Both parties should take the hint: The practical benefits to holding a convention in late August or early September no longer apply. Now, in fact, there are ample reasons to hold a convention earlier, rather than later.

Republicans and Democrats always jockey for convention position. They must conduct their formal nominating processes in time to meet ballot deadlines in key states, but they each want to hold their events late enough to capture attention from undecided voters who haven't yet tuned into the campaign.

But the number of undecided voters who actually spend an evening watching the convention proceedings is incredibly small. Instead, the big speeches Mitt Romney and President Obama will give over the next two weeks will be spliced into soundbites and played in 30-second increments, which will reach more undecided voters than the speeches themselves.

"There's more we can do to prevent gun violence. But I want this to at least be the beginning of a new discussion on how we can keep America safe for all our people," Obama wrote in the Arizona Daily Star, two months after another rampage that left six dead and gravelly wounded 13 others, including former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

If ever there were a moment to have that discussion, it is during a presidential campaign, when voters have the chance to choose between options.

But that discussion isn't happening. Entitlement spending is a subject of heated debate during the presidential campaign. It is no longer a faux pas to criticize a president traveling overseas. But gun control? That's still a third rail in American politics, one that neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney are willing to touch.

The Swiftboating worked brilliantly against the eponymous former Swift Boat captain John Kerry, a Silver Star-decorated war hero who somehow came out looking less tough than a GOP president who had spent the Vietnam War guarding Texas and a vice president who had dodged the draft five times. That's partly because Kerry, eternally anguished about his Vietnam service, failed to fight back in time against the appalling slurs on his record made by these military malefactors.

"Life is life. A baby shouldn't be punished for an act it didn't have a role in,'' he said. "The platform lays out the principles of the party, and we want to show what those principles are. It's a standard we can hold candidates to.''

The chairman of the platform committee is "Gov. Ultrasound,'' as Democrats derisively refer to Bob McDonnell of Virginia after he signed a law requiring women seeking abortions to get ultrasound exams. His role at the convention also gives Democrats fuel to accuse the GOP of waging a "war on women'' as Obama seeks to further widen the gender gap with Romney.

The Romney campaign tried to clarify its position on abortion to distance the nominee from Akin, saying "A Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape.'' But don't expect Democratic attacks on Romney's abortion stance to ebb, considering vice presidential pick Paul Ryan's co-sponsorship of a "personhood" bill with Akin and the now-glaring absence of a rape exception in the platform.

UPDATE: Sure enough, Democrats ramped up their anti-Romney attacks after the platform committee approved the anti-abortion plank. Obama spokeswoman Lis Smith said: "Women across the country should take note of the Republican Party's position." Planned Parenthood Action Fund piled on: "The Republican Party platform approved today is Mitt Romney's agenda every bit as much as it's Todd Akin's agenda."

And this week, when enfant terrible historian Niall Ferguson published another over-the-top screed headlined, "Obama's Gotta Go," much talk ensued, but it wasn't about the political race. Mainly it was a lot of lamentation about how far off the mark Ferguson was, and about how far a once-great magazine, Newsweek, has fallen under the overrated and apparently overwhelmed Tina Brown, who thinks nothing of handing over a formerly coveted cover to anyone with a rant in hand.

Others have dealt amply with all the factual misrepresentations in the article; note, in particular, James Fallows in The Atlantic and Dylan Byers in Politico. I would just like to point out how much Ferguson has gotten wrong since he appointed himself keeper of America's imperial flame and began desperately playing for public attention. In his books The Cash Nexus (2001) and then Colossus (2004), he urged Americans to fulfill their obvious destiny as the next "liberal" empire spreading democracy and Anglo-Saxon legalism across the globe. "The greatest disappointment facing the world in the twenty-first century," Ferguson wrote in The Cash Nexus, is that "the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place lack the guts to do it." When President George W. Bush invaded Iraq, Ferguson eagerly supported the war as evidence that Washington had finally shown some guts and was acting like the empire it ought to be; he also advocated a long-term occupation. But then, in later books and articles, Ferguson began to argue that the United States was succumbing to financial overstretch, having gotten deeply in debt to the rest of the world, especially China. All without any sense of irony. 

(RELATED: Obama Has Significantly Less Money On Hand Than Romney)

Yet Ferguson has also been wrong in sounding alarms about the latter point. In 2009, Ferguson argued that more debt issuance would lead to higher interest rates and fiscal disaster; he was wrong. Again in 2011, Ferguson argued that inflation was coming back, leading the charge for those much-feared bond market vigilantes. He was wrong again.

Barry Diller, the money man keeping Newsweek afloat, has hinted recently that its days as a print publication are numbered. It's sad to say this, but perhaps he's got it right. Conjoined to Brown's Daily Beast, Newsweek is a wounded animal, and maybe it ought to be put out of its misery. That way, maybe, those who remember the magazine at all will remember the years when it was great. And we can all get back to real journalism.

Here are my five quick political takeaways from the burgeoning controversy.

1. Akin still holds even odds to defeat Claire McCaskill.  Missouri is a Republican-trending state, and still conservative on social issues. This blunder is going to cost Akin dearly with  female voters but the race is still a toss-up. There's a reason why Sen. Claire McCaskill was trailing badly to her three Republican primary opponents. Her job approval numbers are very weak in Missouri.

In 2006, when McCaskill ousted GOP Sen. Jim Talent, it was her surprisingly strong performance in the rural parts of Missouri that put her over the top. (Note that Akin underscored his firm opposition to abortion rights in his clarifying statement.) This controversy may not resonate as strongly in those parts of the state as it is currently in Washington.  This race is still a toss-up.

