The Obama Diary

Steve Benen: …. I watch a whole lot of Obama’s speeches, and I’d say he seemed a little more fired up than usual. (Pay particular attention to his tone of voice in the last 90 seconds.)

Las Vegas, August 22

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Politico: President Obama said he’s beating Mitt Romney “by a few points” and said time is running out in the 2012 presidential election.

“I can’t resist a basketball analogy,” he told donors at a Lincoln Center fundraiser that featured NBA commissioner David Stern and current and former basketball stars including Michael Jordan. “We are in the fourth quarter. We’re up by a few points but the other side is coming strong and they, they, they play a little dirty. We’ve got a few folks on our team in foul trouble. We’ve got a couple of injuries and I believe that they’ve got one last run in them.”

“I’d say there’s about seven minutes to go in the game. And Michael’s competitiveness is legendary and nobody knows better than Michael that if you’ve got a little bit of a lead and there’s about seven minutes ago, that’s when you put them away.”

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Cagle

Politico: President Obama mocked Missouri Rep. Todd Akin here, telling a fundraising crowd packed with pro basketball stars that the embattled Senate candidate “somehow missed science class.”

“Recently some of you have been paying attention to the commentary about the senator from Missouri, Mr. Akin,” Obama said. “The interesting thing here is that this, this is an individual who sits on the House Committee on Science and Technology but somehow missed science class. And it’s representative of the desire to go backwards instead of forwards and fight fights that we thought were settled 20 or 30 years ago.”

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Politifact

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