A shadowy $10 billion Obamacare agency with zero oversight just awarded first lady Michelle Obama's pet patient-dumping scheme at the University of Chicago Medical Center a $5.9 million taxpayer-funded grant. It will enable Mrs. Obama's cronies to build a government-sponsored electronic medical record-sharing system.

The Chicago program, known as the Urban Health Initiative, is run by one of President Obama's closest golfing buddies, scandal magnet Eric Whitaker, who has been entangled with Illinois corruption celebrities Rod Blagojevich and Tony Rezko over the past decade.

Fun fact: Whitaker recently was named by author Edward Klein as the man who purportedly offered hate-mongering Rev. Jeremiah Wright $150,000 in hush money during the 2008 campaign.

The nearly $6 million grant was announced last week by the "Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation" at the Department of Health and Human Services. White House watchdog journalist Keith Koffler notes that "some 3,000 applications were received for a share on the $1 billion in 3-year grants available. Only 26 programs were included in the first batch of awards doled out." The administration grants circumvent any and all congressional deliberation as part of Team Obama's election-year "We Can't Wait" initiatives.

The grant recipients will help fulfill the mandated Obamacare vision of a centralized patient-record database with unprecedented federal oversight. The provision is being challenged in court by the Goldwater Institute for forcing Americans to share "with millions of strangers who are not physicians confidential private and personal medical history information they do not wish to share."

HHS denies any favoritism, citing a "competitive, objective" process. But as I first reported in March, a Congressional Research Service analysis concluded that Obamacare's Innovation Center is subject to no administrative or judicial review. The Innovation Center director is, in effect, a super-czar without any checks or balances on his grant-making decisions, methods or results.

I warned two months ago that the Obamacare Innovation Center and its multibillion-dollar slush fund smacked of "another pipeline for political payoffs and Chicago-style boodle that will result in less patient autonomy, fewer health-care choices, more government intrusion and lower-quality care."

The University of Chicago Medical Center grant walks and talks like just such a political payoff. I have reported extensively on how Mrs. Obama helped engineer the Urban Health Initiative's plan to offload low-income patients with non-urgent health needs. With consulting help from Obama senior adviser David Axelrod's Chicago-based PR firm and the blessing of fellow Chicago pal Valerie Jarrett (who chaired the hospital's board of trustees), Mrs. Obama sold the scheme to outsource low-income care to other facilities as a way to "dramatically improve health care for thousands of South Side residents."

The program guaranteed "free" shuttle rides to and from the outside clinics. In truth, it was old-fashioned cost-cutting and favor-trading repackaged by a nonprofit, tax-exempt hospital as minority aid. Clearing out the poor freed up room for insured (i.e., more lucrative) patients.

The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) blasted MichelleObamacare, expressing "grave concerns that the University of Chicago's policy toward emergency patients is dangerously close to 'patient dumping.'" The group concluded that the Urban Health Initiative "reflected an effort to 'cherry pick' wealthy patients over poor." That practice was made illegal by the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) signed by President Ronald Reagan.

Bipartisan complaints about impoverished South Side Chicago patients getting the shaft led GOP Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Democratic Rep. Bobby Rush of Chicago to challenge the crony hospital's abuse of its nonprofit status and lucrative tax breaks. But the probe went nowhere.

And now, Whitaker will have $6 million more to play with when he's not vacationing with Obama or grappling with subpoenas over possible kickback and pay-for-play schemes while he served as a top health official under now-jailed Illinois. Gov. Blagojevich. One of the probes involves Whitaker's oversight of medical facilities construction projects exploited by now-convicted real-estate shark Tony Rezko.

Anyone who isn't concerned about the privacy implications of this government-funded records-sharing network hasn't been paying attention to how Team Obama and its surrogates are digging for dirt on private citizens who donate to GOP campaigns. But I digress.

Nothing to see or smell here? Discerning eyes and nostrils beg to differ. 

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Fischer surged in the final days of the campaign to defeat Attorney General Jon Bruning and state Treasurer Don Stenberg, winning 40 percent of the support. Bruning garnered 36 percent, and Stenberg had 19 percent.

Fischer will go on to face Democrat Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska governor and senator heavily recruited by his party to run for the seat held for two terms by Democrat Ben Nelson. Facing a negative, uphill re-election battle in the traditionally red state, Nelson opted to retire instead.

Most analysts say the Republican nominee should be favored to win in November, given that the state chose John McCain by 15 points in 2008 and George W. Bush by 33 points in 2004. Kerrey’s candidacy is expected to make the race competitive, however. Republicans need a net gain of four seats to win the majority in the upper chamber, and Nelson’s exit makes Nebraska a strong pickup opportunity.

But if this GOP primary is any indication of how the general election will unfold, outside groups figure to play an outsized role in Nebraska. In total, third-party organizations poured nearly $3 million into the race. The outside spending, operatives say, helped make the difference for Fischer.

The Republican primary had been widely considered Bruning’s to lose. The attorney general reported raising $3.5 million, while Fischer hauled in a little less than $400,000 and Stenberg $700,000, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Bruning, who made his opposition to the president’s health care law a campaign pillar, was the establishment’s top choice, but he also attracted a significant amount of conservative support. The Tea Party Express and Citizens United backed him, as did former presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, both well liked among conservatives and Tea Party adherents. But Bruning’s image took a hit early in the campaign when he compared welfare beneficiaries to scavenging raccoons and faced ethics questions surrounding his purchase of a lakefront home.

DeMint, the South Carolina senator who fashions himself a kingmaker in primary and general election congressional contests, threw in his lot with Stenberg, who had served two terms as attorney general before becoming state treasurer but had also run unsuccessfully for Senate twice. The Senate Conservative Fund, a super PAC headed by DeMint, spent nearly $1.2 million on his behalf. Club for Growth spent $728,000 and Freedom Works spent $272,000 in support of Stenberg.

The Club for Growth, which spent heavily in last week’s Indiana GOP primary that sent Sen. Dick Lugar into retirement, ultimately expressed support for Fischer Tuesday night after the results were final. The group’s president, Chris Chocola, said the defeat of Bruning was a success, and made no mention of Stenberg.

“While we did not support Deb Fischer, we are encouraged by the strong pro-growth stands she took in this campaign, and we expect she will live up to those commitments in the Senate next year,” Chocola said in a statement.

Bruning and Stenberg had focused their attacks on each other. At a primary debate last month, Bruning scolded Stenberg for allegedly following his teenage daughter’s postings on Twitter. (Stenberg said his staff handled his Twitter account.)

While those two candidates drew the most attention, Fischer flew quietly under the radar.

Last week, former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin endorsed Fischer, and the Tea Party darling voiced robo-calls on her behalf. The momentum appeared to shift toward Fischer in the final days of the campaign, with a pair of polls showing her a few points ahead. In the final weekend, a super PAC run by Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts spent $200,000 in ads supporting her. The Bruning campaign called foul, as those spots used some of the same video that appeared in a Fischer campaign ad.

ShePAC, a Republican group that supports conservative women and comprised of former Palin aides, backed Fischer, promoting her through Facebook ads, Web videos, and emails. The Ending Spending Fund also ran two ads in support of Fischer -- one touting her ranching roots and casting her two opponents as “lifetime politicians,” and another attacking Bruning on ethical matters.

Operatives describe Fischer as the most moderate of the three conservatives who competed for the GOP nod. National and state party officials are confident in her ability to compete against Kerrey. “There might just be some concern because she will have come through the primary relatively unscathed,” said one Republican operative, who also noted that there was "no hesitation" she could run ahead of Kerrey.

In congratulating the victor, National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn focused on Fischer’s narrative. “Deb is a small business rancher, mother and conservative leader who believes we need to spend less, balance our budget and repeal ObamaCare, while her opponent supports bigger government and higher taxes,” he said.

Republicans perceive Kerrey as a weak candidate. His central liability is that he doesn't live in Nebraska anymore. After retiring from the Senate in 2001, Kerrey moved to New York City to head the progressive New School. He hasn't been on the ballot since 1994, and since he left office, analysts say, Nebraska has become even more conservative.

Democrats, though, argue that Fischer is untested statewide and will try to paint her as a Tea Party candidate. National Democrats circulated a statement Tuesday night, citing an Omaha World Herald report that Fischer and her husband were among several ranchers to benefit from a federal land subsidy. 

Caitlin Huey-Burns is a reporter for RealClearPolitics. She can be reached at chueyburns@realclearpolitics.com.

We are imprinted to prefer a world that is "fair." Our close relatives the chimpanzees freak out when one chimp gets more than his fair share, so zookeepers are careful about food portions. Chimps are hardwired to get angry when they think they've been cheated -- and so are we.

Filmmaker Michael Moore took this notion about fairness to its intuitive conclusion during an interview with Laura Flanders of GRITtv, saying of rich people's fortunes: "That's not theirs! That's a national resource! That's ours!" As is typical, Moore was confused or disingenuous. In our corporatist economy, some fortunes are indeed made illegitimately though political means. The privileges that produce those fortunes should be abolished. But contrary to Moore, incomes are not "national resources." If he's concerned with illegitimate fortunes, he should favor freeing markets.

Fairness is related to justice, the recognition of people's rights to their own lives.

A free market will create big differences in wealth. That wealth disparity is simply a byproduct of freedom -- vastly diverse individuals competing to serve consumers will arrive at vastly diverse outcomes.

That disparity is not unfair -- if it results from free exchange.

The free market (which, sadly, America doesn't have) is fair. It also produces better outcomes. Even "losers" do pretty well.

A more astute observer than Moore might show how unfair government intervention is. Licenses, taxes, regulations and corporate subsidies make it harder for the average worker to start his own business, to go from being a "little guy" to being an independent owner of means of production. Most new businesses fail, but running your own business is the best route to prosperity and -- surveys suggest -- happiness, too.

I once opened a dinky business called "The Stossel Store" in Delaware, hawking hats, books and other goodies on the street. It was hard to open this store. I chose Delaware because it's supposedly the state that makes that easiest -- but "easiest" didn't mean "easy." I still required help from Fox's lawyers to get the permits, and the process took more than a week. In my hometown, New York City, it would have taken much longer.

By contrast, in Hong Kong, I started a business in one day. Hong Kong's limited government makes it easy for people to try things, and that has allowed poor people to prosper. Regular people benefit most from economic freedom.

What makes it hard for people to embrace markets is that anti-market zealots, with their talk of Americans pulling together to take care of one another, remind us of the coziness of village life. Instinct tells us that's where we'll find trust -- and fairness.

But our intuition fools us when it leads us to think that government models that institutionalize what resembles village life must be good. Assuming that government can foster togetherness better than our own voluntary associations, businesses and private charities leads to coziness of the bad kind: back-room dealings between the well-connected and government.

If we're going to have a large-scale, modern society, we need relatively simple rules that respect individual rights and that can be applied to all sorts of new situations without having to put global commerce on hold until the hypothetical village elders come up with a plan.

Since most human beings still lived as farmers two centuries ago, the idea of stranger-filled cosmopolitan life outside the small, close-knit village is still novel. It was only around the 18th and 19th centuries that the ideas we now think of as classical liberalism, libertarianism, anarchism and laissez faire began to be articulated. As Westerners became accustomed to living without the rule of kings, aristocrats and village elders, they began, for the first time since the dawn of writing, to imagine living ungoverned lives.

Sure, it's scary, but surrendering your fate to politicians and bureaucrats is a lot scarier. 

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

The storyline is marred only by this: Everything in it is exaggerated, misleading or wrong.

Let's take stock. Here are four propositions that defy conventional wisdom.

(1) The U.S. banking system is far stronger now than before the 2007-09 financial crisis, and JPMorgan Chase's trading loss never threatened the bank or the banking system.(END ITAL) In a speech last week before JPMorgan's announcement, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke reported that since 2009, the 19 largest banks had increased their stockholders' equity capital by $300 billion to nearly $760 billion. Capital offsets losses, and Bernanke noted that most banks survived the Fed's latest "stress test" simulating a harsh recession. In it, unemployment peaked at 13 percent; stock prices dropped 50 percent; housing prices declined another 21 percent. Despite collective losses of $500 billion, 15 of the 19 banks still met regulatory capital rules.

Even if JPMorgan's trading loss doubled to $4 billion, the amount would be dwarfed by last year's profits of $19 billion and the bank's shareholders' common equity of $184 billion, notes Douglas Elliott of the Brookings Institution. (Disclosure: Elliott once worked at JPMorgan.)

(2) Banks' greatest exposure to losses usually comes from old-fashioned lending, not "proprietary trading." The 2007-09 financial crisis originated in the deterioration of traditional home mortgage lending as opposed to banks' short-term trading of exotic financial instruments for profit. Proprietary trading has a bad image because it's so easily likened to gambling. If the Volcker Rule -- named after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker -- barring banks from proprietary trading had existed before the financial crisis, there still would have been a crisis.

Although proprietary trading can create large losses for individual institutions, it has yet to breed a major financial crisis. The Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s resulted from conventional loans to Latin countries, which were presumed (wrongly) to be good credit risks. Similarly, U.S. banks lost lots of money in the 1980s on bad farm and real estate loans that were predicated (again, wrongly) on the continued inflation of land values and crop prices.

(3) Government regulation can't prevent banking or financial crises. Of course, regulation does some good. Deposit insurance has averted bank runs by individuals. Some safeguards can be imposed. But regulators' practical power is limited, because they are no smarter than the bankers they regulate. Sharing similar assumptions, regulators and bankers may recognize a true crisis only when it's become unavoidable.

Here's an example. In the 1980s, regulators from major countries set bank capital requirements: the amount of capital required to be held against various loans and investments. The standard for most consumer and business loans was 8 percent, with lower amounts for safer assets. Home mortgages and most government bonds were considered among the safest. Mortgages required only 4 percent; most government securities were deemed so safe that they carried no capital requirement. These regulations, which remained in effect for most of the 2000s, steered banks toward the very credits that led to America's financial crisis and Europe's sovereign debt crisis, as political scientist Jeffrey Friedman has noted.

(4) The trading loss at JPMorgan is good for the system -- though not for JPMorgan -- because it reminds people that risk is unavoidable and may identify specific practices that, if they became widespread, could spawn a broader crisis. The time for genuine worry is when everyone agrees that the outlook is bright and risks are few. This suggests the wishful thinking that often precedes financial "bubbles." Government regulation often follows a perverse cycle: too loose when the economy is strong; too rigid when it's weak.

We don't yet know all the details of JPMorgan's loss. How did trades initially intended to hedge risk -- to reduce it -- end up having the opposite effect? Until we can answer that, the wider implications for government regulation, including the Volcker Rule, remain unsettled.

But we ought to avoid simple morality tales of avaricious bankers versus virtuous regulators. The real world is more complicated. The global financial system's complexities and interconnections have grown. Some of these can be restrained; few can be repealed. Bankers and regulators are hostage to a rapidly changing, poorly understood system.

One lesson is obvious. Banks and other major financial institutions need ample capital. The dangers lie not in what we know -- but in what we don't. 

Copyright 2012, Washington Post Writers Group

Created in 1949 and dedicated to Europe's defense, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization served as the Free World's primary military and political vehicle for containing the aggressive threat posed by the Soviet Union. In his 1946 post-World War II "Sinews of Peace" speech, Winston Churchill described the Cold War's decisive military and political battle zone: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent." NATO succeeded in deterring war, in all likelihood a thermonuclear war, on Europe's central front.

Elsewhere, however, the fighting never stopped. The Soviet Union constantly probed and stoked peripheral theaters, exacerbating and in some cases igniting conflicts in the globe's less critical but still bloody corners. A short list of hot wars within the Cold War should jog hazy memories: East Asia (Korean War), sub-Saharan Africa (e.g., Angola, Ethiopia, the Congo), Southeast Asia (e.g., Malaysia and Vietnam), Central Asia (e.g., Afghanistan), the Middle East (take your pick), and Central and South America (e.g., El Salvador and Nicaragua).

Soviet adventurism gave local conflicts a Cold War veneer, and to the eternal detriment of the locals, turned these terrible little conflicts into devastating Cold War proxy wars with global political implications (and often with a strategic economic angle).

In order to sap Western will and sow distrust, the Soviets always littered these proxy wars with Marxist utopian hooey ("Workers' Paradise is the future") and anti-American propaganda that reworked 19th century European autocrat and World War II-era Nazi anti-American themes in Marxist lingo.

NATO obits in the early 1990s saw NATO as a creature of a bipolar world that the obit writers believed disappeared when the Soviet Union shrank to Russia. The world, however, was never really bipolar. It has always been fragmented, with multipolar eddies. Since World War I, the fragments have been heavily armed. The fragments have also been grappling, often violently, with the terms of economic and political modernity.

Sept. 11 was the first time NATO actually invoked its founding treaty's Article 5. Article 5 commits member nations to the active military defense of a NATO ally when that nation suffers a direct attack. It's the alliance's Three Musketeers Clause -- one for all, and all for one.

Article 5 connects this brief history to the troubled present. The Syria-Turkey border is a NATO border. After pro-Assad dictatorship Syrian forces fired into Turkish territory, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said: "NATO has responsibilities (to protect) Turkey's borders, according to Article 5." A rhetorical threat? Perhaps, but Bashar Assad knows NATO intervened militarily in Libya.

NATO 2012 confronts several complex belligerencies and difficult security challenges. Afghanistan, that miserable link between the Cold War and the Global War on Terror, remains unresolved. Syria also has Cold War echoes (Russian political games in the United Nations). Iran's nuclear weapons quest and nuclear threat will be a central subject in Chicago.

The 1990s' obit writers stroked their chins when fragments of the former Soviet empire clamored to join NATO. Many in the "it's dead" crowd, having bought into the decades of Soviet anti-American agitprop, failed to appreciate NATO membership's immense prestige and global influence. NATO membership enhances national status. Moreover, it makes a definitive statement about shared political and security goals that translates into diplomatic strength. As a result, NATO can focus peacekeeping power in ways the United Nations cannot and never will. The Clinton Administration used NATO, not the U.N., as the primary political and then military instrument in its Balkan intervention and peacekeeping operations (especially in Kosovo).

In the 21st century, NATO's ability to coordinate and focus political and military power is a global resource. 

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

For that, we should applaud Lugar. We should also thank him for his nearly four decades of service in the United States Senate. But Lugar did not lose because the Tea Party targeted him. He lost because he was no longer representing the people of Indiana. In theory and practice he has truly become a United States senator.

He lost because the driver’s license in his wallet shows the address of a home he sold 37 years ago -- before I was born. He lost because Hoosiers didn’t know enough about him to appreciate the long years of solid service he’s provided to them and the country. He lost because he believed, like so many life-long politicians do, that he was somehow entitled to re-election.

There are other examples of Incumbent Entitlement Syndrome (IES). Mike Castle would have been a senator from Delaware had he not conveyed a conviction that he was somehow owed the Republican nomination in 2010. Castle’s sense of entitlement resulted in the nomination of the unelectable Christine O’Donnell -- and one less GOP seat in the upper house.

Democrats are not immune from the syndrome either. Martha Coakley would have replaced Edward Kennedy in the Senate had she not concluded that shaking hands with voters outside Fenway Park was somehow beneath her.

Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter was so incensed at the very idea of a primary challenge from a more conservative Republican, then-Rep. Pat Toomey, that he switched parties, becoming the most junior member of the Democratic caucus -- and then lost in a 2010 (Democratic) primary anyway.

Orrin Hatch, like his former Utah counterpart Bob Bennett, now faces a June primary to keep his Senate seat for a seventh term. While he may succeed in his primary bid and likely general election run, it was not without, as one news report stated, having to endure the “indignity of calling individual delegates” to the Utah Republican Party’s nominating convention. That’s actually a classic description of one of the chief symptoms of IES: believing it’s beneath you to actually ask voters for their support.

Another symptom is experiencing feelings of immortality -- and an accompanying aversion to retirement. The Tea Party, Americans for Prosperity, and the other types of outside groups that contributed to Dick Lugar’s loss did nothing more than take advantage of an opportunity: An opportunity that Lugar, who is 80 years old, himself provided them.

Today, four members of the Senate are in their eigthies; 22 of them are in their seventies and 37 of them are in their sixties; 63 percent of those in the chamber are old enough to remember Elvis Presley appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” One is tempted to ask the question why they’re all still there. Most octogenarians want to drink a glass of iced tea or spend time with their grandkids (or great-grandkids) rather than sit through yet another tedious committee hearing.

I can understand the mind-set. A 30-something chief of staff or 40-something political consultant trying to tell an 80-year-old senator what to do would be like me trying to give my 86-year-old grandmother life advice. She’ll listen politely, then pat me on the hand and tell me she knows better than I do what’s good for her.

Dick Lugar didn’t lose because of the Tea Party. The Tea Party backed a candidate that could win because Lugar opened the door and invited them in. And the rising tide of polarization in Washington notwithstanding, his loss should give pause to political lifers. Just because you think you’re doing a great job doesn’t mean anyone at home even knows who you are. 

11:25 A.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you so much. Thank you, Chuck, for that very kind introduction. Chuck is a proud police officer, he’s the proud parent of a police officer, and he has dedicated his life to law enforcement and their families. So I want to thank him for his extraordinary service.

I want to recognize the entire Fraternal Order of Police and its leadership, including Jim Pasco, for all your work on behalf of those who wear the badge. I’d like to recognize FOP Auxiliary President Linda Hennie, all the members of the FOP Auxiliary, members of Congress including Speaker Boehner, Congressman Hoyer, and Senator Leahy, as well as members of my administration. And most of all, I want to acknowledge and thank the families of those who have fallen.

As Scripture tells us, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

Our country’s law enforcement officers use force when they have to. They are well armed and they are well trained. But they never forget that theirs is a mission of peace. Their job is to keep the peace, to allow all of us to enjoy peace in our neighborhoods and for our families. And today, with heavy hearts, we honor those who gave their lives in the service of that mission. Their families are in our thoughts and prayers, as we remember the quiet courage of the men and women we have lost.

These are officers like Detective John Falcone, of Poughkeepsie, New York. In February, Detective Falcone responded to a shot fired call on Main Street. And when he arrived on the scene, he saw a man holding a gun with one hand, and a small child with the other.

In a situation like that, every instinct pushes us towards self-preservation. But when the suspect fled, still holding the child, Detective Falcone didn’t think twice. He took off in pursuit, and tragically, in the struggle that followed, he was shot and killed. He is survived by his parents.

