Is the stench of death on the Romney campaign?

By Richard K. Barry

Remember when I told you that you were going to be the
next vice president of the United States? Oh man, that was funny. 

As much as I wish this thing was substantially decided, it isn't. Still, it's been a good week for the Obama campaign and a bad one for the Romney team.

As Mark Halperin wrote yesterday:

The danger for the Romney campaign right now is the congealing conventional wisdom that the Republican emerged from Tampa and Charlotte meaningfully behind and is now facing some tough Electoral College reality.

This CW is driven by the post-convention polls showing a bump for the President, prominent Politico and New York Times stories citing key Republicans acknowledging that Boston is behind in Ohio and other must-win states, Barack Obama’s outraising Mitt Romney in August and weak Romney and Paul Ryan answers in interviews on such topics as health care, the U.S. military and the budget. The Fox News Sunday round table yesterday sounded like a postmortem explaining a Romney loss.

In other words, a lot of bad things are happening right now if you are Mitt Romney.

Let's not forget, however, that the debates are yet to come and Romney has zillions of dollars to spend on ads in battleground states. Things can always change in politics. The economy could get unexpectedly a lot worse; Obama could screw up somehow. But, in the words of Haley Barbour, as quoted by Halperin, in politics, bad gets worse.

Romney is in a bad position at this moment and, if Obama is ahead by as much as 9 points in Ohio, as Daily Kos reported yesterday, it's getting harder and harder to imagine how Romney wins.

Having said all of that, if you think you're ahead and you're not looking over your shoulder, you are making a big mistake.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)