behind]," Drew University education professor Patrick McGuinn told The Christian Science Monitor. Romney also wants to give states money if they abolish or reform teacher tenure.

The Romney plan "would affect the future of education in this country," Schultz said. "Mitt Romney, if you want to draw the line here, really made the case for the 47 percent in education."

Is Barack Obama "the Democrats' Reagan?" That's the argument Newsweek's Andrew Sullivan makes in his cover story from the latest issue. In the piece, Sullivan argues that Obama could be as transformative a president as the Gipper was. In fact, he says, Obama's electoral and policy strategies may be so successful they could "bring his opposition, the GOP, back to the center, just as Reagan indelibly moved the Democrats away from the far left."

Sullivan does think there are crucial differences, however. On Tuesday's Hardball, he told host Chris Matthews that he thinks Obama has been a superior president to Reagan in many ways.

"Reagan ran for reelection with a higher 'misery index' than Obama currently has," said Sullivan. "Reagan's recession was also a fed-induced recession, in order to wring inflation out of the economy, and it happened and began on his watch."

---

Obama, by contrast, inherited much worse circumstances than did Reagan. "Obama inherited a financial collapse recession, which of their nature last longer, and it happened before he got there," said Sullivan. "I think that helps explain the difference [in how well the economy is recovering]."

Sullivan added that Gallup approval ratings for Reagan and Obama matched more closely than any other two presidents in the last 50 years—except that Reagan's approval sank lower in his first term than Obama's ever did. In addition, "Reagan's recovery was the sugar high," depending on huge deficits for which America is still paying today, Sullivan said, while Obama has given the public tough love, leading them to understand the long-term nature of the problem.

"If you've watched the president, you know that he always plays the long game," Sullivan said.

 

A Tea Party-backed group called the "Voter Integrity Project" has alleged that as many as 30,000 dead individuals could still be on the North Carolina voting rolls. But as MSNBC's Rachel Maddow pointed out on Thursday's The Rachel Maddow Show, the Project has integrity problems of its own.

The Project delivered to the state's election board the names it identified as ineligible, saying that 90% of those persons should be taken off the voter list. Local media lauded the group—but when North Carolina's board of elections reviewed the names, it found that less than 5,000 even merited a second look. And of those, not a single individual was found to have voted after they died, voted illegitimately, or even to have died at all.

The North Carolina Board of Elections checked voter records and death certificates, said Elections Liaison Veronica Degraffenreid, but "we haven't found any instance of voter fraud."

---

While the Voter Integrity Project is focused on North Carolina, similar groups are attempting voter roll purges in Ohio, California, Illinois and Arizona. The Project filed with the state as a business, allowing them to keep their tax returns private, despite describing itself to the public as a "non-profit organization." Once Maddow pointed to the discrepancy, the Project took the non-profit claim off its website and apologized. 

Degraffenreid said the attempted voter purge was unprecedented. "This is a novel approach ... we've never had a group come in before and challenge these number of voters at one time," she said. The Board has been forced to devote some of its limited resources towards examining the Project's claims, taking time and money away from their attempts to ensure that other aspects of the voting process are effective, efficient and fair. Still, the "North Carolina voter rolls are sound," Degraffenreid said—whatever the Voter Integrity Project claims.

As the Romney campaign suffers in the polls and struggles to counter the infamous the video of their candidate seemingly deriding 47 percent of the electorate, Republican candidates across the country are backing away from their presidential nominee. The latest evacuee: Romney's campaign co-chair, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who quit the campaign to join a Wall Street lobbying firm. Ohio's Republican governor Jon Kasich also distanced himself, saying he disagreed with Romney's "47 percent" comments, then qualifying his disagreement by saying, "We all have misspoken."

"They're jumping ship," said MSNBC's Ed Schultz on Thursday's The Ed Show. "They've had enough."

---

Pawlenty and Kasich were hardly alone. Hawaii Senate candidate Linda Lingle recently emphasized that she is not "a rubber stamp for the national party," and that she cannot be held responsible for Romney's statements. Even arch-conservative George Allen, running for Senate in Virginia, said on Thursday night that he had his "own point of view on the subject." His view is that "the people of America still believe in the American dream."

The latest ship-jumpers join a host of other Republican critics of Romney's "47 percent" remark. On Wednesday night's Hardball, even Republican strategist John Feehery conceded that Romney's secretly recorded speech was hugely problematic. "If you're running for president, you have to get as many votes as you can. A lot of those in the 47 percent are people who want to vote for Mitt Romney," he said.

The leaked footage of Mitt Romney's remarks at a private fundraiser include some statements that are at odds with the Republican candidate's stated views on Israel and Palestine. While the Republican candidate has publicly expressed support for a negotiated two-state solution, in private, he has been recorded suggesting that America should "kick the ball down the field."

"And I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues," said Romney in leaked footage of a private fundraiser, "and I say, 'There's just no way."

"All right," he went on, "we have a potentially volatile situation but we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it."

---

That's not what Romney has said in public. In his campaign white paper "An American Century," Romney writes, "the key to negotiating a lasting peace is an Israel that knows it will be secure." But Romney's remarks show that he doesn't believe a U.S.-negotiated peace between Israelis and Palestinian is possible at all. Similarly, the paper states that "as president, Romney will reject any measure that would frustrate direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians." In the video, he makes clear that he think the Palestinians have no interest in making peace, and so negotiations are useless.

“I believe in a two-state solution which suggests there will be two states, including a Jewish state," Romney told Israeli newspaper Haaretz. "I respect Israel’s right to remain a Jewish state. The question is not whether the people of the region believe that there should be a Palestinian state."

On Tuesday's The Ed Show, host Ed Schultz said, "Now that's not what he told his donors. Are we to believe this, or this just lip service?" MSNBC contributor Richard Wolffe added, "it doesn't help Israel to have American leaders disengage," despite what Romney said on the tape.

President Obama responded to the leaked footage of Republican challenger Mitt Romney dismissing nearly half the electorate as "dependent on government" by drawing a distinction between the two candidates.

"One of the things I’ve learned as president is you represent the entire country," he said during a Tuesday appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman.

“When I won in 2008, 47% of the American people voted for John McCain,” Obama said. “They didn’t vote for me, and what I said on election night was, 'Even though you didn’t vote for me, I hear your voices, and I’m going to work as hard as I can to be your president.'”

Indeed he did say that in his victory speech, adding, "I will listen to you, especially when we disagree."

---

In the now-infamous footage of Romney addressing a private fundraiser, the Republican candidate said he would never win votes among the 47% of Americans "who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it." 

Obama disputed the premise of Romney's remarks.

“There are not a lot of people out there who think they’re victims," the president said. "There are not a lot of people who think they’re entitled to something.”

He also rejected comparisons between what Romney said and his own "cling to guns or religion" remarks from 2008. Obama immediately apologized for that line, he said, while Romney has doubled down on it.

“What I think the majority of people, Democrats and Republicans believe, is we’ve got some obligations to each other, and there’s nothing wrong with us giving each other a helping hand," he added.