But there’s another survivor as well: A three-year old child who might not be alive today had it not been for the sacrifice of a hero who gave his life for another.

This willingness to risk everything for a complete stranger is extraordinary. And yet, among our nation’s law enforcement officers, it is also commonplace. Last summer, the North Platte River was running high near Douglas, Wyoming. When a teenage girl got caught in the current, Deputy Bryan Gross, of the Converse County Sheriff’s Office, jumped in after her.

The girl was eventually pulled from the water, but Deputy Gross was swept away. And he is survived by his wife, Amy. Today, we remember a man who swore to protect his neighbors, and who kept that promise no matter what the cost.

I suspect that at that moment, Deputy Gross wasn’t trying to be a hero; he was just doing his job. You can find that bravery, the courage to do your duty, day in and day out, in so many officers across our country.

One of those officers was Deputy Sheriff Suzanne Hopper, from Clark County, Ohio. Deputy Hopper was known as the “go-to person” in her department; no task was too large or too small.

And on New Year’s Day, 2011, Deputy Hopper arrived at a crime scene and began a preliminary investigation, just as she had done many times during her 12 years of service. But as she was photographing evidence, a man opened the door of his trailer and fired at her with his shotgun, killing her. And today, we remember not just a fine officer, but a wife, a mother, and a stepmother.

Like all those we honor today, Deputy Hopper is also survived by the fellow officers who she meant so much to, and who meant so much to her. Last week, her childhood friend, Sergeant Kris Shultz, posted her flag at a memorial in Ohio. He made a promise in her memory. He said, “To honor her, we will keep going, and continue to do what we've done, no matter how hard it is at times.”

We will keep going. There is no pledge that better honors the memory of those we have lost. And there are no memories -- there are no words that better capture the unbreakable spirit of those who wear the badge.

Because even in the face of tragedy, I know that so many of you will return home and continue to do what you have always done. Some of you will kiss your husbands or wives goodbye each morning, and send them out the door not knowing what might happen that day. Some of you are children and parents, sisters and brothers, whose pride is mixed with worry.

And of course, there are the officers themselves. Every American who wears the badge knows the burdens that come with it -- the long hours and the stress; the knowledge that just about any moment could be a matter of life or death. You carry these burdens so the rest of us don’t have to.

And this shared sense of purpose brings you together, and it brings you to our nation’s capital today. You come from different states and different backgrounds and different walks of life, but I know that you come here as a community: one family, united by a quiet strength and a willingness to sacrifice on behalf of others.

The rest of us can never fully understand what you go through. But please know that we hold you in our hearts -- not just today, but always. We are forever in your debt. And it is on behalf of all of us, the entire American people, that I offer my thoughts, my prayers, and my thanks.

May God shine a light upon the fallen and comfort the mourning. May he protect the peacemakers who protect us every day. And may he bless, now and forever, the United States of America. (Applause.)

END
11:33 A.M. EDT 

Let's discuss that with Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida. She is the chair of the Democratic National Committee.

James Carville, a man you know, the man I know, our CNN contributor. He wrote this blog last week saying, I'll put it up on the screen. WTFU, translated, wake the you know what up, there is an earthquake. What are you smoking? What are you drinking?

What are you snorting or just what in the hell are you thinking? Earlier he said, it's time to panic because so many Democratic leadership in the party and the campaign seem to be complacent that the president has a lot before being re-elected. He says you have to fight.

REPRESENTATIVE DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ, DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE CHAIRWOMAN: Well, I guess, it's my job to peel folks like James Carville off the ceiling because it's certainly not time to panic.

I haven't noticed complacency at all. I mean, in the last year, I've traveled to 33 states and almost 100 cities, Wolf and people our very focused.

Our supporters understand what's at stake here. They know the dramatic contrast in the two directions that we could go. They understand that this will be a close election and they are fired up and ready to go. And we've got a tremendous amount of activity through our neighborhood --

BLITZER: You are not just resting assuming it's a done deal.

SCHULTZ: Kicking back and relaxing, I can assure you.

BLITZER: All right, because this "New York Times"/CBS poll today shows, what, 32 percent, a third of the country thinks the economy is good right now and 67 percent, two-thirds think the economy is bad. You agree the economy is issue number one.

SCHULTZ: Absolutely. We need to continue President Obama's laser focus on creating jobs, getting the economy turned around. Remember that he's brought us from really the worst economic crisis that we've had since the great depression in most of our lifetimes.

And now three and a half years later, we've created more than 4.2 million jobs. We got 26 straight months of private sector job growth and we need to keep our eyes on the prize and focused on fighting for the middle class and working families and giving everyone know opportunity to be successful.

When Mitt Romney and his cronies and the Republicans Party and the extremists and the Tea Party are fighting for people who are already doing quite well and trying to make sure they can do even better. That's the choice.

BLITZER: As the Republicans keep saying that the president's campaign, the Democrats, the DNC, the organization you hold, you keep trying to change the subject away from the economy to other issues.

SCHULTZ: Really?

BLITZER: Same-sex marriage, for example.

SCHULTZ: OK.

BLITZER: Or if it's a Bane Capital, Mitt Romney's capital at Bane Capital and anything, but talking about the economy, which they say is the president's weak spot.

SCHULTZ: You see, what I've noticed is that the Republicans are really good at projections, which means that anything that actually applies to them they try to put on their opponents.

It's the Republicans that are focused on everything, but creating jobs and working with this president and compromising so we can reduce the deficit because they focused on social issues. They're had an obsession with culture.

BLITZER: During the Republican primary, but what about now? SCHULTZ: Just over the last few months.

BLITZER: He doesn't want to focus that. He wants to focus the economy. Romney, I think that's a fair assessment. He doesn't want to focus on social issues, which the other Republican candidates like Rick Santorum and those guys.

SCHULTZ: Mitt Romney and the people around him have focused on making sure that the top of their agenda is defunding Planned Parenthood. The top of their agenda -- I mean, you just look at the Republicans when they took over the majority in the Congress.

Their number one bill, HR-1 was the repeal of the affordable care act. HR-3 was a bill that would have defunded Planned Parenthood and ended funding for birth control and family planning. HR-3 also would have made sure that we change how we define --

BLITZER: The Republicans in Congress, does not necessarily Mitt Romney.

SCHULTZ: Mitt Romney certainly has not distanced himself from the Republican leadership and the Congress. He's fully embraced the Romney-Ryan budget, which would end Medicare as we know it. He's completely twisted and intertwined with the extremists in the Tea Party.

BLITZER: As far as you're concerned, you want this race to be focused on jobs and the economy.

SCHULTZ: It has been President Obama's focus since day one and that's why we are moving in the right direction. It's also why that poll showed that most Americans believed that a year from now they themselves would be better off economically and that the economy will continue to improve.

BLITZER: You know, that's very disturbing to me.

SCHULTZ: They're optimistic.

BLITZER: You're a congresswoman. You're running for re-election in your district. I know there are a bunch of Republicans vying.

SCHULTZ: Yes, a couple.

BLITZER: I don't know if you noticed this one individual who's now put up a web site and he's got a picture of you with a dog collar on it. There is it right there. It's a really degrading picture and stop Barack Obama's biggest attack dog is the headline. Do you know this individual Ozzy Defario whatever his name is?

SCHULTZ: I don't know him, no.

BLITZER: Is he a serious Republican challenger potentially to you?

SCHULTZ: I'm focused on representing my constituents and making sure they understand I've been fighting for them and working hard to make sure that we can continue to get this economy turned around.

That they have a seven-way Republican primary and I think that web site itself demonstrates what kind of person he is and it speaks for itself.

BLITZER: Coming on the heels of Alan West's ugly comments about you, you remember those a few months ago.

SCHULTZ: Sticks and bones can break my bones and names can never hurt me. I'm just going to keep focused on my job and work hard and be the grassroots door to door, neighbor to neighbor legislator I've been for 20 years.

BLITZER: Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chair of the DNC. Thanks for coming in. 

One day after he described JPMorgan as "the best, or one of the best managed banks," the White House reported that the president holds up to $1 million in an interest-bearing JPMorgan asset management checking account, and Michelle Obama has up to $15,000 in a regular JPMorgan checking account.

The first family’s personal banking relationship with JPMorgan appeared on the president’s nine-page financial disclosure form for 2011, released by the White House Tuesday, and was also a feature of his disclosures for 2010. Obama’s assets are listed on a government-mandated form in broad brackets, making exact valuations for his holdings difficult to ascertain. The bracketed ranges for executive officials are set by law.

The president, appearing on ABC’s “The View” Tuesday, fielded questions about JPMorgan’s recent $2 billion in trading losses, and offered praise for a bank that has for years enjoyed a reputation for effective risk management, at least up until the point that it disclosed losses described by company Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon as “stupid.”

In the interview, Obama framed the bank’s trading mistakes as a potent argument for tough federal regulation following the 2008 financial meltdown, but he did not mention his family’s personal financial relationship with the bank.

Obama called Dimon “one of the smartest bankers we’ve got.” The blunt-speaking chief executive is a fallen-away Obama supporter who publicly parted company with some of the administration’s regulatory initiatives and its occasionally red-meat rhetoric about the behavior of big banks. Early in 2011, Obama turned to JPMorgan executive Bill Daley to become his second White House chief of staff; Daley left the White House and returned to Chicago within the year.

At a Tampa shareholders meeting Tuesday, Dimon fielded questions about his company’s financial performance and its startling trading losses, telling his audience, “I can’t justify it.” But Dimon weathered an effort to split up the CEO and chairman roles he holds simultaneously, and shareholders also affirmed his 2011 compensation package of $23 million.

The Justice Department reportedly is in the early stages of a criminal probe into JPMorgan’s losses, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said Tuesday that independent regulators “are going to take a very careful look at this incident.” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on Tuesday declined to comment on specifics of JPMorgan’s transactions leading to its steep losses, and he made no mention of Obama’s personal ties to the bank until after his daily briefing.

The president and the first lady listed a 30-year mortgage on their Chicago home -- at a relatively high 2005 interest rate of 5.625 percent -- as a liability with Northern Trust totaling between $500,001 and $1 million.

The Obamas also embrace anticipated college expenditures for Malia and Sasha as a family savings priority -- a theme during recent Obama events tied to student loan rates nationwide. The Obamas have repeatedly confided to audiences since 2007 that they were unable to repay their student loans until Obama earned serious money after the publication of his memoirs. According to Tuesday’s disclosure forms, the Obamas maintain 529 college savings accounts for their daughters valued between $100,002 and $200,000 for each child.

The president and his wife also listed royalties from their books, plus assets held in Treasuries. Such safe but not particularly lucrative investments remove any appearance of a conflict of interest. An Obama individual savings account for self-employed persons produced between $201 and $1,000 in interest, drawn from Treasury bills worth between $100,001 and $250,000, according to the president’s disclosure report. A separate T-bills account valued at between $500,001 and $1 million threw off similarly modest interest income in 2011.

The Obamas hold between $1 million and $5 million in Treasury notes, which paid interest last year of between $5,001 and $15,000.

The White House also released a 2011 financial disclosure report for the Vice President Biden and wife Jill Biden. 

Alexis Simendinger covers the White House for RealClearPolitics. She can be reached at asimendinger@realclearpolitics.com.

Calling for sharp spending cuts and a long-term budget discipline, Romney is trying to frame the campaign against the Democrat as a contest of fairness versus irresponsibility.

"A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation and every day we fail to act we feed that fire with our own lack of resolve," Romney said, according to excerpts of a speech he's scheduled to deliver on his first trip to Iowa since January.

The White House promptly dismissed Romney's critique. Press secretary Jay Carney blamed federal overspending primarily on Romney-backed tax cuts for the wealthy that were enacted during President George W. Bush's administration and on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Carney said Romney wants to repeat policies that led to high deficits and the recession and repeal Obama policies "that reversed the cataclysmic decline on our economy and that now has us growing for 11 straight quarters."

Romney's debt-and-spending argument is also the counter-argument to Obama's emphasis on fairness, in which the president is asking more of wealthier Americans by eliminating tax breaks and loopholes.

It comes as Wall Street deals with the fallout of revelations that one of the nation's most trusted banks made bad bets and lost billions of dollars, and in the wake of disappointing job growth for the month of April.

The speech also shows Romney's effort to focus on the economy, voters' No. 1 concern, after several days in which gay marriage dominated the campaign debate. Obama announced last Wednesday that he supports gay marriage, after publicly opposing it but saying his position was "evolving."

Romney opposes gay marriage and reaffirmed his position while delivering a weekend graduation speech at a conservative Christian university in Virginia.

Romney's speech in Des Moines also marked an effort to paint the wealthy, former private equity firm executive as a live-by-the-rules citizen, not a detached elitist, as the Obama campaign has sought to portray him.

An Obama campaign ad scheduled to run Wednesday in battleground states, including Iowa, casts Romney as a vicious corporate raider. The ad, told in the words of former employees of a failed Kansas City, Mo., steel mill, notes how Romney's firm Bain Capital failed to restructure the company, and cut jobs and benefits.

The ad goes to the heart of Romney's chief argument, that he is better adept by virtue of years of private sector business experience and as the former governor of Massachusetts to hone the federal government and encourage job creation.

"As president, I will approach debt and spending differently. My time spent building businesses and leading state government taught me that we need to hold every department and agency to a simple test: If something can be done better and more efficiently outside the federal government, then that's where it belongs," Romney says, according to the excerpts released by his campaign.

Romney countered that while at Bain Capital and as governor he helped create tens of thousands of public and private sector jobs. His campaign released a web video promoting his time at Bain.

Although Romney's private-sector experience has been used against him before, Obama's campaign is introducing the argument in battleground states before the Nov. 6 election. One of his rivals for the Republican nomination, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, characterized Romney as a corporate raider before the New Hampshire primary in January. Another rival, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, referred to Romney as a "vulture capitalist."

Besides Iowa, Obama's ad also was scheduled to air in Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. He won all five states in 2008 and all are viewed as competitive this year.

Romney's Iowa stop also returns the political spotlight to this Midwestern state, where both campaigns see opportunity in their battle for the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency.

Romney finished in a near-tie for first place in the state's Jan. 3 caucuses. Obama won Iowa's Democratic caucuses four years ago and carried the state in the general election.

Obama was more aggressive in visiting Iowa this spring as Romney campaigned for the GOP nomination.

Obama's new ad marks his fifth this year. The campaign has spent more than $2.5 million on advertising in Iowa, which will yield only six electoral votes. Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and their wives have visited the state this year.

Romney's focus on the general election came as he was still inching toward the Republican nomination, with voters heading to the polls in Oregon on Tuesday.

Romney has campaigned recently in Colorado, Ohio and Virginia, as well as in GOP-leaning Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma for fundraisers.

He was scheduled to travel to Florida, another key battleground, on Wednesday. 

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Even as she faded from the top tier of contenders, Bachmann was never shy about breaking Ronald Reagan's "11th Commandment" -- thou shalt not speak ill of fellow Republicans -- as she relentlessly hammered her chief opponent over his conservative credentials.

Bachmann referred to the now-presumptive Republican nominee as a “chameleon” during a Florida speech and stated unequivocally in a December interview with ABC News her belief at the time that Romney “cannot beat Obama.”

For his part, Gingrich’s attacks on everything from Romney’s finances to his honesty often came across as personal and were always blunt. President Obama’s campaign wasted little time in memorializing them in a 90-second Web ad soon after the former House speaker formally threw his support behind Romney.

But now that Romney is the last GOP hopeful standing, Bachmann and Gingrich are each set to follow a long line of once-bitter primary foes who became active surrogates for the person who beat them.

Bachmann will speak on Romney’s behalf at the Minnesota Republican convention this week, according to a Romney campaign source, and Gingrich is set to hit the trail for Romney with public events and high-dollar fundraisers in his home state of Georgia and elsewhere.

Though the relationship between the Romney and Gingrich camps has long been poor to nonexistent, the former congressman’s press secretary, R.C. Hammond, used a Revolutionary-era metaphor to predict that his boss’s support for Romney would please the presumed nominee’s Boston-based staff.

“You’d think we would be as popular as the British were in Boston to the Commercial Street crew,” Hammond said. “However, if the campaign turns out to plan, we hope to be the GOP's version of General Lafayette.”

Gingrich’s campaign reported $4.3 million in debt in its March 31 report to the Federal Election Commission, and while Hammond has said that about $500,000 of that has since been paid off, the former speaker could certainly use Romney’s help with the rest.

But amid lingering fallout from those campaign spats and a residual sentiment that Gingrich overstayed his welcome in the race once he fell out of contention, the Romney team has not indicated it intends to retire Gingrich’s sizable debt.

In an interview with CNN earlier this month, Gingrich declined to take back his previous assertion that Romney had lied during the campaign, though he said he would trust the Republican “100 times” over President Obama.

As for the former rival who netted the second-most delegates, Rick Santorum raised doubts about his willingness to go all-in for the presumptive nominee by formally endorsing Romney via a late-night email to his own supporters rather than at a public event.

In the email, Santorum did praise Romney on a number of fronts, and a Romney campaign source tells RCP that plans are in the works for Santorum to keynote events on Romney’s behalf.

Hogan Gidley, who served as Santorum’s press secretary during the campaign, noted that the candidate practiced the austerity he preached in managing his campaign’s finances. Thus, his lack of debt might make it more difficult for Romney to earn an unequivocal commitment from the former Pennsylvania senator to go the extra mile for him.

“We obviously weren’t beholden to debt repayment as a bargaining chip because we didn’t have any debt,” Gidley said, adding that Santorum has avoided the fate of other Republican candidates who “hammer somebody for months on the campaign trail, then they get off the campaign trail and realize they’re millions of dollars in debt and come out and speak so fervently for the person they were opposing just days prior. And it appears disingenuous, I think, because it is to a large degree.”

Rick Perry, who was expected to be Romney’s toughest competitor when he entered the race but stumbled repeatedly and then exited before the South Carolina primary, told FOX News earlier this month that he planned to support Romney emphatically.

Perry’s wife, Anita, is slated to join Ann Romney for a fundraiser in Austin this week, and the Romney campaign says it is working to nail down events for the Texas governor.

“If the campaign sees a good opportunity for Gov. Perry, I’m certain that he would be on the trail,” a former Perry campaign aide told RCP. “This is important. He truly believes Barack Obama has been a disaster as a president.”

Tim Pawlenty, who retired his outstanding campaign debt in April with the help of Romney and some of his top financial backers, is one ex-competitor who has been a vigorous and consistent advocate for the presumptive nominee ever since endorsing him in September.

As the lone former rival still considered a vice-presidential prospect (though he has dismissed the possibility out of hand), Pawlenty campaigned on Romney’s behalf last weekend in Oklahoma and is expected to continue his role as an active national surrogate.

The situation could scarcely be more different with former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman. He endorsed Romney upon ending his campaign after the New Hampshire primary, but has since encouraged a third-party candidate to enter the race.

Huntsman’s daughter Abby Livingston told ABC News last month that her father would not campaign for Romney in the general election, and according to aides from both camps, an offer from the Romney campaign to help retire Huntsman’s debt is not in the cards. 

Scott Conroy is a national political reporter for RealClearPolitics. He can be reached at sconroy@realclearpolitics.com.

Through Romney's prism, Obama is seen as a big-spending liberal partisan who is clueless on how to revive the economy and whose environmental, regulatory and tax policies have made things worse.

The former Massachusetts governor is trying to capitalize on his private-sector resume at a time of high voter anxiety over sputtering job growth.

He was sharpening his attack Tuesday with a speech in Des Moines to focus on Obama's economic stewardship, suggesting the president fanned a "prairie fire of debt" while casting himself as a defender of fiscal responsibility.

It comes on the day of the Oregon GOP primary- Romney's first without an opponent. Lone rival Rep. Ron Paul of Texas said he would no longer campaign actively in remaining GOP primaries.

Much as 2004 Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts saw a top strength - his Vietnam military record - mischaracterized and used against him by the outside group "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," the Obama team is trying to transform Romney's business record into a liability.

Thus, Romney becomes a job-destroying "vampire" capitalist. TV ads this week by both Obama's re-election campaign and a supportive super PAC focus on layoffs and bankruptcies at companies bought by Bain Capital, the private-equity firm Romney co-founded.

Both campaigns of course are oversimplifying and omitting important details.

Much of the surge in the national debt is due to lower tax revenues and government anti-recession programs under both former President George Bush and Obama. And many companies bought by Bain are now profitable.

But sometimes negative images stick, especially if repeated enough and not strongly rebutted.

Just ask John Kerry. 

© 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

For a stark reminder that "liberal intolerance" is real, look at the brouhaha over Naomi Schaefer Riley's ejection from the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, Brainstorm. A moderately conservative journalist and author, Riley joined the site's left-dominated roster of bloggers in early 2011. On April 30, she made a post titled "The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations." The piece was prompted by a recent Chronicle cover story lauding a new generation of black studies Ph.D., with a sidebar profiling the first five students in Northwestern University's six-year-old black studies doctoral program. Riley offered sarcastic summaries of three of their dissertation topics, describing them as "left-wing victimization claptrap."

It was a shot heard 'round the blogosphere. Riley was denounced as a purveyor of hate speech. Sixteen Northwestern black studies faculty members joined a guest post on Brainstorm lambasting her comments as "cowardly, uninformed, irresponsible, repugnant, and contrary to the mission of higher education."

Chronicle editor Liz McMillen initially stood by Riley, defending her piece as an invitation to debate and allowing her to respond to critics. A few days later, faced with a deluge of angry mail and an anti-Riley petition with over 6,500 signatures, she reversed herself. A May 7 "Editor's Note" stated that Riley's post "did not meet The Chronicle's basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles" and that Riley had been asked to leave Brainstorm. McMillen also apologized for initially treating Riley's post as "informed opinion" and "for the distress these incidents have caused."

The conservative media picked up the story, portraying Riley's dismissal as an egregious case of speech-stifling political correctness and cowardice. One might think most liberals would agree, on the principle attributed to Voltaire: "I disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Yet most left-of-center commentators who have weighed in -- such as Atlantic editor and blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates and Center for American Progress fellow Eric Alterman -- have condemned Riley and defended her firing. Their argument is that, while Riley has a right to her opinions and criticism of black studies is not racist, her post was so "lazy," "sloppy" and "ignorant" that such "know-nothing hackery" has no place on the blog of an academic publication. That's because Riley freely admits she did not read the dissertations she lampooned but relied on The Chronicle's summaries (not, as some have mistakenly claimed, the titles alone).

