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If Nate Silver is right, it could be a surprisingly good night for President Obama. My favorite political oddsmaker has Obama’s chances of victory at 91%, with potentially 314 electoral votes. If this turns out to be the result, the Republican Party is going to have to do some major soul searching, because if they could not defeat a Democratic incumbent with unemployment at 7.9%, then must reconcile themselves to permanent minority status. In California Republicans represent just 28% of the population and as the diversity of our state becomes the national norm, the party of Old White Men will decline into irrelevance.

This decline explains some of the more egregious tactics of Republicans in the last six months. A party spends its efforts at disenfranchising the opposition party only when it cannot win elections on the strength of its platform. When you are no longer willing to speak for the young, the gays, the people of color, your only way to victory is the Jim Crow way. I’m old enough to have been involved in the Civil Rights movement in 1962 and 1963. The forces in the White Citizens Councils who would make sure that Blacks could not vote surely must have known that their days in power were numbered, but they didn’t care. They were going to fight for their “way of life” until the very end. Rick Scott, Governor of Florida, is no different than George Wallace in 1963 yelling “Segregation Forever”. The Tampa Bay Times editorial says it all.

Gov. Rick Scott, the Republican-led Legislature and the Republican Party of Florida have done everything they can to discourage you from voting and participating in democracy. Don’t let them get away with it.

The other aspect of the Dying Republican Party is the constant dog whistle of thinly cloaked racism that pervaded the Romney campaign. It’s all of a piece: from the early lies of Obama eliminating welfare requirements to the 47% remarks about people who would never take responsiblity for them selves, to John Sununu’s wish that Obama would learn how to be an American, to Donald Trumps incessant birtherism, right up to Paul Ryan’s closing statement that an Obama victory threatens “Judeo-Christian” values.

It’s a dangerous path, it’s a path that grows government, restricts freedom and liberty, and compromises those values, those Judeo-Christian, Western-civilization values that made us such a great and exceptional nation in the first place.

A Romney loss will cause the hard right to double down and say he wasn’t conservative enough. But the truth is that Paul Ryan’s pinched view of the American future is a minority view. And that minority will be even smaller in four years as many of the fiercest partisans die of old age.

Chris Christie is a smart politician. His full scale embrace of President Obama in the last three days was not done without consideration for the political value going forward. My guess is that Christie has seen enough internal Republican polling to understand that Obama will probably win on next Tuesday. He doesn’t want to be too closely associated with a loser like Mitt Romney. But more importantly he is thinking about 2016. Romney was losing badly until he did his frantic pivot to the center in the first debate. It must be clear to Republicans that a “severe conservative” cannot win a Presidential campaign. Given that Paul Ryan has made it clear that he would like to run for President, that leaves Christie as the centrist candidate in the party. Embracing a Democratic President in bi-partisan ardor, cements that position for 2016.

I think Christie is probably right about Romney losing. The ever dependable Nate Silver has raised Obama’s chance of victory to 79%, the highest it has been since just before the first debate.

Mr. Obama continues to hold the lead in the vast majority of polls in Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin, the states that represent his path of least resistance toward winning the Electoral College. This was particularly apparent on Wednesday, a day when there were a remarkable number of polls, 27, released in the battleground states.

Christie’s apostasy has of course unleashed a fury on the far right. My sense is that if Romney loses the Republican circular firing squad will be out in force. El Rushbo will say Romney lost because he softened his conservative message in the closing weeks, ignoring the clear polling that the moderation was the only thing that got him close.

The closing days are going to be interesting, but I am beginning to feel pretty confident of an Obama victory.

When months ago Mitt Romney’s spokesman suggested he could Etch a Sketch his way back to the political center, I expected the Convention to be the venue for this makeover. But that was not to be, as a hall full of Tea Party fanatics would have actively booed a moderate acceptance speech from Romney. So they waited until the debates which had an additional benefit of catching Obama flat-footed in responding to Moderate Mitt.

