"If the election were held today, Mitt Romney would probably lose. With unemployment above 8% and two-thirds of the country thinking we're going in the wrong direction, how on earth is Obama still ahead? The first reason is negative ads and Romney brand management. Just about every week this summer Democrats have launched a new attack against Romney, and they have stereotyped him as a tax-dodging, cancer-causing, outsourcing, 1950's aristocrat. Romney has not launched the type of aggressive counter-offensive necessary to defeat the campaign of a Saul Alinsky acolyte. The Obama team throws a knife and Romney's team tosses a pillow. An effective rapid response team would have nailed Obama on the Super-PAC cancer ad. I would have said something like this: 'We're all getting sick, sick of this poisonous style of campaigning and sick of politicians like Barack Obama who blame others for their broken promises and failed policies.' Romney's team should be going into the Republican National Convention seven points up, not down. He must give voters a sober, brutally exacting description of how dire the situation is for America. Then he needs to hit the trail with a road show to explain how his policies will begin to turn things around. Both the country and his own campaign need the stellar crisis management skills that saved the 2002 Olympics. The Romney team must expose the Obama record and elevate the campaign away from the Obama distractions."

Laura asked Romney supporter and former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu about his candidate's prospects. "The Rasmussen Poll has Mitt Romney up four with likely voters," Sununu said, "and Gallup has him even with registered voters. Those polls do daily counting and they are the gold standards. Also, I disagree with you that the Romney campaign did not jump on the Obama ad. The Governor himself attacked it quite aggressively and the Romney campaign has put out its own ad questioning President Obama's character." Sununu added that President Obama has been able to outspend Governor Romney, but that advantage will disappear later this month. "The day he is the nominee they will be equal in terms of money. I guarantee you that this crowd that proved to be ruthless in the primaries is going to be equally ruthless with President Obama. Have faith, it will work!"

The Obama campaign has produced a TV ad implying that Mitt Romney has been a serial tax cheat, while Romney's team created an ad questioning the President's character. Laura discussed the nastier-by-the-day campaign with newspaper editor Cathy Areu and professor Christopher Metzler. "President Obama wanted to have the 'hope and change' message," Areu posited, "but because the other side has gotten so dirty they have to fight back. They are simply stating facts, I don't think the Obama campaign has done anything wrong. It is possible that Harry Reid is right and Romney did not pay taxes." But Metzler denounced the Obama team as issue-evading prevaricators. "This campaign can be described as lies, lies, and damned lies. Mr. 'hope and change' realizes that he has changed nothing, he has a dismal economic record, and his blaming of Bush is not working. He is 'hypocrite in chief' rather than commander in chief, these ads are absolutely ridiculous."

Massachusetts is spending taxpayer money to register welfare recipients to vote, and the effort actually involves the daughter of Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren. Laura tried to get to the bottom of the story with Emily Tisch Sussman of Young Democrats of America. "There was a lawsuit to enforce the National Voter Registration Act of 1993," Sussman explained. "One piece of that act is that people should have access to registration if they are recipients of state aid. Massachusetts was not properly enforcing that and this is definitely a lesson that states should be following the law." Laura concluded that registering welfare recipients will help Democrats, specifically Elizabeth Warren: "Republican Scott Brown won this Senate seat and now we have Warren's daughter chairing the group that is representing the plaintiffs in this case. Massachusetts has debt of $16.7 billion, but this is going to cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars."

With gas prices again heading north, Laura assessed the political fallout with Democratic strategist Bernard Whitman and Eric Bolling, co-host of FNC's "The Five." "President Obama is really in a quandary right now," Bolling said. "He really needs unemployment to go down, but if unemployment goes below 8%, gas prices are going to soar. In a swing state like Virginia, gasoline is up 30 cents a gallon in the past month." Bolling blamed rising prices on the President, saying, "Everything he's done has been anti-drilling and he's done everything in his power not to get prices down at the pump." Whitman contended that President Obama won't play a political price. "What's missing from this conversation and what's missing from Eric's analysis is that the President actually has an extraordinary energy policy. Domestic oil production has been up every year he's been in office, natural gas production is at an all-time high, and we have more oil rigs than any country in the world."

The prosecution in the George Zimmerman case mistakenly released confidential material to the media, including a photo of Trayvon Martin's dead body. Geraldo Rivera entered the No Spin Zone to elaborate. "If the photo was going to inflame the public and taint the jury pool," Rivera said, "a conspiracy theorist might say they released the photo intentionally. But it wasn't a very good picture and I really don't think it was premeditated, I think this was just a dopey assistant in the prosecutor's office who released this xerox of the death photo. What is far more probative and significant is the fact that George Zimmerman lied, or his wife lied and he condoned it, during his bail hearing. That tarnished his credibility."

U.S. Olympic hurdler Lolo Jones, who finished fourth at the London Games, has blasted the New York Times for implying that she is more interested in her glamorous image than her sprinting. Laura welcomed Fox Business reporter Sandra Smith, a former teammate of Jones at Louisiana State University. "Lolo's job was to run the fastest she could from the starting line to the finish line," Smith said, "and that's what she did every single race. For the New York Times to say that she hasn't gotten where she has based on her own merits is just false. She has been in two Olympics and she holds the indoor world record in her event. When I read the article, I felt it was written by someone who just didn't know what he was talking about." Laura concurred, saying Jones' "athleticism speaks for itself."