Is this a sloppy approach for a 520-word blogpost? First, let's turn the political tables. Suppose a left-wing academic blogger had poked fun at stupid Ph.D. dissertations from conservative Christian colleges arguing that homosexuality can be cured or that teaching evolution undermines students' morals -- and based her post on a magazine's summary of the thesis topics. Would those tut-tutting at Riley's laziness demand actual perusal of such works?

Second, let's look at The Chronicle's general standards of quality in blogging -- standards that Alterman suggests were lowered for Riley in order to appease the right by hiring a conservative.

There is Laurie Essig, a Middlebury College sociologist whose posts -- mostly unrelated to academia -- tend to be fact-free, muddled rants on the "white privilege" underlying the campaign against child-murdering Ugandan warlord Kony, the heterosexual oppressiveness of the happy endings of "Harry Potter," or the merits of an attempted pie assault on Rupert Murdoch. One Essig post decries the "hysteria," "racism," and "class warfare" of concerns about unwed motherhood, making the unsupported claim that children of single parents fare no worse than their two-parent peers when they have similar resources. Another asserts that Americans "hate black women" but love Oprah Winfrey because she supports the values of "white supremacy" (by emphasizing individual choices) and "fulfills white longings for Mammy."

There is also Dave Barash, a University of Washington biologist and psychologist, who a month ago made a post titled "Major League Baseball Takes on the First Amendment." In it, Barash deplored the suspension of Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillén after he professed love for Fidel Castro, and his subsequent apology. So much for intellectual rigor: one need not be a constitutional scholar to know that a private company's decision to sanction an employee for offensive public speech is not a First Amendment issue. Shockingly, Barash's dedication to free speech does not seem to extend to Naomi Schaefer Riley.

Finally, what about the factual diligence displayed by some of Riley's media critics? Alterman -- who writes that "conservative journalists specialize in attacks that ignore traditional standards of fairness and professional competence" -- repeatedly makes the inaccurate claim that Riley slammed the thesis projects because she "didn't like their titles." He also throws in an aside about her earlier authorship of a Wall Street Journal column which "sought to blame women who dressed provocatively for 'moronic behavior' that allegedly invited rape." Alterman's source, however, is not Riley's column -- which never mentioned provocative dress -- but a left-wing website's angry recap. (Riley's actual point was that it's not smart to get so plastered at a college party that you can't refuse, or even remember, unwanted sex.) Surely, relying on a hostile summary to attack an op-ed column -- which can be found and read in a few minutes -- is sloppier than relying on a sympathetic summary to attack a dissertation.

Whether Riley's broadside against black studies is entirely fair is another matter. Some of her supporters quibble with her dismissal of a thesis on black women's childbirth experiences, including historical black midwifery, as irrelevant. It should be noted that Riley has not hesitated to lambaste what she regards as trivial research topics in other fields. Her last book, The Faculty Lounges -- praised by Queens College sociologist and staunch liberal Andrew Hacker -- asserts that nearly all current research in the humanities and social sciences is useless because it's too narrow to be read by more than a dozen people. Others would argue that specialized research enriches knowledge and may supply valuable material to authors writing for broader audiences.

That aside, The Chronicle's description of the other four dissertations from its up-and-coming stars lends considerable weight to Riley's argument that black studies programs are dominated by leftist hackery rather than (as Northwestern professor Martha Biondi claimed in the Chronicle piece) "rigorous intellectual inquiry."

Take La TaSha Levy, whose dissertation on black Republicanism "argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have 'played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.'" According to Levy, her interest in the topic was born when, as director of the black cultural center at the University of Virginia, she saw students reading books by black authors challenging left-wing racial orthodoxy. She worried that "they were latching on to arguments that black culture was the only thing that held the race back, and against affirmative action." Does one need to read the dissertation to see that Levy has no interest in seriously engaging the ideas of those odious "black conservatives"? The fact that she lumps McWhorter -- a self-styled liberal Democrat who supports Barack Obama and has never voted for George W. Bush -- together with Republicans does not inspire confidence.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's thesis "looks at the federal government's role in promoting single-family homeownership in low-income black communities after the unrest of the 1960s." Given Taylor's comments about "the profitability of racism in the housing market," the clear implication is that promoting black homeownership was a sinister agenda.

The Chronicle's profile neglects to add that Taylor is affiliated with the International Socialist Organization, whose socialism is not mere advocacy of European-style welfare: the ISO website boasts of standing "in the tradition of revolutionary socialists Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky." One of Taylor's columns for its publication, Socialist Worker, hails the urban riots of the 1960s as "rebellions" that "transformed U.S. politics." Had Rush Limbaugh set out to create a caricature of a black studies Ph.D., he could not have done better.

The two dissertations Riley did not mention further support her case.

Thus, Zinga Fraser, a political activist whose dissertation is a comparative study of black Congresswomen Shirley Chisholm and Barbara Jordan, explains to the Chronicle that her goal is to examine "the aggressive politics of poverty and reproductive health and how the demonization of black women still operates today."

Dwayne Nash, a former New York assistant district attorney who says that "prosecuting people of color took a toll" on him, is studying "stop-and-frisk laws as a form of legalized racial profiling." According to Nash, stop and frisk "has very little to do with stopping crime and has a lot to do with how blackness is perceived." Stop and frisk does raise genuine concerns about civil liberties and police-community relations; but to start with the assumption that such practices have nothing to do with actual crime -- whose victims, overwhelmingly, are also black -- is more dogma than reality-based inquiry. (A recent study led by George Mason University's David Weisbrud, a world-renowned criminologist, provides evidence that street stops track the occurrence of criminal incidents.)

Is this ground to dismiss the black-studies enterprise? Alterman cites four scholars in the field -- Anthony Appiah, Henry Louis Gates, William Julius Wilson, and Cornel West -- as intellectuals whose work needs no justification. Actually, many would question that description of West, whose contributions to American discourse include attacking Barack Obama as "a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs." As for Appiah and Wilson, their primary disciplines are, respectively, philosophy and sociology; both have been attacked by hardcore black-studies mavens as insufficiently pro-black. Gates has cautioned against excessive politicization in African-American studies and against a "fear of pluralism" that would exclude conservative voices like Sowell. That warning seem to go unheeded at programs such as Northwestern's.

Riley's Brainstorm post could have launched a discussion of these issues. Instead, the response has amounted to radicals shouting "burn the heretic" and liberals using double standards to the excuse the immolation.

As often happens, bad behavior on the left reinforces bad tendencies on the right. Too many conservatives move from criticism of left-wing academic nonsense to general hostility toward scholarship and "elitist" knowledge. And there are those who would use "political correctness" as an excuse to wink at real bigotry. The Riley affair gives them ammunition. 

Cathy Young writes a weekly column for RealClearPolitics and is also a contributing editor at Reason magazine. She blogs at http://cathyyoung.wordpress.com/. She can be reached at cyoung@realclearpolitics.com

The very next night, the Cranston campaign unleashed a sustained, weeks-long negative campaign advertising attack on Mr. Zschau. The idea being that if Zschau was given time to regroup for the general election, he would be unstoppable.

Sen. Cranston did not have a record that demanded his re-election. The issue had to be the challenger, not the incumbent. It was the first time in modern campaign history that a statewide incumbent had ever gone flat-out negative so early in the general election cycle.

It worked. Zchau's campaign wasn't ready for the assault. The damage done in June proved too much to overcome in November. Sen. Cranston was narrowly re-elected.

This year's presidential campaign sets up much like Senator Cranston's re-election campaign of 1986. President Obama cannot risk an election that becomes a referendum on his record. Fairly or not, that's a framework for defeat. So the task of his handlers is to make the election a referendum on his opponent.

Since even my dogs know that Mr. Romney is going to frame the election as a referendum on President Obama's stewardship of the economy, the Obama handlers must do everything they can to make people imagine that President Romney's stewardship of the economy would be worse; an assault on the interests and values of "average" Americans. Thus yesterday's 2-minute ad on Bain Capital's unsuccessful turn-around of GST Steel in Kansas City. The ad's thrust is that Romney was (and is) an economic "vampire."

What's remarkable about the ad is not its content (mis-leading though it may be). Anti-Bain ads have been used against Romney in 1994 (by Ted Kennedy's handlers), 2002 (by Shannon O'Brien's campaign) and 2012 (by New Gingrich).

What's remarkable about the ad is that it raised at least as many questions about the Obama campaign as it did about Mr. Romney.

On the very day that the ad was released, President Obama attended a fund-raiser in New York City hosted by a senior executive at the Blackstone Group, a leading private equity firm and frequent co-investor with Bain Capital on turn-around projects.

And, it further turns out that a 2008 and 2012 campaign finance bundler for President Obama, one Jonathan Lavine, was a managing director at Bain Capital during the time that GST Steel was being “run into the ground” by the evil Bainiacs.

And, just to put some icing on the cake, it turns out that Mr. Romney was off fixing the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics during the time that Romney and Bain were allegedly “vampiring” GST Steel.

It makes you wonder. Did Team Obama think that no one would notice? Did they assume that only right-wing bloggers would care?

Had this been an isolated event, Democrat campaign professionals might not be all that concerned. Mistakes, after all, are made. But this was hardly a "one off." There are, in the view of many Democratic pros, far too many other examples of the Obama campaign making a hash of fairly straightforward political matters.

Most recently, for instance, Vice President Biden previewed the president's "evolution" on the issue of same sex marriage on NBC's "Meet The Press." The press, predictably, made it the next day story.

Two days later, the voters of North Carolina, in large numbers and by a wide (61-39%) margin, voted against same-sex marriage. As messages go, it was hard to misread.

The very next day, President Obama told the North Carolina knuckleheads to take their referendum and shove it; he endorsed same sex marriage, although he didn't make a federal case out of it. He left it for the states to work out the legislative details (conveniently enough).

The mishandling of the President’s endorsement of same sex marriage sent the president's re-election prospects into a tailspin; electoral college handicappers busily moved North Carolina from “toss-up” to “likely Republican.” And it necessitated today’s "let's-get-the-media-talking-about-something-else” news event (the Bain attack ad).

Because we have been told for so long that Team Obama is the very model of the modern campaign operation, we have come to sort of believe it. In reality, they’ve been surprisingly inept since they set up shop last year. They've been through three slogans and four over-arching re-election "themes." They've made a big deal out of Romney's dog. They've introduced us to "Julia," which seemed like a right-wing parody of the perfect constituent of the nanny state. One could on (and on).

So far, the president's re-election campaign measures up poorly, in terms of its execution, against the Alan Cranston re-election effort of 1986. Imagine that. 

John Ellis is a contributing columnist to RealClearPolitics who lives in New York.

As an incumbent, Obama's method is to target various constituencies -- albeit ones that supported him four years ago -- and make the sale with this argument: On the issues they care most about, he has advanced specific policies to help them, programs opposed by the Republican Party and its presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney.

Throughout the spring, as the political conversation shifted from women to Latinos to young voters and most recently to the gay community, the White House had something to offer each group that Romney is not selling. This strategy could imperil Romney by defining him for each of these constituencies before his general election operation even gets off the ground. As Romney’s campaign has begun to ramp up, its responses have focused on the unemployment rate and other economic difficulties that each of these groups face under Obama.

Meanwhile, Latino audiences are informed that Obama’s Justice Department has challenged the state of Arizona over its anti-illegal immigration legislation, that he supports the DREAM Act that would grant citizenship to some young people brought illegally to this country as children, and that the president vowed to produce comprehensive immigration reform legislation if elected to a second term.

Women’s groups are reminded that feminists within the administration pushed successfully for provisions in the Affordable Care Act stipulating that birth control and contraception be included in federally mandated health insurance. College students have been promised the administration’s help in keeping rates low on some government-backed student loans. The gay and lesbian community needs no reminding that Obama himself finally endorsed same-sex marriage.

Mitt Romney’s answer to almost all of this -- gay marriage is a separate category -- is a vow to work tirelessly to improve the economy. Vulnerable Americans are in the same boat, he and his surrogates keep saying; and what Latinos, working women and college students all need is a vibrant U.S. economy that generates prosperity and creates jobs.

“President Obama can’t talk about the big issues facing Americans -- jobs and the economy -- because he knows, despite his promises, he hasn’t made things better,” said Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul. “So, he is resorting to a campaign run on gimmicks and distractions.”

Countered Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt: “It’s no surprise that Governor Romney doesn’t want to talk about how his policies would impact women or Latinos, since he has committed to getting rid of Planned Parenthood, endorsed a personhood amendment that would ban many forms of birth control, and said he would veto the DREAM Act.”

These talking points are framed as though the two camps are having an argument. Actually, they are talking past each other, and deliberately so, in hopes of maximizing the respective strengths -- and philosophy -- of each candidate.

Romney really is most comfortable talking about job creation. And although they don’t publicly phrase it just this way, Obama’s team really is seeking to take advantage of demographic changes in the electorate that favor the president.

In 2008, the Obama voting cohort was a formidable mosaic of overlapping constituencies and demographic groups. He tallied significant majorities -- sometimes overwhelmingly -- among African-Americans, Latinos, social liberals, feminists, gays, government employees, environmentalists, organized labor and young people. If he can stitch these same voting blocs together again he can win re-election comfortably.

But in offering narrow appeals based on self-interest to different groups of Americans, Obama risks forfeiting the aspirational appeal that galvanized the country four years ago and rallied it behind the first African-American president in history.

“I would submit to you that’s not a winning campaign strategy,” said Gregg Keller, executive director of the American Conservative Union. “It’s not what Bush did in ’04, and it’s not what Obama did in ’08. Obama didn’t win by giving goodies to every single group out there or individually greasing the palms of each of these groups. Now . . . they want to slice the electorate in 20 different slices and try to win each of them individually.”

Tim Miller, an RNC spokesman, echoed this point: “This election isn’t going to be won by pandering to every interest group under the sun; it will be won by the candidate who has a vision about how to turn our economy around.”

Nevertheless, Obama successfully seized on an issue raised by Rick Santorum concerning contraception early this year. Not content to register his objections to Roe v. Wade, the last serious challenger to Romney also took issue with the Supreme Court decision on which Roe was based, Griswold v. Connecticut, which dealt with the sale of contraceptives. Birth control, Rick Santorum said, “is not okay.”

In Obama’s Chicago headquarters it almost seemed that they could hear the gear-grinding sound of a clock being turned back. This kind of talk helped Obama slip out of a self-made trap contained in Obamacare -- a requirement that all health care plans in the country, even those offered by religious employers, offer birth control. Instead, Democrats turned the tables, arguing that the GOP doesn’t have the best interests of women at heart. The rhetorical war lasted months and damaged Romney’s poll numbers among women.

Not wanting to lose any of the ground he gained this spring, Obama said at the launch of his general election campaign earlier this month: “I will not go back to the days when insurance companies had unchecked power to cancel your policy, or deny you coverage, or charge women differently from men. We’re not going back there.”

He added, “We don’t need another political fight about ending a woman’s right to choose, or getting rid of Planned Parenthood or taking away access to affordable birth control. I want women to control their own health choices, just like I want my daughters to have the same opportunities as your sons. We are not turning back the clock. We are moving forward.”

In rebuttal, the Romney campaign is nothing if not consistent: The real war on women taking place in this country, it says, is the alarming attrition in female employment in this country since Obama took office. Likewise, promises about immigration legislation are nice, but the Latino community’s most immediate worry is the fact that its unemployment rate is stuck above 10 percent, which Romney highlighted in an attack ad.

As for young voters and those all-important student loan rates, one top Romney adviser told RCP, “Our priority, and we’re going to highlight this with examples of real people, is to create an economic environment in which young people can get a job so they can actually pay back their college loans . . . instead of moving in with their parents.” 

Erin McPike is a national political reporter for RealClearPolitics. She can be reached at emcpike@realclearpolitics.com.

Were JPMorgan's more than $2 billion in trading losses "stupid," but part of doing business, as Dimon suggested, or painful evidence that risk-taking by financial institutions poses a systemic threat and demands tougher federal restrictions, as Obama indicated Monday?

At least one contrast the president wanted to present against Mitt Romney suddenly looked sharper, thanks to JPMorgan’s self-inflicted black eye. Obama argues that unsuspecting workers and investors can suffer when companies make bad bets with others’ money, while Romney says risk-taking by companies (often with borrowed money) spurs U.S. growth and job creation.

Although Obama’s campaign is investing millions of dollars in advertising in swing states to assail Romney for his Bain Capital corporate takeover history, the ads may be less potent than headlines about JPMorgan’s admitted errors.

Dimon conceded during a television interview Sunday, “We know we were sloppy. We know we were stupid. We know there was bad judgment."

The Senate Banking Committee announced Monday that JPMorgan’s actions will soon be under a congressional microscope to probe trade decisions and disclosures; too-big-to-fail banks and their capitalization; and debates about smart regulation during what has become an era of famously fallible corporate management. At issue in Congress is the so-called Volcker Rule, which bars banks from using their own money for speculative trades but allows the use of firms’ funds to hedge against portfolio risks. Congress wants to know if the Volcker Rule, which has not yet been implemented, would have prevented JPMorgan’s troubles. Federal regulators are divided on that question, and were expected to meet Tuesday to discuss it, according to news reports.

Obama signed the mammoth Dodd-Frank financial reform law in 2010, and Romney is now campaigning to repeal it. Congressional hearings this spring may serve to remind voters what caused the financial crisis, what prompted the recession, why decisions by financial institutions impact realms beyond their complex bets, and how consumers and investors are being affected.

The president lost no time Monday explaining his side of that story, answering a question about JPMorgan’s losses during a taped interview in New York City with ABC’s “The View,” to be broadcast Tuesday.

“It is my strong belief that we’ve got to have vigorous enforcement of these rules that we just passed,” Obama said, referring to the Dodd-Frank changes and the rulemaking process underway to implement the law within the regulatory agencies.

“Think about it: This is the best, or one of the best-managed banks. You could have a bank that isn’t as strong, isn’t as profitable, making those same bets, and we might have had to step in. And that’s exactly why Wall Street reform is so important,” he continued. “I hope that everyone who is watching is [writing letters to] their members of Congress [saying that] we want these rules in place to make sure this stuff does not happen again.”

Obama’s reference to government intervention was noteworthy because the bailouts that began under President Bush and continued under Obama’s watch became decidedly unpopular with most of the public. Even mentioning that the government intervened -- or might intervene -- to prop up a major financial institution gives incumbent Democrats the vapors.

JPMorgan can cover its estimated $2.3 billion in losses without upending its own financial health or that of the larger financial system. But Jamie Dimon, his risk managers, and the JPMorgan brand have often been celebrated as Wall Street’s smart set -- the industry’s leaders, not its losers. Dimon, in particular, has enjoyed a reputation as an effective manager who steered his company through the financial crisis when other CEOs did not fare as well. At least three senior officers and possibly more involved in the bank’s losses are now casualties of its efforts to hedge against the potential of an economic downturn while also trying to profit from that hedge.

Obama is eager to turn Romney’s former private equity experience against him, much as Romney’s GOP primary contenders did, while the former Massachusetts governor tells voters the president made the economy worse. Dimon is a Democrat who privately supported Obama in 2008 and later had a falling out with the administration over its regulatory zeal and Democrats’ bank-bashing rhetoric. Dimon said in January he was undecided how he’d vote in November, and he met privately with Romney in September prior to a New York fundraising event hosted by a hedge fund owned by JPMorgan.

Dimon, as a member of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, can privately support a candidate but is not supposed to publicly endorse one. On Monday, Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, who originally proposed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, part of the Dodd-Frank reforms, urged that Dimon forfeit his Fed perch. The JPMorgan CEO is on record criticizing the new consumer bureau as regulatory excess.

Without naming Dimon, Obama found a way to lash Romney, as a former profit-seeking devotee of wealth creation, to the JPMorgan mess.

“If we get all the rules that we proposed and were passed by Congress implemented into law, it should prevent this kind of stuff from happening,” Obama said. “But this, again, is going to be part of what the election is about. We’ve got real differences here, because Gov. Romney, some of the Republican members of Congress and the financial industry have been arguing that this is unnecessary, that this is impeding capital formation. It’s making it harder to lend to businesses, etc. And what I’ve said is, look, we want a successful financial industry. . . . But what makes us the best financial industry is transparency, accountability, rules so that small investors feel like if they put their money into Wall Street, it’s not going to suddenly just disappear.”

Earlier Monday, while delivering the commencement address at Barnard College, the president made a similar point and received robust applause. “We know that we’re better off when there are rules that stop big banks from making bad bets with other people’s money,” Obama said.

At the same time that his company hedged against losses if the economy soured, Dimon talked up his confidence in a rebounding economy last year. As the economy slowed and JPMorgan tried to unwind its ballooning trades, its losses mounted. Facing shareholders in Tampa on Tuesday, Dimon is expected to hear calls for governance changes and explanations about his knowledge of the trades.

In the weeks ahead, he will be reminded on Capitol Hill and in the media of his own blunt discussions about the importance of managing the threat of losses at his company. “We try to minimize the risk and move on,” he told investigators with the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission during an October 2010 interview about the causes of the financial crisis. “We’re big boys.”

During that discussion, Dimon was quick to argue that companies’ poor management decisions led to the financial crisis, while lax federal oversight, too many regulators, overlap of their turf and lack of clarity about what was out of bounds allowed excesses to get out of hand. “If you had caught, in my opinion, 30 to 40 percent of it, it would never have gotten this bad,” Dimon said at the time.

“I don’t blame the regulators for the mistakes of companies, okay. I blame the companies,” he continued. “It’s their job. It doesn’t matter what the regulators say. Again, you’re the parent. If you’re responsible, it’s up to you to teach them. I’m being very clear about the individual responsibility of the companies.”

Unexpectedly -- and at a moment of some regulatory consequence for Wall Street just a year and a half later -- JPMorgan finds itself mired in a teachable moment. So far it’s one that favors Obama’s political narrative, and appears tough for Dimon to explain. 

Alexis Simendinger covers the White House for RealClearPolitics. She can be reached at asimendinger@realclearpolitics.com.

