MISSING THE MAGIC: Walter Shapiro was underwhelmed by Obama’s Ohio speech. “Yet watching the faces in the crowd at the Ohio State rally and listening to the chatter afterward as the largely student audience wandered toward the restaurants and bars on High Street, I had a sense that the Obama piece was still missing in action.”

UPDATE: Brand failure. “Forty years ago, the real life Mad Men knew how badly a brand could be destroyed if they made impossible claims about a product, a lesson that the creators of Barack Obama’s image are relearning the hard way.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mickey Kaus: Obama Clings Again! Blames “Scared” Voters. “Usually the ‘blame the customer’ approach, as Mark Shields calls it, takes hold in the wake of an election defeat. Obama has broken new ground by moving it up to three weeks in advance of the vote.”