Ben Schreckinger reports in his post “Democrats Widen Enthusiasm Gap” at The National Journal that “Democrats are now significantly more engaged by the presidential race and view it more favorably than Republicans, according to a Pew survey published on Wednesday…Two-thirds of Democrats find the campaign “interesting” compared with only half of Republicans, while 68 percent of Dems find it “informative,” compared with just under half of Republicans, according to survey, conducted over the weekend by the the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.”
Nate Silver has a lot more to say about the “decline of the enthusiasm gap” at FiveThirty Eight, which leads him to conclude that “for now, our forecast has stabilized a bit, with Mr. Obama holding in the range of about a four-point lead in the popular vote and an 80 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.”
If you thought that RNC Chairman Reince Priebus might want to lay a little low for a while and let the wake of his hideously bungled convention quietly subside, you would be quite wrong. David Atkins cuts Priebus and his party no slack at Hullabaloo, regarding the RNC chair’s inane tweet “Obama sympathizes with attackers in Egypt. Sad and pathetic.” Says Atkins: “That’s the actual, nominal head of the Republican Party speaking, not some radio shock jock…But this this is who they are, and what the official Republican discourse has been reduced to. It’s time the press started reporting the callous, lying extremism of the mainstream Republican Party for what it is.”
The Boston Globe piles on in today’s editorial “Romney’s comments raise doubts about his foreign-policy savvy,” as did The Washington Post editorial “Mr. Romney’s rhetoric on embassy attacks is a discredit to his campaign.”
In keeping with Romney’s dazzling display of diplomatic ineptitude, note that Russian President Vladimir Putin has thanked the GOP nominee for his myopic comment that Russia is our “number one geopolitical foe.” As Kirit Radia reports at abcnews.com’s ‘OTUS’ blog, Putin said, “I’m grateful to him (Romney) for formulating his stance so clearly because he has once again proven the correctness of our approach to missile defense problems,” Putin told reporters, according to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.”
Here’s some really great stats for the Obama campaign, from The New York Times editorial “Fewer Uninsured People“: “The Census Bureau reported on Wednesday that the number of people without health coverage fell to 48.6 million in 2011, or 15.7 percent of the population, down from 49.9 million, or 16.3 percent of the population, in 2010. Health experts attributed a big chunk of the drop to a provision in the health care reform law that allows children to remain on their parents’ policies until age 26. Some three million young adults took advantage of that provision, other surveys show.”
Add to that a new government report that the Affordable Care Act has saved health care consumers an estimated $2.1 billion in premiums, as Allison Terry reports at The Monitor..
Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball takes a sneak peek at an article taking an overview of 13 current political forecasting models in PS: Political Science & Politics, a journal of the American Political Science Association. Sabato’s summation: “…They vary widely, with eight of the 13 showing victory for President Obama and five seeing Mitt Romney as the next president. The chances of an Obama plurality range from a mere 10% to a definitive 88%. For whatever it is worth, the average of the models’ projected vote for President Obama (of the two-party total, excluding third-party and independent candidates) is 50.2% — a tiny advantage for Obama, but hardly ironclad.”
Lots of buzz about a new study of facebook as a GOTV tool. As John Markoff reports in the New York Times, “The study, published online on Wednesday by the journal Nature, suggests that a special “get out the vote” message, showing each user pictures of friends who said they had already voted, generated 340,000 additional votes nationwide — whether for Democrats or Republicans, the researchers could not determine. ”
In a more partisan vein, GOP-friendly consultant Vincent Harris reports at Campaigns & Elections on how Republican U.S. Senate nominee Ted Cruz used social media in his upset win of his party’s primary in Texas. Harris explains: “Most importantly, digital was baked into all aspects of the campaign from communications to political fieldwork to polling….Ted announced his candidacy for Senate on a conference call with conservative bloggers. Texas has a large network of active conservative bloggers and giving access to them was important to promoting Ted’s conservative message and helping generate buzz about his candidacy among the party base. Ted met with bloggers in person and via phone often, and the campaign created a robust blogger action center encouraging bloggers to post supportive widgets, and created a segmented email list to update bloggers from.” Dems take note.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.’s Washington Post op-ed “Can Romney show he’s more than a politician?” unearths some Republican convention history to show just how far the GOP has fallen. Dionne notes that Romney’s father, Michigan Governor George Romney actually walked out of the convention speech in 1964 in protest against Goldwater’s extremism. He then quotes from New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s speech to the same convention terming the views of the Goldwaterites “wholly alien to the sound and honest conservatism that has firmly based the Republican Party in the best of a century’s traditions.” Dionne adds, “Nothing better captures the absolute victory of the forces of Goldwaterism than a Romney triumph on the basis of Goldwater’s ideas.”
For an excellent article title, look no further than Joseph A. Palermo’s HuffPo post, “The Republican National Convention: Where Social Darwinism Meets Theocracy.”
Ryan may be laying the macho blue collar hobby stuff on just a tad thick, as Andrew Romano reports at the Daily Beast, quoting Ryan thusly: “My veins run with cheese, bratwurst, a little Spotted Cow, Leinie’s, and some Miller. I was raised on the Packers, Badgers, Bucks and Brewers. I like to hunt here, I like to fish here, I like to snowmobile here. I even think ice fishing is interesting.”