The third debate last night was the most amazing part of the Etch a Sketch strategy. Since the beginning of the campaign, Romney has surrounded himself with George Bush’s most aggressive Neocon foreign policy experts, like John Bolton and Dan Senor. I would have given a lot to watch John Bolton observing Romney twist and sweat himself last night into the ultimate peacenik in his closing statement, “I want to see peace. I want to see growing peace in this country. It’s our objective.” But of course, just like all of Romney’s instant transformations, this one is not credible.

I’m convinced the Kumbaya routine from Romney comes from his pollsters who are telling him that America is tired of fighting wars in the Mideast and Romney’s bellicose rhetoric towards Iran is scaring voters. Obama needs to drive this home just the way LBJ used the famous daisy bomb ad to scare voters about Goldwater’s finger on the nuclear trigger. Obama already has an ad that makes this point. He should put it up nationally this week.

George Will said on ABC that last night’s debate was the best he has seen in his lifetime and I agree. He also said Obama won–and I agree. Determined to erase the memory of his poor performance two weeks ago, the President turned the first question of the night (on jobs) into a good right jab to Romney’s chin–”when Governor Romney said we should let Detroit go Bankrupt”–and never let up for the rest of the night.

The coup de grace came in the final exchange. Just like in a great prize fight I could see in slow motion that Romney had left himself open to a knockout when he began his final statement by saying, “I care about 100% of the people.” I said to the people in the room I was watching with ,”here comes the 47%”, and Obama did not disappoint.

I believe Governor Romney is a good man. Loves his family, cares about his faith. But I also believe that when he said behind closed doors that 47 percent of the country considered themselves victims who refuse personal responsibility, think about who he was talking about.

Folks on Social Security who’ve worked all their lives. Veterans who’ve sacrificed for this country. Students who are out there trying to hopefully advance their own dreams, but also this country’s dreams. Soldiers who are overseas fighting for us right now. People who are working hard every day, paying payroll tax, gas taxes, but don’t make enough income.

And I want to fight for them. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last four years. Because if they succeed, I believe the country succeeds.

When my grandfather fought in World War II and he came back and he got a G.I. Bill and that allowed him to go to college, that wasn’t a handout. That was something that advanced the entire country. And I want to make sure that the next generation has those same opportunities. That’s why I’m asking for your vote and that’s why I’m asking for another four years.

That was the closing line of the debate. Romney was on the canvas. The Governor had tried to work the ref all night, but in the end he was outclassed. This was the comparison I had been waiting for. This is still going to be a very tight race, but I’m pretty sure Obama has stopped Romney’s move up. The instant polls all showed Obama winning the night, but Karl Rove and company are about to unleash a tsunami of advertising in the swing states. My guess is that the number of undecideds (who are these people?) is very small, so that November 6 will be all about enthusiasm and turnout. In that game, Obama just fired up his troops.

President Obama was caught off guard in the first debate by Mitt Romney’s pivot to the center and his embrace of the Compassionate Conservative position. That Obama allowed Romney to blur their differences on healthcare, social security and even taxes was distressing for Democrats and clearly has shaken up the race. Tonight the President has an opportunity to draw a bright line between his foreign policy and that advocated by Romney. Failing to do that would probably lead to Obama’s defeat in November.

Two weeks ago Mitt Romney’s Foreign Policy Director Alex Wong told reporters that a President Romney would ensure “the restoration of a strategy that served us well for 70 years.” Here is what that 70-year strategy looks like in terms of money spent. That much of the world has been free riding on our blood and treasure is the issue of the moment.

 Romney assumes that the aggressive military strategy of the George Bush administration still enjoys the support of the American public. He surrounds himself with Bush Neocons like Dan Senor and John Bolton who recently stated that America should “not grant any validity to international law” because it will be “used by those who want to constrict the United States.” But the country has turned away from the preemptive war strategies of the Bush era. The Libertarian wing of the Republican party (estimated to represent almost 24% of the voting public by a recent Reason-Rupe Poll) is staunchly anti-war, calling for a pullback of American forces stationed abroad. Even the Republican Realists like former National Security Director Brent Scowcroft have acknowledged that, “the decision (by Bush 43) to …..try to deal with those problems (terrorism and the empowerment of non-state actors) as a unilateral nation-state using traditional military power, is what brought America to the point of crisis.”

