If you live in Ohio, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are giving you a lot of love. But if you reside in California or Alabama, you may feel neglected and ignored by the candidates for president. Like parents in a big, noisy family, all their attention goes to the troublesome kids, not the compliant, quiet ones.

There has never been much doubt that states such as California, New York, Massachusetts and Washington would give their electoral votes to the president, and no doubt that Romney could depend on states such as Alabama, South Carolina, Texas and South Dakota to be solidly in his camp. All but about 10 states lined up months ago for one candidate or the other. Now it looks as if the number of states still up for grabs has dropped to seven.

As a result, there is really not a national campaign going on. All the effort and money for many weeks has been focused on voters in the swing states. Since, under the U.S. Constitution, the electoral vote, not the popular vote, determines who will...

Another debate brought out another version of Mitt Romney. This third time around, the chameleon candidate was not the hard-charging neo-con hawk of the primaries. Instead, he talked about peace, negotiations and using military power as a last resort. 

He also was not the pushy CEO who commandeered the first debate or the combative sparring partner of Debate 2. From the first minute in this discussion of foreign policy, President Obama tried to pick a fight, but Romney was just ducking punches. Heck, after the Romney smack-down Jim Lehrer suffered back in the first debate, Bob Schieffer, Monday night’s moderator, was barely even badgered by this kinder and gentler Mitt. 

Yes, Romney took shots at Obama's foreign policy, calling it weak and apologetic, but then he proceeded to agree with the nearly every aspect of what the president has done, from Libya to Iran. He abandoned his criticism of Obama's timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and said he would bring the...

The 2012 presidential campaign has largely been a nasty, uninspiring slog toward election day, but there have been moments of hilarity, wonderful absurdity and even a bit of hope – reminders that politics can be fun.

My cartoon today is in that spirit. When the starlet with the extra-messy life, Lindsay Lohan, announced she was likely voting for the ultra-straight-laced Mitt Romney, I just had to get the two together in a cartoon. And I could not resist tossing in a reference to women in binders. In the second presidential debate, Romney said that, in seeking more females for positions in his gubernatorial Cabinet in Massachusetts, he came up with “binders full of women.” It was the latest odd example of how the Republican nominee sometimes packages his thoughts, and it immediately went viral.

The funniest riffs on Romney’s comment came in a flurry of bogus product reviews on the Amazon Web page where binders and other office supplies are sold. Here is an excerpt...

If the Barack Obama who showed up for the second presidential debate had shown up for the first debate, there is a good chance Republicans would now be sullenly turning their thoughts to 2016 and arguing over how they got tricked into nominating a loser two elections in a row.

The Obama who did show up for that first debate breathed new life into Romney's candidacy by being lifeless himself. Tuesday night, though, the president was in command. He reinvigorated his own campaign by delivering the best debate performance of his political career.

Romney was still good, but, this time, he had a top-notch opponent to deal with and, at times, looked just a bit rattled. The fact that he brought up the 47% issue himselfat the very end of the debate, thereby giving Obama a perfect setup to deliver a powerful final punch, suggests that Romney’s mental discipline was slipping. Why else would he have provided the president such a wide opening to attack on the very issue that has most damaged...

Vice President Joe Biden was all smirks, smiles, laughs, sharp elbows and impolite interruptions in his debate with the No. 2 guy on the Republican ticket, Paul Ryan. It is always a risky tactic to let Joe be Joe, but it seems to have paid off.

After President Obama’s passive, lackluster response to Mitt Romney’s energetic assault during the first presidential debate, demoralized Democrats were praying that Biden would come out swinging at Ryan. They got what they wanted and, as a result, Democrats should be reinvigorated as the closing days of the 2012 campaign tick away. 

Photos: Biden and Ryan square off

That matters because, after weeks of gaffes and goof-ups, Romney finally got Republican blood pumping with his debate performance. There is a good chance that the party that is most motivated to turn out and vote will win the election. Sure, all the speculation in recent days has been about the tiny number of undecided voters in swing states who could push the election one...

Winning a presidential debate is a lot like winning a belching contest. Sure, it takes a peculiar sort of skill, but is it anything to be proud of?

Mitt Romney was universally acknowledged as the "winner" of his first debate with President Obama, but what did he actually do to claim victory? He reversed positions he had taken through the entire campaign. He failed to give any serious detail about how he planned to make up for the huge revenue losses inherent in his big plan to cut taxes. He attacked his opponent with a stream of false or exaggerated characterizations of administration policies. And he bullied moderator Jim Lehrer with relish akin to the enthusiasm he must have displayed when he gave that gay kid an involuntary haircut back in his prep school days.

Why does any of that make him a winner?

And what qualified Obama as a loser? The president told supporters this week he had been too polite in the debate, but it was more than that. Having been reminded over and over again not...

Perhaps only a man of elastic convictions like Mitt Romney can successfully navigate the polarized and paranoid battlefield of contemporary American politics. It is no longer merely a contest of Republicans versus Democrats or red states versus blue states, it is now a confrontation between two versions of reality.

Romney's latest incarnation as a relative moderate is reminiscent of the other Mormon candidate in the Republican primaries, Jon Huntsman. But the reason Romney is the nominee and Huntsman is just an occasional third-tier guest on political chat shows is that Romney was willing to bend his beliefs toward the paranoid, conspiracy-mongering right wing of his party and pretend to be one of them. Now, understanding that he could not stay forever in the alternative universe of the tea party and talk radio and actually win the presidency, he has bounced back toward the center.

Should he become president, though, he will have to contend with those in his party who operate with a...

Mitt Romney may have won the first presidential debate, but what stuck in many people’s minds was his threat to fire Big Bird. Apparently, Romney thinks America’s debt problem can be fixed by picking up pennies along Sesame Street.

Pressed to explain how he would balance the federal budget while cutting trillions of dollars in taxes, the allegedly masterful debater offered up just two specifics: He would repeal “Obamacare” (even though the Congressional Budget Office says the healthcare act actually reduces deficit spending) and eliminate the federal subsidy to the Public Broadcasting System.

Directly addressing beleaguered debate moderator Jim Lehrer, the former anchor of the PBS "NewsHour," Romney said, “I’m sorry, Jim, I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS.... I like PBS, I love Big Bird, I actually like you, too, but I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for.” 

Romney went on to say he...

A man who built his career on testosterone, who spent years pumping iron and staring at himself in mirrors, who thrived in the egocentric troika of sports, Hollywood and politics is probably not a good candidate for faithful husband. Maria Shriver had to have known that when she married Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Arnold and men like him are supreme narcissists. Sure, they are charming, dynamic, seductive, even magnetic, but the world beyond their own minds and bodies is an abstraction. Other people are moons revolving around their sun. They are emotionally detached. All they really need in life are themselves.

So, it is truly mystifying to the Arnold Schwarzeneggers of the world why a wife would get upset about him having sex with other women. As Arnold said to Maria, it had nothing to do with her; he still thinks she’s hot. It’s only sex, after all – sex and an inconvenient love child.

That’s how Arnold tells the story, anyway, in his new memoir, "Total Recall." And,...