 Romano adds “Two days later, Ryan took his introduction tour to Lakewood, Colo., where he somehow managed, over the course of a 20-minute speech, to mention working at McDonald’s, filling the gas tank on his truck, camping and fishing with his family” and “I got a new chainsaw,” Ryan told the magazine. “It was nice. It’s a Stihl.”
Smart people make a pretty convincing case that Rove still runs the GOP

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A worthy challenge for the MSM, from Jeff Jarvis’s “Reporters: Why Are You in Tampa?” at HuffPo. Jarvis asks: “I challenge every journalist in Tampa for the Republican convention — every one of the 15-16,000 of you — to answer this: Why are you there? What will we learn from you? What actual reporting can you possibly do that delivers anything of value more than the infomercial — light on the info, heavy on the ‘mercial — that the conventions have become? Would you be better off back at home covering voters and their issues? Can we in the strapped news business afford this luxury?”
With the internet attracting increasing face-time and political ad time being gobbled up on TV and radio, Dave Nyczepir’s “Know your online ad options” at Campaigns & Elections has an interesting discussion on the benefits of “pre-roll,” “mid-roll,” “post-roll” and banner ads.
Ed Kilgore wonders at The Washington Monthly if maybe all of the fuss about the “enthusiasm gap” is pointless, since “”Enthusiasm” which exceeds the willingness to cast a ballot only matters if it is communicable to other voters” and because “You only get one vote. And if your passion is part of a political message that repels swing voters, and helps mobilize the other party’s base, then it may be worth even less than nothing.”
Jonathan Chait’s “Team Romney White-Vote Push: ‘This Is the Last Time Anyone Will Try to Do This‘” at New York magazine illuminates Romney’s grand strategy — “To squeak out a majority, Mitt Romney probably needs to win at least 61 percent of the white vote — a figure exceeding what George H.W. Bush commanded over Michael Dukakis in 1988…a near total reliance on white votes to win a presidential election.” And this cynical strategy assumes a comparable turnout of white voters, which is by no means a sure thing. Nate Silver, for example, cites “An Above-Average ‘Likely Voter Gap’ for Romney.”
Alternet’s Peter Montgomery takes an interesting behind-the-scenes look at the loons behind the Republican platform lunacy, subtitled “they’re breaking out the crazy down in Tampa.”
The Republican ticket is betting a lot on the white working-class, but there’s an important constituency they better not write-off as a lost cause. Ron Brownstein explains why in his article at the Atlantic, “Romney’s Big Challenge: Win White-Collar Suburban White Voters” As Brownstein puts it, “During the primaries, Romney’s supporters argued that his buttoned-down demeanor and managerial pedigree positioned him to recapture voters in white-collar suburbs now tilting Democratic. Even with his working-class gains, Romney probably won’t win unless he proves them right.”

