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.
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.
Benjy Sarlin puts on the green eyeshades and examines claims that Democrats are winning the outside money game.
I’ll just say it: I don’t think the political pundit class understands just how toxic the Swiss/Caymans/Bermuda accounts issue is for Romney. Not that they don’t know it’s a liability at all. But I don’t think they realize the extent of it.
Here’s a report just out from ABC News on how Ted Strickland introduced Obama in Ohio … Read More
I’ve received a fair amount of email and Twitter traffic from conservatives upset with Chief Justice John Roberts for upholding the Affordable Care Act in what they construe to be a political way. They essentially imply that Roberts doesn’t believe his own written opinion — that he upheld the law to protect himself and the Court — and to support this view, they note that Roberts’ controlling opinion meanders uncharacteristically toward its contentious conclusion.
If you’re an ACA critic, that’s a convenient reading of the facts. So I’d like to propose a thought experiment. Read More
In which NRO’s Jim Geraghty, responding to Benjy Sarlin‘s piece, defends not including giant anonymous contributions from 501(c)(4) entities in his analysis of which side is benefitting most from outside money in the post-Citizens United world. Shorter rationale: It’s hard to find those numbers.
I’m on record saying Washington Republicans erred by glomming on to the Supreme Court’s ACA ruling to attack President Obama for secretly raising taxes. Not that the RNC and congressional Republicans didn’t have their own good reasons. Obviously they did. But that on the whole it would’ve made sense to defer to the Romney camp’s original view that the mandate is a penalty — not a tax — that the Court should have struck down.
Well we know how the story ended. Read More