I like AllahPundit a ton. However, I think he misses a point of analogy in this post trying to tell us that Mitt Romney’s fundraising comment about Obama voters isn’t a problem:

This was recorded awhile back at a fundraiser, just like Obama’s infamous “bitter/clinger” comments in 2008. Remember how big that blew up? That’s how we ended up with President McCain.

The bitter/clinger comment from Obama came during the Democratic primary–it was one of the great insights into Obama’s character that he wasn’t even talking that dismissively about Republicans, but rather about Democratic primary voters. And I’d argue that the bitter/clinger remarks haunted him all through the primary season, which is why Hillary Clinton won more votes than he did.

We’ve got two totally divergent views on gadget design and roll-out in America right now. On the one hand is Amazon, which updates its devices on an irregular schedule, keeps changes to the product line almost completely in the dark, downplays each release, and never, ever, talks about how many of them it’s sold.

So far as I can tell, the Amazon Way is designed with the following strategic goal: Entice more customers to purchase a device right now by eliminating the fear that the next-generation device is both near and superior. They’re willing to sacrifice aggressive subsequent upgrade sales in the name of getting customers into their ecosystem.

Apple is almost the exact opposite. Yesterday’s iPhone 5 was another largely iterative improvement on the existing iPhone: Faster chipset, larger screen, updated form, new connector. No one needed any of these changes right now; they could have easily been rolled into some other generation of the phone. (Much as the 4s was really just the phone that the 4 should have been at launch.) The only reason there’s an iPhone 5 is that people will buy the thing. It’s a demand-based product, not an innovation-based product.

Nothing wrong with that–nearly all products are demand-based. The difference is in the way Apple rolls it out. Every iGadget is The Most Amazing Invention Ever.

Now, Apple has lots of reasons to run their business this way. For starters, it’s working really, really well. For another, unlike Amazon, their ecosystem is already built and they can sacrifice marginal adopters for the business of repeat buyers.

But at some point, you have wonder a boy-who-cried-wolf dynamic might set in.

If you’re at the DCCC, why wouldn’t you throw $5M at Rob Zerban? I suspect that kind of money would buy a lot of WI air time in the next 8 weeks and if a poll showed Zerban getting any sort of traction, it might freak out the Paul Ryan folks. Strikes me that there are worse ways to waste $5M.

I’ve been sort of fascinated by Glenn Beck’s The Blaze for the last few months. So far as I can tell, it’s a dominant internet property doing both enormous traffic and real business. It’s a slick magazine. And it’s a real, live internet TV channel, with an actual line-up of daily programming and on-air talent and ambition to spare.

Yet what really fascinates me is how The Blaze seems to be basically ignored by the rest of the media world. While everyone else is writing about what Buzzfeed and Huffington Post are doing (which are also both interesting) it’s like The Blaze is tearing up the world and making money hand over fist in some alternate universe which is invisible to media reporters in the mainstream.

If you want further evidence that The Blaze is probably the media story of the last year, check out this news that Beck has reached a deal with Dish Network to bring its TV component to the satcaster.

It’s pretty amazing. Anyone can have a cable channel–there’s probably 100 channels that exist with virtually no viewership. But Beck looks like he’s trying to build a channel by establishing his audience on the internet first, and then porting them over to satellite (and eventually cable) after the fact. It’s ingenious and daring and really impressive.

What’s bizarre is why no one is writing about it.

(This essay on The Atlantic, on the other hand, I have been waiting for for years. And it satisfies nearly every desire. Via The Transom.)

Sean Trende has a typically smart and insightful column about what the two conventions tell us about how the campaigns see themselves. On the Romney team and Tampa:

[T]he Republican Party is still held in lower esteem than the Democrats. The last CBS News poll, for example, found the GOP with a 35 percent favorable rating vs. a 53 percent unfavorable rating. For the Democrats it was better: 43 percent favorable, 47 percent unfavorable.

This is actually perfectly consistent with the edge in registration that Republicans are opening up. It suggests that this isn’t a “real” advantage, but rather is a function of Republican-leaning independents increasingly calling themselves Republicans, rather than any change in mindset.

This is why the Republicans invested so much time and effort trying to reintroduce their party. It’s a rebranding effort, and I suspect it was meant to pre-empt any attempts to tie Romney/Ryan to the unpopular Bush administration, as well as to inoculate the ticket against a generic “Do you really want to put the Republicans in charge?” argument. I don’t think it was particularly successful, but that is what I think is going on.

I’d largely agree with his assessment both of their strategic goals and with their level of success. What’s striking is that there’s an obvious way Romney could have shown voters that his party is different than it was four years ago–and it’s something smart conservatives like James Pethokoukis have been urging for months: Break up the big-banks.

It’s populist. It’s a Republican Sister Soulja. And it’s also something that’s probably worth doing on the merits. Imagine how changed the RNC might have been if the twin centerpieces of the Romney plan were to break up the big banks and solve the fiscal crisis? Instead it was “we build this” and “we love women.” I’m not sure how well those messages go toward achieving what Trende sees as their strategic convention goal.