“Koch Industries ranks as the Wisconsin Republican’s sixth-largest source of campaign money throughout his career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which says the company’s PAC and affiliated individuals have given him a total of $65,500 in donations.”
– from Bob King’s Politico post, “Koch brothers have Paul Ryan’s back”
“He has never held statewide office and has no foreign-policy experience. Both could be liabilities.”
– from NBC News.com’s First Read on “Paul Ryan’s Strengths and Weaknesses”
“Ryan “was voted prom king and the ‘Biggest Brown-Noser’ of his 1988 high school class before leaving for college in Ohio.”
– from Bryan Bakst’s Associated Press profile of Ryan
Wikipedia deleted the “biggest brown-noser” comment from its bio page on Ryan this morning.
— from Dylan Byers’s Politico post, “The Paul Ryan Wikipedia edits begin”
Politifact gave him a “Pants on Fire” animated gif rating for his statement that “President Barack Obama “has doubled the size of government since he took office.”
– from Politfact Wisconsin’s “Paul Ryan’s File”
He may be Mr. Deficit Hawk now. But twas not ever thus: “He was the sponsor in the House of a bill to create new private accounts funded entirely by borrowing, with no benefit cuts. Ryan’s plan was so staggeringly profligate, entailing more than $2 trillion in new debt over the first decade alone, that even the Bush administration opposed it as “irresponsible.”
— from Jonathan Chait’s New York magazine article on “The Legendary Paul Ryan: Mitt Who?”
Further, “There are also holes in Ryan’s budget-hawk armor: He voted for some of the biggest drivers of the deficit/debt — the Bush tax cuts, the Iraq war, and the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, all of which weren’t paid for. Moreover, Ryan voted against the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles recommendations.”
– from NBC News.com’s First Read on “Paul Ryan’s Strengths and Weaknesses”
Worse, “Ryan has been a steady voter for unwise bailouts of big banks, unfunded mandates and unnecessary wars. Few members of Congress have run up such very big tabs while doing so little to figure out how to pay the piper.”
— John Nichols, The Nation
“Ryan is just a “hyper-ambitious political careerist– who has spent his entire adult life as a Congressional aide, think-tank hanger-on and House member,” says Nichols. He “wants to keep on climbing until he’s America’s real life John Galt. He knows he could control a doddering fool of a puffed up CEO type like Romney as easily and thoroughly as Cheney controlled Bush,” adds the Paul Ryan Watch.
– from “Paul Ryan? Seriously?” by The Nation’s John Nichols, via The Paul Ryan Watch
Romney may have just booted Florida.

With the selection of Paul Ryan for V.P. The Democratic Strategist is reissuing several posts about his political philosophy. This post is from April 27th 2912
Ed Kilgore has an insightful and entertaining post up at Political Animal, taking Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to task for his less than credible dismissal of Ayn Rand as his philosophical guru. Riffing on a Ryan interview with National Review’s Robert Costa, Kilgore explains:

So we learn this week from an interview with National Review’s Robert Costa that Paul Ryan laughs off his identification as a big fan of Ayn Rand as an “urban legend,” based on little more than his youthful enjoyment of (and later, philosophical “bantering” about) her “dusty novels.” No, he sternly asserts, he rejects Rand’s “atheist philosophy;” give him St. Thomas Aquinas any old day!
Costa does not report that Ryan specifically denies the actual foundation for the “urban legend” associating him conspicuously with Rand: his remark in 2005, when he was hardly a callow teenager, that Rand inspired his entire career in public service, or his habit of giving copies of Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s militant magnum opus, to his congressional interns in 2003.
All of this wouldn’t matter much, except for the fact that Rand is the philosophical godmother of modern GOP obstructionism, the rigid refusal to compromise on legislation to benefit working people or inconvenience the wealthy in any way. Kilgore elaborates:
…The thing about Ayn Rand, as anyone who has actually read her works can attest, is that she offered readers an all-or-nothing proposition. She didn’t entertain, she instructed. This was most evident in Atlas Shrugged, whose centerpiece was an endless didactic “radio broadcast” by her hero John Galt, identifying all human misery with the “mysticism of the mind” (supernatural religion) and the “mysticism of the muscle” (socialism, or more accurately, the rejection of strict laissez-faire capitalism), and with the ethics of altruism both reflected.

As Kilgore quotes from Whitaker Chambers’ review of Atlas Shrugged, “I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal…”
As for Ryan’s reputation as a top GOP thinker, Kilgore concludes,

It’s possible, I suppose, that Paul Ryan is a secret “Objectivist” who keeps gold dollar sign pins in his underwear drawer. More likely, though, he doesn’t understand Ayn Rand any better than he seems to understand Catholic social teachings. In either event, his reputation as a deep thinker whose brilliance and good will demand respect from everyone across the political spectrum strikes me as entirely undeserved.

It’s not hard to understand why Ryan, like a deer caught in the headlights, would deny Rand’s formative influence on him, since she was not only a heartless reactionary, but also a militantly pro-choice atheist, who accepted Social Security and Medicare (According to “100 voices: an oral history of Ayn Rand”), while sneering at social programs for everyone else. But Ryan’s denials won’t be taken very seriously by anyone familiar with his record.

