Jon Stewart has a field day with Clint Eastwood’s convention speech.

“You might as well have watched it on a black-and-white TV,” President Obama tells an Iowa crowd.

One of those classic Daily Show segments where you wonder, Do the targets get the joke?

The most retweeted tweet of the Republican National Convention was a tweet by Barack Obama snarking on the Eastwood episode.

It would seem that the big question being pushed going into the Democratic convention is the classic: Are you better off than you were four years ago?

For every incumbent this is an inherently fair question. Whether it is you or the country, it’s the most essential question on offer. It is also an inherently tricky one for President Obama since the economy remains anemic and job growth has yet to approach the levels necessary to really get the country fully back on its feet. Indeed, job growth fell back after briefly appearing to be in take-off mode in late 2011 and early 2012.

But there are some basic facts required to put this question in perspective. Read More

The latest on the state of the presidential race in the two convention host states.

I generally despise the counter-intuitive pundit take (pace TNR). But I think there’s a chance this renewed focus on the ‘4 years ago’ question could backfire on Team Romney. The best campaign posture for Romney is on the present. Because, let’s face it, 8+% unemployment sucks. I would go so far as to say that anything that gets the debate off the immediate present is a bad thing for Romney.

Context is Obama’s friend. We’re not doing great? Sure, but remember the catastrophe I got handed? Fine, we’re not where we should be. But look how far we’ve come. Read More

I’ve now seen folks on both sides of the aisle quibbling, chattering about when the clock starts for the ‘4 years ago’ question: early September 2008, a couple weeks before Lehman and the full jobs meltdown? or late January 2009, when most of the job losses and contraction had actually occurred and when President Obama took office. Obviously, each side has a reason for starting the clock in its favored position. But I think for any voter who is even remotely persuadable this is a literalism that misses the point. People get the point.

More broadly, trying to say that somehow things were still rocking couple weeks before the bottom officially fell out recalls that classic joke about the guy who falls out of a 50 story building and gets asked half way down “How’s it going?”

To which he answers, “So far, not bad!”

When I first heard about Gallup’s poll of reactions to the Republican convention, I thought they’d said that reactions to Romney’s speech were only better than Bob Dole’s in 1996. That’s not correct. Gallup has only been tracking the question back to 1996. And Romney’s fared worse than any of the convention speeches back those 16 years. Read More

More on New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s investigation into a tax avoidance practice that is a favorite of the private equity firms, including Bain.