I confess. I didn't read it. I didn't bother. Because 1) Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei's "Obama stumbles out of the gate" will soon be followed in all probability by something along the Politico lines of, "Obama scores a bit later out of the gate," and 2) as Joe Klein forensically notes: "The evidence for this [headline assertion]? Well, uh, there isn’t very much, really."
But damn it's exciting. It's the "meme of the day in journo-world," continues Klein, it's the latest in this edge-of-your-seat horse race, it's a dramatic sign of how far the politically mighty have fallen (insert exclamation point here).
It's also an indispensable precursor to the story taking unexpected and just as exciting turns--QED. Which is to say, it isn't really that exciting. In truth, it's rather boring. Because it's predictable--less like a horse race than like basketball games, in which nothing determinative ever seems to happen until the last two minutes.
Indeed, the last two minutes--two months--of this presidential contest would seem to be as foreseeable as the currently running hype of a vast unpredictability. Assuming the U.S. economy doesn't tank, as every Republican is praying it will, then it's the prodigiously inept Mitt Romney who'll continue to stumble out of the gate and into the gate and stagger repeatedly somewhere in the gate's vicinity. And Obama will continue to pulverize Mitt's tormented operation into an unsightly rubble.
I don't say this as a stage-one exercise in mere wish-fulfillment. I say it simply because the fundamentals are intact. Romney has yet revealed his abject unsuitability for his party's nomination, and Obama has yet begun to really unload. There are many, many stumbles to come, by both sides, that's for sure, that's politics. But most of them, by far, will be Romney's, because Romney is an anxiety-ridden gaffe machine that hasn't a clue as to how to get the winning ball in the basket.