To underscore how socially conservative much of Missouri is, check out this campaign ad for Rep. Sam Graves in 2008 against Kansas City Mayor Kay Barnes.  This was a big House battleground race that year, when President Obama headed the top of the Democratic ticket.  The ad, which attacked Barnes' social liberalism, drew controversy because some critics believed it referred to her as "Gay Barnes." But while the punditocracy mocked the ad, Graves won in a landslide.  

2.  Akin, another not-ready-for-primetime Republican Senate nominee.   For the flak Mitt Romney gets over his political skills, it's his party's not-ready-for-primetime battleground Senate nominees that are running behind him.  It's awfully ironic that Republican strategists are (anonymously) carping about Romney's pick of Paul Ryan potentially costing them control of the Senate when in reality, it's the GOP's own weak nominees.

Romney could conceivably win the battleground states of Missouri, Indiana, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan without the GOP winning any of those Senate seats.  Josh Mandel (Ohio), Pete Hoekstra (Michigan) and Tom Smith (Pennsylvania) are consistently running well behind the presidential ticket.  Akin will be in the same situation after the dust settles from this controversy.  And Republican strategists are still nervous about Connie Mack's campaign in Florida, knowing that a more-polished Senate nominee would probably be a favorite against Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.

3. Don't blame the Tea Party for the predicament.  Akin was not the tea party-backed candidate in Missouri.  In reality, none of the three candidates Republicans ran in the race fit the definition to a tee.  But Akin, as a longtime socially conservative congressman who defended earmarking, hardly fits the profile.  He narrowly won a primary where none of the candidates captured excitement from the GOP electorate.

Most of the other weaker-than-average Republican Senate nominees can't be blamed on the tea party movement, either. Mandel won support from tea party groups, but also was recruited by the party establishment.  Hoekstra, as a supporter of the TARP bailout, was opposed by many movement conservatives.  Smith is a self-funding former Democrat.

The one exception is state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, the tea party favorite who upset Sen. Richard Lugar in the Indiana Senate primary.  But while he's turned a guaranteed-Republican seat into a competitive race, he's still a mild favorite to prevail over Rep. Joe Donnelly, D-Ind.

Apparently Joe Biden and Paul Ryan never got the memo.

Here we are, fewer than three months removed from Election Day, and Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have entered full-fledged campaign mode, jetting breathlessly between battleground states to raise money, energize supporters and make their case to undecided voters. Yet for much of the past week, their efforts have been largely eclipsed by their running mates, whose activities have, for better or worse, commanded considerably more attention from the press.

Has a Pennsylvania court done what the Romney campaign has been unable to: Erase President Obama's advantage in the state?

A trial judge Wednesday upheld Pennsylvania's much-criticized voter ID law, finding no evidence that voters in the state would be disenfranchised despite testimony at trial that suggested that more than 750,000 voters lack the necessary government-issued identification to vote in November. (Advocacy groups and some experts have argued that the number is more than 1 million. Earlier estimates had the figure much lower, closer to 100,000.)

Slam dunk, right?

The debate over what kind of Republican Ryan is -- a knuckle-dragging ideologue bent on smothering the size of the federal government, as Democrats insist, or a bipartisan dealmaker, as Romney claims -- will be one of the central fights in the broader war over defining the GOP ticket.

On Ryan's biggest issue -- the budget -- he has shown little willingness to compromise with Democrats. "This is not a budget. This is a cause," he said in 2011, when he rolled out the GOP spending plan.

Still, both sides have some ammunition.

Exhibit A for Romney is that Ryan worked with liberal Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon last year to craft a bipartisan "white paper" on how to overhaul Medicare. It's still on Wyden's website, complete with a photo of him huddling studiously with Ryan. But Wyden has been working hard to distance himself from Ryan's broader budget blueprint and remove his name from GOP talking points.

"Governor Romney is talking nonsense," Wyden has said.

Last year, Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, also worked with his Democratic counterpart on the budget panel, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland, to unveil a proposal to allow a limited presidential line-item veto of spending. They even appeared side-by-side on MSNBC. "We want to show we don't always go at each other's throats around here. We can actually agree on some things, and this is one of those things we agree on," Ryan said, as Van Hollen nodded.

Ryan's genial nature, even as the climate in the Capitol has soured, has made him friends across the aisle. But there is little in Ryan's recent record to indicate he is a big-picture compromiser with Democrats. His 2012 budget package passed this year out of the House with zero Democratic votes. The New York Times' Nate Silver has pointed out one measurement that ranks Ryan as "the most conservative Republican member of Congress to be picked for the vice-presidential slot since at least 1900."

Though Ryan talks regularly about striking a bipartisan deficit-reduction deal, he's been at the forefront of scuttling any packages that have appeared to have any momentum. In 2010, Ryan was a member of the bipartisan deficit-reduction panel chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Except that Ryan voted against the final commission plan (It included a tax hike). And a year later, when a bipartisan group of senators were whispering about a bipartisan deficit package of their own, Ryan's criticism helped derail the talks.

In a lengthy New York magazine profile earlier this year, Jonathan Chait wondrously asked, "How has Ryan managed to occupy these two roles in our national life--[nonpartisan fiscal] award-winning spokesman for those Americans demanding a bipartisan agreement to reduce the deficit, and slayer of bipartisan deficit agreements--simultaneously?"

Chait settled on Ryan's "remarkable talent for radiating good intentions." It's a talent that the rigors of a presidential campaign will put to the test.