President Barack Obama designated Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., his top surrogate on foreign policy issues, fueling speculation he'd be secretary of state in a second Obama administration.

So Washington is abuzz with rumors the president will replace Mr. Biden with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

He ought to. Slow Joe is a national embarrassment.

Osama bin Laden made plans to assassinate the president and Gen. David Petreaus, according to captured documents. But the vice president should not be attacked, bin Laden wrote, because "Biden is totally unprepared for that post." If he were president, Mr. Biden would "lead the U.S. into a crisis."

Something stupid the vice president says makes news nearly every week. Last week he suggested to a group of rabbis that the Bush administration was to blame for the Iranian nuclear weapons crisis, as opposed to Iran.

Mr. Biden may suffer from logorrhea, which Merriam-Webster defines as "pathologically excessive and often incoherent talkativeness or wordiness that is characteristic especially of the manic phase of bipolar disorder." So what the White House calls "Joe Bombs" will keep on coming, a prospect which must chill Team Obama.

But there are downsides to dumping him. The move would reek of desperation.

Dumping a loyal supporter, however feckless, would seem ruthless and selfish. These are not traits a president wants foremost in voters' minds when he's hoping that his personal-approval ratings will compensate for his low job-approval ratings.

If Mr. Obama dumps Slow Joe, he'd be admitting he chose poorly in 2008. This president can't afford to give voters more reasons for questioning his judgment.

There isn't much upside. In the old days of ticket balancing, all political pros hoped for was that a vice presidential candidate would carry his home state. This happened in 1960. Jack Kennedy wouldn't have won Texas, or the election, if Lyndon Johnson weren't on the ticket. It hasn't happened since.

In 1988, the stature gap between vice presidential candidates was never wider. Democratic Sen. Lloyd Bentsen was hugely respected. Republican Sen. Dan Quayle was the butt of jokes. It didn't matter. Republican George H.W. Bush crushed Democrat Michael Dukakis.

People vote based on what they think of the presidential candidates. This is especially so if the candidate is already president. So, though a popular choice can goose turnout in a dispirited base, as Sarah Palin did in 2008, the vice presidential candidate -- no matter how good or bad -- changes few votes.

That said, if the jettisoning of a running mate reflects poorly on the judgment or character of the presidential candidate, there is blowback, as Sen. George McGovern learned after he dumped Sen. Thomas Eagleton in 1972.

So it may be prudent for Mr. Obama to stick with Mr. Biden. One benefit is that as long as Slow Joe is out there saying stupid things, people will take less notice of the stupid things the president says, wrote Jonah Goldberg in National Review.

Still, I expect the switch to be made, because if Team Obama wasn't desperate before this week, it must be now.

A federal prisoner won 41 percent of the vote against the president in the Democratic primary in West Virginia Tuesday.

Mr. Obama opposed the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage on the ballot in North Carolina. It won overwhelmingly. Then he evolved into an outright supporter of same-sex marriage.

In Wisconsin, GOP Gov. Scott Walker, running essentially unopposed in the recall primary, got more votes than the leading Democrats combined.

Support for the war in Afghanistan plunged to 27 percent, the lowest ever recorded, in an AP poll Wednesday.

Also Wednesday, Goldman Sachs said the weak first quarter GDP growth rate of 2.2 percent is likely to be revised to 1.9 percent. For workers under age 25, the unemployment rate last month was 16.4 percent. Which helps explain why there were so many empty seats at Mr. Obama's "official" campaign kickoff at Ohio State University last weekend.

"At times, the rallies (at OSU and Virginia Commonwealth University) had the feeling of a concert by an aging rock star," wrote Mark Landler of The New York Times.

For one of the youngest presidents ever, that sounds like an epitaph. 

"The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox News Channel was the first major television program to report this incident. Yet this story is not just a Norfolk story, either in what happened or in how the media and the authorities have tried to sweep it under the rug.

Similar episodes of unprovoked violence by young black gangs against white people chosen at random on beaches, in shopping malls or in other public places have occurred in Philadelphia, New York, Denver, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, Los Angeles and other places across the country. Both the authorities and the media tend to try to sweep these episodes under the rug as well.

In Milwaukee, for example, an attack on whites at a public park a few years ago left many of the victims battered to the ground and bloody. But, when the police arrived on the scene, it became clear that the authorities wanted to keep this quiet.

One 22-year-old woman, who had been robbed of her cell phone and debit card, and had blood streaming down her face said: "About 20 of us stayed to give statements and make sure everyone was accounted for. The police wouldn't listen to us, they wouldn't take our names or statements. They told us to leave. It was completely infuriating."

The police chief seemed determined to head off any suggestion that this was a racially motivated attack by saying that crime is colorblind. Other officials elsewhere have said similar things.

A wave of such attacks in Chicago were reported, but not the race of the attackers or victims. Media outlets that do not report the race of people committing crimes nevertheless report racial disparities in imprisonment and write heated editorials blaming the criminal justice system.

What the authorities and the media seem determined to suppress is that the hoodlum elements in many ghettoes launch coordinated attacks on whites in public places. If there is anything worse than a one-sided race war, it is a two-sided race war, especially when one of the races outnumbers the other several times over.

It may be understandable that some people want to head off such a catastrophe, either by not reporting the attacks in this race war, or not identifying the race of those attacking, or by insisting that the attacks were not racially motivated -- even when the attackers themselves voice anti-white invective as they laugh at their bleeding victims.

Trying to keep the lid on is understandable. But a lot of pressure can build up under that lid. If and when that pressure leads to an explosion of white backlash, things could be a lot worse than if the truth had come out earlier, and steps taken by both black and white leaders to deal with the hoodlums and with those who inflame the hoodlums.

These latter would include not only race hustlers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson but also lesser known people in the media, in educational institutions and elsewhere who hype grievances and make all the problems of blacks the fault of whites. Some of these people may think that they are doing a favor to blacks. But it is no favor to anyone who lags behind to turn their energies from the task of improving and advancing themselves to the task of lashing out at others.

These others extend beyond whites. Asian American school children in New York and Philadelphia have for years been beaten up by their black classmates. But people in the mainstream media who go ballistic if some kid says something unkind on the Internet about a homosexual classmate nevertheless hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil when Asian American youngsters are beaten up by their black classmates.

Those who automatically say that the social pathology of the ghetto is due to poverty, discrimination and the like cannot explain why such pathology was far less prevalent in the 1950s, when poverty and discrimination were worse. But there were not nearly as many grievance mongers and race hustlers then. 

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Here, too, the mayor has his statistics, and they are as fittingly gargantuan as the city itself: 685,724. That is the number of times last year the police stopped someone on the street and frisked him (or the occasional her) for weapons. (In 2002, the figure was 97,296.) For all that effort, the results are paltry: 780 guns confiscated. To the mayor's critics, that shows there is something awfully wrong with the program.

But to the mayor and his defenders, the low rate of returns proves that the program is working. The gun-toters of yesteryear know better than to walk the streets of New York packing heat. This means that when one gentleman disrespects another gentleman, one or the other of them does not reach for a gun. The proof in this case is not the number of guns seized but the number of bodies not taken to the morgue. Bloomberg has a point.

Inevitably, there is a racial aspect to all this. Young black and Hispanic men constitute only 4.7 percent of the city's population, yet in 2011 they represented about 42 percent of all stops. For some critics of the program, this statistic is both damning and, as they say, dispositive: The program is racist on its face. But as Bloomberg -- but not his critics -- notes, blacks and Hispanics comprise 90 percent of all murder victims. The only people who don't seem to know this are certain politicians pandering for votes and The New York Times, whose recent editorial on this issue omitted awkward statistics regarding the ethnicity of both killers and their victims.

I am neither young nor black (or Hispanic) but if I were, I'd sure abhor stop-and-frisk. It has to be infuriating to be stopped from time to time by the very cops I am paying to protect me. The presumption of guilt based mostly on color or ethnicity (and youth) raises profound civil liberties issues and clearly alienates elements of the minority community. We bend over backward to protect the innocent or the not-yet-guilty from police abuse -- the Miranda rule, the right to a lawyer -- and yet permit the cops to invade the privacy and personal space of just about anyone.

Still, the Bloomberg statistic resonates. New York City is largely crime free (except for Wall Street), and that, as the number-crunching mayor is glad to tell you, is central to a robust economy. Whole areas of the city have risen from the dead. Stores have opened. People stroll the streets. The sound of a car alarm is almost nostalgic and the handmade sign to save thieves the bother -- "No Radio" -- is seen no more. New York is a vast movie set.

As with the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, race is not only a complicating and highly emotional factor but one that does not always get discussed in an open manner. A suffocating silence blankets these incidents. Accusations of racism are hurled at those who so much as mention the abysmal homicide statistics -- about half of all murders are committed by blacks, who represent just 12.6 percent of the population -- and they come, more often than not, from liberals who advocate candor in (almost) all things. Others reply as if there are not basic questions of civil rights and civil liberties at stake.

The dangers of generalizations and of stereotyping should be obvious. So, too, are the dangers of crime and its pernicious effects on its victims -- not just the immediate ones, but whole neighborhoods and, after a while, the whole city. The argument Bloomberg makes is a good one; so, too, is the one made by those who worry about the cost to racial and ethnic harmony of repeated and clearly enraging stop-and-frisks. This is an issue worthy of a full-throated debate, not recourse to censorious political correctness. All voices should be heard -- including those of Bloomberg's 5,600. 

Copyright 2012, Washington Post Writers Group

Ah, ABC must have hired him for his high-minded contribution to the debate. Spitzer continued: "What we tried here under Barack Obama is Keynesian economics, restructure the economy, invest where you need to. It worked for 70 years. It will work in the next 100 years. That is what the public should focus on."

Spitzer must not have been paying attention when we experienced stagflation in the 1970s -- impossible under the Keynesian model. Does Spitzer really want the public to focus on the Obama economic record? The president doesn't seem to. He scarcely mentions the nearly $1 trillion economic stimulus, Dodd-Frank or Obamacare. He seems more eager to talk about free contraceptives, gay marriage and bashing the rich. Obama doesn't seem to think there's anything to boast about. In fact, he's been creative about finding excuses. The financial crisis was worse than we knew, he says. Or it was the Japanese earthquake, the European debt crisis or the Arab Spring.

Let's take Spitzer up on his invitation and focus on the economic record. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which was supposed to jump-start the economy and keep unemployment below 8 percent, clearly failed. Unemployment topped 10 percent after the stimulus became law and has remained above 8 percent since.

In their new book, "Debacle," John Lott and Grover Norquist remind us that the Obama administration had all of the data about the severity of the economic crisis of 2008 by the first months of 2009. Yet in May of 2009, Obama claimed that the stimulus was "already seeing results," and "laying the foundation for a better economy." By September, Vice President Biden was saying, "In my wildest dreams, I never thought it would work this well." The summer of 2010, administration spokesmen crowed, would be the "Recovery Summer."

It wasn't. The economy limped along. Unemployment climbed to 9.6 percent. President Obama himself acknowledged in October 2010 that he had learned something: "There's no such thing as shovel-ready projects."

Economists John F. Cogan and John B. Taylor analyzed both the Bush (2008) and Obama stimulus spending to see whether increased government spending had the desired "multiplier" effect that Keynesian theory posits. Keynesians argue that when government spends money, say on construction workers, the workers then go out and buy products such as refrigerators and thus, goose economic activity. It didn't work either time. Both in 2008 and 2009, stimulus spending had no affect on consumption. Individuals and states used the money to pay down existing debt instead.

Of the vaunted $862 billion stimulus in 2009, which Obama had claimed would build roads and bridges and "invest in the future," Cogan and Taylor found that only $4 billion was devoted to infrastructure projects as of January 2011. Fully half of all stimulus spending went to fund Medicaid -- which may or may not be good social policy but is hardly a stimulant to economic growth. And arguably, the strings the federal government attached to Medicaid funds -- insisting that states could not restrict eligibility rules or reduce benefits -- was bad policy.

Further, as John Lott observes, the stimulus funds were hardly targeted to help "those hardest hit by the economic crisis" as Obama had promised. Instead, "the states hardest hit by the recession received the least money. States with higher bankruptcy, foreclosure and unemployment rates got less money. And lower-income states also received less." The key was politics. "Having an entirely Democrat congressional delegation in 2009, when the bill passed, increased the per capita stimulus dollars that the state receives per person by $460. In addition, the states that Obama won by the largest percentage margin in 2008 got the most money."

Large Democratic donors did well, too, including Solyndra owner George Kaiser, Tesla Motors owners Leon Musk, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, NRG Energy owners Warren Buffett, Steven Cohen and Carl Icahn, and Fisker Automotive's Al Gore.

The Obama economic policy did not help those who were worst off, failed to revive the economy, sank the U.S. more steeply in debt, and rewarded Obama's friends and supporters. By all means, let's focus on it. 

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

It is true that voters' unhappiness with high unemployment and slow growth poses a challenge for President Obama as he seeks re-election. But for Mitt Romney and the GOP to take advantage of this potential opening, they'll have to do more than chant the word "economy" like a mantra. They have to make the case that their policies will work better than Obama's.

And what might Romney's proposed economic policies be? Why, they're basically the same as those of George W. Bush, only worse.

Just as Obama owns the recession and the slow recovery, Bush owns the financial crisis that sent the slumping economy over a cliff. But for all his sins -- the gratuitous tax cuts, the off-budget wars, the defiance of basic arithmetic -- Bush at least demonstrated a certain empathy for Americans who struggle to make ends meet. One of his budget-busting initiatives, for example, was expanding Medicare to cover prescription drugs without worrying about how this much-needed new benefit would be paid for.

It's safe to predict that Romney would never make such a gesture out of compassion for the beleaguered middle class. To this day, he refuses to take back his criticism of Obama for bailing out General Motors and Chrysler -- even though letting the companies fail would have meant the extinction of the U.S. auto industry and the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

It is a measure of Romney's ideological stubbornness that even with Chrysler rebounding under new ownership and GM reporting record profits, he still insists that his view -- let the companies go bankrupt so the "creative destruction" of capitalism could work its magic -- was correct.

Romney is something of an expert on creative destruction, I guess, having orchestrated a good deal of it while running the private-equity firm Bain Capital. The Obama campaign recently released an ad about one of Bain's less successful acquisitions, a small steel mill in Kansas City called GST Steel.

The company, which was more than 100 years old, failed after a decade under Bain's ownership; GST's 750 employees lost their jobs, pensions and health benefits. Bain, however, made money, investing $8 million in the company and taking out $4 million in profits and $4.5 million in management fees. The Romney campaign contends that GST, with its unionized workforce, could not compete with cheap foreign steel being dumped on the market. The Obama campaign alleges that Bain burdened GST with crushing debt while sucking the company's coffers dry.

Is this the genius of free markets at work, or is it "vulture capitalism" run amok? Let's have that argument. Please.

Let's also have a long, detailed discussion of Romney's economic plans versus Obama's. Romney wants to make tax rates for the wealthy even lower than they are now; Obama wants a small increase for those making more than $1 million a year, whom he challenges to pay "their fair share." Romney's entire economic plan, basically, involves tax cuts and deregulation -- in other words, a repeat of the Bush-era policies that led to the crisis.

Does Romney have any fresh ideas? Well, when he was governor of Massachusetts, he was smart enough to see that universal health coverage would not only improve the lives of the uninsured but also help rein in runaway medical costs. He found the solution in an innovative idea developed in Republican-leaning think tanks: an individual health insurance mandate.

It worked. In fact, it was Romney's greatest policy success as a public official. But now he doesn't talk about it much.

My guess is that Republicans won't want to talk about the past or the future in much detail. They'd like to keep things blurry, so that we only see Romney in broad outline: a successful businessman who'll put us back in business. For details, we'll mail you the prospectus.

I can't help but think of the "prosperity theology" movement, or scam, in which preachers convince congregants that God's will is for Christians to be rich -- and that the way to become rich is to put lots of money in the collection plate. It's not believable unless the preacher looks and acts the part. Maybe he lives in a mansion. Maybe his wife drives "a couple of Cadillacs."

Actually, it's not believable even then. 

Copyright 2012, Washington Post Writers Group

A much updated version of slumming has been taking place in Manhattan, where Facebook is arranging its initial public offering. This time, though, it's the super-rich visitor, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is dressed in rags -- his trademark T-shirt and hoodie. The Wall Street investors currying his favor are the ones in expensive business suits.

What Zuckerberg's costume says is: "They need me. I don't need them." Like the tuxedoed waiters scurrying about the four-star restaurants that tech tycoons visit in jeans and baseball caps, Wall Street heavies are merely another kind of servant. Of course, most eyes stay dry at images of investment bankers in the top half of the top 1 percent being dissed by a kid in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent.

Less appetizing is the con perpetrated on Facebook users. The entire wealth of the enterprise is based on the munchkins' willingness to surrender their privacy and friends' names to Facebook -- data to be packaged a thousand ways and sold to the highest bidder. To use the users, Zuckerberg must get them to trust him, hence the after-school sweats.

Elsewhere on Facebook's upper deck, another founder, Eduardo Saverin, has just renounced his American citizenship, a mere 14 years after the Brazil native obtained it. Saverin denies that he became a citizen of Singapore to avoid the American taxes he'd surely pay after the spectacular stock offering. Funny how no one believes him.

From the annals of ingratitude: Under a kidnapping threat, Saverin's wealthy family left Brazil for the safety of Miami. Eduardo later attended Harvard. There he met Zuckerberg. Together they created Facebook and grew the company in Menlo Park, Calif. The United States provided Saverin with police protection, schooling, contacts, the fertile tech soil of Silicon Valley and financial markets. Who has been paying for this stuff? The honchos who stay put, for sure, but mostly the 99 percent.

On the corporate level, tech giant Apple has apparently mastered the art of moving profits earned in the United States to foreign tax havens. The magic trick works best in the digital economy, where the source of wealth -- royalties, intellectual property, and downloaded songs and software -- can't so easily be pinned to any earthbound set of coordinates. It's much harder to hide the money when your products are tractors or cardboard boxes, or you sell things out of buildings.

Thus, Wal-Mart last year paid taxes at a rate of 24 percent on its worldwide profits. Apple was taxed at a rate of 9.8 percent. Had Apple not routed the dough through certain foreign addresses, its check to the IRS last year would have been $2.4 billion higher than it was, according to economist Martin A. Sullivan, formerly of the Treasury Department. Nonetheless, Apple's late founder, Steve Jobs, dressed in his trademark jeans and black turtleneck, would complain bitterly about the taxes his company paid.

America educates the mathematicians, engineers and other workers who make these tech successes possible. It guards their glassy corporate facilities and their 7,000-square-foot homes. And the minute some foreigner tries to steal their intellectual property, the companies call on the expensive apparatus in Washington to stop it.

Be prepared for more Silicon slumming by zillionaires in their sweats. They are just happy-go-lucky peasants like the rest of us, so we have to be on their side, right? Wrong. 

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

While the unemployment rate had fallen from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent, 342,000 workers had stopped looking for work. They had just dropped out of the labor market.

Only 63.6 percent of the U.S. working age population is now in the labor force, the lowest level since December 1981.

During the Reagan, Bush I and Clinton years, participation in the labor force rose steadily to a record 67 percent. The plunge since has been almost uninterrupted.

Here is a major cause of the economic malaise of the 21st century, a condition over which a president has little control. A shrinking share of our population is carrying an ever-expanding army of dependents.

If this were a result of American women going home to have kids, that would be, as it was after World War II, a manifestation of national vigor and health.

But that is not the case here.

The number of Americans of working age not in the labor force grew in April from 87,897,000 to 88,419,000 -- by an astonishing 522,000. This is an immense army for the rest of society to carry.

Why are Americans dropping out?

Some have given up looking for jobs in towns they grew up in, because the jobs are gone and not coming back, and they don't want to leave. Some are rejecting the low-wage unskilled work being offered, because the alternative -- unemployment checks and federal and state welfare -- is not all that torturous.

With some, the work incentive was never implanted. With others, the option of moving back in with the parents is not all that terrible.

America, it seems, is becoming less like the country we grew up in, in its attitudes about work and idleness, and more like Europe.

Whatever its causes, this social and economic torpor that seems beyond the capacity of presidents to correct or cure is a dark cloud over the hopes of Barack Obama for a second term.

And yet another ominous cloud, no longer on the far horizon, is now directly above: the impending departure from the labor force of 70 million baby boomers in the next two decades.

According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, from Jan. 1, 1930, to Dec. 31, 1935, there were 13 million births in the U.S. From January 1940 through December 1945, there were 16 million.

This was the Silent Generation, born in Depression and war. It never produced a president, and never will, unless Ron Paul catches fire pretty quickly. The Greatest Generation gave us six presidents, starting with JFK and ending with Bush I. Our three most recent presidents -- Bill Clinton, Bush II, Barack Obama -- are all baby boomers

And here we come to the heart of our next economic crisis.

If one adds up all the children born between Jan. 1, 1946 and Jan. 1, 1965, the era of the great American baby boom, the total comes to 77 million babies born in the United States.

Why is this so significant now?

Because this year, 2012, the first wave of baby boomers, all those born in 1946, like Clinton and George W. Bush, will reach 66, and eligibility for full Social Security and Medicare benefits. The boomers, en masse, will start moving off payrolls onto pension rolls.

Let us assume the 77 million boomers are down to 72 million. This means that over the next 20 years, boomers will be retiring and reaching eligibility for Social Security and Medicare at a rate of 3.6 million a year, or 300,000 a month, or 10,000 every day.

Three hundred thousand a month leaving the labor force may help to explain its shrinkage. And as the boomers are the best-paid, best-educated generation we produced, the loss of their collective skills, abilities and tax contributions will be as heavy a blow to the nation as the funding of their Medicare and Social Security will be a burden to the taxpayers they leave behind in the labor force.

Since Roe v. Wade, abortions have carried off 53 million of the generations that were to replace the boomers. While those 53 million lost have been partially replaced by 40 million immigrants, legal and illegal, our recent immigrants have not exhibited the same income- or tax-producing capacity as boomers.

In 1965, LBJ announced his plan to convert our ordinary society into a Great Society. Since then, trillions have been spent.

The fruits of that immense investment? The illegitimacy rate, dropout rate, crime rate and incarceration rate have set new records, as the test scores of high school students have plummeted to new lows.