A new opinion poll conducted by Democracy Corps and Resurgent Republic for National Public Radio sheds light on public attitudes toward the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding the Affordable Care Act and the possible impact on President Obama’s re-election prospects. The survey, conducted 7/9-12, 2012, polled 1000 LV’s nationally, including an oversample of 462 voters in twelve battleground states. NPR commissioned DCorps, which leans toward the Democratic Party and Resurgent Republic, which favors the GOP, to insure bipartisan credibility in survey methods. But there are differences in interpretation and analysis.
According to the lead sentence in the e-blast of NPR’s analysis, “In the first-ever joint survey for National Public Radio by Democracy Corps and Resurgent Republic, voters in key battleground states voice opposition to further attempts by Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act.” Further,

While voters are evenly split on the Supreme Court’s health care decision, they believe the Court has spoken and think it’s time to move forward and focus on the economy. More than half of all voters (51 percent) say “the Supreme Court has spoken and it’s time for us to move forward…our main focus should be on our economy–getting people back to work with better paying jobs.” This message beats the Republican alternative–that we need to continue to try to repeal the law because it is hurting our economy–among all voters by a 7 point margin and by 9 points (53-44) in the battleground.

Among the highlighted findings, according to NPR:

All voters sharply disapprove of Congress, including overwhelming majorities of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. In the battleground, three quarters of all voters disapprove and half (49 percent) disapprove strongly.
Obama enjoys net positive approval among all voters (49 percent approve, 46 percent disapprove). Voters in the battleground are split evenly.
The Presidential contest remains very close; Obama marginally edges Romney by 2 points (47 percent to 45 percent) among all voters. The race is locked in a dead heat in the battleground, 46-46.
Americans are evenly divided on the Supreme Court decision–among all voters, 47 percent approve, 46 percent disapprove. On balance, however, voters say the decision is more likely to make them support the law.
In detailed arguments back and forth, voters lean towards supporting the health care law; in every debate, the pro-health care law position draws even with or beats the anti-health care law position.
Democrats draw their strongest advantage when they assert that the Supreme Court has spoken and it is time to move on and focus on the economy.

For the DCorps analysis of the poll, click here.
As you might guess, the Republican-favoring Resurgent Republic analysis of the data spins it a little differently. According to Resurgent Republic’s e-blast on thepoll, “in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the constitutionality of the health care reform law, President Obama’s signature domestic achievement continues to be a drag on his chances for reelection, and the presidential election remains a dead heat, both nationally and in battleground states.”
With full results available at www.resurgentrepublic.com, the following are key highlights:

Independents remain a sticking point for President Obama. Swing voters disapprove of his job performance (50 to 43 percent) and his handling of the economy (56 to 41 percent).
On the presidential ballot, Independents favor Romney by 5 points (45 to 40 percent).
More voters still oppose than support the health care reform law: 48 to 43 percent (overall); 50 to 37 percent (Independents); and 52 to 39 percent (Battleground States).
Controlling the cost of health care is the top priority in reform, and among these voters, 68 percent say the health care reform law does not address their concern about costs.
On the issue of whether the health care law is good or bad for America, Republicans hold an advantage with Independents (47 to 43 percent) and battleground-state voters (50 to 44 percent).
On the issue of whether the health care reform law raises taxes, Republicans again have an advantage with Independents (48 to 42 percent) and battleground-state voters (49 to 45 percent).

Naturally, this interpretation fails to factor out those who oppose the ACA because it isn’t progressive enough or doesn’t provide a public option. Even taking the Resurgent Republic analysis at face value, it doesn’t look like Dems have too much to worry about regarding how opinions about the ACA will influence the few undecided voters remaining.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Mitt Romney’s refusal to take responsibility for the actions of Bain Capital from 1999 to 2002 says a lot about the kind of president he would be.
Friday night, Romney persisted in denying that he was responsible for the behavior of Bain during the period, even though he was listed on SEC documents as the firm’s CEO, Chairman, President and sole stockholder. Romney claims he “left” Bain Capital to run the Olympics back in 1999 and is not in the least responsible for the actions it took over the next three years, notwithstanding the fact that he was CEO, Chairman, President and sole stockholder until 2002.
There is mounting evidence of specific decisions and actions that undercut Romney’s case that he was no longer involved in the day-to-day decisions of Bain Capital after 1999.
But the central, indisputable fact is that the CEO, Chairman, President and sole stockholder of a company is responsible for whatever the company does — by definition. For normal people, any argument to the contrary simply defies common sense
Romney can dance around the issue, parse words, argue he gave up “management control” until he is blue in the face. But however he structured the decision making process at Bain Capital while he was also running the Olympics, he was ultimately in charge — and he was ultimately responsible for — and benefited mightily from its actions. In every business the buck stops with the CEO, Chairman, President and sole stockholder — it’s that simple.
Romney’s refusal to be held responsible for the actions of the company he owned — and for which he remained CEO, Chairman and President — says a lot about the kind of President he would be — and a lot more about his character.
Romney was happy to make millions of dollars from the company he owned. He was happy to take credit for the “jobs he created.” But he refuses to take responsibility for the lives his company destroyed, or the fact that in some cases he loaded up companies with debt and bled them dry to pay his own fees before he put them into bankruptcy and fired their employees.
Romney cashed Bain’s checks — and sometimes he apparently deposited them in Swiss Bank accounts — or accounts in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. But he refuses to take responsibility for the fact that the firm was — as the Washington Post called it — a “pioneer of outsourcing.”
This is a guy who plays by a different set of rules than ordinary mortals. And the last thing he wants to do is allow those ordinary mortals to see first hand how he did what he did by disclosing his income tax returns from the years he was active at Bain.
Some of the companies he acquired at Bain did well. Others went under. But win or lose, Romney always made money. Workers may have lost their livelihoods and pensions. Small businesses that served as suppliers to his companies may have gone under. But Romney always came out ahead.
Mitt Romney is the kind of guy who is always happy to bask in the glow of success, but is never willing to take responsibility for failure.
This entire episode is reminiscing of Romney’s reaction to the revelation that as an 18-year-old student at the Cranbrook Prep School, he was involved in bullying John Lauber, a fellow student who he didn’t believe “fit in.” The Washington Post reported that a fellow student named Mathew Freidman, and three other former students, reported that Romney had marched:
The Post wrote:

