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.
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