Reuters

If there's one thing the media won't tolerate for long, it's an unchanging media narrative. So the current story of the presidential campaign -- Obama sits on a lead that is modest but increasingly comfortable, thanks to a hapless Romney and a hapless Romney campaign -- should be yielding any moment to something fresher.

The essential property of the new narrative is that it inject new drama into the race, which means it has to be in some sense pro-Romney. This can in turn mean finding previously unappreciated assets in Romney or his campaign, previously undetected vulnerabilities in the Obama campaign, etc. The big question is whether the new narrative then becomes self-fulfilling, altering the focus of coverage in a way that actually increases Romney's chances of a victory. And that depends on the narrative's exact ingredients. Here are some candidate memes:

1. Romney has a previously undiscovered sense of humor! Here apologies are due to my Atlantic colleague Molly Ball, who, actually, discovered Romney's sense of humor some time ago. Sorry, Molly, but I'm afraid your discovery will have to be shrouded in obscurity, because the meta-narrative governing new narratives dictates that their ingredients be fresh and surprising. Man must bite dog! There has to be a new Mitt, an unexpected Mitt, so that suddenly all bets are off. For example, a little joke Romney makes at the Clinton Global Initiative has to seem so refreshingly unexpected that it makes headlines.