While you are correct in identifying Ohio as Romney’s biggest problem, he has more than that. He can’t be President without Virginia either, and there’s little indication he’s anything but a mid-single-digit underdog there. Nevada and Colorado are decidedly leaning Obama, and the biggest surprise to me is that Obama is holding up in Florida. Cycle after cycle, the polls are more generous to Democrats in FL than the election day results, but even so I would have thought Florida would be solidly in the Romney camp by now. And it would be if Romney had made the obvious choice and selected Marco Rubio as his running mate. I still don’t get that one, as on top of taking Florida off the table for Obama, Rubio would have likely been worth 10 points nationally with the Latino vote. Instead, Romney picks the spawn of Satan from Wisconsin who believes Mitt Romney should pay 0.87% in taxes and who fantasizes that the private health insurance market has any interest at all in absorbing the guaranteed multi-billion-dollar annual losses that would come from providing insurance coverage to 85-year-olds currently on Medicare. I won’t discount the prospect of Ryan helping Romney win Wisconsin, even though it still seems odds-against, but Ryan helps nowhere else….and Romney needs help elsewhere.

Obama has no chance in Missouri, and frankly I’m still not convinced that Todd Akin won’t pull a Michele Bachmann-style 2008 comeback amidst the increasingly right-wing electorate of Missouri even after saying something jarringly stupid. Frankly, Akin’s comments didn’t even really jump out at me as outside the boundaries of the usual Republican delirium. People who buy into the rest of the nonsense the party’s emissaries spew–and that includes the majority of the Missouri electorate–are ultimately not gonna be thrown off their game by what Akin said.

And it’s hilarious that you’re attempting to make a false equivalence between Todd Akin and Sandra Fluke. Seriously Jay? The message of Sandra Fluke is all upside for Obama. Anybody who’s wringing their hands with fury about government-funded birth control was a Romney voter in the first place. Meanwhile, the issue is a huge motivator for young, single women to get to the polls. Don’t believe it? Go to a college campus and single out five coeds to ask their thoughts.

Making Romney toxic couldn’t have been easier for Obama. And considering the centerpiece of Romney’s campaign is that his business background gives him unique knowledge on economic revival, it’s perfectly fair game for the Obama campaign to hit his glass jaw on what happened in the real world of Bain Capital. They clearly overdid it with the “Romney killed my wife” ad, but beyond that, the Obama campaign’s litigation of the issue has been reality-based and deadly effective. If Republicans want to nominate a guy who’s spent his life as a wrecking ball in the business world, prepare to pay the consequences.

Furthermore, the real dishonesty in this campaign is coming from the GOP–as always–and has escalated since the Ryan selection. But the content is so cartoonish and provably false that Republicans are gonna have a hard landing trying to spin them in perpetuity just as they did when they repeatedly insisted Sarah Palin “stopped” the Bridge to Nowhere in 2008 when every shred of evidence proved she was lobbying on its behalf from the get-go. Similarly, Romney-Ryan’s insistence that they will “restore” the $700 billion Obama “cut” in Medicare won’t hold up to two months of reality nor will the bald-faced lie of Obama “cutting the work requirements for welfare” as a 1980s retro-style appeal to Joe Sixpack to hate on the racial stereotype of the “welfare queen in the pink Cadillac”. To whatever extent the media are Obama’s allies, these lies won’t be allowed to survive the rest of the campaign.

You are correct that Romney needs to dwell on his business successes if he wants to win. The one part of Romney’s narrative that has stuck is this idea that because he ran a successful business due to family connections–and ran a successful Winter Olympics due to doubling the outlays from the federal government compared to any previous American-run Olympics–it means he has secret knowledge of how to navigate an economy successfully. It’s rubbish, and Romney’s vows to extract resources from a consumer base whose current rate of poverty is already the core problem for our economic paralysis will only make the economic situation worse both short-term and especially long-term, but the narrative is clearly working given Romney’s persistent leads in polls on the question of “who will be better in handling the economy?” but it’s the only card Romney has to play so he damn well better play it.