Lies the parties tell themselves this summer

For the presidential campaigns, the long, slow, anxious summer is starting to drag.
With Election Day still more than three months away and a few weeks still to go before the conventions, there’s relatively little that operatives on either side think they can do to shift the dynamics of the race.

So with the fundamentals of the 2012 campaign increasingly locked in place – a weak, economically hobbled incumbent matched off against an unsteady, unpopular challenger – strategists on both sides have turned their attention to another rite of summer during presidential years: convincing themselves that they’re winning.

National polling shows the race is as close as ever. The vulnerabilities of both candidates have only grown over time. In public, both the Obama and Romney campaigns will express only the purest of confidence that their candidate is ahead.
So in private, strategists and supporters of both candidates have been kicking around a collection of arguments for why they really, truly, honest-to-goodness have the upper hand in the race.
Here’s our guide to some of the wishful thoughts (some of them more wishful than others) making their way around the 2012 universe in the pre-Labor Day doldrums.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/79128.html#ixzz22C1FIknT