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Yes, I'm always nervous about the outcome of any election that I'm invested in and I get a bit more stressed when it's a national one. I was very anxious the entire day four years ago when I knew Obama had it in the bag in 2008. This time it's a lot closer. Fox has created its own political reality as I've been writing about and Romney is following right along. it's never been more evident since the third and finale debate took place on Monday.

Jonathan Chait:

In recent days, the vibe emanating from Mitt Romney’s campaign has grown downright giddy. Despite a lack of any evident positive momentum over the last week — indeed, in the face of a slight decline from its post-Denver high — the Romney camp is suddenly bursting with talk that it will not only win butwin handily. (“We’re going to win,” said one of the former Massachusetts governor’s closest advisers. “Seriously, 305 electoral votes.”)This is a bluff. Romney is carefully attempting to project an atmosphere of momentum, in the hopes of winning positive media coverage and, thus, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Fox News is beating this drum loudly also. See, we've seen this many times before. Karl Rove is the master at playing this garbageand he's continuing the trend.

Karl Rove employed exactly this strategy in 2000. As we now know, the race was excruciatingly close, and Al Gore won the national vote by half a percentage point. But at the time, Bush projected a jaunty air of confidence. Rove publicly predicted Bush would win 320 electoral votes. Bush even spent the final days stumping in California, supposedly because he was so sure of victory he wanted an icing-on-the-cake win in a deep blue state. Campaign reporters generally fell for Bush’s spin, portraying him as riding the winds of momentum and likewise presenting Al Gore as desperate.

Unfortunately it worked so now it's a staple of their play book.

Obama’s lead is narrow — narrow enough that the polling might well be wrong and Romney could win. But he is leading, his lead is not declining, and the widespread perception that Romney is pulling ahead is Romney’s campaign suckering the press corps with a confidence game.

Digby writes:

So, I'm hearing this morning that despite the fact that President Obama cleearly won last night's foreign policy debate, he actually lost...

That's all you hear on FOX, but it's much subtler on other cable news channels. They say that since Mitt memorized some talking points he passed the commander in chief test.

Michael Tomasky writes about this in his piece this morning:

Today may be the most important single day of the campaign. Obama won the debate. Everyone this side of Charles Krauthammer agrees that Romney was general and platitudinous and not that engaged. That makes two out of three. You might think that would mean momentum. And yet the conventional wisdom is congealing right now—it is hardening this morning, minute by minute—that Romney is going to win the election.

From Playbook, which distills the c.w.: President Obama won last night’s foreign-policy debate on substance, in snap polls and with the pundits, but Mitt Romney did well enough that for the first time in six years, Romney folks emailed, “We’re going to win.”
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In reality, Obama is the favorite. The state maps still make him so.

Digby then continues:

Conservatives know all this. But they’re constructing an opposite reality. This is at the heart of everything going on right now, I think. It’s what they can do that liberals can’t really do. They've always done it. “Romney is going to win” in 2012 isn’t so different from “We’ll be hailed as liberators” in 2003. They say something and try to make it so, and the media go for it time and time again.
And... they are.

This is the right's great advantage. They have their own media, (which the Democrats stupidly validate every chance they get) and they have a boatload of professional spinmeisters ready to instantly hit the talking points. They have been at this for a very long time and they are probably better at doing it than anything else --- especially governing.

To me, it was clear that Obama won the debate. He was much more fluent on the issues, and obviously truly engaged. This is what he cares about. Indeed, everyone should remember that until the fall of 2008, domestic issues weren't at the top of the list and Obama made his bones on his foreign policy promise. The country was looking for someone who would get us out of the stinking mess Bush's bellicose neocons had created.

Conservatives are trying to condition the media to report that Romney is killing it now and help pump undecideds to vote for Mittens. The con never sleeps in tea party land.

Democratic Strategist: The midterms too, shall pass

Michael Tomasky: Taxes and inequality (and Lady Gaga's meat bikini)

Mother Jones: Rick Santorum's anal sex problem

3quarksdaily: The Crimewave That Shames the World

The Donkey Edge: The Theater of the Absurd

Tina Dupuy: Net Neutrality: A critical issue with a lame name

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The Tea Party hero, Rand Paul, had a very unstable couple of days. On Wednesday 'Baby' Paul flamed out quicker than a defective Roman candle with Rachel Maddow. His performance was so utterly enlightening about his beliefs -- and thus truly terrifying. His advisers burned the midnight oil to figure out how far he would run back what he really believes so that he could appear as somewhat normal.

His weak ass flip flop on Civil Rights before the sun came up on Thursday shows you how America views Paul's ideology. His defense is that we're all just conflators.

Evil liberals only wanted to bring up a case that he was too young to remember. Heck, I'm not even bring up his wretched 2002 letter to the Bowling Green Daily News. Things looked bleak so he needed a friend. Hello, Laura Ingraham. He told her that it was a poor political decision to go on Maddow's show because she's a conflater too and he won't be visiting her show for a while.

Rand Paul: You're right. And it was a poor political decision. Probably won't be happening any time in the near future. Yeah, because they conflate things and want to say ...

He was exposed to America for his 'Only Open for Big Business Club' principles that were passed down to him by Poppa Paul. And I'm no fan of those beliefs. Show me a liberal and I'll show you someone who really does care about civil liberties.

Michael Tomasky lets it all hang out in his post about Poppa Paul and Baby Paul even before this flameout occurred: Intellectual consistency can be overrated. Read the whole article because it's very funny.

When we write about libertarianism, most liberals feel compelled to say something like, you know, I disagree with that viewpoint, but I respect that it's principled and intellectually consistent.

I say balderdookey. Libertarianism is kookoo. There can be no such thing as a basically stateless society (except for national defense and barest administration of law, I think are the exceptions they typically allow for). It's just ridiculous. Civil society would collapse without the state.

I've written this before, a few months ago. Conservatives, and libertarians, seem to think that we have regulations in this society because we have a bunch of underemployed pencil pushers sitting around dreaming up ways to make small business people's lives miserable.

It's ridiculous. We have regulations because throughout history people in various pursuits did really sleazy and unethical things. They swindled investors, they dumped toxins into bodies of water, they made children work long hours for slave wages. Et cetera. And so laws were passed and regulations were written.

And unfortunately such is man's endless capacity for sleaze and unethicality that this process will never end: as technology presents new ways to be sleazy, we'll always need to invent new ways to prevent sleaze from happening.

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We all support a few libertarian-ish principles; we all agree that the state should have some limits. For example, I think it's perfectly fine for the state to make fast-food joints post nutrition information. But I would oppose the state having the right to ban the Quarter Pounder. So we all get that kind of thing.But big-L Libertarianism is vapid. I hope in the next few months it is properly exposed as such.

Baby Paul's staff will do everything they can to cover up his beliefs as much of it as he can and then to Luntzify them. Grab the popcorn.