Obama Camp Goes Squirrelly UPDATE: More Kids

Less than ten days from the election the Obama camp has gone squirrelly over the battle for the white House, and it may bode ill for post-election litigation from a beaten Obama camp.

Team Obama over the last couple of weeks has hopped from Big Bird, to binders to bayonets in an effort to find something, anything, that would resonate with voters. Nothing seemingly has. And as the polls have worsened, panic and squirrely behavior has set in. It has manifested itself in litigious behavior. Firstly, the campaign has gone back after Gallup again, for poll results they don't like.  Trying to portray Gallup's results as implausible is not a strategy and it even fails as a tactic, but they are trying it nonetheless.

The Obama campaign today blasted the latest battleground state polling that finds Mitt Romney with a five point lead among likely voters, saying the Gallup/USA Today poll has “deep flaws.”

“Gallup’s data is once again far out of line with other public pollsters,” Obama’s pollster Joel Benenson wrote in a memo...

“We believe the problem with Gallup’s outlying data is rooted in their 7 question likely voter screen, which distorts the composition of likely voters, leading to erratic and inaccurate results,” Benenson wrote.

“In the past, Gallup’s justification for such outlying numbers is that they are providing a snapshot of voter attitudes during a particular time period, not predicting the outcome of the election. But this implausible result among women appears to not even provide an accurate reflection on the electorate today, making its value questionable,” he said.

Normally you'd expect some sort of comment about how their internal polls show differently and that they are very confident that they still have the easiest path to the presidency.  What you don't expect is them to question what is perceived to be the gold standard of polling.  Conservatives have disagreed with Gallup in the past, but you did not see the Romney campaign, down by a lot, for a long time, question the polls.

And it doesn't end there.  You've also got deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter out there questioning the endorsement of Romney by the Des Moines Register, a paper which hasn't endorsed a Republican since Nixon.  It's a bit specific, and it sounds like panic.  It doesn't sound like a campaign confident in its chances of success.  Had this happened in 2008 the campaign would have ignored it because it didn't matter.  Instead, this:

“They endorsed Mitt Romney in the primary, so this was not much of a surprise,” said Cutter on ABC’s “This Week” of the influential swing-state paper’s backing for President Obama’s challenger.

“It was a little surprising to read that editorial, because it didn't seem to be based at all in reality, not just in the president's record, but in Mitt Romney's record,” Cutter added. “It says that he'd reach across the aisle, which he'd do the exact opposite. It's the exact opposite of what he did in Massachusetts.”

These sort of actions convey a sense of a campaign in disarray.  It speaks more volume than the polling results themselves.

UPDATE:  It just got worse.  Obama brought out the singing kids.  Creepy, inappropriate and again, squirrelly.