Dear Mr. President: you are making too many Big Bird jokes. If there was a time for that, it was during the debate proper last Wednesday night--a well-placed Wall St. vs. Sesame Street quip might have stopped the bleeding and made you look engaged and clever and extemporaneous. Now it makes you seem smaller than the office you hold. And the office you seek. And yes, Mr. President, you are a candidate again. There are four weeks until November 6. Our fellow citizens are already voting. This election isn't about PBS. Please talk about 32 consecutive months of job growth on your watch. Please talk about the destruction wrought by Bain Capital. Talk about the Republican plan to dismantle Medicare as we know it. Talk about the Republicans' war on women. Talk about how GM is alive and Osama Bin Laden is dead. But please, stop giving lazy local reporters one-liners about Elmo they can just mail in instead of doing substantive journalism. You are not the Shecky Green-in-Chief. You'd probably agree that the most distressing thing about Mitt Romney's startling performance in Denver was what it reveals about what Mr. Romney thinks of the American people. He thinks that we are dumb--certainly too dumb to be bothered by dodges, evasions, pivots, or outright falsehoods on policy positions. He thinks that we are just going to vote for the guy we like the most, or the Alpha-dog in the room, the winner on style points. He is betting that presidential elections work like American Idol. He might be right. Last time, in 2008, if he is indeed right, that happened to inure to your benefit. Up until last week, it still did. But now that is over. So now what then? Unburdened by your cloak of charismatic invincibility, you can move beyond the "cult of Obama" nonsense and win now simply because your ideas are better.