Our labor force is shrinking, the number of dependent U.S. adults is growing, our social programs are failing, and our best educated and most productive generation is retiring.

To borrow from Merle Haggard, "Are the good times really over for good?" 

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

It was an important speech, not only because it seems to have closed the gap between Romney and evangelical Christians but also because it spelled out major themes in Mitt Romney's understanding of America.

Romney: "You know who you are. And you know whom you will serve. Not all colleges instill that kind of confidence . . . ."

This is a truism. Most American universities seek to graduate men and women who are as committed to secularism as nearly all the members of faculty are. In contrast, at traditional Christian and Jewish schools, the aim is, as Romney said, to produce students who know "whom [they] will serve."

What Romney is asking is this: If one is not morally accountable to God, to whom or what is one morally accountable? Most universities will respond: to one's conscience. But those who adhere to Judeo-Christian values do not trust the conscience alone. What Nazi or Communist mass murderer was not at peace with his conscience? The conscience is as easily manipulated as the heart (the heart being the other guide to behavior among most college graduates).

Romney: "Moral certainty, clear standards, and a commitment to spiritual ideals will set you apart in a world that searches for meaning."
The death of God has not only led to moral uncertainty; the secular left actually boasts of its moral uncertainty. Unlike the religious, who have a black and white view of moral issues (so the left tells us), those on the left struggle with moral complexity. But this is self-delusion. The left is as morally certain about its positions as the most fundamentalist Christian. Where is the left's moral uncertainty about same-sex marriage? About abolishing capital punishment? About race-based affirmative action? About higher taxes? Indeed, about anything the left believes in?

Romney: "That said, your values will not always be the object of public admiration. In fact, the more you live by your beliefs, the more you will endure the censure of the world."

Is that ever true. Those of us who adhere to Judeo-Christian values and live a religious life are mocked as fools when not dismissed as dangerous. If you believe that nature was designed by a Creator, you are regarded as an anti-science buffoon. If you get your values from the Bible, you are considered a living anachronism.

Romney: "Harvard historian David Landes devoted his lifelong study to understanding why some civilizations rise, and why others falter. His conclusion: Culture makes all the difference. Not natural resources, not geography, but what people believe and value. . . . For those who graduate from high school, get a full-time job, and marry before they have their first child, the probability that they will be poor is 2 percent. But, if those things are absent, 76 percent will be poor. Culture matters."

This is the key to understanding the underclass here and in Europe. But it is the antithesis of what is taught at American universities. They -- and the rest of the left -- teach that it is not values or culture that most determines human behavior. Violent crime is not caused by a murderer's lack of moral values, father, self-discipline, church life, or marriage, but by poverty and/or racism.

Romney: "Central to America's rise to global leadership is our Judeo-Christian tradition . . . ."

Exactly right. Every free country on earth was formed by Christianity or shaped by a Christian country that imposed it (India and Japan, for example). And the freest of them all, America, has been the most Judeo-based Christian country in the world.

Romney: "The American culture promotes personal responsibility, the dignity of work, the value of education, the merit of service, devotion to a purpose greater than self, and, at the foundation, the pre-eminence of the family."

And each one of these values has been under siege by the left. The left undermines personal responsibility by excusing the irresponsibility of all but white Christian males; undermines the dignity of work with ever-increasing entitlements; shifts "the merit of service" from individuals and communal institutions to the state; and weakens the family by strengthening people's reliance on the government, and by removing all stigma to unwed motherhood.

Romney: "From the beginning, this nation trusted in God, not man."

This is why one of the mottos of this country is "In God We Trust." This is the heart of the cultural civil war in which America is now engaged. Do human rights come from the Creator or from men?

Romney: "People of different faiths, like yours and mine, sometimes wonder where we can meet in common purpose, when there are so many differences in creed and theology."

A very significant statement -- a major Mormon figure stating that mainstream Christians and Mormons have "different faiths." But even more important is his truly American realization that all Americans, of every faith (including Islam, one might add), and even those who have no formal religion, "can meet in common purpose." And that purpose is living by and promulgating the American value system: "Liberty," "In God We Trust," and "E Pluribus Unum."

Barack Obama would not have given this speech. Making that clear will make Mitt Romney the next president. 

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Aaron's only hope of not dying behind bars is a presidential commutation. President George W. Bush might have granted him a pardon. But he didn't, The Washington Post and ProPublica reported Sunday, after Department of Justice pardon attorney Ronald Rodgers withheld information as he recommended that Bush deny Aaron's petition.

Rodgers remains the pardon attorney under the Obama administration.

For more than a decade, I've urged whoever was president to commute Aaron's sentence. It's been an uphill battle. Bush rejected 7,500 applications and commuted 11 sentences. Barack Obama has rejected nearly 3,800 requests and commuted only one sentence.

During the Bush years, I heard rumors that the administration had seriously considered Aaron's petition. In 2004, a previous pardon attorney recommended against clemency. In search of more favorable recommendations, the Washington Post story confirms, the Bush administration asked the Justice Department to reconsider Aaron's petition.

When officials consider a pardon, two people can swing a request in an applicant's favor: the sentencing judge and the U.S. attorney. If either one opposes a commutation, it isn't likely to happen. During Bush's first term, sentencing judge Charles Butler would not take a position on Aaron's petition. In 2008, however, Butler told the White House he did not think it would be unfair to release Aaron immediately, a weak sign of approval.

Whereas her predecessor opposed a pardon, U.S. Attorney Deborah J. Rhodes recommended that the White House commute Aaron's sentence. Because Aaron did not "accept responsibility" for his actions, however, she favored resentencing Aaron to a 25-year term, which would result in his release in 2014.

Instead, Rodgers resent the 2004 recommendation for denial to the White House. Wrongly, he claimed that Rhodes believed that Aaron's commutation request was "about 10 years premature."

Samuel Morison, a former lawyer in the pardon attorney's office, told me he believes that Bush would have commuted the sentence if Rodgers accurately had conveyed case facts.

I never have argued that Aaron did not deserve prison time. He broke the law, for which there are consequences. Those consequences, however, tend to fall disproportionately on black men.

Obama has a decision to make. The president has the power to pardon when the criminal justice system overreaches. The court put away a first-time nonviolent offender for life, with no chance of parole, but because the feds do not want to admit they made a mistake, Rodgers and his ilk have been willing to let a young man rot in prison for the rest of his life.

The only question is: Will the president let him get away with it? 

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

The decision to deliver the commencement address at Liberty University, founded by the late Jerry Falwell, did not promise much better. It is the type of venue chosen by a chain-smoking Republican campaign operative who once met an evangelical in 1984 and has felt no need to renew the acquaintance. "We need to get those born againers," one imagines the pitch. "Don't they all like Falwell?" Never mind that there are dozens of respected evangelical academic settings in battleground states with less culture war baggage.

But a good speech can make use of any setting. And Romney's Liberty University address on Saturday was more than good. It gave evidence of creative, lively intelligence somewhere near the center of the Romney campaign machine.

The speech performed a number of moves at a high degree of difficulty. Its language was fresh and graceful. The students heard that their faith "demands and creates heroic souls" -- a phrase that deserves remembering. Romney strategically conceded the theological tensions between Mormons and evangelicals -- "people of different faiths, like yours and mine" -- but described a broad overlap on matters of service and morality. His depiction of this shared moral ideal was ethically rich: "justice for the persecuted, compassion for the needy and the sick, or mercy for the child waiting to be born."

Romney managed to praise Rick Santorum while demonstrating an appealing alternative to Santorum's tone. Romney emphasized that "men and women of every faith, and good people with none at all, sincerely strive to do right and lead a purpose-driven life" -- this last phrase an homage to the title of pastor Rick Warren's best-seller. There were deft references to evangelical heroes -- William Wilberforce, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis, Charles Colson -- throughout the speech.

But the most interesting element of the Liberty address was its main argument. Romney claimed that culture is the key to civilizational success -- and that American culture is shaped by Jewish and Christian values such as the priority of the individual, personal responsibility and the dignity of work. These values, in turn, are strengthened in religious institutions and traditional families. Agree or disagree, Romney set out a sophisticated case for cultural conservatism: that liberal public institutions depend on virtues and values shaped in conservative social institutions.

Contrast this to the way President Obama has often approached social issues. He justified his recent switch on gay marriage, in part, as the direct application of Christian teaching. "When we think about our faith," he said, "the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it's also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated." In 2008, he justified his support for civil unions by saying: "If people find that controversial, then I would just refer them to the Sermon on the Mount, which I think is, in my mind, for my faith, more central than an obscure passage in Romans." During this year's National Prayer Breakfast, Obama justified raising taxes on the rich by contending it "coincides with Jesus' teaching that 'for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.'"

Agree or disagree with the policies Obama recommends, his arguments can't be called sophisticated. They are the liberal political application of a "What Would Jesus Do?" wristband. In a mirror reflection of the religious right, Obama has a tendency to engage in partisan proof texting -- which is divisive in service to any ideology. Saying "I would just refer them to the Sermon on the Mount" is a claim of divine authority that short-circuits democratic debate. Even when Obama changes his political views, Jesus somehow comes around to agreeing with him.

Injecting religion into politics is always a tricky business. Religiously informed moral beliefs about human rights and dignity have public consequences -- properly debated on issues from abortion to gay rights. But the use of faith and scripture as partisan trump cards is bad for religion and for politics. On recent evidence, it is Romney who is more sensitive to the danger. 

Copyright 2012, Washington Post Writers Group

The number three Democrat in the House of Representatives differs somewhat with President Obama on the issue of gay marriage.

James Clyburn welcomes the president's support, but feels it doesn't go far enough.

Representative Clyburn is joining us now from his home state of South Carolina.

Congressman, thanks very much for coming in.

REP. JAMES CLYBURN (D), SOUTH CAROLINA: Thank you.

BLITZER: Tell us why you believe the president does not go far enough in his declaration saying that he personally supports gay marriage?

CLYBURN: Well, thank you so much for having me, Wolf.

I don't disagree with the president. What I said was and I genuinely feel that, as a 71-year-old growing up -- having grown up here in South Carolina, I can remember when marriage between two people of different races was not allowed in South Carolina.

But it was allowed in other states. So I think that when you have something like this, you have to be very careful that you don't have a state-by-state approach that could very well have people jumping across state lines, having people's conditions changing late in life, and finding out that they're in the state where certain things may not be recognized and it could have very severe legal consequences going forward.

So I just think we need to really look at this issue, study it very well, and be very, very careful how we implement it.

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: Because I just want to make it clear -- Congressman, I just want to make it clear, the president, in announcing his support for same-sex marriage, said this was a personal view but it should be left up to the states.

You disagree with him on that. You believe this should be a federal issue not left up to the states because you see it as a civil rights issue; is that right?

CLYBURN: Yes, it is personal with me as well.

And so -- civil rights are very personal with me as well. So if we are going to say this is in fact a civil rights issue, then it ought to be an issue for all Americans, not just based upon what state you might live in. That's what I'm talking about.

We have been down that road, where my rights here in South Carolina were different from rights in, say, a New York or Pennsylvania. I don't think that we can tread too lightly here. We have got to be very, very careful of how we put these kinds of issues together.

Look, I just signed the amicus brief on DOMA, Defense of Marriage Act, because I want the federal courts to rule that law that I voted for several years ago, but have evolved to the point where I am today. So I am all for the federal courts determining that to be unconstitutional. That's why I signed that.

I supported President Clinton's position some years ago when it came to don't ask, don't tell. I voted against don't ask, don't tell last year last year or whenever it was because I had evolved to that point. This is an issue that all of us know that's been challenging all of our lives. I'm a preacher's kid, born and raised in the...

(CROSSTALK)

CLYBURN: But I have been married to the same woman for 51 years.

So we all are difficult in how we approach this. And I just think that we have to be very careful that we don't tread on people's rights.

BLITZER: Well, Congressman, it raises the issue because as you well know -- and you're in South Carolina -- and a lot of African-American ministers, pastors this past Sunday, they were speaking out against the president's support for same-sex marriage.

Here's a blunt question. If the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King were alive today, today, where would he stand on the issue of same-sex marriage?

CLYBURN: I think Dr. King would have evolved, much like President Obama has evolved, much like I have evolved.

Al Sharpton, a lot of us have evolved on this. I don't believe that at the time that Dr. King passed away or was taken from us that he was then where I am today. I just don't believe that. I don't remember him ever addressing this in any of his writings or speeches, but I believe that all of us grow

I think it was Thomas Jefferson who once said one should not be expected to wear the same jacket as a man that he wore as a child. That's the way I feel. And I think that I have grown to a different size jacket today when it comes to this question.

BLITZER: Will you introduce legislation in the House of Representatives that would allow same-sex marriage to go forward across the country?

CLYBURN: Well, once again, I'm not going to do anything willy-nilly.

I'm going to sit down with members. I would hope that it's an issue that could be dealt with in a bipartisan way. But there's a big difference in us doing something in statute and something being determined constitutionally.

That's why I signed the amicus brief, because I want this issue addressed by the judicial body that will get the opportunity to determine what I may or may not have done is in fact constitutional. That's -- I'm big for health reform. And now we all sit and wait with bated breath to see what the Supreme Court is going to do about the constitutionality of that.

So it's one thing to do something statutorily. It's something else for the constitutionality to be determined. I just think that this is an issue that we have to read very lightly when we're dealing in it.

BLITZER: Hey, Congressman, thanks as usual for coming into THE SITUATION ROOM.

CLYBURN: Oh, thank you so much for having me.

BLITZER: Jim Clyburn is the assistant Democratic leader in the House of Representatives. 

Joining me now to discuss, Democratic Congresswoman Donna Edwards of Maryland and Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who is a member of the House Republican leadership team.

Is there?

REP. CATHY MCMORRIS RODGERS (R), WASHINGTON: Absolutely not. It is a myth.

(CROSSTALK)

KING: It's a myth. If it is a myth -- let me -- I am sorry to interrupt, but if it is a myth, one of the reasons this myth or whatever you want to call it gets perpetuated or exaggerated or amplified is because you have a team that is running for president of the United States.

You heard that conference call. They should know his position on the Lilly Ledbetter Act, should they not?

MCMORRIS RODGERS: You know, that was a bill that was passed and signed into law early 2009. It has been several years. Republicans absolutely support equal pay for equal work.

And he very quickly came along after that and said, you know what, no one is proposing that we repeal or change the Lilly Ledbetter.

KING: His staff didn't do him a favor there.

(CROSSTALK)

MCMORRIS RODGERS: Well, but I think your list is incomplete when you look at the issues that are really impacting women. It is the economy, it is jobs, it is the debt. That's what women are concerned about as we head into the election this fall.

KING: Well, and Governor Romney makes that point, Congresswoman.

Now, you are the Democrat. You want to take issue with his record. But listen to Governor Romney here when he talks in public about what -- the mythical, he says, war on women.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROMNEY: There has been some talk about a war on women. The real war on women has been waged by the Obama administration's failure on the economy. Do you know how many women, what percent of the job losses were women? -- 92.3 percent.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Are women going to make their choices -- and, look, there are Democratic women and Republican women who have made their choices. In the middle, people who are undecided and back and forth, are they going to make their choices about what is a liberal-conservative policy divide, like whether the government should fund Planned Parenthood, or are they going to make it on the economic circumstances of their life come October and November?

REP. DONNA EDWARDS (D), MARYLAND: Well, a lot of those decisions in fact are economic.

I mean, the fact that Governor Romney can't decide what -- whether he supports the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, when women are making 77 cents on the dollar is a shame. Even in Ms. McMorris Rodgers' state, women there make 63 cents on the dollar. In Maryland, it is 83 cents. It is unacceptable.

And Governor Romney should have a position on that. When it comes to economics, when a family knows that they're getting 25 percent less than they ought to because we don't have fair pay in this country, that's an economic question for women and for families.

And so I think it is all fair game. And contraception, if you can't make decisions about your own private health care and about contraception, what that means is that you can't make decisions about education, about jobs, about planning your family. And I think it is really unacceptable for Governor Romney to embrace a Republican budget -- in fact, you can call it a war or you can call it whatever you want.

The facts speak for themselves, where women's educational opportunities are cut back, where there are cutbacks on things like child care that women really depend on, where two-thirds of women actually receive Pell Grants, and yet the Republican budget that Governor Romney endorses and embraces slashes Pell Grants.

KING: You hear a fairness argument, and she says fairness, with a special hit on women in the Republican budget.

MCMORRIS RODGERS: Right. Equal pay for equal work, there's no controversy.

And when you look at women that are in -- with similar education, similar experience on the job market, the pay gap that is referenced very quickly closes. Those are not an apples-to-apples comparison.

When you look at the contraceptive issue, no one is talking about taking away contraceptive coverage for women. It was President Obama -- it was President Obama through Health and Human Services that proposed to change the rule regarding insurance policies and the coverage of contraception.

It was President Obama that proposed that change. But Republicans...

KING: And Republicans had a great issue there when he was at war with Catholic and other religious institutions. They had a great issue. Did they overplay their hand with the Blunt amendment, which would allow anybody to say, I have a moral objection, not just a religious institution?

If it was John King, Inc., John King, Inc., could say, well, I don't like contraception; therefore, I'm not going to put it on my health care plan. Did the Republicans overplay what was a winning hand?

MCMORRIS RODGERS: I think President -- I think it is important to remember that it was President Obama that initiated that whole debate.

But Republicans are about getting people back to work. That's the best thing we could do for women. It's the best thing we could do for families. Fifty percent of children right now that are graduating from college are unemployed, underemployed. We have had the longest streak of unemployment since the Great Depression, of high unemployment, over 8 percent.

We have a record debt this president has accumulated, $5 trillion in debt. These are the issues that women and families are concerned about. And women are the decision-makers in this country.

(CROSSTALK)

KING: So then why?

As we finish the conversation, let's put these numbers up. If you look at the registered voters' choice for president, among men, it's essentially a split. That's a statistical tie. Look at that gender gap. Look at that gender gap, 55 percent for the president, 39 percent for Governor Romney. Why?

EDWARDS: Well, the reason there is a gender gap is because women know that under -- under the economic recovery, where we were losing 750,000 jobs when the president took office, that the first thing he did was signed into law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

The next thing that he did was embrace a stimulus package to make sure that our educators, many of whom are women, continued to work. He has embraced legislation that -- to ensure that women are getting back to work, four million jobs created in this economy, over 25 months of growth, and 1.2 million of those are women.

I mean, the president has actually embraced policies that do great service to women, whereas you just look at the plain language of the Republican budget, and they're slashing...

(CROSSTALK)

KING: How can Governor Romney close that gap?

MCMORRIS RODGERS: Well, he is closing that gap.

And when -- and it is President Obama's policies that have failed, failed women, failed families, failed Americans and getting people back to work. I think what the Democrats recognize and why they have calculated this and put together this war on women is because they know the Republicans won the women's vote in 2010.

It was the first time since Ronald Reagan the Republicans won the women's vote. And they know that they have to do better going...

(CROSSTALK)

EDWARDS: They won't win the women's vote by taking away contraception and by taking away Pell Grants and student loans.

(CROSSTALK)

MCMORRIS RODGERS: They will win the women's vote by getting Americans back to work.

(CROSSTALK)

EDWARDS: ... small businesses for women. I mean, that is not a way to win the women's vote, by taking away their...

(CROSSTALK)

MCMORRIS RODGERS: Economic opportunities will win the women's vote.

KING: One hundred and -- 176 days to have this debate. We will bring you back.

EDWARDS: Thank you.

KING: Enjoyed it. Thank you both for coming. Thank you. 

1:28 P.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you so much. (Applause.) Thank you. Please, please have a seat. Thank you. (Applause.)

Thank you, President Spar, trustees, President Bollinger. Hello, Class of 2012! (Applause.) Congratulations on reaching this day. Thank you for the honor of being able to be a part of it.

There are so many people who are proud of you -- your parents, family, faculty, friends -- all who share in this achievement. So please give them a big round of applause. (Applause.) To all the moms who are here today, you could not ask for a better Mother’s Day gift than to see all of these folks graduate. (Applause.)

I have to say, though, whenever I come to these things, I start thinking about Malia and Sasha graduating, and I start tearing up and -- (laughter) -- it's terrible. I don't know how you guys are holding it together. (Laughter.)

I will begin by telling a hard truth: I’m a Columbia college graduate. (Laughter and applause.) I know there can be a little bit of a sibling rivalry here. (Laughter.) But I’m honored nevertheless to be your commencement speaker today -- although I’ve got to say, you set a pretty high bar given the past three years. (Applause.) Hillary Clinton -- (applause) -- Meryl Streep -- (applause) -- Sheryl Sandberg -- these are not easy acts to follow. (Applause.)

But I will point out Hillary is doing an extraordinary job as one of the finest Secretaries of State America has ever had. (Applause.) We gave Meryl the Presidential Medal of Arts and Humanities. (Applause.) Sheryl is not just a good friend; she’s also one of our economic advisers. So it’s like the old saying goes -- keep your friends close, and your Barnard commencement speakers even closer. (Applause.) There's wisdom in that. (Laughter.)

Now, the year I graduated -- this area looks familiar -- (laughter) -- the year I graduated was 1983, the first year women were admitted to Columbia. (Applause.) Sally Ride was the first American woman in space. Music was all about Michael and the Moonwalk. (Laughter.)

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do it! (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: No Moonwalking. (Laughter.) No Moonwalking today. (Laughter.)

We had the Walkman, not iPods. Some of the streets around here were not quite so inviting. (Laughter.) Times Square was not a family destination. (Laughter.) So I know this is all ancient history. Nothing worse than commencement speakers droning on about bygone days. (Laughter.) But for all the differences, the Class of 1983 actually had a lot in common with all of you. For we, too, were heading out into a world at a moment when our country was still recovering from a particularly severe economic recession. It was a time of change. It was a time of uncertainty. It was a time of passionate political debates.

You can relate to this because just as you were starting out finding your way around this campus, an economic crisis struck that would claim more than 5 million jobs before the end of your freshman year. Since then, some of you have probably seen parents put off retirement, friends struggle to find work. And you may be looking toward the future with that same sense of concern that my generation did when we were sitting where you are now.

Of course, as young women, you’re also going to grapple with some unique challenges, like whether you’ll be able to earn equal pay for equal work; whether you’ll be able to balance the demands of your job and your family; whether you’ll be able to fully control decisions about your own health.