President Eisenhower warned the country in his Farewell Address that, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.” But he would have been shocked to see how far that power has been extended. A view of our current budget priorities tells the tale.

What is really remarkable is that Congress has already passed laws (the Budget Control Act of 2011 and the Sequester) that reverse the 70-year policy of continuous increases in the Military budget. For the Pentagon, the Sequester would mean about $50 billion a year in less defense spending from fiscal year 2013 to FY2021, on top of the roughly $450 billion in reduced defense outlays from the Budget Control Act according to the Congressional Budget Office. And while the Corporate Welfare crowd like Senator Lindsay Graham vow “that I will fight this with every ounce of my being”, he is on the losing side of the political argument. As an April 2012 ABC News Washington Post Poll found “two-thirds of Americans now say the War in Afghanistan has not been worth fighting.”

As Gary Wills pointed out in an important essay, President Obama came in to office trapped by the facts on the ground of the National Security State–what Wills calls “the Entangled Giant.”

The permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the “war on terror”—all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order…

Here is the irony. Reagan and the neoconservatives managed to convince their followers that the only thing the government knew how to do well was fight wars. All the rest–building the Interstate Highway System or the Internet, running Social Security and Medicare—the government must be incompetent. But it is the financing of the National Security State that prevents us from providing a world-class universal health care and K-College education system. Nothing else. And what is Mitt Romney offering us? A return to Reaganomics, with higher military budgets and lower taxes on the wealthy, leading to endless deficits. The tragedy of Ike’s warning is that both Democrats and Republicans alike have embraced the Military Keynesian model, which Romney used in his convention speech: “we can’t cut the military budget and sacrifice all those good defense industry jobs”. Even Bill Clinton, presiding after the fall of the Soviet Union, never delivered a peace dividend because his own draft record left him too vulnerable to take on the Pentagon. Now Obama has a once in a lifetime chance to do some nation building at home instead of in the Middle East. He must seize the opportunity or become a one term President.

Two of the big research themes of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab converged in last night’s VP Debate: Social Sentiment Analytics and Transmedia Storytelling. The analytics part is fairly straightforward. For the last year in association with the Signals Analysis and Interpretation Lab, we have been recording the real time sentiment on Twitter of the Presidential Candidates. This is a huge corpus of data and during last week’s Presidential debate we were analyzing about 1400 tweets per second. Last night Joe Biden seemed to overwhelm Paul Ryan both in volume and in positive sentiment on our real time dashboard.

Which leads me to the second part of our work, Transmedia Storytelling. As our Chief Advisor Henry Jenkins has taught us, Transmedia is the art of telling a single story across multiple platforms, with each piece adding to the total narrative. The story cannot be told in a single commercial or a single debate as each piece adds to the transmedia narrative. Last night Joe Biden helped clarify the Democratic narrative that had been so muddied in the first debate by Mitt Romney’s desperate dash to the center.Two elements of the Democratic difference were hammered home relentlessly.

Clashing in a feisty, hard-edged debate, Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday night repeatedly accused challenger Paul D. Ryan and his running mate, Mitt Romney, of favoring the rich at the expense of middle-class Americans and engaging in loose talk that could lead the country to another war.

Ryan tried to put Biden on the defensive over Libya, but it didn’t work.

BIDEN: I will be very specific. Number one, the — this lecture on embassy security — the congressman here cut embassy security in his budget by $300 million below what we asked for, number one. So much for the embassy security piece. Number two, Governor Romney, before he knew the facts, before he even knew that our ambassador was killed, he was out making a political statement which was panned by the media around the world. And this talk about this — this weakness. I — I don’t understand what my friend’s talking about here. We — this is a president who’s gone out and done everything he has said he was going to do. This is a guy who’s repaired our alliances so the rest of the world follows us again.

