WaPo opinion writer Dana Milbank has a perceptive take on the tone of the 2012 presidential campaign. Milbank quotes WaPo’s Dan Balz and other sources commenting on the toxicity of the campaign, but then adds that one major thing is indeed very different:

…Democrats are now employing harsh tactics that have been used against them for so long…Yes, it’s ugly out there. But is this worse than four years ago, when Obama was accused by the GOP vice presidential nominee of “palling around with terrorists”? Or eight years ago, when Democratic nominee John Kerry was accused of falsifying his Vietnam War record?
What’s different this time is that the Democrats are employing the same harsh tactics that have been used against them for so long, with so much success. They have ceased their traditional response of assuming the fetal position when attacked, and Obama’s campaign is giving as good as it gets — and then some.
Balz is correct when he observes that the “most striking” element of the campaign is “the sense that all restraints are gone, the guardrails have disappeared and there is no incentive for anyone to hold back.” In large part, this is because the Democrats are no longer simply whining about the other side being reckless and unfair:

And that’s all to the good — and long-overdue.

Looks like the GOP has dredged up a new ‘swift boat’-style attack ad to belittle President Obama’s leadership in the raid that did what the Republicans failed to do under nearly 8 years of their ‘leadership’ — find and kill bin Laden. As Juliet Lapidos explains in “Return of the Swift Boat” at the New York Times ‘Taking Note’ Editor’s Blog:

…A new group with ties to the G.O.P and the Tea Party called Special Operations Opsec Education Fund has released a 22-minute video rebuking the president for “politically capitalizing” on national security operations, like the raid that killed Bin Laden.
Anyone who watched the late-night address in which Mr. Obama announced bin Laden’s death will remember that he praised the “tireless and heroic work of our military and our counterterrorism professionals” and the “years of painstaking work by our intelligence community.” The Opsec video includes a clip of that address, but omits the “heroic work” and “painstaking work” lines so that it seems as though Mr. Obama gave himself undue credit. Cue Dave Lamorte, a retired C.I.A. officer, who says: “The administration didn’t capture, or kill or eliminate bin Laden or anybody else. There’s a whole lot of folks in the intelligence and the military community who have been working on this for a very long time.” Then Ben Smith, a former Navy SEAL, chimes in with his best Don LaFontaine impression: “Mr. President, you did not kill Osama bin Laden. America did.”

But the military leader who was actually involved with with the raid strongly disagrees with Lamorte. As Scott Shane notes in his New York Times Report,

In a CNN interview last month, Adm. William H. McRaven of the Navy, who oversaw the raid as commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, said, “The president and his national security team — I’m not a political guy, but I will tell you as, as an interested observer in this — they were magnificent in how they handled it start to finish.”

As Lapidos eloquently sums up the new swift boat attack ad:

It’s a dishonest hatchet job that’ll make you long for a shower, especially since the “stars” of the video present themselves as concerned citizens with no partisan motivations. “We have become a political weapon. We are not. Our job is to be silent professionals. We do not seek recognition; we do not seek popularity,” says Mr. Smith, evidently unaware that appearing in a long attack ad doesn’t gel with his claims.

Better make that two showers.

Greg Sargent blogs at WaPo’s The Plum Line on Mitt Romney’s unverified statement today stating that he never paid less than 13 percent taxes over the last decade. As Sargent explains:

What we’re looking at here is an extraordinary gamble by the Romney camp — call it the “just trust me” campaign. In essence, Romney is betting he can withhold huge amounts of detail about his finances and his major policy proposals without the public knowing or caring about it enough to matter.
On taxes, this lack of transparency goes beyond the amounts he paid; tax experts think the returns could shed light on Romney’s various offshore accounts and any techniques — fully legal, but perhaps difficult to explain politically — he used to keep his rates low. Romney has stuck to this stance even though multiple Republicans, including his longtime backer and fundraiser Jon Huntsman Sr., have called on him to come clean with the American people.
That’s only the begining. Romney won’t reveal the names of his major bundlers, even though he’s taken a drubbing from major editorial boards for failing to do so…

The lack of transparency and candor is not just regarding his personal finances; It’s also his policies that he keeps deliberately vague:

…Romney has claimed he wants to eliminate whole government programs and agencies, but has freely admitted he won’t specify which ones, because so doing could be political problematic. Romney did let a bit of detail slip about which programs and agencies he’d consolidate or eliminate, but only in a closed-door fundraiser that was overheard by reporters.
Romney has proposed a tax overhaul that he vows will be revenue neutral, but he won’t say which loopholes and deductions he’d close to ensure that his plan’s deep tax cuts on the rich will be paid for without hiking the middle class’s tax burden. And not only that, but Romney and his running mate have freely confirmed in interviews that they see no need to reveal these details until after the election — after which, they claim, it can all be worked out with Congress. And so on.