And while opportunities for women have grown exponentially over the last 30 years, as young people, in many ways you have it even tougher than we did. This recession has been more brutal, the job losses steeper. Politics seems nastier. Congress more gridlocked than ever. Some folks in the financial world have not exactly been model corporate citizens. (Laughter.)

No wonder that faith in our institutions has never been lower, particularly when good news doesn’t get the same kind of ratings as bad news anymore. Every day you receive a steady stream of sensationalism and scandal and stories with a message that suggest change isn’t possible; that you can’t make a difference; that you won’t be able to close that gap between life as it is and life as you want it to be.

My job today is to tell you don’t believe it. Because as tough as things have been, I am convinced you are tougher. I’ve seen your passion and I’ve seen your service. I’ve seen you engage and I’ve seen you turn out in record numbers. I’ve heard your voices amplified by creativity and a digital fluency that those of us in older generations can barely comprehend. I’ve seen a generation eager, impatient even, to step into the rushing waters of history and change its course.

And that defiant, can-do spirit is what runs through the veins of American history. It’s the lifeblood of all our progress. And it is that spirit which we need your generation to embrace and rekindle right now.

See, the question is not whether things will get better -- they always do. The question is not whether we’ve got the solutions to our challenges -- we’ve had them within our grasp for quite some time. We know, for example, that this country would be better off if more Americans were able to get the kind of education that you’ve received here at Barnard -- (applause) -- if more people could get the specific skills and training that employers are looking for today.

We know that we’d all be better off if we invest in science and technology that sparks new businesses and medical breakthroughs; if we developed more clean energy so we could use less foreign oil and reduce the carbon pollution that’s threatening our planet. (Applause.)

We know that we’re better off when there are rules that stop big banks from making bad bets with other people’s money and -- (applause) -- when insurance companies aren’t allowed to drop your coverage when you need it most or charge women differently from men. (Applause.) Indeed, we know we are better off when women are treated fairly and equally in every aspect of American life -- whether it’s the salary you earn or the health decisions you make. (Applause.)

We know these things to be true. We know that our challenges are eminently solvable. The question is whether together, we can muster the will -- in our own lives, in our common institutions, in our politics -- to bring about the changes we need. And I’m convinced your generation possesses that will. And I believe that the women of this generation -- that all of you will help lead the way. (Applause.)

Now, I recognize that’s a cheap applause line when you're giving a commencement at Barnard. (Laughter.) It’s the easy thing to say. But it’s true. It is -- in part, it is simple math. Today, women are not just half this country; you’re half its workforce. (Applause.) More and more women are out-earning their husbands. You’re more than half of our college graduates, and master’s graduates, and PhDs. (Applause.) So you’ve got us outnumbered. (Laughter.)

After decades of slow, steady, extraordinary progress, you are now poised to make this the century where women shape not only their own destiny but the destiny of this nation and of this world.

But how far your leadership takes this country, how far it takes this world -- well, that will be up to you. You’ve got to want it. It will not be handed to you. And as someone who wants that future -- that better future -- for you, and for Malia and Sasha, as somebody who’s had the good fortune of being the husband and the father and the son of some strong, remarkable women, allow me to offer just a few pieces of advice. That's obligatory. (Laughter.) Bear with me.

My first piece of advice is this: Don’t just get involved. Fight for your seat at the table. Better yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table. (Applause.)

It’s been said that the most important role in our democracy is the role of citizen. And indeed, it was 225 years ago today that the Constitutional Convention opened in Philadelphia, and our founders, citizens all, began crafting an extraordinary document. Yes, it had its flaws -- flaws that this nation has strived to protect (perfect) over time. Questions of race and gender were unresolved. No woman’s signature graced the original document -- although we can assume that there were founding mothers whispering smarter things in the ears of the founding fathers. (Applause.) I mean, that's almost certain.

What made this document special was that it provided the space -- the possibility -- for those who had been left out of our charter to fight their way in. It provided people the language to appeal to principles and ideals that broadened democracy’s reach. It allowed for protest, and movements, and the dissemination of new ideas that would repeatedly, decade after decade, change the world -- a constant forward movement that continues to this day.

Our founders understood that America does not stand still; we are dynamic, not static. We look forward, not back. And now that new doors have been opened for you, you’ve got an obligation to seize those opportunities.

You need to do this not just for yourself but for those who don’t yet enjoy the choices that you’ve had, the choices you will have. And one reason many workplaces still have outdated policies is because women only account for 3 percent of the CEOs at Fortune 500 companies. One reason we’re actually refighting long-settled battles over women’s rights is because women occupy fewer than one in five seats in Congress.

Now, I’m not saying that the only way to achieve success is by climbing to the top of the corporate ladder or running for office -- although, let’s face it, Congress would get a lot more done if you did. (Laughter and applause.) That I think we’re sure about. But if you decide not to sit yourself at the table, at the very least you’ve got to make sure you have a say in who does. It matters.

Before women like Barbara Mikulski and Olympia Snowe and others got to Congress, just to take one example, much of federally-funded research on diseases focused solely on their effects on men. It wasn’t until women like Patsy Mink and Edith Green got to Congress and passed Title IX, 40 years ago this year, that we declared women, too, should be allowed to compete and win on America’s playing fields. (Applause.) Until a woman named Lilly Ledbetter showed up at her office and had the courage to step up and say, you know what, this isn’t right, women weren’t being treated fairly -- we lacked some of the tools we needed to uphold the basic principle of equal pay for equal work.

So don’t accept somebody else’s construction of the way things ought to be. It’s up to you to right wrongs. It’s up to you to point out injustice. It’s up to you to hold the system accountable and sometimes upend it entirely. It’s up to you to stand up and to be heard, to write and to lobby, to march, to organize, to vote. Don’t be content to just sit back and watch.

Those who oppose change, those who benefit from an unjust status quo, have always bet on the public’s cynicism or the public's complacency. Throughout American history, though, they have lost that bet, and I believe they will this time as well. (Applause.) But ultimately, Class of 2012, that will depend on you. Don’t wait for the person next to you to be the first to speak up for what’s right. Because maybe, just maybe, they’re waiting on you.

Which brings me to my second piece of advice: Never underestimate the power of your example. The very fact that you are graduating, let alone that more women now graduate from college than men, is only possible because earlier generations of women -- your mothers, your grandmothers, your aunts -- shattered the myth that you couldn’t or shouldn’t be where you are. (Applause.)

I think of a friend of mine who’s the daughter of immigrants. When she was in high school, her guidance counselor told her, you know what, you’re just not college material. You should think about becoming a secretary. Well, she was stubborn, so she went to college anyway. She got her master’s. She ran for local office, won. She ran for state office, she won. She ran for Congress, she won. And lo and behold, Hilda Solis did end up becoming a secretary -- (laughter) -- she is America’s Secretary of Labor. (Applause.)

So think about what that means to a young Latina girl when she sees a Cabinet secretary that looks like her. (Applause.) Think about what it means to a young girl in Iowa when she sees a presidential candidate who looks like her. Think about what it means to a young girl walking in Harlem right down the street when she sees a U.N. ambassador who looks like her. Do not underestimate the power of your example.

This diploma opens up new possibilities, so reach back, convince a young girl to earn one, too. If you earned your degree in areas where we need more women -- like computer science or engineering -- (applause) -- reach back and persuade another student to study it, too. If you're going into fields where we need more women, like construction or computer engineering -- reach back, hire someone new. Be a mentor. Be a role model.

Until a girl can imagine herself, can picture herself as a computer programmer, or a combatant commander, she won’t become one. Until there are women who tell her, ignore our pop culture obsession over beauty and fashion -- (applause) -- and focus instead on studying and inventing and competing and leading, she’ll think those are the only things that girls are supposed to care about. Now, Michelle will say, nothing wrong with caring about it a little bit. (Laughter.) You can be stylish and powerful, too. (Applause.) That's Michelle’s advice. (Applause.)

And never forget that the most important example a young girl will ever follow is that of a parent. Malia and Sasha are going to be outstanding women because Michelle and Marian Robinson are outstanding women. So understand your power, and use it wisely.

My last piece of advice -- this is simple, but perhaps most important: Persevere. Persevere. Nothing worthwhile is easy. No one of achievement has avoided failure -- sometimes catastrophic failures. But they keep at it. They learn from mistakes. They don’t quit.

You know, when I first arrived on this campus, it was with little money, fewer options. But it was here that I tried to find my place in this world. I knew I wanted to make a difference, but it was vague how in fact I’d go about it. (Laughter.) But I wanted to do my part to do my part to shape a better world.

So even as I worked after graduation in a few unfulfilling jobs here in New York -- I will not list them all -- (laughter) -- even as I went from motley apartment to motley apartment, I reached out. I started to write letters to community organizations all across the country. And one day, a small group of churches on the South Side of Chicago answered, offering me work with people in neighborhoods hit hard by steel mills that were shutting down and communities where jobs were dying away.

The community had been plagued by gang violence, so once I arrived, one of the first things we tried to do was to mobilize a meeting with community leaders to deal with gangs. And I’d worked for weeks on this project. We invited the police; we made phone calls; we went to churches; we passed out flyers. The night of the meeting we arranged rows and rows of chairs in anticipation of this crowd. And we waited, and we waited. And finally, a group of older folks walked in to the hall and they sat down. And this little old lady raised her hand and asked, “Is this where the bingo game is?” (Laughter.) It was a disaster. Nobody showed up. My first big community meeting -- nobody showed up.

And later, the volunteers I worked with told me, that's it; we’re quitting. They'd been doing this for two years even before I had arrived. They had nothing to show for it. And I’ll be honest, I felt pretty discouraged as well. I didn't know what I was doing. I thought about quitting. And as we were talking, I looked outside and saw some young boys playing in a vacant lot across the street. And they were just throwing rocks up at a boarded building. They had nothing better to do -- late at night, just throwing rocks. And I said to the volunteers, “Before you quit, answer one question. What will happen to those boys if you quit? Who will fight for them if we don’t? Who will give them a fair shot if we leave?

And one by one, the volunteers decided not to quit. We went back to those neighborhoods and we kept at it. We registered new voters, and we set up after-school programs, and we fought for new jobs, and helped people live lives with some measure of dignity. And we sustained ourselves with those small victories. We didn’t set the world on fire. Some of those communities are still very poor. There are still a lot of gangs out there. But I believe that it was those small victories that helped me win the bigger victories of my last three and a half years as President.

And I wish I could say that this perseverance came from some innate toughness in me. But the truth is, it was learned. I got it from watching the people who raised me. More specifically, I got it from watching the women who shaped my life.

I grew up as the son of a single mom who struggled to put herself through school and make ends meet. She had marriages that fell apart; even went on food stamps at one point to help us get by. But she didn’t quit. And she earned her degree, and made sure that through scholarships and hard work, my sister and I earned ours. She used to wake me up when we were living overseas -- wake me up before dawn to study my English
lessons. And when I’d complain, she’d just look at me and say, “This is no picnic for me either, buster.” (Laughter.)

And my mom ended up dedicating herself to helping women
around the world access the money they needed to start their own businesses -- she was an early pioneer in microfinance. And that meant, though, that she was gone a lot, and she had her own struggles trying to figure out balancing motherhood and a career. And when she was gone, my grandmother stepped up to take care of me.

She only had a high school education. She got a job at a local bank. She hit the glass ceiling, and watched men she once trained promoted up the ladder ahead of her. But she didn’t quit. Rather than grow hard or angry each time she got passed over, she kept doing her job as best as she knew how, and ultimately ended up being vice president at the bank. She didn’t quit.

And later on, I met a woman who was assigned to advise me on my first summer job at a law firm. And she gave me such good advice that I married her. (Laughter.) And Michelle and I gave everything we had to balance our careers and a young family. But let’s face it, no matter how enlightened I must have thought myself to be, it often fell more on her shoulders when I was traveling, when I was away. I know that when she was with our girls, she’d feel guilty that she wasn’t giving enough time to her work, and when she was at her work, she’d feel guilty she wasn’t giving enough time to our girls. And both of us wished we had some superpower that would let us be in two places at once. But we persisted. We made that marriage work.

And the reason Michelle had the strength to juggle everything, and put up with me and eventually the public spotlight, was because she, too, came from a family of folks who didn’t quit -- because she saw her dad get up and go to work every day even though he never finished college, even though he had crippling MS. She saw her mother, even though she never finished college, in that school, that urban school, every day making sure Michelle and her brother were getting the education they deserved. Michelle saw how her parents never quit. They never indulged in self-pity, no matter how stacked the odds were against them. They didn't quit.

Those are the folks who inspire me. People ask me sometimes, who inspires you, Mr. President? Those quiet heroes all across this country -- some of your parents and grandparents who are sitting here -- no fanfare, no articles written about them, they just persevere. They just do their jobs. They meet their responsibilities. They don't quit. I'm only here because of them. They may not have set out to change the world, but in small, important ways, they did. They certainly changed mine.

So whether it’s starting a business, or running for office, or raising a amazing family, remember that making your mark on the world is hard. It takes patience. It takes commitment. It comes with plenty of setbacks and it comes with plenty of failures.

But whenever you feel that creeping cynicism, whenever you hear those voices say you can’t make a difference, whenever somebody tells you to set your sights lower -- the trajectory of this country should give you hope. Previous generations should give you hope. What young generations have done before should give you hope. Young folks who marched and mobilized and stood up and sat in, from Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, didn’t just do it for themselves; they did it for other people. (Applause.)

That’s how we achieved women’s rights. That's how we achieved voting rights. That's how we achieved workers’ rights. That's how we achieved gay rights. (Applause.) That’s how we’ve made this Union more perfect. (Applause.)

And if you’re willing to do your part now, if you're willing to reach up and close that gap between what America is and what America should be, I want you to know that I will be right there with you. (Applause.) If you are ready to fight for that brilliant, radically simple idea of America that no matter who you are or what you look like, no matter who you love or what God you worship, you can still pursue your own happiness, I will join you every step of the way. (Applause.)

Now more than ever -- now more than ever, America needs what you, the Class of 2012, has to offer. America needs you to reach high and hope deeply. And if you fight for your seat at the table, and you set a better example, and you persevere in what you decide to do with your life, I have every faith not only that you will succeed, but that, through you, our nation will continue to be a beacon of light for men and women, boys and girls, in every corner of the globe.

So thank you. Congratulations. (Applause.) God bless you. God bless the United States of America. (Applause.)

END
2:00 P.M. EDT 

But as a result of the six-term congressman's work as a lobbyist two decades ago for a Namibian uranium operation with ties to Iran, a GOP primary opponent and Democrats are portraying him as aWashington insider who should not get to succeed retiring Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.

Well before Flake was a leader in the campaign to eliminate the pet projects and grants that lawmakers add to spending bills, he was a registered foreign agent who represented Namibia and a uranium mine in the southern African nation that gained independence in 1990. Flake has since received $100,000 in contributions from mining interests and voted a number of times against penalties on Iran.

In Washington's revolving-door climate, it's not unusual for lawmakers and lobbyists to switch back and forth.

Rep. Jason Altmire, D-Pa., for example, began his political career as a congressional aide, then lobbied on behalf of hospitals for a decade before winning election to the House in 2006. Several lawmakers have worked as lobbyists between service in Congress, including Sens. John Thune, R-S.D., and Dan Coats, R-Ind., and Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif.

Flake says his lobbying past has never been a secret and that it was tied to his "love affair" with southern Africa, where as a young Mormon he did missionary work. He says his focus was on helping the transitional government of Namibia emerge as a democracy and develop its economy.

He says it's ridiculous to imply that his work representing Rossing Uranium, which was majority-owned by the global mining conglomerate Rio Tinto Zinc of London, played any role in his votes on Iran. He says it was only last year that he learned that the Iranian government also had a stake in the mine.

But his past has become an issue in his bid to replace Kyl, a race that could influence the presidential vote in Arizona and help determine which party controls the Senate in 2013.

Arizona has one of five Republican-held seats targeted by Democrats as takeover possibilities in November; the others are Indiana, Nevada, Maine and Massachusetts. In Arizona, Democrats are counting on Richard Carmona, surgeon general under President George W. Bush.

Democrats say Carmona, who accused the Bush administration of trying to politicize his job as the nation's top public health official, could contribute to making the traditionally Republican state competitive as President Barack Obama seeks a second term.

The last Democratic senator in Arizona was Dennis DeConcini, who left office in 1995.

According to Flake and federal records, the future congressman came to Washington as a public affairs executive with the firm of Shipley, Smoak & Henry, where he first represented Namibia.

He soon moved to Namibia as executive director of the Foundation for Democracy, a group established to draft Namibia's constitution. Flake's campaign says he worked for the foundation from April 1989 to 1990.

In 1992, Flake returned to Arizona, where he headed the Goldwater Institute, a think tank, until he was elected in 2000.

But after leaving Shipley, Smoak & Henry, Flake also owned and operated Interface Public Affairs from 1990 to 1991. Flake acknowledges that he was registered foreign agent and was paid $7,000 a month for representing Rossing Uranium Limited, which was majority-owned by Rio Tinto Zinc.

He said in his 1990 foreign agent registration with the Justice Department that his job was to "introduce the corporation and its citizenship activities within Namibia to the U.S." ... and to "attempt to promote the image ... and good relations between the United States and Namibia."

Flake said his focus was on helping lift apartheid-era penalties against the country and the mine. He said he did not know until last October that Iran owned a 15 percent stake in the Rossing Uranium, an interest that he said pre-dates the Iranian revolution that deposed the shah, an ally of the West.

"I don't know how a congressman who claims to be transparent doesn't disclose this beforehand," said real estate investor Wil Cardon, Flake's opponent in the GOP primary Aug. 28. "It makes me question every vote he has taken when it comes to Iran."

Cardon added: "It's also confusing to me that Flake has taken tens of thousands of dollars from the mining industry. From a guy who was a lobbyist before going to Washington, and claiming to fight special interests, it's interesting how beholden to special interests he has become."

Since joining Congress, Flake has received at least $97,000 from mining interests, including Rio Tinto, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracked donations through the 2010 election cycle.

He has backed legislation favorable to mining interests in Arizona. Last year Flake proposed ending a ban on uranium mining claims around the Grand Canyon. In 2009 he introduced a land swap bill that would enable Resolution Copper, an arm of Rio Tinto, to develop a mine in eastern Arizona.

Democrats also are making Flake's lobbying past an issue.

"Jeff Flake is the definition of a Washington D.C. insider," said Matt Canter, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

"He spent years as a Washington lobbyist and a registered foreign agent, doing the bidding of special interest foreign clients, before becoming a career politician who voted to benefit his former clients and refused to tell his constituents about his conflict of interest," Cantor said.

Flake's campaign denies any conflicts and says his critics are twisting facts from a background that he's never tried to hide.

"I have mentioned it in bios, I have mentioned it in numerous speeches. So this notion that I tried to hide my past is farcical," Flake said in a recent interview.

He says his record as one of a few congressmen who have repeatedly voted against sanctions for Iran is irrelevant. He says he long has opposed all such unilateral penalties, whether against Iran, Sudan, Cuba, Myanmar or any country.

That opposition, he said, dates back to his time in Namibia, where he saw the damage that sanctions can have on innocent people. 

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

The re-election campaign is running the two-minute-long ad in Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The spot offers the perspective of fired workers from a Kansas City steel company that Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney founded, took over in 1993. The company went bankrupt in 2001.

The spot attempts to undermine Romney’s business experience, which he has made a focal point of his campaign, and marks a sharp bid by the Obama campaign to define the president’s general election opponent.

But the Bain attacks are not new. Indeed, the Obama team is reprising attacks initially leveled by some of Romney’s Republican primary opponents. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich bought and released the half-hour-long “King of Bain” video that portrayed Romney as a “corporate raider,” and his super PAC aired portions of the film in television ads. Texas Gov. Rick Perry described Romney’s work at Bain as “vulture capitalism.”

The Obama spot takes a similar approach, using interviews with laid-off workers to question Romney’s business tactics. “Bain Capital walked away with a lot of money that they made off of this plant. . . . We view Mitt Romney as a job destroyer,” says one of the former employees.

“Those guys were all rich. They all had more money than they’ll ever spend, yet they didn’t have the money to take care of the very people that made the money for them,” says another.

The Obama team also launched a website, RomneyEconomics.com, that homes in further on the presumptive GOP nominee’s business record, and released a longer version of the television spot, telling the story behind the closed steel company in a six-minute-long Web video.

The Romney campaign defended the candidate’s record Monday and accused Obama of trying to distract voters from the president's “failed” jobs record. “Mitt Romney helped create more jobs in his private sector experience and more jobs as Governor of Massachusetts than President Obama has for the entire nation,” said spokeswoman Andrea Saul in a statement. “President Obama has many questions to answer as to why his administration used the stimulus to reward wealthy campaign donors with taxpayer money for bad ideas like Solyndra, but 23 million Americans are still struggling to find jobs.”

Steve Rattner, who advised Obama on the restructuring of the auto industry, called the ad “unfair” Monday morning in a discussion on MSNBC’s "Morning Joe." “I do think to pick out an example of somebody who lost their job, unfortunately this is part of capitalism, this is part of life, and I don’t think there’s anything Bain Capital did that they need to be embarrassed about,” he said.

Last week, the Obama team announced a $25 million ad campaign and launched a minute-long television spot in nine battleground states touting the president’s record. Senior Adviser David Axelrod told reporters last week that while the campaign was focused on making “a positive case to the American people,” it was also prepared to respond via the airwaves to pro-Romney ads. 

Caitlin Huey-Burns is a reporter for RealClearPolitics. She can be reached at chueyburns@realclearpolitics.com.

Crossroads Generation, a new super PAC formed with the help of a handful of established GOP groups, is tapping into the economic frustrations of under-30 voters facing dim job prospects, crippling student loans or the prospect of having to move back home with their parents.

Starting Monday, the PAC is launching a $50,000 social media ad campaign targeting younger voters in eight swing states, including Ohio and Virginia. Their ultimate goal: woo younger Americans to the Republican side, including some who supported Obama in 2008.

"Younger voters aren't looking for a party label," said Kristen Soltis, who advises the new super PAC's communications. "They're looking for someone to present a solution for how things are going to get better."