On Tuesday Obama will have an opportunity to press this theme. Romney has surrounded himself with Bush era Neocons like John Bolton and Dan Senor, who clearly would like nothing more than to start another war in Iran (and maybe one is Syria as well). I’ll have more to say on that subject on Monday, but for now it is safe to say that Biden got the Democratic Transmedia story back on track.

For Obama the debate was an unmitigated disaster. It was a low energy performance by a man who seems to think he is sitting on a lead and has to play a conservative game. Obama kept looking to moderator Jim Leher to be the fact checker on Romney’s rather outrageous statement that his tax plan didn’t mean what it means. But Romney had already intimidated Leher, who effectively became the empty chair.

From a body language perspective, Obama seemed listless and disengaged, almost as if he didn’t want to be there. He kept looking down and seemed to be constantly on the defensive. Most of all his “no drama Obama” demeanor was the wrong tone to carry in the face of such aggressive attacks from Romney. If Axelrod and Plouffe advised him to abstain from attacking Romney (not one mention of 47%, Cayman Islands, Vouchercare) they made a terrible miscalculation. Even if that was the game plan, why didn’t Obama realize it wasn’t working and assume a more aggressive stance in the second half?

Now it will be up to Joe Biden to take Paul Ryan to the woodshed next week. And then Obama will have to drink a double espresso in two weeks and come into round two ready to confront Romney on every issue.

I’d like to enlist your help in a project we have been creating at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab . We have built an analytics tool to track sentiment around the two candidates using Twitter as the data feed. So we take in every tweet about the candidates and our language-ware reads the tweets and creates a score from 1-100, positive or negative. In the Presidential Debate this Wednesday we will probably be reading and analyzing up to 1000 tweets per second. Ideally our real time sentiment analysis will act like a million person focus group on the debate.This work is similar to the analyses we’ve done over the past 18 months on pop culture events like the Oscars, Summer Blockbusters, Fashion Week trends, and sporting events such as the World Series and Super Bowl.

So here is where we need help. Computers, as you might imagine, are not great at detecting sarcasm. Though advances in software and cognitive computing are helping us make great progress.When we first started this project I remember a tweet, “I’m so happy Michelle Bachmann has thrown her tin foil hat in the ring”. The computer thought that was a positive sentiment towards Bachmann, until a human student corrected it. We have built a human annotation page into the dashboard where you can correct any tweet you think has been mis-scored. From the main page of the site, click “Go to Tweets/annotation page”. There you will see a sampling of the latest tweets and their score. Click on any given tweet and you will be taken to an annotation page where you can manually correct the computer. Obviously the more people who do this, the better the outcome.

One last note. Obviously as you read some of the most negative tweets you will be appalled at what passes for political dialogue in the age of Twitter. We surmise that because many people tweet anonymously, they feel free to speak in the most hateful language. As you will see, most people tweet against a candidate rather than for a candidate. It says something about the psychology of Twitter, but I’m not sure just what it means for an digital democracy.

We’re learning quite a bit through this project and others about how analytics technologies can be applied to Big Data to understand and predict trends. Thanks in advance for your help.

Nate Silver is the most reliable assessor of political polling in our country. His latest column seems to indicate that President Obama is in pretty good shape. Here are some highlights

This is probably about the last week, for instance, in which Mitt Romney can reasonably hope that President Obama’s numbers will deteriorate organically because of a convention bounce…

First, the polling by this time in the cycle has been reasonably good, especially when it comes to calling the winners and losers in the race. Of the 19 candidates who led in the polls at this stage since 1936, 18 won the popular vote (Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 is the exception), and 17 won the Electoral College (Al Gore lost it in 2000, along with Mr. Dewey).