As for the strategy behind Romney’s evasions, Sargent adds, “Romney appears to be betting that he can muddle his way through to victory despite the merciless incoming he continues to take, because voters disillusioned by the bad economy will want an alternative so badly that they won’t be too picky about the details…Romney is betting on media incompetence — its inability to inform the public — or on voter apathy, or on a combination of both, to allow him to skate through.”
It’s a cynical ploy, one that assumes an extraordinary degree of apathy, dim-wittedness or distraction among voters. America’s hopes for a better future depend in no small measure on him being wrong.

In the Philadelphia News, Will Bunch’s “Poll gives Obama the edge, but how would voter ID affect the lead?” offers an encouraging observation from veteran Philadelphia-based political analyst Larry Ceisler: “The reality is it [voter ID] will not have much effect – if anything it will boomerang” against the Republicans, wile noting that it might have more of an affect on some local races.
There have to be swing voters out there who are repulsed by Republican efforts to make voting harder. Google up “voter suppression” +”unamerican” and you get about 22K hits, one example being “F-L-A Governor Rick Scott’s Walk On The Wild Side: Voter Suppression Is UnAmerican” at Shred of Truth. Progressives have been reluctant to use the term, perhaps because it was used to destroy innocent people during the ‘Red Scare’ era. But if anything is a shameful betrayal of American democracy, it is voter suppression. There may not be much Dems can do to invalidate these laws between now and November, but we can certainly crank up the outrage among fair-minded voters. Maybe it’s time for high-profile Dems to start working the “U” word a little more aggressively and say it plain.
Regarding voter i.d. laws, Republicans are able to hide behind a phony concern about ‘voter fraud,’ even though all relevant data indicates that it is all but non-existent. But the rationalizations for repealing early voting laws are even more indefensible, and opponents of early voting should be compelled to explain their views at every opportunity. It would be fun, for example to hear Romney or Ryan try to boil this essay against early voting into credible soundbites — if the MSM had the gumption to call them out.
As for overcoming voter suppression in PA, at PolitcusUSA Adalia Woodbury’s “Keep Fighting: How to Beat Pennsylvania’s Attempt to Suppress Your Vote ” walks her readers through the steps needed to insure their voting rights in the Keystone State.
The hope is that the Republican campaign to suppress early voting will backfire by pissing off the highest-turnout constituency, seniors, especially those with mobility issues. But it’s a calculated risk Republicans are willing to make, since no constituency votes more Democratic than African Americans. Stephanie Siek explains, for example, at The Griot “How early voting changes in Ohio will hurt Democratic, black voters”.
Here’s an Ohio ACLU precis on the state’s balkanized, racially-motivated early voting system and the resistance to it.
In her HuffPo article, “GOP to Young Voters: Don’t Vote,” Christine Pelosi, executive director of Young Democrats of American, explains the techniques of — and remedies for — Republican youth voter suppression.
James Ridgeway’s “The Mother of All Vote-Suppression Tactics?” at Mother Jones provides an excellent overview of felon disenfranchisement laws. Ridgeway notes: “Florida leads the pack in the number of citizens excluded. But according to the Brennan Center for Justice, 48 states (exceptions: Maine and Vermont) prohibit current prisoners with felony convictions from voting and 29 of them also bar those on probation or parole…black men make up 36 percent of the nation’s disenfranchised population, but just 6 percent of the nation’s general population…According to Desmond Meade of the nonprofit Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, “Over 1 million people in Florida right now are disenfranchised,” he says. Nearly 1 in 3 of them are African American men. If these people were able to vote, Meade continues, “Florida would no longer be a swing state.”
Indications are Dems still have a lot of work to do to educate voters about the realities of voter ‘fraud’ and suppression, as this Washington Post poll reported by Michael Brandon and Jonathan Cohen suggests. The poll found that a healthy majority supports voter i.d. laws, and there may not be time to persuade a critical mass of these voters otherwise by November 6. Maybe Dems should put more muscle into fighting other forms of voter suppression, like felon disenfranchisement and restrictions on early voting.
The AFL-CIO has an impressive “Voter Suppression and Voter I.D. Laws: A Toolkit for Activists,” which should be of use to anyone who wants to get more involved in fighting to protect voting rights.

