The picture was taken while they were campaigning in Iowa, Barack Obama said. Michelle Obama added: "Also, I hadn’t seen him in a while. You know, when you're campaigning, they have, we're two ships passing in the night, and the first time I saw him was when I walked on stage to greet him. And that’s my honey giving me a hug."

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From The Washington Post:

The day after Labor Day, just as campaign season was entering its final frenzy, FreedomWorks, the Washington-based tea party organization, went into free fall.

Richard K. Armey, the group’s chairman and a former House majority leader, walked into the group’s Capitol Hill offices with his wife, Susan, and an aide holstering a handgun at his waist. The aim was to seize control of the group and expel Armey’s enemies: The gun-wielding assistant escorted FreedomWorks’ top two employees off the premises, while Armey suspended several others who broke down in sobs at the news.

The coup lasted all of six days. By Sept. 10, Armey was gone — with a promise of $8 million — and the five ousted employees were back. The force behind their return was Richard J. Stephenson, a reclusive Illinois millionaire who has exerted increasing control over one of Washington’s most influential conservative grass-roots organizations.

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From The Globe:

Arriving at his suite in the Westin Boston Waterfront ­hotel, Romney received regular updates from his staff. He made small talk about the Patriots and the Celtics and played with his grandchildren. He was about to concede around 11:15 p.m when Republican strategist Karl Rove made his now-infamous appearance on Fox News Channel, insisting that his own network was wrong in calling Ohio for the president.

The concession call was canceled, followed by an hour of uncertainty. Then, after Fox ­executives dismissed Rove’s concerns and stood by the network’s projection, Romney said: Call the president.

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Just how bad was Mitt Romney's campaign? So bad that top Republican officials are now trying to "reverse engineer" his race to make sure no GOP candidate ever makes the same mistakes.

According to a behind-the-scenes story of the Romney campaign in today's Boston Globe -- by reporter Michael Kranish, who co-authored the biography "The Real Romney" -- Mitt's aides are still in disbelief over what hit them.

It describes a campaign that was deeply divided on whether to run on Romney's biography or on his business record. Ultimately, the paper reports, Romney sided with campaign manager Stuart Stevens rather than with the family members who wanted to stress his biography.

Among the revelations in the story:

* Romney's Ohio director had no idea what Obama's campaign was doing with all of its ground-game power. In a hilarious quote, Rich Beeson tells the paper: “Now I know what they were doing with all the staffs and ­offices. They were literally creating a one-to-one contact with voters.”

* Beeson wasn't the only mystified member of the team. The Globe reports that when Tagg Romney studied Obama's spending patterns, he "could not figure it out. Why had Obama spent so heavily during the primaries when he had no primary opponent? Only later did Tagg realize this was a key to Obama’s victory."

* Romney's campaign was caught flat-footed on social media. They wanted to build a Facebook app to locate voters who do not have landlines. They did not unveil it until three weeks before the campaign, and it was downloaded only 40,000 times. In contrast, Obama's had been released months earlier, and was downloaded some 1 million times. The project's coordinator tells the paper that the goal was: “Can we do 80 percent of what the Obama campaign is doing, in 20 percent of the time, at 10 percent of the cost?”

* Romney was still convinced he would win Ohio. Beeson, in late October, wrote a memo that "all but ridiculed the notion that the Republican presidential nominee, with his 'better ground game,' could lose." One problem, as the Globe notes: "But the claims proved wildly off the mark, a fact embarrassingly underscored when the high-tech voter turnout system that Romney himself called 'state of the art' crashed at the worst moment, on Election Day."

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We don't really know, and it's likely we never will. Many of the groups that spent the most on the election aren't required to report their donors. But thanks to recent campaign finance filings, we can get a better idea.

We dug through Federal Election Commission and Internal Revenue Service records and found that Adelson and his wife, Miriam, spent at least $98 million this election cycle. The money went to at least 34 different candidates and groups, with contributions ranging from $2,000 for a Florida congressional candidate to $30 million for Restore Our Future, the super PAC that supported Mitt Romney.

Adelson also gave $20 million to Winning Our Future, a super PAC backing Newt Gingrich; $23 million to American Crossroads, a conservative super PAC; and $5 million each to the Congressional Leadership Fund and the YG Action Fund, both of which supported Republican candidates for Congress.

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Surprise! It's Politico.

I have written tens of thousands of words on what, precisely, is wrong with Politico. But I can put the case much more simply here: It's Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei.

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Rove writes that Obama's positions on tax increases and additional stimulus spending are both "political" and "ideological. The president does want to expand government's size, cost and reach in order to, in his words, 'transform' America."

He continued that Obama is also hoping that by not backing down on tax increases, he can cause a rift in the Republican party:

He apparently believes that Republicans, in a weakened state and defending an unpopular position, might buckle on a central GOP tenet, opposition to any increase in marginal rates. That might kick off a Republican civil war, resulting in divisive party primaries in 2014 that leave the president's opposition even more weakened and produce more subpar candidates like this year's Republican Senate candidates in Indiana and Missouri.