There has not been any tendency, at least at this stage of the race, for the contest to break toward the challenging candidate.

Instead, it’s actually the incumbent-party candidate who has gained ground on average since 1936. On average, the incumbent candidate added 4.6 percentage points between the late September polls and his actual Election Day result, whereas the challenger gained 2.5 percentage points.

The last point seems the most salient. Political races often become self-fulfilling prophecies in the last few weeks. The stench that Romney is a loser grows and so contributions slow down.

But Mr. Romney’s grass-roots fund-raising is not nearly so robust as Mr. Obama’s. In order to match Mr. Obama dollar for dollar, as he intends to, Mr. Romney must therefore spend more time than the president at big donor events, at a time when challengers might traditionally spend more time on the road campaigning.

The conventional wisdom was that Romney would not need to raise as much money as Obama because he had the mighty Super-Pacs behind him. In a little noted article, the Wall Street Journal reported that Karl Rove and company are not have the influence they thought they would.

But signs are few that super PACs have had the major impact that both supporters and critics predicted. The flood of spending doesn’t appear to have significantly influenced voter opinion in key states in the presidential contest or in top congressional races.

On the presidential front, conservative outside groups backing Republican candidates say they already have played their most significant role, and that their influence will fade as the candidates themselves present their closing arguments to voters.

I believe this is because at a certain point there are diminishing returns to carpet bombing ads, especially for a product that people don’t want to buy like Mitt Romney. So now the remaining danger for the Democrats is overconfidence. If Obama can use what Nate Silver calls the “tendency of the contest to break towards the incumbent” and run a “throw the bums out” campaign (chart above) against a “do nothing congress” in the last month, then we really might have a choice election.

It has been the contention of this writer that the philosophical underpinnings of the Romney Ryan campaign are the writings of Ayn Rand, most specifically Atlas Shrugged. “Rand’s heroes must continually fight against “parasites”, “looters”, and “moochers” who demand the benefits of the heroes’ labor”, and Romney clearly sees himself as a Randian hero and 47% of Americans as “parasites”. I believe that the video that came out yesterday of Romney speaking to his wealthy donors from his heart will be the fatal blow to his presidential hopes. Here is the critical quote from the fundraiser.

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, 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. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.My job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

This could have been taken straight from Atlas Shrugged. But let’s look at the facts of the 47%. To begin with, a majority of them don’t pay income taxes because the payroll taxes taken from their pay checks satisfy their tax obligations, because they don’t have additional income from stock dividends or capital gains.

Of the remaining “parasites”, more than half are elderly and no longer earning an income and the remainder are the really poor, a family living on less than $20,000 per year. Just as interesting is to see where the “moochers” live. Mostly in Red States that vote Republican.

The task now for the Democrats is to wake up the 47%, half of which vote Republican in the delusion that Mitt Romney cares for their interests because he talks about God and is against abortion. They must spend every day of the last 49 days of this campaign making it clear to the working class of America that the whole Republican plan is a shadow play, in which the true beneficiaries are the people in the Romney video who can afford the $50,000 ticket to the fundraiser. The real losers are the people who put their cultural passions above their economic interests.Romney and Ryan don’t give a damn about the middle class, but see themselves and their millionaire friends as a persecuted minority. Here is how the Atlas Society portrays the world.

Atlas Shrugged is an extended cry against the oppression of creators, most particularly businessmen: the Atlases who bear this world on their shoulders. Uniquely, Rand’s work portrays the exploited entrepreneurs of the mixed economy as the true successors of Socrates, Galileo, and the countless other truth-seekers who, over the centuries, have been silenced, punished, crushed, and killed—not for their vices but for their virtues.

In their view criminals like Mike Milken or rapacious capitalists like John Paulson or Sheldon Adelson are the “exploited entrepreneurs”, that need to be rescued from Obama and his “schemes” to raise their taxes. It is a warped view of humanity and of society. Here’s hoping the 99% will wake up and vote the Republican Rascals out of the government.