To help cut through the thickening smokescreen the Romney-Ryan team is puffing up around their unpopular tax policies, Mike Lofgren’s “Romney and Ryan’s Phony Deficit-Reduction Plan” at The Daily Beast has a nut graph that simplifies it:

It is not just that he cuts taxes, it is how Ryan cuts taxes that gives us a clue as to the Republican agenda. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that under his plan, those making less than the princely sum of $20,000 a year would have an average tax increase of $193 annually, while those earning more than $1 million would reap an average tax cut of $265,000. When, under the Bush administration, the capital gains rate was lowered to 15 percent, it not only exacerbated the growing income disparity in America (many of the rich earn most if not all of their wealth from capital gains: that is why Romney pays an effective rate of less than 14 percent). The capital-gains rate cut also helped fuel the asset bubble that led to the greatest financial collapse in 80 years. Ryan’s budget would eliminate the capital-gains tax altogether. But, since we must all tighten our belts, he proposes to help offset the revenue loss by eliminating the child tax credit!

As Lofgren observes, “Republicans’ caterwauling about deficits and debt is eyewash to gull the public into believing they are serious fiscal stewards. Their rhetoric is intended to camouflage their real objective, which is to slash taxes for their wealthy contributors.”

The following article, by Andrew Baumann and Erica Seifert, vice president and senior associate, respectively of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, is cross-posted from Politico:
Mitt Romney’s presidential team is touting Rep. Paul Ryan’s selection as the Republicans’ vice presidential candidate as a game changer. They may be right — but not in the way they’re hoping.
There are certainly benefits to Romney’s selection of Ryan. He not only consolidates but also electrifies a base that continues to have serious doubts about their presumed presidential nominee. Ryan will likely bring a boost to Romney’s already overflowing campaign coffers. He’s also a capable spokesperson for conservative economic policies.
But the risks for Romney are enormous. And the fact that the former Massachusetts governor is willing to take those risks shows that the Romney brain trust realizes that their recent dip in the polls is real.
Ryan begins this new chapter relatively unknown (54 percent have never heard of him in a recent CNN poll) and the voters who do know him are split — even in his home state of Wisconsin. He had a 36 – 29 percent favorable/unfavorable ratio in a recent Marquette University poll.
The impact of vice presidential nominees on the Electoral College is always overrated, and Ryan will likely be no exception. A recent analysis by Nate Silver in The New York Times estimated that Ryan’s addition to the ticket would add only a net 0.7 points to Romney’s margin in Wisconsin, hardly enough to swing the state.
Of course, the Ryan pick matters far more on a strategic, rather than tactical, level. Republicans have insisted from the beginning that this election would be a referendum on President Barack Obama’s economic record. Obama and his team have done their best to turn it into a choice between two governing philosophies: one holding that “the only way to create an economy built to last is to strengthen the middle class,” as Obama says in a recent campaign ad, and one that would sacrifice the middle class and its priorities in favor of more giveaways to the very wealthy and special interests.
The Romney camp’s selection of Ryan is an admission that their efforts to make this a referendum have failed. It also ensures that Ryan’s unpopular budget plan will be a focus of the campaign – to Obama’s advantage.
Obama and Democrats have been trying to hang Ryan’s plan around the necks of Republicans since it first passed the House in April 2011. And with good reason. Americans opposed Ryan’s plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program 58 to 35 percent, according to a CNN poll in May 2011. Our own research over the last year and half for Democracy Corps has found that the Ryan plan has only become less popular.
Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare remains the most unpopular portion of his budget plan, raising serious doubts in the mind of two-thirds of voters in our April national survey.
But it’s hardly the only unpopular element. Voters also reject Ryan’s plan to cut taxes for the very wealthy while raising them on the poor and middle class; his plan to allow the refundable child tax credit to expire, which would push the families of 2 million children back into poverty; and to his drastic cuts to education spending. All these create serious doubts with at least 59 percent of likely voters, and very serious doubts with between 37 and 40 percent of likely voters (a strong intensity score).
They are even more potent with key swing groups (independents, suburban voters and seniors), as well as Democratic base voters (Latinos, youth and unmarried women) who have yet to become energized in this election.
While the individual elements of Ryan’s plan are deeply unpopular, the biggest effect on the campaign may well be how it helps Obama’s argument that Romney has the wrong priorities for middle class Americans. Obama has already been using Romney’s history at Bain Capital, plus the recent Tax Policy Center report on Romney’s tax plan, to argue that “Romney Hood” policies would rob the middle class to help the wealthy.
Swing voters expressed these same sentiments when we described the Ryan plan to them (in neutral language) in recent focus groups. One non-college, independent woman from Columbus. Ohio said:
“It’s just wrong, in my opinion…I think of Robin Hood, where the king is stealing from the poor to make more money.”
The Ryan budget’s impact on Romney at the ballot box will be very real. In our June national survey (before Obama’s recent surge in national polling), after voters heard a favorable description of the Ryan plan (paraphrased from Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) as well as balanced arguments for and against the budget, we asked them to imagine a debate in which Romney embraced Ryan’s plan while Obama opposed it.
The vote shifted significantly, with Obama’s lead more than doubling from 3 to 8 points (51 to 43 percent). Among critical independent voters, Obama’s margin expanded from 2 to 11 points.
Voters no longer have to imagine a Romney embrace of the Ryan budget. This weekend, Romney made Ryan’s priorities his own.

