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In what appears to be a pit stop for Paul Ryan’s never-ending quest to find objects to lift and make his sublime biceps even bigger, the Republican vice-presidential candidate did some dishes in an Ohio soup kitchen last week.

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In 2004 George W. Bush lost the first presidential debate to John Kerry. He sighed, had bad posture at the podium, and seemed generally disengaged. Sound familiar?  President Obama followed in the same footsteps in what we might call the “incumbent trap” of presidential debates where the sitting president doesn’t take the debates as seriously as he should and turns in an uninspired performance.

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Time for round two. Candy Crowley, the moderator of Tuesday night’s debate at Hofstra University on Long Island, said that she won’t be “a fly on the wall” during the town hall–style evening. “I’m going to react organically to what’s happening,” Crowley said on Monday.

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Is President Obama too smart for debates?We know his energy was low in Denver. That he looked like he wanted to be anywhere else. That he looked churlish and peeved. And that he missed countless opportunities to raise issues or counter Mitt Romney’s assertions.

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It’s a conundrum for conservatives—Mitt Romney couldn’t get traction while he was playing to the base with his vice-presidential selection or his convention speech.  But once he broke out the big Etch A Sketch in his first debate against President Obama, Mitt started soaring in the polls.

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So here we are. Let’s get right to it. Here are Barack Obama’s eight tasks tonight:Be a fighter for beliefs. I wrote this already, but it needs to be on this list. Obama must communicate that he wants to spend four more years fighting for the things he believes in and the people he represents.

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I don’t believe in the undecided voter. Let me be clear on this: I am not saying that I doubt the sincerity of someone who declares today, three weeks before an election that we’ve all been hearing about for years, that they have no idea for whom they are going to vote.

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Is Mitt Romney giving up on Pennsylvania? The Keystone State has long been considered one of the crucial swing states up for grabs this year. In fact, the state’s blue-collar Democrats were the ones who Barack Obama famously described as sticking to their guns and bibles.

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Despite a lackluster debate performance, President Obama maintains a slight lead over Mitt Romney. A Reuter/Ipsos poll found Obama leading with 47 percent support among likely voters compared with Romney’s 45 percent. It’s a virtual tie, but it does indicate that Obama is recovering from his debate performance.

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The electoral map is changing—and changing fast. Just a few weeks ago, Obama was nearing 270 electoral votes. The president appeared to have 265 electoral votes as opposed to 191 for Mitt Romney. As of this morning, however, Obama is only leading by 10 electoral votes, according to Real Clear Politics—201 to 191.

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President Obama’s debate team is clearly anxious that a second poor performance could seriously hurt him among undecided or “soft” Obama supporters,” despite history suggesting that presidential debates rarely impact an election.

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Buzzfeed departed from its short-form formula on Monday when it published a nearly 11,000-word exposé that blew the myth of George Romney apart like an abandoned automotive plant. Taking aim at the moderate Republican halo that has come to surround presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s father—the auto executive, Michigan governor, and presidential candidate in his own right—the thorough going-over by BuzzFeed contributor John R.

Rudy Giuliani smells something fishy about the Obama administration’s response to the recent attacks in Benghazi, Libya. “Who put Susan Rice on it? The State Department? Or the political people? It was a political appearance on CNN,” the former NYC mayor said on CNN Monday morning.

Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo

Good for Martha Raddatz. In last Thursday’s vice-presidential debate, she served up the first serious, widely watched discussion of the foreign-policy differences between this year’s Democratic and Republican tickets. And in so doing, she revealed what foreign-policy wonks already know.

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The character of Selina Meyer—the fictional vice president in Armando Iannucci’s comedy series, Veep—reminds us that Americans usually don’t take the job of deputy commander in chief too seriously. Whereas presidents elicit respect even from their political opponents, veeps and would-be veeps have been providing gag writers with material for generations.