Crossroads Generation is drawing upon $750,000 in seed money from GOP organizations like the College Republicans, the Young Republicans, the Republican State Leadership Committee and American Crossroads — itself a super PAC that has raised $100 million so far this election cycle to defeat Obama and will support the Republican nominee, very likely to be Mitt Romney.

"We want to give a voice to our generation," said Derek Flowers, 28, the group's executive director, adding that his generation has faced unprecedented levels of unemployment and debt.

The super PAC is also planning a ground game for this fall, leveraging the roughly 250,000 student-members of the College Republicans who span more than 1,800 campuses across the country.

Obama's campaign defended the president's efforts to reduce Generation Y's unemployment and debt. It said under Obama's leadership the economy added 4.2 million private-sector jobs and that unemployment among recent college graduates is lower than when Obama took office in January 2009.

Conservative and GOP efforts to target under-30 voters this election cycle have been growing, as groups like Generation Opportunity have tapped into Millennials' uneasiness about the economy and the ballooning costs of a college degree.

To be sure, they are issues Obama has realized are essential in maintaining the support of younger voters. Just last month, the president pushed for lowering college costs and freezing student loaninterest rates — a message he took on the road to three states strategically important for his reelection effort.

Student loan debt has reached roughly $1 trillion in the United States, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Bank of New York has estimated that 37 million Americans — roughly 15 percent — have outstanding loan debt. About two-thirds of that debt is held by people under 30.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. 

At the center of the push — the president's most forceful attempt yet to sully Romney before the November election — is a biting new TV ad airing Monday that recounts through interviews with former workers the restructuring, and ultimate demise, of a Kansas City, Mo., steel mill under the Republican's private equity firm.

"They made as much money off of it as they could. And they closed it down," says Joe Soptic, a steelworker for 30 years. Jack Cobb, who also worked in the industry for three decades, adds: "It was like a vampire. They came in and sucked the life out of us."

The ad, at the unusual length of 2 minutes, will run in five battleground states: Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Colorado. The campaign declined to describe the size of the ad buy though it's in the middle of running a $25 million, month-long ad campaign in nine states. A longer version of the ad was being posted online Monday.

The commercial will be coupled with a series of events Obama's campaign is holding this week in Florida, Missouri, Iowa, Nevada and North Carolina to highlight Romney's role at Bain Capital, a company he co-founded.

It's unclear whether Obama, himself, will criticize his Republican rival on the subject when the president appears at events in New York on Monday or whether he'll leave the skewering to campaign surrogates as he prepares to meet with foreign leaders during the G-8 and NATO summits later this week.

Also this week, Vice President Joe Biden holds two days of events in Ohio, where he's expected to discuss Romney's role as a corporate buyout specialist.

The Romney campaign did not comment on the ad early Monday. The former Massachusetts governor was spending the day in Boston, with no public events scheduled, after delivering a commencement speech in Virginia on Saturday.

Romney has accused Obama of attacking free enterprise and called the criticism of his business background an attempt by Democrats to distract voters from the president's record.

Both candidates were entering a new week in the campaign seeking to shift the focus back to voters' No. 1 issue, the economy, from social issues that dominated after the president announced his support for gay marriage.

The two campaigns contend that in a nation where unemployment is hovering around 8 percent, voters will choose between Obama and Romney based on economic arguments. Obama is trying to convince voters to stick with him as he heralds an economic rebound, as sluggish as it is. Romney counters that Obama has had enough time, and only he — with his deep background in business — knows how to jumpstart the nation's job market.

Obama, hosting his first campaign rally earlier this month in Columbus, Ohio, gave a preview of the new line of attack, saying Romney had "drawn the wrong lessons" from his business experience at the helm of Bain.

"He doesn't seem to understand that maximizing profits by whatever means necessary — whether through layoffs or outsourcing or tax avoidance or union-busting — might not always be good for the average American or for the American economy," Obama said then.

Romney, a multimillionaire, left Bain in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympic Games but maintained a financial interest in the company after departing. He has said that his firm had a strong overall track record, creating jobs in prominent companies like Staples and Sports Authority, while acknowledging that some companies Bain invested in were unsuccessful.

Obama's new ad, which reprises criticism leveled at Romney during the Republican primaries, focuses on one of those unsuccessful companies, GST Steel.

Bain was the majority shareholder in GST Steel beginning in 1993. The company eventually filed for bankruptcy in 2001, a period in which the U.S. steel industry was roiled by a flood of cheap steel imports. About 750 workers lost their jobs, and were left without any health benefits and reduced pensions. The federal government was forced to infuse $44 million into the company's underfunded pension plan.

Bain received $12 million on its $8 million initial investment and at least $4.5 million in consulting fees, according to a January report by Reuters.

The commercial shows interviews with former workers at the Kansas City plant who said Bain's role led to job losses and slashed benefits. It intersperses their claims with clips of Romney promoting his business background and empathizing with the jobless during campaign events. There also are images of a closed factory, run-down buildings and a road sign that says "Dead End."

"Bain Capital walked away with a lot of money that they made off this plant. We view Mitt Romney as a job destroyer," said steel worker John Wiseman.

David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Obama's campaign, said Romney wants to "create the illusion that somehow his experience equips him to lead the economy but there's nothing about the record that would support that."

"His central premise is that he's an economic wizard who can really get this economy moving and if that's the only claim he is making for this office, that's a premise worth examining," Axelrod said. 

Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. 

The ad included the usual criticism of Catholicism, but I was most struck by this paragraph: "If you think you can change the church from within -- get it to lighten up on birth control, gay rights, marriage equality, embryonic stem-cell research -- you're deluding yourself. By remaining a ‘good Catholic,' you are doing 'bad' to women's rights. You are an enabler. And it's got to stop."

My, my. Putting aside the group's love for unnecessary quotation marks, it was shocking to learn that I'm an "enabler" doing "bad" to women's rights. But Catholic liberals get used to these kinds of things. Secularists, who never liked Catholicism in the first place, want us to leave the church, but so do Catholic conservatives who want the church all to themselves.

I'm sorry to inform the FFRF that I am declining its invitation to quit. They may not see the Gospel as a liberating document, but I do, and I can't ignore the good done in the name of Christ by the sisters, priests, brothers and lay people who have devoted their lives to the poor and the marginalized.

And on women's rights, I take as my guide that early feminist, Pope John XXIII. In Pacem in Terris, his encyclical issued in 1963, the same year Betty Friedan published "The Feminine Mystique," Pope John spoke of women's "natural dignity."

"Far from being content with a purely passive role or allowing themselves to be regarded as a kind of instrument," he wrote, "they are demanding both in domestic and in public life the rights and duties which belong to them as human persons."

I'd like the FFRF to learn more about the good Pope John, but I wish our current bishops would think more about him, too. I wonder if the bishops realize how some in their ranks have strengthened the hands of the church's adversaries (and disheartened many of the faithful) with public statements -- including that odious comparison of President Obama to Hitler by a Peoria prelate last month -- that threaten to shrink the church into a narrow, conservative sect.

Do the bishops notice how often those of us who regularly defend the church turn to the work of the nuns on behalf of charity and justice to prove Catholicism's detractors wrong? Why in the world would the Vatican, apparently pushed by right-wing American bishops, think it was a good idea to condemn the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the main organization of nuns in the United States?

The Vatican's statement, issued last month, seemed to be the revenge of conservative bishops against the many nuns who broke with the hierarchy and supported health care reform in 2010. The nuns insisted, correctly, that the health care law did not fund abortion. This didn't sit well with men unaccustomed to being contradicted, and the Vatican took the LCWR to task for statements that "disagree with or challenge positions taken by the bishops."

Oh yes, and the nuns are also scolded for talking a great deal about social justice and not enough about abortion (as if the church doesn't talk enough about abortion already). But has it occurred to the bishops that less stridency might change more hearts and minds on this very difficult question?

A thoughtful friend recently noted that carrying a child to term is an act of overwhelming generosity. For nine months, a woman gives her body to another life, not to mention the rest of her years. Might the bishops consider that their preaching on abortion would have more credibility if they treated women in the church, including nuns, with the kind of generosity they are asking of potential mothers? They might usefully embrace a similar attitude toward gays and lesbians.

Too many bishops seem in the grip of dark suspicions that our culture is moving at breakneck speed toward a demonic end. Pope John XXIII, by contrast, was more optimistic about the signs of the times.

"Distrustful souls see only darkness burdening the face of the earth," he once said. "We prefer instead to reaffirm all our confidence in our Savior who has not abandoned the world which he redeemed." The church best answers its critics when it remembers that its mission is to preach hope, not fear. 

Copyright 2012, Washington Post Writers Group

Driven by high grain and soybean prices, farmers' cash income hit a record $109 billion in 2011. Land values have followed high crop prices. Since 2006, an average acre of Iowa farmland has doubled. Last year, the increase was 33 percent to $6,708, reports Michael Duffy of Iowa State University. And farms sustain factories. In Cedar Rapids, a few miles from here, Cargill makes corn syrup and soybean oil; ADM produces ethanol; Quaker Oats makes cereal. Iowa's unemployment rate is now 5.2 percent compared with 8.1 percent nationally.

"In the last 30 or 40 years, these are the best times we've seen," says Kirk Weih of Hertz Farm Management, an advisory firm.

American agriculture is the story of unending small changes relentlessly boosting productivity. In 1960, an average acre of planted corn yielded 55 bushels; that's now about 150 bushels. Behind the increase lie better seeds (including bio-tech seeds that combat corn borer and root worm -- two threats to healthy corn), improved use of fertilizer, insecticides and herbicides, better planting techniques and advances in farm machinery.

Consider Carson's tractor. It's guided by GPS satellites. This makes for straighter and more productive rows. It also allows for the automatic adjustment of seed flow, depending on fields' different soil types that have been programmed into the computerized controls. Sandier soils, says Carson, can't handle higher seed rates. Seeds are saved; yields improve. And the Deere planter now puts in 24 rows of seeds simultaneously; that's up from four or eight a few decades ago.

To cover costs and maximize use of expensive equipment, farmers need to cultivate more land. Encouraging consolidation, this has altered the farm belt's sociology. Many farm families have left for Des Moines, Chicago and New York -- but kept their farms and contracted with the remaining farmers to do the work. Perhaps half of Iowa's acreage is leased by absentee owners, says Weih.

Could the present boom go bust? Well, yes. Agriculture is notoriously cyclical, and people here remember bitterly the 1970s and early 1980s. Initially, corn, wheat and soybean prices soared, pulling land values with them. Then, high interest rates in the early 1980s caused land prices to crash. Farmers couldn't repay loans. Foreclosures multiplied. It was a human and economic calamity. There are eerie parallels between then and now. Farmers are vulnerable to a global economic downturn. But there are also crucial differences.

One is that farmers use less credit to buy land. "The lesson of the 1980s was that leverage (borrowing) is not a good thing," says Weih. Lenders now require a 35 percent down payment, he says. With less debt, farmers are less vulnerable to repayment problems.

Price increases in the 1970s reflected general inflation. Present prices rest on sturdier pillars: for starters, corn demand for ethanol mandated to be mixed with gasoline. From 1999 to 2011, ethanol's share of U.S. corn use climbed from 6 percent to 39 percent. Although ethanol use is flattening, the congressional mandate has been a lucrative boon to corn farmers. (It's also unwise, raising food prices for modest gains in fuel.)

A second source of demand comes from developing countries, led by China, that are improving diets by shifting to more beef, pork, poultry and dairy products. This requires more corn and soybeans for animal feed. Poultry require roughly two pounds of feed for every pound gained, reports Janet Larsen of the Earth Policy Institute; for cattle, the ratio is seven-to-one. The United States is the largest exporter of corn and, along with Brazil and Argentina, in the top three for soybeans. Corn prices, which once averaged $2 to $3 a bushel, now hover around $6.

There is a lesson here for government. American agriculture transcends the Midwest farm belt. It also includes fruit and vegetable producers, poultry operators and cattle ranchers. But most of these others, dairy farmers excepted, are largely unsubsidized. Meanwhile, subsidies going mostly to grain and cotton now average about $12 billion annually, reports the Agriculture Department.

Begun in the Great Depression, these subsidies could once be justified as cushioning farming's enduring insecurities: bad weather, big shifts in supply and demand, crop infestations. But most industries now face comparable uncertainties from new technologies, global markets and erratic business cycles. Congress is writing a new farm bill and is struggling with how much to trim subsidies. But why should prosperous grain farmers and absentee owners receive special treatment and windfalls? The proper level of subsidies is simple: zero. 

Copyright 2012, Washington Post Writers Group

But I said there were other possible scenarios. I can think of three.

The 1964/1972 scenario: Challenger disqualifies himself. Barry Goldwater and George McGovern were idealistic, intelligent senators who took positions on issues that made them unacceptable to most voters in years favorable to incumbents.

This could happen to Mitt Romney this year. And it might well have happened if some of his primary opponents had won the nomination. But he doesn't seem to be the kind of candidate who would disqualify himself. Chances for this scenario: less than 5 percent.

The 1988 scenario: Affluent voters break strongly Republican. Vice President George Bush was 17 points behind Michael Dukakis after the Democratic National Convention. But he came back to win by a 53 to 46 percent margin.

One reason is that his "read my lips, no new taxes" promise solidified his support among affluent suburbanites. His margins in suburbs enabled him to carry metro Philadelphia, metro Baltimore, metro Detroit, metro Chicago, metro Los Angeles and the surrounding states.

Since then, affluent non-Southern suburbanites have trended Democratic. And big city crime and welfare rolls -- cause for complaint in 1988 -- have declined.

Republicans' conservative stands on cultural issues and the increasing Southern influence in the party repelled suburbanites. Barack Obama carried most affluent non-Southern suburbs handily in 2008.

But Romney showed particular appeal to this constituency in the primaries. Without big margins in affluent suburbs, he would have lost Michigan, Ohio and Illinois to Rick Santorum.

Romney's proposed tax cuts and Obama's proposed tax increases pose the sharpest contrast on the tax issue since Bush beat Dukakis 24 years ago. And economics is far more important than cultural issues this year. Chances for the 1988 scenario: maybe 20 percent.

The 1980 scenario: Late break away from the incumbent. We remember the 1980 election as Ronald Reagan's landslide defeat of Jimmy Carter.

It didn't look like that during the campaign. Carter led in polls much of the time. Sometimes the race looked like a 2000/2004-style long, hard slog through target states.

But Carter's job rating was buoyed up that year by approval of his varied attempts to free the hostages in Iran. Underneath those numbers, his ratings on other foreign issues and the economy were weak.

Most voters were ready for an alternative, but were wary of Reagan, who was 69 years old and supposedly extreme conservative. He might have disqualified himself in a number of ways.

Instead, in his one debate with Carter, on the Thursday before the election, Reagan echoed a 1934 Franklin Roosevelt fireside chat, which he remembered but the press corps didn't. "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" he asked voters.

Opinion moved quickly. Weekend polling showed an unprecedented 10-point shift from Carter to Reagan. Pollster Pat Caddell had to go to the White House Monday morning and tell Jimmy Carter that he was not going to be re-elected president of the United States.

Could something like this happen this year? It is my view that Obama was helped in 2008 by a widespread belief that, in the abstract, it would be a good thing for Americans to elect a black president. I know I felt that way myself.

This year, I sense that many, perhaps most voters do not want the country to be seen rejecting the first black president. Such a feeling might be buoying Obama's support despite the lagging economic recovery and the widespread opposition to his signature policies.

If that is correct, it is possible that in the last days of the campaign a large number of voters will decide, quietly and out of public view, that they just don't want any more of what they've had for the last four years and they will try the other guy and see if he can do better.

That's what happened in 1980. Reagan carried 44 states and won the popular vote by 10 points, more than anyone else since. Chances for the 1980 scenario: maybe 20 percent.

So what remains for the chance of the 2000/2004 long, hard slog scenario? At least 55 percent. Still the best bet. But not the only one. 

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Let me start out, I want to play something that Senator Durbin said in mid-April to kind of kick off our conversation.

Senator, let me remind you of what you said, which was unless there is some intervening event, some external event, I think the reality is we are not going to take up tough issues involving spending, taxes, Medicare, Social Security before an election.

My question to both of you, and I'll start with you, Senator Cornyn, is why are you all here at this point, because you just are -- nobody wants to do anything big because they think the other might get the advantage, and you're going to do it all in the lame duck or try to and maybe even kick it then. Why even stay in Washington?

CORNYN: Well, Candy, as you know, Senator Reid is the majority leader and is the one that determines what the agenda is on the Senate floor. For the last three years Senator Reid has said we will not take up and pass a budget in the Senate, and you're right.

There's no good reason for us to be here if we're not going to make some of these tough decisions, cast tough votes. That's what we get paid for. That's what we should do, and that's what we should be held accountable for.

But do nothing because the majority leader has said he doesn't want to put Democratic incumbents --

CROWLEY: But you all also blocked --

CORNYN: -- makes no sense.

CROWLEY: -- you all also block so much of the stuff that comes up. And that's certainly -- I imagine I could get Senator Durbin say that and I want to bring him into the conversation. But isn't it -- I mean there is -- I think the country looks at this and it's pretty clear there's fault on both sides here.

CORNYN: Well, there are 12 -- there are a couple -- about a dozen, maybe two dozen bills the House has passed that have come over to the Senate that are dead on arrival because Senator Reid simply refuses to take them up.

And, yes, when Senator Reid refuses to allow the minority an opportunity to offer amendments and debate amendments and vote on amendments, then we have no choice but to say, we have to protect the minority's right to have its voice heard. The people we represent simply cannot be excluded because of Senator Reid's fiat.

CROWLEY: So, Senator Durbin, no kidding, why don't you guys just go home, because no one expects -- not even you all expect anything big is going to happen?

DURBIN: Candy, I think a lot of people on cable are really protesting because the C-SPAN channel has no activity on it. We lurch from one mind-numbing filibuster to the next. Last Tuesday we tried to bring up this provision, a simple provision, which said don't let the interest rate on student loans double on July 1st to 6.8 percent.

We called for a vote on Tuesday and said open to amendments. Bring up -- let's bring up this matter and have a real debate on amendments. Not a single Republican would vote for it. So we got stuck in another filibuster.

But I -- let me just say the blame is on both sides to some extent, but if we're ever going to get anything done, we literally have to reach some level of agreement. I think about the Bowles- Simpson Commission.

Honest to goodness, when Tom Coburn and I can both vote for this and say let's move forward and use this as a template, that should have been a moment, a teachable moment, for all the members of the Senate and the House.

CROWLEY: But it wasn't, and so you can understand why people look and say they're just not going to do anything this year. And do you agree with that, until after the elections, you all aren't going to deal with these tough issues that have to do with the continuation of tax cuts, or the stopping of the tax cuts or the spending cuts that are due to come into place? None of that is going to happen until after the November election?

DURBIN: I think that's an honest appraisal, and I think it may have started with the Republican leader McConnell saying our job is to make sure Obama is a one-term president. And so we had more filibusters than ever in the history of the United States Senate.

We just cannot take up anything constructive. The American voters have the last word in November. Do they want to continue this kind of obstructionism or do they want to see something different?

CROWLEY: It seems like kind of a waste of a year but I don't think I'm going to get you all to agree on who is to blame here. I want to move us into the political realm.

Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, was at Liberty University in Lynchburg yesterday talking to the largest Christian university, certainly, in the country. I want to play something he had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROMNEY: Culture, what you believe, what you value, how you live matters. Now, as fundamental as these principles are, they may become topics of democratic debate from time to time. So it is today with the enduring institution of marriage. Marriage is a relationship between one man and one woman.

(APPLAUSE)

CROWLEY: That was the biggest applause line, as you might imagine. The battle is clearly joined. We had the president this week, coming out, making history, saying that he favors gay marriage. I know Senator Durbin that you also believe that gays should be allowed to marry.

Do you worry, though, that the president could lose some states, North Carolina, Missouri, some of those where the evangelical vote is very strong because of his same-sex position? DURBIN: I can just tell you I don't think it was a political calculation by the president. I think it was a matter of conscience. He talked it over with his wife and his children, and I know I have talked to him over the years. It's a difficult issue, a real challenging issue, but I think the president came down on the right side.

This morning I took a look at Loving versus Virginia, which I'm sure Senator Cornyn remembers, the 1967 Supreme Court decision that said that the Virginia law banning interracial marriages was a violation of equality under the laws and due process. And I think it comes down to the same basic principle, whether we're going to have marriage equality in this country.

CROWLEY: But do you think that it could hurt the president politically in some of these swing states, is the question?

DURBIN: Well, I don't think he's going to lose votes that he otherwise hadn't lost. I'm not sure the evangelicals were going to lean toward President Obama anyway.

CROWLEY: Senator Cornyn, is this something that you think Mitt Romney ought to bring up frequently? Is this an issue that you think is a winning issue for Republicans?

CORNYN: Candy, President Obama brought this issue up because he wants to -- he can't run on his record. Let's put it that way. And so he's trying to raise divisive issues up to solidify his base and to divide the country, and that isn't what we should be focusing on now. We should be focusing on jobs and the economy.

We have two looming things that are going to happen in December and January, and the president is AWOL on both the largest tax increase in American history, that will occur when about 130 different tax provisions expire on December the 31st, and a sequestration in January, which will be a half a trillion dollars in what Secretary Panetta, his own Secretary of Defense, said would be disastrous cuts to the military.

Where is the president? Well, he's raising issues that aren't going to be resolved between now and then and in an attempt to try to distract the country from his record.

CROWLEY: So that's a no, you don't think this ought to be a focal point for Mitt Romney to campaign on, his opposition to gay marriage?

CORNYN: I think we ought to talk about what the American people want, and that is jobs and get the economy on track. They want to know what the president's plan is, once the Supreme Court strikes down his -- the so-called Affordable Care Act, which we find out is the unaffordable care act, but when the Supreme Court rules in June, what's the president's plan? What's his plan B?

CROWLEY: I want to talk to both of you, Senator Durbin to you first. There was a story in "The Washington Post" this week with some firsthand accounts of Mitt Romney's high school years, where, certainly under any definition, he was portrayed as a bully, apparently against a gay student.

He said, "Look, I don't remember it. It certainly wasn't about the student being gay". Do you think this story tells you anything about Mitt Romney? Do you think this is an important point in a campaign where you start looking at who the person is?

DURBIN: Well, here is what it comes down to. I find it hard to believe that you couldn't remember that kind of an episode in your life, even if it occurred in high school, but --

CROWLEY: So you think he's lying?