So, here we go again with the bogus “working class hero” b.s. Mentions of Ryan’s “working class” appeal/background are starting to appear in reports by the more gullible MSM press. Romney and Ryan are even conspicuously shedding their neckties in joint appearances. “Aristocrats? Who Us?,” sort of like Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor doing the “That’s right. We bad” prison perp walk in ‘Stir Crazy.”
Yes, Like a lot of upper-middle class kids, Paul Ryan had summer jobs as a teenager. But his father was a lawyer, he grew up in an affluent neighborhood and his family were owners of a multi-state construction company doing projects worth as much as 50 million dollars. It is doubtful that he ever worked a day on a construction site in his life.
Joan Walsh says it well in her Salon post, “Paul Ryan: Randian poseur “:

The other component of GOP fakery Ryan exemplifies is the notion that a pampered scion of a construction empire who has spent his life supported by government somehow represents the “white working class,” by virtue of the demographics of his gradually gerrymandered blue collar district. I write about this in my book: guys like Ryan (and his Irish Catholic GOP confrere Pat Buchanan) somehow become the political face of the white working class when they never spent a day in that class in their life. Their only tether to it is their remarkable ability to tap into the economic anxiety of working class whites and steer it toward paranoia that their troubles are the fault of “other” people – the slackers and the moochers, Ayn Rand’s famous “parasites.” Since the ’60s, those parasites are most frequently understood to be African American or Latino – but they’re always understood to be the “lesser-than” folks, morally, intellectually and genetically weaker than the rest of us.

Reactionary that he was, Buchanan at least embraced protectionist trade policies popular with unions, an option not open to Ryan, who has cast his lot with the globalist out-sourcers Romney so ably personifies. Don’t bet that this ticket will get much traction in blue collar America.