“It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said Thomas Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.”

Romney could have accepted responsibility for what he did as a young man — and acknowledged that it must have been a horrific experience for the bullied student. Instead, when confronted with the charges, he said he didn’t “remember” the episode that fellow students referred to as a “vicious attack.” Then he gave a non-apology-apology. He told a radio talk show host that, “Back in high school, I did some dumb things and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize for that…” In the military there is a tradition that when there is a problem — when a soldier is called on the carpet — the correct response is “no excuse sir.” Not Mitt Romney. Romney is the past master at ducking responsibility and making excuses.
Romney may believe that the President of Bain Capital didn’t have responsibility for the company’s actions — but someone should explain to him that the President of United States is absolutely responsible for the work of every Executive Department, whether or not he is directly involved in every decision. The President of the United States is responsible for the success or failure of every military mission. He is responsible for preventing recession — for saving the auto industry even when it is unpopular — for making the tough decisions and living with their consequences. When you’re President of the United States, you can’t say, “Oh I had no responsibility because I left the day-to-day decisions of the Defense Department to others.” Do we really want a President that refuses to take responsibility for the actions of a company for which he was CEO, President, Chairman and sole stockholder?
But it doesn’t stop with personal responsibility. Romney Economics refuses to take responsibility for the future of the next generation. In fact the whole body of radical right wing economic philosophy that Romney has embraced is an absolute abrogation of the concept that we have a responsibility to each other. The core element of that philosophy is the notion that millionaires and billionaires have only one moral obligation — to look out for themselves. They rationalize this unbridled selfishness with elaborate theories about how their bounty will ultimately trickle down to everyone else — how they have to make more money because they are — after all — the “job creators.” In fact, of course, the real job creators are ordinary middle class consumers, whose demand causes businesses of all sorts to hire people to produce products and services. Companies don’t create jobs because they have more money in their bank accounts or out of the goodness of their hearts. They create jobs because someone has the money in their pockets to buy the things that they sell.
But “trickle down” economics is really nothing more than an elaborate justification for millionaire selfishness — for the refusal of the wealthiest Americans to take responsibility for the welfare of the entire community and for the next generation. The advocates of Romney Economics claim to be hugely concerned that we do not leave our children a massive federal debt. But their concern does not carry far enough to allow them to agree to a meager increase in their own tax rates to levels that persisted during the 1990’s when our economy added 23 million new jobs and created quite a number of new millionaires. They’re responsibility to the next generation does not go far enough to prevent them from despoiling the planet in order to pad their Swiss Bank accounts. It does not prevent them from denying the scientific fact of global climate change in order to prevent oil company profits from declining.
In fact, the irresponsibility of the one percent crowd is little different than that of a group of thoughtless teenagers that throw beer bottles onto the highway out of the windows of their cars, not caring that someone else will inevitably have to clean up their mess. Like the irresponsible teenagers, it’s all about them. And many of them are so out of touch that they don’t have a clue about their own selfishness.
Ask some of the folks who attended the Romney fundraisers in the Hampton’s last weekend:

