Visual source: Newseum
Dan Balz:
Advisers to the president now see their likely rival as having suffered potentially permanent damage from a campaign in which he has had to run to the right to win acceptance from his party’s conservative base. Romney’s advisers believe otherwise. They see any damage as overstated. They believe the president has vulnerabilities that have been largely ignored by the media while the Republicans have been on center stage. And they say that will change once the nomination battle ends.
Yeah, largely ignored. Like his birth certificate, or palling around with terrorists. And it will all change because no one has been paying any attention to Obama for four years. So here's one for the Romney people: When Obama said "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon," it was a pitch perfect response. When in this campaign has Romney ever been pitch perfect? He makes a gaffe a week, and a major gaffe a month. And why will that "advantage Obama" suddenly change?
Nicholas Kristof:
I wonder if we in the news media aren’t inadvertently leaving the impression that there is a genuine debate among experts about whether an Israeli military strike on Iran makes sense this year.
There really isn’t such a debate. Or rather, it’s the same kind of debate as the one about climate change — credible experts are overwhelmingly on one side.
AP:
The Supreme Court’s ruling on the constitutionality of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul is likely to shake the presidential election race in early summer.
But the winners in the court will not necessarily be the winners in the political arena.
No doubt, a decision to throw out the entire law would be a defeat for Obama. His judgment and leadership, even his reputation as a former constitutional law professor, would be called into question for pushing through a contentious and partisan health insurance overhaul only to see it declared unconstitutional by the court.
But it would not spell certain doom for his re-election. In fact, it would end the GOP argument that a Republican president must be elected to guarantee repeal of the law. It also could re-energize liberals, shift the spotlight onto insurance companies and reignite a debate about how to best provide health care.
Ezra Klein:
There’s an added complication for Republicans. They have assumed huge savings from applying the exchange-and-subsidies model to Medicare. But they don’t assume — in fact they vehemently deny — that those same savings would result from the identical policy mechanism in the Affordable Care Act. The Democrats haven’t assumed significant savings from the exchange-and-subsidies model in either case. If the concept works as well as Ryan says it will, then the Affordable Care Act will cost far, far less than is currently projected. There’s no compelling reason to believe competitive bidding will cut costs for seniors but fail to do so among younger, healthier consumers who, if anything, are in a better position to change plans every few years and therefore pressure insurers to cut costs.
Frank Bruni:
Rethinking His Religion
This man attended Catholic services every Sunday in a jacket and tie, feeling that church deserved such respect. I kept a certain distance from him. I’d arrived at college determined to be honest about my sexual orientation and steer clear of people who might make that uncomfortable or worse. I figured him for one of them.
About two years ago, out of nowhere, he found me. His life, he wanted me to know, had taken interesting turns. He’d gone into medicine, just as he’d always planned. He’d married and had kids. But he’d also strayed from his onetime script. As a doctor, he has spent a part of his time providing abortions.
For some readers his journey will be proof positive of Rick Santorum’s assertion last month that college is too often godless and corrupting. For others, it will be a resounding affirmation of education’s purpose.
I’m struck more than anything else by how much searching and asking and reflecting he’s done, this man I’d so quickly discounted, who pledged a fraternity when he was still on my radar and then, when he wasn’t, quit in protest over how it had blackballed a Korean pledge candidate and a gay one.
Longish, very interesting piece about people and assumptions. Good Sunday essay.
Kathleen Parker:
First, we must recognize moderation once again as a virtue, both in our public and private lives. Those who shun political moderation view its practitioners as traitors to some higher cause, spineless and weak. Many Republicans cheered Olympia Snowe’s announcement that she would retire from the U.S. Senate. What use was a moderate voice to the hard-right agenda?
But the shunners are something worse than spineless or weak. They are incurious and, by the rigidity of their convictions, lacking in imagination. Want boring? Talk to someone enamored of his own certitude.
A mild reference to the GOP's "hard-right agenda" doesn't begin to describe the problem, let alone solve it. So, Kathleen, what are you going to do about it? Nothing at all, besides some tut-tutting while barely mentioning that the problem resides squarely with Republicans. And that's why there's no more moderates.