The following article by Democratic Stategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
I can’t think of any other VP pick in history who has ever made the activists on both sides of the political divide so immediately ecstatic. Most VP picks are snoozers picked to balance the ticket geographically or demographically. Some are unknowns like Palin was last time, and/or like Palin and Quayle quickly become seen as duds that weigh down the ticket. But the Ryan pick instantly electrifies and clarifies the political dynamic for both movement conservatives and movement progressives. It is the dream ticket for both sides- but in the end I think it will be a dream for us Democrats and a nightmare for the Republicans.
At the top of the ticket you have Mr. 1%, the Wall Street tycoon poster child whose brutal brand of corporate ethics made him wealthy beyond his dreams while laying off workers, cutting benefits, pioneering out-sourcing, and bankrupting companies. And as his number 2, you have the ultimate cheerleader and intellectual wunderkind for this style of Ayn Randian capitalism. Paul Ryan, whose open worship of Rand (his inspiration for getting into politics) will be a major discussion in this campaign, crafted the ultimate budget document for rewarding the Romneys of the world and punishing everyone else, and Romney rewarded him with the VP pick.
Romney’s strategy will be to use Ryan to try and make this campaign about the federal debt, but don’t be fooled: the Ryan budget doesn’t project actually balancing the budget until 2040, and then only with wildly optimistic economic growth projections that no economist with a straight face could back up. Yes, he radically slashes the budget in Medicare, Medicaid, education spending, services for the poor and disabled, and other domestic spending- but his spending cuts are basically just given to the wealthiest people in America, the Romneys of the world, in the form of tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires as deep as his radical spending cuts.
The Ryan budget, which Romney has enthusiastically endorsed, is the ultimate fantasy of the far right and the extremist followers of Rand. It has virtually every cut and tax cut for millionaires ever proposed by right wing think tanks over the last 20 years in programs for the middle class and poor; it ends the guarantees of health and nursing home coverage for seniors and those with disabilities in Medicare and Medicaid; it completely deregulates Wall Street, health insurers, and oil and coal companies while keeping all their tax loopholes; it dramatically increases defense spending far beyond what even those in the Pentagon have been calling for, giving a massive benefit to defense contractors; it will, according to Brookings and every other analysis of the Ryan budget done, will force taxes on the middle class and the poor to rise in order to meet their deficit targets.
This budget is the ultimate document for making people like Mitt Romney and his wealthy benefactors like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson and all those Wall Street bankers far richer while at the same time cutting the heart out of the things everyone else in our society benefits from. Our elderly parents will have to move in with us; our children will be going to devastated schools, and their student loans to go to college decimated; our kids with disabilities will have the programs to help them slashed; our air and water will get dirtier and dirtier; and the Too Big To Fail banks will have no one watching over them. All of this so that millionaires and billionaires can get larger tax cuts than even George W. Bush gave them.
The Romney-Ryan budget could just as easily be called the Ayn Rand budget, because it does everything Rand dreamed of. She proclaimed selfishness as the ultimate virtue, and said that Christian charity and compassion was evil and weakened society. She rejected the idea of the Golden Rule and that we are to be our brother’s and sister’s keeper. She glorified the wealthy as the only ones who mattered in society, the only ones who weren’t leeches and failures. This is her budget, the budget that she inspired Paul Ryan to write. Bain Capital was her kind of company, where the wealthy and well-connected did whatever it took, ran over whoever it took, to be successful. If there is an afterlife with a heaven and a hell, I think it is quite likely she is being tormented in hell, but even so she would have to be looking up and glorying in this selection today. The founder of Bain Capital and the author of the Ryan budget as the Republican nominees for President and VP: this is Ayn Rand’s moment.
This is the dream ticket for Democrats and progressives. They have given us the ultimate chance to make our case as to why the Wall Street ethics of Bain and the ultimate suck-up-to-the-rich budget of Ryan are fundamentally wrong for America. This is not a debate about how we cut the federal deficit, as many Democrats have far more realistic and responsible plans to do that. This campaign instead is about the ultimate debate in values and morality and what will benefit the future of the vast majority of Americans more. If we preach the historic values that made this country great — our beloved communities, our belief that we are all in this together and that we rise or fall as one people, our belief that our policies should be oriented toward making the middle class prosperous and growing, our belief in the Golden Rule and government of,by, and for the people — we will win this debate and this campaign. The values of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Ayn Rand will not prevail if we make our case without fear and equivocation to the American public.

Republicans hope putting Ryan on the GOP ticket will help galvanize public support for his austerity budget. But the American people are looking for a very different agenda, as TDS CO-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’

In the recently released American Values Survey, conducted by Penn Schoen Berland for The Atlantic Monthly and the Aspen Institute, the public endorses spending more on education and infrastructure while raising taxes on the wealthy as the best route to economic growth (56 percent) instead of lowering taxes on individuals and businesses while cutting spending on government services and programs (42 percent).
The public’s opposition to cutting even less essential government services to provide such tax cuts was made clear in a mid-July CBS/New York Times poll where 66 percent opposed that approach, compared to just 30 percent who supported it.