A woman in a blue chiffon dress poked her head out of a black Range Rover here on Sunday afternoon and yelled to an aide to Mitt Romney, “Is there a V.I.P. entrance. We are V.I.P.” [New York Times, 7/8/12] “We’ve got the message,” [A New York City donor from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits] added. “But my college kid, the babysitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”[LA Times, 7/8/12] “A few cars back, Ted Conklin, the owner of the American Hotel in Sag Habor, N.Y., long a favorite of the well-off and well-known in the Hamptons, could barely contain his displeasure with Mr. Obama. “He is a socialist. His idea is find a problem that doesn’t exist and get government to intervene,” Mr. Conklin said from inside a gold-colored Mercedes as his wife, Carol Simmons, nodded in agreement. Ms. Simmons paused to highlight what she said was her husband’s generous spirit: “Tell them who’s on your yacht this weekend! Tell him!” Over Mr. Conklin’s objections, Ms. Simmons disclosed that a major executive from Miramax, the movie company, was on the 75-foot yacht, because, she said, there were no rooms left at the hotel.” [New York Times, 7/8/12]

Let’s be honest, Mitt Romney — and many of his supporters — were born on third base and think they hit a triple.
The last thing that we need in a president is a man who refuses to take personal responsibility for his own actions and that of his company. The last thing we need is a president whose economic philosophy is an elaborate justification for the unwillingness of many of our wealthiest citizens to take any responsibility whatsoever for the welfare of our entire society.

(This article by leading pollster James Zogby is cross posted from the Huffington Post)
Republican presidential challenger, Mitt Romney was given credit last week for refusing to endorse a proposed ad campaign that sought to link President Barack Obama with the controversial sermons delivered by his former pastor Jeremiah Wright. In doing so, Romney appeared to be demonstrating the same streak of decency that wouldn’t allow him to join in with the silly “birther” cabal, or the “Islamophobic” hysteria when these tendencies were all in vogue.
So far, so good. But before pinning any medals on Mitt Romney, it is important to note some worrisome signs indicating that he and his campaign may have opted for a more subtle approach to establishing the “otherness” of Barack Obama.
The more ham-fisted approach was used in 2008 by then vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. It was both divisive and a failure. Beautifully cataloged by radio and TV personality, Bill Press, in his new book, The Obama Hate Machine, the GOP and their media echo chamber engaged in a multi-pronged assault against Obama in an effort to paint him as “radical,” “foreign” and “different than the rest of us.” He was “Muslim,” “associated with terrorists,” “of foreign birth;” a “Black militant,” “not a loyal American,” or a “Marxist” — all of which Press termed “the ‘othering’ of candidate Obama.”
Republicans failed to defeat Barack Obama in 2008. But their efforts did leave a deep residual mistrust of the President. For example, recent polls show that an average of 40 percent of Republican voters in Southern states do not believe that Obama was born in the United States (and is, therefore, ineligible to be president) and more than a quarter of all Republicans still believe that Obama is a Muslim.
There was also a more subtle approach to establishing the “otherness” of Obama, and it had its roots in the 2008 Democratic primary. A memo prepared back then by Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Mark Penn, pointed out the “diverse multicultural background” of her opponent, suggesting that “it exposes a very strong weakness for him — his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine Americans electing a president… who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and values.”
Based on this assessment, Penn then asked, “How we could give some life to this contrast without turning negative?” And he answered his question with the following advice:
“Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America… and talk about the… deeply American values you grew up with… Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches, and values. He doesn’t. Make this a new American Century, etc… Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds.”
While candidate Clinton rejected this approach, her surrogates, at times, did not. In any case, this Penn memo proposing a more subtle “othering” of Obama appears now to have been picked up by team-Romney in 2012.
Earlier this week I received a mass fundraising mailer from the Romney campaign. It included a glossy full color photo of the candidate in wrinkled jeans and wind-breaker, standing in front of a weathered barn emblazoned with a massive American flag. Under the photo was written:

“James,
Thank you for believing in America as much as I do…this is a moment that demands we return to our basic values and core principles.
Mitt Romney”

The fundraising letter that accompanied the photo featured, on just its first page, in only 15 lines of text, the words “America” and “American” 10 times. The letter began: “I believe in America… I believe in the American Dream. And I believe in American strength.” And continued: “This election is a battle for the soul of America.” It concluded by asserting that this campaign is “to reclaim America for the people.”
While only a touch more subtle than the rejected “paint him with the Jeremiah Wright is a radical brush,” the net effect of this Romney mailing is the same. In case you missed the point: Mitt Romney is the “real” American; he is the one who believes in “American values;” and he alone is fighting for the “soul of America.”
And the subtext of the message, in case you missed that: Obama is different; he’s not like “us;” his ideas are foreign; and he and his supporters believe in values that are un-American.
So while claiming to be the higher road, this GOP approach invites the same conclusion and opens the door to same bigotry that has for four years now tarnished our national discourse.
This election can be about many things. It can be about approaches to job-creation, or philosophies of governance, or character, or even qualities of leadership. But in a time of great national stress, faced, as we are, with a struggling economy and an unsettling and rapidly changing world, what this election debate should not be about are subtle or not so subtle digs calling into question the “patriotism” or “otherness” of the incumbent.

