Visual source:
Newseum
NY Times:
With Mitt Romney on a steady march to the Republican presidential nomination after a sweep of three primaries, both he and President Obama are seizing on the Republican House budget, and its ambitious young architect, Representative Paul D. Ryan, as a defining issue of the unfolding campaign.
Add poor judgment to the lack of core principles Romney has exhibited from the start of his candidacy.
Dana Milbank:
Deferring to industry is a Romney trademark. Even his thoughts on his gender gap in the polls came straight from the boardroom.
“Almost every measure that the president has taken made it harder for small business to decide to grow in America or big business to stay here,” he said, vowing to create “the best environment for business in the world — small business, big business, entrepreneurs, innovators, job creators of all kinds.” He continued his answer on the gender gap by quoting the Coca-Cola chief’s views on China.
The candidate is clearly aware of his style deficit, because he closed with a wish for November that “our choice will not be one of party or personality.”
And if the campaign is about personality? To paraphrase Yogi Berra, Romney will be an overwhelming underdog.
And they think Romney-Ryan is a winning ticket?
Matt Miller:
Ordinarily, one would say it’s hard to imagine the West Wing’s glee when Ryan got his troops to walk the plank again and pass a fresh version of last year’s extreme, regressive blueprint. But, in fact, I can imagine it perfectly.
In an otherwise good piece,
NY Times gives credence to the currently fashionable Etch a Sketch bullshit that everything starts over (the experts say so):
Daron Shaw, a political scientist at the University of Texas and a Republican campaign adviser, said “there’s no relationship” between the two phases of the 2012 campaign. Primaries are naturally volatile. They force partisans to choose among candidates of similar philosophies and platforms, which swells the importance of subjective, less predictable factors like personality and messaging.
The experts are missing the damage done not to the candidate but to the Republican brand. See graphic from Daily Kos/SEIU polling.
Charles Blow:
For many Republicans, Romney’s greatest virtue is that he is not President Obama. But that may also be his greatest weakness. Being A.B.O. (anyone but Obama) doesn’t necessarily make you able. The protest vote will carry a candidate only so far. It ensures the support of the base, but not the middle. And in a general election, the middle must be won. Candidates must connect with the people there and passionately sell a vision of America that resonates with them.
The only thing Romney is passionate about is installing car elevators in his homes.
The New England Journal of Medicine has some thoughts on the oral arguments on ACA:
Many legal scholars (including me) believed that this would be an easy case, because health insurance so obviously involves interstate commerce and the mandate is unquestionably central to many of the ACA's core unchallenged provisions. But these matters can be seen differently, as witnessed by the deep split among the lower courts. Thus, Justice Anthony Kennedy's opening salvo to the government's lawyer speaks volumes: “Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?” Doing so, he later said, is an unprecedented move that “changes the relationship of the federal government to the individual in a very fundamental way.”