It’s highly unlikely that Ryan, Romney or any Republican ideologue is going to transform the public’s deeply-held beliefs about fairness in tax policy and government’s important role in addressing human needs. As Teixeira concludes, “If Conservative politicians’ crusade to cut spending and preserve tax cuts for the wealthy may charge up the conservative base. But the broader public seems distinctly unenthusiastic.”

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
DES MOINES – “It’s a historic day,” Rep. Steve King of Iowa announced yesterday from the podium of the FAMiLY Leadership Summit 2012, a major gathering of social conservatives in a suburban Des Moines megachurch that drew a host of national political celebrities. King wasn’t talking about the event, or even the prospect of ejecting Barack Obama from the White House, but of the choice of his friend and colleague Paul Ryan to become Mitt Romney’s running-mate. The first mention of Ryan’s name elicted raucus applause from the crowd–which included the last two Iowa Caucus winners, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, along with one-time 2012 front-runner Rick Perry–that even exceeded that for the first reference to Chick-fil-A, the sandwich purveyor now famous among the Christian Right for its “biblical” values.
Mitt Romney, by contrast, was barely mentioned during the portion of the conference I attended; the presidential candidate’s primary significance on this day was his V.P. selection. Overall, the sense I got from the crowd was not so much the incandescent excitement that greeted the selection of Sarah Palin (a maximum celebrity in the anti-choice movement long before John McCain’s decision to make her his running-mate) among similar people in 2008, but of a quiet satisfaction that the election cycle was headed in the right direction. There was zero doubt that social conservatives are now mobilizing to support the GOP in November as never before.
This wasn’t always a given. Indeed, achieving a state of quiet satisfaction among the turbulent, ever-demanding ranks of movement conservatives may have been the most important goal motivating Mitt Romney’s surprise selection of Ryan. In a very real sense, the primaries did not end for Romney when he clinched the presidential nomination months ago, and might not have ended even with his formal crowning in Tampa on August 30. The conservative commentariat has constantly peppered Romney and his team with criticism, mainly encouraging a more sharply defined, ideological, “substantive” campaign. In some cases that criticism may have reflected sincere strategic advice for the GOP nominee. But it’s hard to avoid the more obvious conclusion that serious conservatives simply didn’t trust Mitt Romney, and were planning on continuing to insist on a serial reestablishment of Romney’s bona fides, up to and indeed far beyond November 6.
By giving the greatest gift within his immediate power, the vice-presidential nomination, to the conservative movement’s very favorite politician, Romney has finally ended the primaries, and may now hope to have achieved his own liberation from friendly fire and the politically counter-productive need to respond whenever ideological commissars crack the whip. In effect, the Romney campaign could be saying to the Right: “Here you go! Now STFU!”
At this early date it isn’t clear if this definitive propitiation of the angry spirits of the Cause will work, or will outweigh the risks involved in elevating someone as controversial as Ryan. Perhaps the calculation is that while activists thrill with delight or horror at Ryan’s name, the actual electorate knows little about him, and the Romney/Ryan ticket can now run a campaign of its choosing, leaving the significance of this “historic day” to the activist elites and ultimately to the historians.
In any event, whether the selection of Ryan reflects Romney’s final surrender to the leaders of the conservative movement, or a crafty effort to buy them off and shut them up with the fool’s gold of symbolic power, it does represent a bit of late vindication for the Right, which seemed to have so thoroughly botched its own efforts to consummate its conquest of the GOP by controlling the 2012 presidential nomination. There was certainly no sense of lost opportunity among the attendees of the FAMiLY Leadership Summit, even in the remarks of the men who once were hailed as the candidates who might finally turn the ever-faithless GOP into a fine instrument of God’s Will and the invisible hand of unregulated markets.
If Romney/Ryan lose on November 6, it will not be for lack of conservative enthusiasm for the ticket. But it’s another matter entirely as to whether this enthusiasm will be contagious beyond the ranks of the already-persuaded.