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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.

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What a delicious bit of video from Heather at Video Café. Tamron Hall lost her temper at the right wingers who tried really hard to distract everyone from Mitt Romney's bullying ways and more importantly, his disingenous denials and half-apologies.

Carney, a right-wing writer for The Examiner, did what wingers always do when they're on the "liberal network." He tried to filibuster and dodge her specific question, which was not about what Mitt Romney did 50 years ago, but how he handled it when confronted with five witnesses—four of whom were willing to speak on the record—about the incident. Via The Atlantic, who reported it as a story where Hall was in the wrong:

Here's what happens when they don't. Tim Carney, a columnist with the conservative Washington Examiner, was on MSNBC's NewsNation with Tamron Hall this afternoon to talk about Romney. Carney came out of the gate fast: "What you're doing here is a typical media trick. You hype up a story and then you justify the second-day coverage of the story by saying, oh, well people are talking about it." Hall almost immediately lost her cool, chastising Carney, telling him he didn't need to come on the show, shouting over him, and eventually cutting his mic. Sample line: "You don't [want-sic] me to go anything on you, because you're actually irritating me."

The Atlantic's David Graham says Hall was wrong and Carney was right; that viewers don't care about how Romney handled the story or whether it will do any long-term damage to Romney's campaign. I disagree. I think it's a story that's entirely relevant to voters and one that should be given as much attention as possible. Not because it's negative, but because Mitt Romney's reaction was dismissive. He seemed shocked that it was even something that was being talked about.

Sorry David Graham, but Digby's right on the money about this and you're not:

I wasn't joking when I said this would actually help Romney with the base. This bullying is one of the defining characteristics of modern American conservatism. The idea that the good people all work hard and it's only the lazy that ever need help is fundamental to their worldview. Even the Tea Partiers who are on government assistance insist that unlike all the others, they have worked hard and so deserve it.

I've been writing about this for a long time, often in the context of the torture debate. But it also plays a large part in our political system. It's actually a very well developed form of social control called Ritual Defamation (or Ritual Humiliation:

Which is why it was good to see Tamron let Mr. Carney have it with both barrels. He was condescending to her and evading her actual questions. When it became clear that he simply intended to filibuster and not respect what she was asking or why it was being asked, she cut him off. Good for her.

One last note to David Graham at The Atlantic:

Moreover, he's exactly right about how TV news inflates stories. It's a bipartisan tactic: Jon Stewart showed some time ago how Fox News built up narratives by a two-step process: First, the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity talk up non-controversies; the next day, news anchors like Megyn Kelly would bring up the stories with the same "some people say" formulation.

Citing Jon Stewart exposing Fox News does not—I repeat, does NOT—make it a bipartisan tactic. Really, let's leave the false equivalence to the pundits and think-tankers, shall we?

If only Harry Reid could end Senate filibusters so cleanly, eh?