"This brings us to Mr. Obama's real goal: having Democrats recapture the House in 2014 and once again stave off losses in the Senate," Rove writes.

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In a letter to Gil Kerlikowske, the administration's director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Leahy wrote:

The Senate Judiciary Committee has a significant interest in the effect of these developments on Federal drug control policy. How does the Office of National Drug Control Policy intend to prioritize Federal resources, and what recommendations are you making to the Department of Justice and other agencies in light of the choice by citizens of Colorado and Washington to legalize personal use of small amounts of marijuana? What assurance can and will the administration give to state officials involved in the licensing of marijuana retailers that they will not face Federal criminal penalties for carrying out duties assigned to them under state law?

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You can almost here the cries of “Too soon! Too soon!”

Following up on the campaign that wouldn't end, political scribblers Mark Halperin (no relation to this writer) and John Heilemann are going to ensure that the 2012 election lives forever in breezy prose. Following up on their bestselling, absurdly readable account of the 2008 race, “Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime,” Halperin and Heilemann will be unleashing “Double Down: Game Change 2012” on a defenseless public, the Hollywood Reporter reports. Penguin is the publisher and HBO has already optioned the book.

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The so-called “leadership” of cash-strapped Detroit has a message for President Obama: We voted for you, so bail us out.

It’s sad, but true. In fact, just this past week Detroit City Councilwoman JoAnn Watson was quoted as saying: “Our people in an overwhelming way supported the re-election of this president and there ought to be a quid pro quo and you ought to exercise leadership on that. Of course, not just that, but why not?"

He then quotes Ronald Reagan on how dependency leads to dictatorship and then monarchy. And if you make it to the end of the email Akin has just one more thing to add:

P.S. – We still have a little ground to make up on our campaign debt retirement. I would be incredibly appreciative if you could click here to donate $5 or more today.

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Huffington Post, which first pointed out the comments, reports that Tranter owns Vlytics, a "data consulting" company that was paid more than $3000 by Mitt Romney's campaign.

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Politico counts 27 days since Rove's last appearance on Fox, a brief hiatus that ended with last night's appearance on "Special Report" with Bret Baier.

Gabe Sherman of New York Magazine reported last week that Fox News chief Roger Ailes instructed staffers to keep Rove and Dick Morris off the air, as "a pair of pundits perhaps most closely aligned with Fox’s anti-Obama campaign," as Sherman put it.

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Last week, Savage lined up with other gay couples in the state to get their marriage licenses, after the state legalized gay marriage in November.

“It’s really a remarkable journey we’ve been on and such a remarkable sea change,” Savage told Seattlepi.com. “And not just for gay people, but straight people have changed, too. It’s gotten better for us because straight people have gotten better about us.”

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Romney also met Pacquiao before the fight to wish him luck. According the AP, Pacquiao's publicist Fred Sternburg says that Romney added: "Hello Manny. I ran for president. I lost."

The AP writes: "The Romneys arrived during the undercard, drawing little reaction from the crowd."

Here's video of Romney meeting Pacquiao before the fight:

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The two incumbents were forced into the same district when Louisiana lost a congressional seat because of anemic population growth in the latest federal census. The state will have six U.S. House seats in the new term that begins in January.

A four-term congressman who had gone into Saturday's balloting favored by the new district design, Boustany will represent the 3rd District covering southwest Louisana and nearby Acadiana.

With nearly all precincts reporting, Boustany led Landry by about a 3-2 margin. About one-fifth of district voters cast ballots on Saturday.

"This looks like a very solid victory. We had a very strong ground game, which was a key element in the runoff. We reached out to a lot of voters with a solid message backed by the results I've gotten in Congress," said Boustany, a retired doctor.

Landry, the tea party favorite, was unable to build enough grassroots support in his bid to oust Boustany. The race had been marked by sharp attacks since both men ran as conservative Republicans opposed to the policies of President Barack Obama and had little philosophical ground in which to distinguish themselves.

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Although it is still early, Mitt Romney, who has 16 grandchildren, is leading among the patriarchs of America's dynastic political families, in part due to the present childlessness of George P. Bush and Chelsea Clinton, whose presence in articles on this subject is an apparent journalistic convention. Starting families now could give the hypothetical grandchildren of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton a head start on the theoretical grandchildren of Barack Obama, whose daughters are years away from having children if they decide to procreate at all.

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The center points out that "The government places no limits on these contributions, but Obama capped money for his inauguration at $50,000 per person – still, more than 10 times what individuals could give to his campaign." The largest total contributions came from individuals in finance, law, entertainment, "business services" and real estate.  Donors who topped out at $50,000 "reportedly got tickets to the official ceremony, the parade and inaugural balls."

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