The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Believe that, as President, Mitt Romney would revert to his days as a “Massachusetts Moderate?” Think again.
Every bit of evidence indicates that if he were President, the Far Right would lead Romney around by a ring in his nose.
Just last week, we saw it clearly on display. It didn’t take but two weeks for the Far Right to force the Romney campaign to sever its ties with openly gay Richard Grinnell, who it had hired as its foreign policy spokesman. The campaign itself argued that it had begged Grinnell to stay. But right wing talk show host Brian Fischer of the American Family Association, who had led the drive to force Grinnell’s resignation, declared it a major victory.
On his radio show, Fischer bragged that Romney had learned his lesson and would never again hire a gay or lesbian in a major campaign role. And you certainly didn’t see Romney contesting that assessment.
Instead we’ve seen Romney lined up shoulder to shoulder on TV with Tea Party icon Michele Bachmann, and Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell — a potential Romney VP pick and a champion of “trans-vaginal ultrasounds.”
The reason why there is not a chance that Romney will ever reinvent himself once again as a “moderate” is that he wasn’t really a “moderate” in the first place. He’s always practiced one version or the other of ultra right wing, “let Wall Street run wild” Romney economics. And he’s never given one thought to firing workers, cutting pensions, loading companies with debt and bleeding them dry of millions of dollars.
But you can’t really say that he is a committed believer in any economic principle or political value. Mitt Romney is committed to one thing and one thing alone — his own success. He has shown he has no core values whatsoever.
That’s why it wasn’t hard at all for Romney to shed his “moderate” past positions on issues like abortion rights, contraception, gay rights and immigration and to become what he himself calls a “severe conservative.”
Why will he remain a “severe conservative” if he is elected President? Because people who have no core values have no backbone. You won’t find Mitt Romney taking a stand against the dyed-in-the-wool ideologues that dominate the Republican caucus in Congress.
Those Republican ideologues may be way out of the mainstream, but they definitely have core values. Some of them were so committed to those values that they were willing to take our country to the brink of bankruptcy last year due to their unwillingness to give an inch of compromise.

Read more…

Ed Kilgore has an insightful and entertaining post up at Political Animal, taking Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to task for his less than credible dismissal of Ayn Rand as his philosophical guru. Riffing on a Ryan interview with National Review’s Robert Costa, Kilgore explains:

So we learn this week from an interview with National Review’s Robert Costa that Paul Ryan laughs off his identification as a big fan of Ayn Rand as an “urban legend,” based on little more than his youthful enjoyment of (and later, philosophical “bantering” about) her “dusty novels.” No, he sternly asserts, he rejects Rand’s “atheist philosophy;” give him St. Thomas Aquinas any old day!
Costa does not report that Ryan specifically denies the actual foundation for the “urban legend” associating him conspicuously with Rand: his remark in 2005, when he was hardly a callow teenager, that Rand inspired his entire career in public service, or his habit of giving copies of Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s militant magnum opus, to his congressional interns in 2003.

All of this wouldn’t matter much, except for the fact that Rand is the philosophical godmother of modern GOP obstructionism, the rigid refusal to compromise on legislation to benefit working people or inconvenience the wealthy in any way. Kilgore elaborates:

…The thing about Ayn Rand, as anyone who has actually read her works can attest, is that she offered readers an all-or-nothing proposition. She didn’t entertain, she instructed. This was most evident in Atlas Shrugged, whose centerpiece was an endless didactic “radio broadcast” by her hero John Galt, identifying all human misery with the “mysticism of the mind” (supernatural religion) and the “mysticism of the muscle” (socialism, or more accurately, the rejection of strict laissez-faire capitalism), and with the ethics of altruism both reflected.

As Kilgore quotes from Whitaker Chambers’ review of Atlas Shrugged, “I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal…”
As for Ryan’s reputation as a top GOP thinker, Kilgore concludes,

It’s possible, I suppose, that Paul Ryan is a secret “Objectivist” who keeps gold dollar sign pins in his underwear drawer. More likely, though, he doesn’t understand Ayn Rand any better than he seems to understand Catholic social teachings. In either event, his reputation as a deep thinker whose brilliance and good will demand respect from everyone across the political spectrum strikes me as entirely undeserved.