Allahpundit points out that Jennifer Granholm’s performance last night sounded like a wrestling intro. I’d take that a big further: She was eerily reminiscent of Vickie Guerrero with her “Excuse me!” and breathless harping about her man of the moment. Heel heat begins at the 0:25 mark.

I said it in Tampa and I’ll say it again: In my own experience, at least, it’s very difficult to judge the political effectiveness of a convention from the inside. I can tell you how it plays to the room and I can give you some thoughts to what the stagecraft seems to suggest about how the candidates view the race. But as far as understanding how it will actually move public opinion? I don’t have much to say on that score.

With that in mind, I have the following tentative thoughts:

* This was a very conventional convention. Very different to 2008, which had a level of messianic insanity that, God willing, we’ll never see again. The rhetoric, message, and imagery of it were generic enough that you have dropped basically any generic Democratic candidate in and it would have worked more or less.

* To an enormous degree, this convention is a vindication of the clientelism thesis Jay Cost posits in his excellent book, Spoiled Rotten. Short version: Beginning with FDR, the Democratic party began to assemble its coalition not through ideology but through spoils. So it brought disparate groups together and gradually became a collection of client groups more than a coherent ideological enterprise.

The DNC explicitly broke people into 14 communities. And the convention’s over-arching catch phrase was, “We’re all in this together.” But it struck me that the subtext of that–maybe even the text–was that the “we” here isn’t “Americans.” It’s the “14 communities.” It’s the client groups. The message this convention was sending, I’d argue, was that We need to band together to keep our spoils. That’s why the first few hours of each night, before the prime-time broadcasts began, were devoted to subjects such as abortion, affirmative action, gay rights, unions, immigration, etc.

* The most interesting speech of the week, to me, was Elizabeth Warren’s. She made the case that the problem in America right now is that the system is rigged against the middle class. This is a powerful argument. It’s an argument against TARP and Goldman and too-big-to-fail and, when deployed properly, the most damning argument against Bain Capital. It’s a pro-family, crypto-conservative, populist pitch.

And yet, Warren was the only one all week mining this vein.

One of the enduring mysteries of the 2012 cycle is why at the moment when the environment is ripe for populism, we have two candidates who want no part of it. As someone quipped a couple months ago, only two politicians in America want to keep the big banks and the financial sector insulated from any systemic reforms. And both of them happen to be running for president.

* Bill Clinton gave the speech Paul Ryan should have made. In Tampa, with the exception of Chris Christie, no Republicans made anything like a sustained argument about the fiscal crisis America is in. There was almost no substantive policy talk. And so suddenly Bill Clinton became the first person to talk about the economy and sound like a grown-up. I just can’t understand why Republicans ceded that opening.

* There is something slightly weird about the conservative Twitter-sphere. Beginning yesterday, conservative Tweeters started harping on the DNC’s decision to move the Wed. session indoors. They got invested in saying the move was made out of fear of Obama not being able to fill the stadium. That struck me as wrong–the weather has been so bad this week and the optics of a wet, soggy session so awful that I absolutely would have made the same call.

And it turned out to be a good call. Because this afternoon around 3:00–when everyone would have been slogging through security and trying to get into the stadium–it rained like crazy for at least an hour. And all over Twitter conservatives were trying to suggest that it wasn’t really raining. It just makes no sense to me.

* Finally, Obama has absolutely nothing to say about what he will do in a second term. His entire pitch is backward-looking–that he needs to be elected as a barrier against the Evil Bad Republicans.

I’m not sure how much any of this will matter. We’ll see in a week.

Update: Oddly enough, Joe Biden seemed highly effective in spots–granting all of his built-in absurdities. He found a smart way to critique Bain Capital and took a Liz Warren-like aim at a populist message. Plus, he actually framed the re-elect case in a coherent way, but in a less data-driven manner than Clinton.

Listening to Obama (and having read ahead through his transcript) it’s not clear to me what he was trying to do. It’s a cautious speech that doesn’t do a particularly impressive job of either justifying his past performance or explaining why his project deserves to be seen through to another term. The only through-line I can see is a general justification of government itself and an appeal to the Democrats’ aforementioned client groups. It’s a missed opportunity.

Now that we’re just about wrapped up, my Best of 2012 speakers list would go: Christie, Condi Rice, Marco Rubio, Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, and–heaven help me–Joe Biden. Your mileage may vary. Will any of these talks move the needle at all? Probably not.

Final Update: The more I think about it, the more I can’t believe Obama ended his speech with Hope. That strikes me as nearly insulting to his marginal ’08 supporters–he’s neither explaining why things didn’t turn out the way he promised nor changing his core message. He’s just asking them to sign up for more of the same with not even a changing the verb. Yet at the same time, this probably shouldn’t be surprising. It’s just one more sign of his narcissism that he seems to think voters will want more of the same Obama, despite how his tenure turned out. If you’re Barack Obama, everything your whole life has always worked out for you just because you’re you–so why would you change anything?

Sitting in the Women’s Caucus meeting, there’s the strange incongruity of speakers insisting that, on the one hand, women are the country’s most powerful group of citizens but that it’s absolutely essential that President Obama be re-elected so that he can “protect” them. (Their word.)