Let me say that one more time: Barack Obama may be the smartest politician alive. He beat the Clinton Machine and is about to do the same to the billionaire SuperPAC'd GOP.

There is strong evidence to suggest the Obama Team essentially politically engineered Paul Ryan's VP selection to make the Medicare fight a central piece of the news cycle and debate, by forcing Romney's hand from a potentially winning "referendum on Obama's economy" frame to the grim "choice between two visions of America: Backwards or Forward". Needless to say, the Romney camp has lost control of the message a mere days after announcing Ryan as its VP, and both of them are in a compromising situation yielding headlines like "The Romney Spell: Paul Ryan Starts Flip-Flopping Days After VP Selection". Whether this is 11-dimensional chess or just chess in the three dimensions we know, none of this is happenstance. Say what you may about Obama's ability to play political chess, but the man knows how to play a long game.

So it was not surprising to discover this morning that, just one day after Romney asked America to swallow, without evidence, that he has paid no less than 13% in taxes for the past 10 years (and uttered with the conviction that this 13% was fair, if it was even referring to income tax proper), and to take his word for it, as if his statement alone ought to suffice and put to rest the public's clamoring to see more than the one year of tax returns he has released, Obama has laid out a masterful trap for Romney: let's make a deal. You show us the money, and we'll move on past the tax returns.