Benjy Sarlin puts on the green eyeshades and examines claims that Democrats are winning the outside money game.
TPM Reader MS responds to my note last night about the Journal’s scorching Romney OpEd …
On some level I suspect the WSJ’s critique is accurate. Forget the stuff about the tax and the mandate, that’s just journalistic aggrandizement of subject, making the peg worth the ink/pixels needed to write about it.
But there’s something to it. I think liberals have developed a split opinion about Romney’s skills as well. On the one hand, he’s ridiculous and contemptible and all that, but somehow I think liberals suspect that there’s a ‘real’ Romney buried in there who’s a damn good pol and knows his material and can present very well. So there’s an ’emperor’s new clothes’ problem all around. I think the emperor actually has no clothes — Romney is not that good a campaigner, and we’ll see the evidence of that in abundance over the next few months.
Even though his campaign website promises that Mitt Romney “will nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts,” Romney says he wouldn’t have nominated Roberts knowing what he knows now.
In an editorial released late Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal OpEd page lowers the boom on Mitt Romney and his campaign over its admittedly comical handling of the mandate/tax business. Just to rehearse: Romney has called it both over the years. Republicans came out of the gate hard after the Court ruling calling it a tax. Then Romney’s top advisor, Eric Fehrnstrom, said it wasn’t a tax but rather a penalty. And then today Romney sorta kinda said it was a tax after all — or he kind of wishes or thinks it’s not a tax or did but now the Court has spoken and since the Court has original jurisdiction over campaign terminology, so it’s a tax. And yet somehow his own identical mandate in Massachusetts wasn’t a tax. Read More
Steve Kornacki has an interesting post up in Salon arguing that what is keeping Obama in the game in the presidential race is the fact that while voters think the economy stinks they remain fairly optimistic about where it’s going to be a year from now. This contrasts, Steve says, with the numbers in the second half of last year when voters were more pessimistic and Obama’s reelection looked much iffier. Basically, I agree. And a number of the reasons he posits look right to me too. But I’d add one point. To a great degree last year’s economic pessimism was driven by the politics of the debt crisis. Read More
Coming off the massive success finally discovering evidence of the existence of the Higgs-Boson particle, CERN has announced plans to bombard subatomic particles together at a speed close enough to the speed of light to isolate Mitt Romney’s actual underlying position on whether or not the health care mandate is a tax.