Obama urges the world to win the future

The writer M.S. at the Economist's Democracy in America blog, who finds Obama's address to the U.N. "cogent, right, sensitive, sophisticated and moving," meditates on the various audiences it was addressed to and concludes that the main audience was a domestic American one. He is skeptical that Obama's eloquent re-presentation of American values as universal ones would reach Arab citizens in any meaningful numbers.

I will leave that question alone. But I do want to amplify the author's point about the way Obama's speech resonates in our domestic political realm. M.S. cites the following passage as evidence that Obama is responding to the political imperative to denounce the violence against American missions abroad more robustly than he denounces the bigotry of the anti-Muslim film that ostensibly triggered the violence. I hear a different chord struck:

A false choice between hope and fear

Media coverage of political strategy is often about framing false choices. Or rather, about framing either/or choices where a delicate balance is required.

For the Obama campaign, the either/or de jour is hope vs. fear.  A couple of days ago, I put forward my own plea that the Obama campaign quite legitimately scare us by spelling out the consequences of the tax cuts and budget cuts Romney has promised.  Seems I needn't have worried -- at least as regards the degree of aggression, if not its focus: I think it should be mainly economic, as Romney's polling lead as the candidate better able to manage the economy is the chief danger sign for the Obama campaign right now.  But John Heilemann has taken a deep dive into the Obama campaign's thinking, and he reports on plans for a full-scale multi-front attack in the offing: