Writing in Newsweek, former Reagan budget director David Stockman takes a scalpel to Mitt Romney’s claims that he was a job creator at Bain Capital.

“That is the modus operandi of the leveraged-buyout business, and in an honest free-market economy, there wouldn’t be much scope for it because it creates little of economic value. But we have a rigged system–a regime of crony capitalism–where the tax code heavily favors debt and capital gains, and the central bank purposefully enables rampant speculation by propping up the price of financial assets and battering down the cost of leveraged finance.”

“So the vast outpouring of LBOs in recent decades has been the consequence of bad policy, not the product of capitalist enterprise. I know this from 17 years of experience doing leveraged buyouts at one of the pioneering private-equity houses, Blackstone, and then my own firm. I know the pitfalls of private equity. The whole business was about maximizing debt, extracting cash, cutting head counts, skimping on capital spending, outsourcing production, and dressing up the deal for the earliest, highest-profit exit possible. Occasionally, we did invest in genuine growth companies, but without cheap debt and deep tax subsidies, most deals would not make economic sense.”

“With less than a month until Election Day, the primary battlefields for the presidential campaign can be found in just three states: Ohio, Florida and Virginia,” Politico reports.

“In these big three, home to a combined 60 electoral votes, President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are spending both the most money and the most time. Over the last two weeks, the candidates and their allies have aired the most TV ads in Ohio, Florida and Virginia, in that order. And over the same period, Obama and Romney have held more than three times as many campaign events in the big three than they have in the other six swing states combined.”

“In a rare example of political unity, both the Romney and Obama campaigns have expressed concern to the Commission on Presidential Debates about how the moderator of the Tuesday town hall has publicly described her role,” Mark Halperin reports.

“While an early October memorandum of understanding between the Obama and Romney campaigns and the bipartisan commission sponsoring the debates suggests CNN’s Candy Crowley would play a limited role in the Tuesday-night session, Crowley, who is not a party to that agreement, has done a series of interviews on her network in which she has suggested she will assume a broader set of responsibilities. As Crowley put it last week, ‘Once the table is kind of set by the town-hall questioner, there is then time for me to say, ‘Hey, wait a second, what about X, Y, Z?””

“In the view of both campaigns and the commission, those and other recent
comments by Crowley conflict with the language the two campaigns agreed
to, which delineates a more limited role for the moderator of the
town-hall debate. The questioning of the two candidates is supposed to
be driven by the audience members themselves — likely voters selected by
the Gallup Organization.”

National Journal: “Obama’s biggest problem tomorrow night isn’t Romney. It’s the debate’s format, which couldn’t be more difficult for an incumbent mounting a comeback.”

“If Hillary runs, she walks away with the nomination and then beats whichever Republican. It’s lights out.”

— Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D), quoted by the AP, on the 2016 presidential race.

Sarah Palin’s leadership political action committee “spent more than $774,000 during the year’s third quarter after taking in more than $843,500 — the bulk of it from donors who contributed $200 or less,” Politico reports.

A New York Magazine poll of political insiders, asked to predict the winner of the presidential election, finds President Obama overwhelmingly favored over Mitt Romney, 82% to 18%.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds President Obama leading Mitt Romney among likely voters, 49% to 46%, “basically unmoved from the poll two weeks ago, just before the two candidates met in Denver for their first debate.”

“Nearly two-thirds say they do not need any more information before Election Day, and barely one in eight is undecided or says there is a chance he could change his vote. Even as voters overwhelmingly perceive that Romney won the first debate, the vast majority say their opinion of the president did not shift as a result.”

“But more people changed their views of Romney, largely in a positive direction. Overall, more than twice as many say their opinions of the former Massachusetts governor improved than say they worsened as a result of the debate. The strongest reaction is among Romney backers, 70 percent of whom say Denver made them think more highly of the GOP nominee.”

A Politico/GWU poll finds Obama ahead 48% to 47%.

A Newsmax/Zogby poll shows Obama leading 47% to 44%.

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows President Obama leads Mitt Romney by a 59% to 31% among those who have already voted.

With the November 6 election just more than three weeks away, 7% of those surveyed said they had already voted either in person or by mail.

Here are the latest polls from the battleground states:

Colorado: Obama 48%, Romney 46% (Gravis)

Florida: Romney 49%, Obama 48% (Public Policy Polling)

North Carolina: Romney 49%, Obama 47% (Public Policy Polling)

The father of Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya who was killed in the attack in Benghazi last month, told Bloomberg his son’s death shouldn’t be politicized in the presidential campaign.

Said Jan Stevens: “It would really be abhorrent to make this into a campaign issue.”

Saturday Night Live gets the debate right again.

[Read more…]

“The endless presidential campaign is about to enter its last lap, and with it will come a final fusillade of TV ads as both Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama seek to make closing arguments for why the country would be better off with them, and worse off with the other guy,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“If you live in a battleground state, brace yourself. Another couple hundred million dollars in ad spending is about to rain down on your living rooms in the last weeks of the campaign.”

New York Times: “Strategists affiliated with the Obama and Romney campaigns say they have access to information about the personal lives of voters at a scale never before imagined. And they are using that data to try to influence voting habits — in effect, to train voters to go to the polls through subtle cues, rewards and threats in a manner akin to the marketing efforts of credit card companies and big-box retailers.”

Here are the latest polls from the battleground states:

Arizona: Obama 44%, Romney 42% (Rocky Mountain Poll)

Ohio: Obama 51%, Romney 46% (Public Policy Polling)

Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) told CNBC he would not endorse Mitt Romney for president, “arguing that neither he nor President Barack Obama would make necessary cuts to public spending that would avert a fiscal catastrophe.”

Said Paul: “I’ve been in this business a long time and believe me there is essentially no difference from one administration to another no matter what the platforms. The foreign policy stays the same, the monetary policy stays the same, there’s no proposal for any real cuts and both parties support it.”