It’s not hard to understand why Ryan, like a deer caught in the headlights, would deny Rand’s formative influence on him, since she was not only a heartless reactionary, but also a militantly pro-choice atheist, who accepted Social Security and Medicare (According to “100 voices: an oral history of Ayn Rand“), while sneering at social programs for everyone else. But Ryan’s denials won’t be taken very seriously by anyone familiar with his record.

For some good news for Democrats, see the Associated Press report, “Swing-state unemployment down,” which notes “unemployment has dropped more sharply in several swing states than in the nation as a whole. A resurgence in manufacturing is helping the economy — and Obama’s chances — in the industrial Midwestern states of Ohio and Michigan…And Arizona, Nevada and Florida, where unemployment remains high, are getting some relief from an uptick in tourism….in Michigan and Ohio. In Michigan, unemployment fell to 8.5 percent in March from 10.5 percent in March 2011. And in Ohio, it dropped to 7.5 percent from 8.8 percent over the same period, putting it well below the national average of 8.2 percent…In Florida, unemployment tumbled to 9 percent in March from 10.7 percent a year earlier. That was more than twice the nationwide drop of 0.7 percentage point (from 8.9 percent to 8.2 percent) over the same period. A rise in tourism is helping.”
Scott Bauer has an AP update on Republican leaders in Wisconsin openly asking their supporters to cross party lines in the May 8 primary to vote for fake Democrats to prevent recall of GOP state Senators. As state Rep. Robin Vos, the Republican expected to serve as speaker of the Assembly next year, put it “We are encouraging Republicans to vote in the Democratic primaries.” Crossing party lines to influence the opposition party’s outcome is defensible. Running fake candidates is pretty sleazy.
Dems have a great ad spot up, riffing on Gov. Scott Walker as a job-killer. “Most states gained jobs last year,” says the narrator of the ad. “But under Gov. Walker, Wisconsin lost more jobs than any other state. Dead last.” See the ad and read Sean Sullivan’s Hotline on Call report right here.
Meanwhile in PA, Republicans are still screwing around with voter i.d. laws on the eve of the state primary. Philly Inquirer reporter Bob Warner adds “A survey by the Pennsylvania Public Interest Research Group looked at IDs issued by 110 colleges and universities and found only 19 appeared to meet the new standards. Most of them lack the expiration dates the law requires.”
Benjy Sarlin’s “Obama’s Daunting Task: Bring Back The Youth Vote” at Talking Points Memo indicates that the president’s campaign is working some bread-and-butter angles: “…The White House…would prevent interest rates on subsidized student loans from doubling to 6.8 percent. …Student loans are one area where the administration can tout concrete gains: In 2009, Obama passed student-loan reform through a controversial reconciliation procedure, transferring billions of dollars from private lenders to funding for more generous grants and loan terms…Ending the Iraq war is a big applause line on campuses, as is as the president’s successful push to allow gays to openly serve in the military. And some of the Affordable Care Act’s most popular elements have particular weight with young voters, including a provision allowing Americans to stay on their parent’s health insurance up to age 26: Over 2.5 million more young people are insured as a result, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.”
American Prospect’s Paul Waldman reports at CNN on a new Romney strategy, “bracketting” or the “pre-buttal” in which he gets to a town just before Obama and steals a big bite of his opponent’s favorable coverage. Hmm, could this work down-ballot?
Howard Kurtz reports at The Daily Beast that Romney is “carefully avoiding most national interviews outside of Fox.”
Kurtz also reports on a new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism of 52 key newspaper, television, radio, and Web outlets, which found that “Overall, it was no contest. From Jan. 2 through April 15, Romney’s coverage was 39 percent positive, 32 percent negative, and 29 percent neutral, the researchers found. Obama’s coverage was 18 percent positive, 34 percent negative, and 34 percent neutral. That means Romney’s depiction by the media was more than twice as positive as the president’s. So much for liberal bias.”
Sen. McCaskil’s re-election campaign is making GOP Super-PAC money a central issue, according to Rosalind S. Helderman’s WaPo article, “Sen. Claire McCaskill takes fight to super PACs as Missouri swings farther right.” Helderman quotes McCaskill, “You make one company mad by casting a principled vote, and they say, ‘Okay, we’ll just gin up $10 million of our corporate money and take her out anonymously,’ ” she said. “I think if people figure out that’s what’s going on, they’re going to be very turned off by it.”