DURBIN: -- I'm going to say this -- well, I just say it's hard to believe he doesn't remember, but I will say this. There's not a single thing that I know about Mitt Romney in his adult life which suggests this kind of discrimination or this kind of prejudice.

And so I don't believe it was a telling moment in terms of who he is today. It was obviously something he should regret and probably does deeply regret from his youth.

CROWLEY: Senator, I want to just pick up on one more subject, and that is the defeat of Senator Lugar. He's been in the Senate for more than 30 years. He was known as someone who would reach across the aisle. What does this say about Republicans' desire to have someone who actually will work with the other side?

CORNYN: Well, what I think it says, Candy, is that people are mad at what's happening in Washington. The inaction that you have identified early on in important issues where we should be working together to deal with jobs and getting the economy back on track, and where they see nothing but inaction. And so people are tired of just yelling at the TV set. They actually are going to turn out and vote, and they did, and they want to try new leaders. And that's what happened in Indiana. By the way, we will hold that seat. Mr. Mourdock is the state treasurer there. And we will hold that seat in November, but Dick Lugar is a wonderful, wonderful man and a great example of graciousness, and really has done a wonderful job in the Senate. We'll miss him.

CROWLEY: Senator John Cornyn, Senator Dick Durbin, thank you both for joining us. I think people are probably still yelling at their TV sets, but I thank you both very much for getting up this morning and joining us. Appreciate it. 

Born in New Eagle and raised in Charleroi in Pennsylvania's Monongahela Valley, Guy comes from a long line of Democrats. "My grandfather worked at Corning Glass, my father worked in the mines, the steel mill and finally at Corning," he recalled. "The family always had union ties, and that usually meant a tie to the Democratic Party."

That's no longer true for him, however: "As my life started to improve financially, I realized that unions seemed to be damaging the economy and Democrat legislation always seemed to impact my wallet."

Guy lives in a Canton suburb lively with soccer fields, businesses, car cruises and recycling programs. He has a blended family of six daughters and one son; his wife, Cheryl, is a nurse and a registered Democrat.

His story is not much different than that of those West Virginia Democrats who protest-voted for a convicted felon over a sitting president in last Tuesday's state primary.

The problem for President Barack Obama and down-ticket Democrats on November's ballot is that average white guys aren't just found in West Virginia; they're in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and other states, too, and they can tip this fall's election.

According to Gallup's latest battleground numbers, Obama's main electoral strengths are with voters who are nonwhite, nonreligious, single or postgraduates. Republican Mitt Romney's strength is with white voters, particularly men, those who are religious, and those who are 30 or older.

Romney leads Obama with white male and female voters and does significantly better among men, 59 percent to 32 percent.

Among white women, Romney leads by nine points, 50 percent to 41 percent.

Rudy Guy says Obama has lost his registered-Democrat wife's vote: "Cheryl and I pretty much see eye-to-eye on the Republican Party's legislation direction."

Some Democrats like to portray the GOP as a party of white, middle-class, married Christian men. Interestingly, the president, who ran as someone who would unite the nation, has disconnected with the next largest plurality in the electorate behind women - white guys, men who once were the backbone of the Democratic Party.

These are the men whose skills include fixing the wiring in your home, mining the coal that supplies 82 percent of Ohio's and 48 percent of Pennsylvania's electrical power, and running the small businesses that keep our communities (and other small businesses in them) rolling along.

They make the widgets and fix the computers we use, own the lawn-care companies that tend to our neighborhoods and schools, volunteer as our children's coaches, and attend church probably less often than they would like because of work or community commitments.

They are the sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of European immigrants whose commitment to work, family and God all held equal priority. College either was not an option or was skipped so that they could use their hands and their ingenuity to become gainfully employed.

Many also are employees of what today appears to be the next great economic frontier - the energy industry. Yet, oddly, they are ignored by Democrats, or used by the president to sell class warfare in his re-election campaign.

They did vote for him in 2008 - but the polls suggest they are not coming back this time.

The loss of the average white guy is why you see President Obama devoting so much effort on trying to encourage the college-educated young to vote, said Mark Rozell, political-science professor at George Mason University. "He needs to offset substantial losses among predominantly white, non-college-educated men who are a big component of those left behind by the struggling economy," Rozell explained.

And the quintessential example of that is Canton's Rudy Guy.

"It seems to me that Obama is intent on punishing anyone who is employed with a job over minimum wage," Guy said. "In the last three years, I've seen my spendable income drop, my cost for health-care insurance go up, and my benefits go down.

"Three years ago the question was, 'Are you better off now than when Bush took office?' Most of us weren't. But am I better off today than when Obama took office?"

His answer is simple: "No." 

This question of "next steps" in the Iran nuclear talks is important, because neither side is likely to commit to the first set of "confidence-building" measures" unless it knows where the process is heading. Iran feels it has been tricked in the past by Western peace feelers that didn't lead anywhere; the U.S. has the same wary suspicion. Both sides need more clarity.

A compelling framework for future talks has been prepared by analysts from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The authors are George Perkovich, a leading U.S. scholar on proliferation issues, and Ariel Levite, a former deputy director of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission. In preparing the plan, the Carnegie team has had quiet discussions with U.S. and Iranian experts.

The basic idea of the Carnegie proposal is to create a "firewall" between Iran's civilian nuclear program, which it could pursue, and a military bomb-making program, which it couldn't. Along with separating permissible from impermissible, the Carnegie authors propose special procedures for dual-use technologies that are near the dividing line.

A big selling point for the Iranians is that this approach is based on the pledge by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that Iran won't build nuclear weapons. Khamenei's most explicit statement came on state television in February: "Iran is not after nuclear weapons because the Islamic Republic, logically, religiously and theoretically, considers the possession of nuclear weapons a grave sin and believes the proliferation of such weapons is senseless, destructive and dangerous."

President Barack Obama sent a back-channel communication to Khamenei in late March that his fatwa banning nuclear weapons would be a good starting point for negotiations. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivered the message when he met Khamenei on March 29. Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman reiterated Obama's theme during the first round of negotiations with the Iranians in Istanbul on April 14.

So how could Iran fulfill this pledge in a way that reassures Israel and other nations that fear a nuclear-armed Iran? The Carnegie experts propose a red-yellow-green system, like a nuclear traffic light. In the "green" approved category would be nuclear power plants, medical research reactors and basic academic and scientific research. Forbidden "red" activities would be those directly related to weaponization, such as warhead design and procurement of items used in making and testing bombs.

The "yellow" dual-use activities would be the trickiest problem, and the firewall would have to be carefully constructed. Some enrichment of uranium might be permitted, for example, if it were verifiably limited below 5 percent -- so it could be used for only peaceful purposes. So-called "neutron triggers" would be banned, since they could be used to initiate a bomb's explosion, except for those configured for oil exploration, which would be supplied to Iran.

Any real reduction of tensions with Iran will also require greater openness and transparency about past as well as present activities, so that each side is confident it isn't being cheated, and that its basic security hasn't been compromised. That's part of the Carnegie proposal, too.

"This approach is not a zero-sum game," argue Perkovich and Levite. "It would require commitments and concessions from both sides." And by defining the activities that are part of building a nuclear weapon, it would fill a gap in the existing Non-Proliferation Treaty -- and could be applied to other nations, not just Iran.

The negotiations that began last month in Istanbul between Iran and the "P5+1" group of nations are at the initial confidence-building stage. They're aimed at gaining time for a comprehensive agreement like what the Carnegie authors propose.

What's likely to be on the table at the next meeting in Baghdad May 23 is a plan for Iran to stop enriching uranium above 5 percent, and ship its existing stockpile of 20-percent-enriched uranium (currently estimated at more than 100 kilograms) out of the country, in return for medical isotopes and fuel rods for a civilian research reactor. U.S. officials hope this would mean the Iranians would halt work at Fordow, near Qom, a facility that has been used for enrichment above 5 percent.

President Obama believes this interim agreement would buy time for further negotiations, by delaying Iran's bomb-making ability. But to have a lasting pact, it will be necessary to translate Ayatollah Khamenei's words into a clear and verifiable "red line." 

Copyright 2012, Washington Post Writers Group

For bonus points: This moment has spared White House press secretary Jay Carney from the contortions he had been forced to perform as he explained why the president opposed same-sex marriage but also opposed state measures to ban same-sex marriage because they "deny rights to LGBT Americans."

Mitt Romney's position on same-sex couples has evolved, as well. In 1994, when he was a candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, Romney told the gay Log Cabin Republicans that he supported "full equality" for homosexuals. Last week, he sang a different tune when he voiced his opposition to "civil unions" that have "identical" rights as traditional marriage.

Thus, both Obama and Romney have taken positions that appeal more to their respective parties' bases than to moderate voters.

The latest Gallup poll reports that 50 percent of Americans think same-sex marriage should be legal, while 48 percent do not. But there is reason to believe that polls are not an accurate barometer, at least among voters.

Last week, North Carolina became the 30th state to ban gay marriage in its state constitution. In six states and the District of Columbia, where same-sex marriage is recognized, courts or legislators changed the law. But every time a state's voters have had an opportunity to vote on same-sex marriage, they have voted to ban it, not legalize it. Voters in my very blue state of California passed a law restricting marriage to one man and one woman, with 52 percent of the vote, in 2008.

Jonathan Rauch, a gay man who is a guest scholar at The Brookings Institution, estimated that, because people lie, polls are off by a 5-point margin. Rauch sees the Obama decision as courageous but against the president's re-election interest, as it threatens to cost Obama precious votes in key swing states.

Policywise the Obama about-face does not change much. Obama's Department of Justice already announced that it will not defend legal challenges to the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, signed by President Bill Clinton.

Carney would not say whether the president will go to states to campaign against same-sex marriage bans. It doesn't seem likely, however, as the president told ABC News' Robin Roberts that he thinks the fact that "different communities are arriving at different conclusions at different times" is "a healthy process."

GOP political strategist Rob Stutzman doesn't think the Obama statement is "that big a deal politically," especially because the president "obviously was pushed into it."

Forget the politics, Rauch argued; the Obama announcement is huge culturally. Also, it contrasts well against Romney's journey from one-time courtier of gay votes to tepid supporter of civil unions. (It's not as if Romney looks highly principled on this issue.)

I wonder whether Obama will be able to maintain the tolerant attitude he displayed Wednesday as the presidential campaign heats up. The president told ABC that he supports same-sex marriage laws that are "respectful of religious liberty" and allow churches and faith institutions to determine their sacraments for themselves. Those were reasonable, moderate points -- which fly in the face of his administration's decision to force church-based institutions with deeply held religious objections to provide contraception as part of their employee health care plans.

If church groups can't say no to subsidizing contraception, why would they be able to say no to same-sex couples?

Already activists are calling for the Democratic Party to move its national convention out of Charlotte to punish North Carolina for its vote against same-sex marriage. Some 26,000 people have signed a "say no to discrimination" petition that calls for Democrats to move the confab to a "state that upholds values of equality and liberty."

Much has been written of Romney's sojourn from gay-friendly Republican to pared-down civil-union supporter in an often craven pursuit of voters in the GOP base. The less Romney says about civil unions the better.

Obama has the opposite problem.

In coming home to his support of same-sex marriage, Obama has unleashed his like-minded base. This is the base that has tried to use the courts to force the Boy Scouts to admit gay Scout leaders and its political muscle to coerce church-based charities to provide benefits for domestic partners. Obama's base has a name for people who (like Obama last month) believe marriage is a union between a man and a woman only. That word is "bigot."

And those who hurl it do so in the name of tolerance. 

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Abraham Lincoln is remembered today for freeing the slaves. But he didn't start out with that policy, and he didn't get there quickly. He reached his ultimate position only by slowly and painfully "evolving" -- while blacks waited and suffered in bondage.

When he came out for same-sex marriage, Obama won praise from gays, liberals and libertarians who have supported same-sex marriage all along. But he has also gotten sharp criticism from both left and right.

The Log Cabin Republicans, representing gays and lesbians, called the president "callous" for not speaking up sooner. One blogger jeered that if Obama "were on the Supreme Court, he would vote against us. Obama supports same-sex marriage, but he sees no constitutional mandate."

The conservative New York Post accused him of "a carefully calculated political ploy, designed for maximum political effect to shore up an increasingly unenthusiastic voter base" -- the "epitome of cynicism."

It's not hard to make the case that Obama is a cold-blooded operator keenly interested in his own political fortunes. If he were principled, he would have stuck to the pro-gay marriage position he took in 1996. If he were fully committed to equal rights, he wouldn't agree to let states ban same-sex unions.

And what has he actually done to legalize gay marriage? Nothing. In his ABC News interview Wednesday, Obama merely said that "personally," he's for it. He took no concrete action.

Nor does he plan to. The next day, he stressed, "I'm not going to be spending most of my time talking about this." His shift could be taken as empty symbolism.

But if you think Obama has been slow, ineffectual and averse to political risks, you should have seen Lincoln's handling of slavery. Through the haze of history and myth, it's hard to remember that on this matter, Lincoln was often anything but inspiring.

"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists," he declared in 1858, and he reiterated that position in his first inaugural address.

Lincoln was anti-slavery in the sense that he opposed allowing it in new states and territories and thought halting its spread would eventually cause it to die. But he was in no hurry. Slavery, he said, "might be let alone for a hundred years, if it should live so long, in the States where it exists."

Once in office, Lincoln was endlessly faulted by abolitionists. He held off issuing the Emancipation Proclamation until the Civil War was nearly two years old -- and his directive had little effect, since it liberated slaves only in Confederate states, which did not recognize his authority.

The slave states that remained in the Union were exempt. As for letting blacks vote, he didn't get around to a tentative endorsement until after the Confederate surrender.

Yet in the end, we know, it took Lincoln to abolish slavery and set the nation on the path toward racial equality. He is not remembered as the Great Emancipator for nothing.

Like him, Obama has to deal with hard political realities. Had he endorsed same-sex marriage four years ago, the White House would be occupied by John McCain, who supported the military's ban on gays. Were Obama to launch an all-out campaign for a federal law, he would pave the way for GOP victory that would set back the cause of gay rights.

He has done what he can, and more than any of his predecessors. There is something to be said for a president who, after much delay, takes even a mild stand in favor of same-sex marriage -- and nudges the nation toward greater freedom and equality.

The former slave and black leader Frederick Douglass might have understood. What he said of Lincoln's approach to slavery could also be said of Obama on same-sex marriage: "Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent. But measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined."

Today, the critics get their say. Years from now, it's what Obama did that will be remembered. 

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

In Mogadishu, a former teacher wishes he had sent more economic assistance and fewer armed drones to fix Somalia's problems. And many in the Middle East wonder what became of Obama's vow, in a landmark 2009 speech at the University of Cairo, to forge a closer relationship with the Muslim world.

In a world weary of war and economic crises, and concerned about global climate change, the consensus is that Obama has not lived up to the lofty expectations that surrounded his 2008 election and Nobel Peace Prize a year later. Many in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America were also taken aback by his support for gay marriage, a taboo subject among religious conservatives.

But the Democrat still enjoys broad international support. In large part, it's because of unfavorable memories of his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, and many people would still prefer Obama over his presumptive Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

"We all had high hopes for him," said Filomena Cunha, an office worker in Lisbon, Portugal, who said she's struggling to make ends meet. "But then things got bad and there's not much he can do for us over here." 

Obama's rock-star-like reception at Berlin's Victory Column in the summer of 2008 was a high point of a wildly successful European campaign tour. The thawing of a harsh anti-Americanism that had thrived in Europe was as much a reaction to the Bush years as it was an embrace of the presidential hopeful.

Those high European expectations have turned into disappointment, largely because of the continued U.S. military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and Obama's failure to close Guantanamo Bay in the face of vehement congressional opposition.

Foreign policy expert Josef Braml, who analyzes the U.S. for the German Council on Foreign Relations, said many Germans give Obama too much of the blame because they don't understand the limits of his powers.

"There's a lack of understanding both of how the system of checks and balances works — or doesn't work any longer — and a lack of understanding of how big the socio-economic problems in the United States are, which cause the gridlock," Braml said in a telephone call from Greece, where he was on vacation.

Obama's views on Europe's financial crisis also have rankled some on the continent. In September, he said the crisis was "scaring the world" and that steps taken by European nations to stem the eurozone debt problem "haven't been as quick as they need to be."

The Obama administration describes the eurozone crisis as a European problem that needs a European solution. The U.S. and Canada last month refused to participate in boosting the International Monetary Fund's financial resources to manage the crisis.

"I think people see through his game to put the blame on Europeans — I think Germans and Europeans still know where the economic crisis had its beginning," Braml said. "That's just finger-pointing, not doing a fair analysis of the dire situation in the U.S., but I can understand Obama is doing that because he wants to get re-elected so they need to shift blame around on the Republicans or the Europeans." 

Mehmet Yegin, a specialist in Turkish-American relations at USAK, the Ankara-based International Strategic Research Organization, said Europe still sees Obama as superior to Romney, "because they primarily evaluate Romney as a Republican and their memories about George W. Bush linger."

Many in the Mideast also would like to see Obama win a second term, though they feel he has not lived up to his Cairo speech, in which he extended a hand to the Islamic world by calling for an end to the cycle of suspicion and discord.

Obama has been the U.S. president "least involved in the Palestinian issue," said Mohammed Ishtayeh, an aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

"We were very optimistic when Obama was elected. He talked in his meeting with us without looking into his notes; that tells how much he knows about our issue," he said.

But since Obama made his Cairo speech, Ishtayeh added, "he found his hands tied and couldn't make much progress."

The Palestinians have refused to conduct peace talks while Israel continues to expand its settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem — areas claimed by the Palestinians. Officials have quietly given up hope for any sort of breakthrough until after the presidential election. 

Obama also has a strained relationship with Israel, where Bush was popular. Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been cool to one another in their handful of meetings. Obama's Mideast envoy, former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, made no progress during two years of frequent meetings with both sides before quitting last year.

Despite the chilly relations between Obama and Netanyahu, overall ties between the allies remain strong. The U.S. has backed Israel on several key occasions at the United Nations, for instance, helping block a Palestinian attempt to join the world body last year without a peace deal and fending off attempts by other countries to charge Israel with human rights abuses.

"Concerning Israel, he has proved that he is not absolutely rigid but is willing to reconsider when confronted with facts that he would not have expected," said Avraham Diskin, a political scientist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University.

"He began very inexperienced on all fronts, but he is a very intelligent person and Israelis see that," Diskin added.

In Iraq, site of the war that fed much of the international community's dislike of Bush, Obama has received some credit for pulling out combat forces last year.

"President Obama has removed so much of the cowboy image of America that has been imprinted in the mentality of Iraqis by Bush," Baghdad lawyer Raad Mehsin said.

But Carawan Ahmed, a high school teacher in Iraq's northern Kurdish capital of Irbil, said Obama has ignored the Kurdish minority, which continues to struggle against the Shiite-dominated government.

"When Democrats, including Obama, are in power, we lose the sympathy and support from America. To be frank, the Republicans protected the Kurdish people, while Obama's administration is not," Ahmed said.

In Mogadishu, former schoolteacher Fadumo Hussein retains a shaken support for Obama, but disapproves of the mounting casualties from U.S. drone attacks on Somalia's al-Qaida-linked insurgency while the country's humanitarian need is neglected.

"He only sent drones, not enough assistance," Hussein said. "We don't need bombs, but other means of assistance." 

Obama remains popular in Japan, one of the United States' closest allies, though that may be a matter of style over substance, said Koichi Nakano, political science professor at Sophia University in Tokyo.

"The Japanese like Obama. Maybe they don't know all that much about him, but I guess he continues to be seen as a youthful, energetic, charismatic leader," he said.

America's stature has taken a hit in Japan since the 2008 financial meltdown, which highlighted the excesses of U.S.-style capitalism to many Japanese. They also fret about the increased attention Washington is giving China, which supplanted Japan as the world's second-largest economy.

While still widely admired in Japan, the U.S. "comes across as a more divided country and less self-confident, more concerned about its social harmony and less about the outside world," Nakano said. That's translated into "a general perception that Obama may not be that interested in foreign policy, period." 

Obama, however, has tried to build on America's connections to Asia as authoritarian China grows. Adam Lockyer, a lecturer at Sydney University's U.S. Studies Center, said those efforts have been received more warmly in Australia because of who is in charge.

During a visit last year in which he received an overwhelmingly popular reception, Obama announced that up to 2,500 U.S. Marines will be stationed in Australia's north for joint training exercises. Australian government fears of a public backlash were never realized.

"The fact that Obama himself was making the announcement of U.S. troops in Australia quelled a lot of fears," Lockyer said. If Bush had made it, he said, "there would have been a lot more hostility."

"Democrat presidents tend to be a little bit more hesitant to define the world as good and evil, which tends to be more attractive to Australian ears," he said.

———

Don Melvin reported from Brussels, and Rod McGuirk from Canberra, Australia. Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers David Rising in Berlin, Ian Deitch in Jerusalem, Mohammed Daraghmeh and Dalia Nammari in Ramallah, West Bank, Malcolm Foster in Tokyo, Mazin Yahya in Baghdad, Abdi Guled in Mogadishu, Somalia, Hamza Hendawi in Cairo, Barry Hatton in Lisbon, Portugal, and Chris Torchia in Ankara, Turkey. 

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. 

Now, Congressman. Let me just start there. If you go through the many pages of Dodd-Frank, is there something in there that should have caught this is this.

REP. BARNEY FRANK (D), MASSACHUSETTS: There may well be. He is premature saying it doesn't violate the Volcker rule. You pass a complex piece of legislation. And then, there is a process by which it has to be flashed out.

The rules of the federal government call for a proposal to come out. And then, for there to be come in. So, the Volcker rule, which was part of the law, hasn't yet taken effect. It will take effect later this year.

So, technically, no. It didn't violate the rule but Mr. Dimon is pre- mature in saying it wouldn't violate the Volcker rule. It depends on the nature of the trade and the nature of the rule. And frankly, I think the fact that this is happening, is going to be an argument for tighter rule.

And Jamie Dimon too much as he said, just because we are stupid, Jamie Dimon isn't stupid. He is a very able guy and with a very well-run bank. And that's precisely the point. When one of the best run- institutions presided over by very intelligent people can make a mistake of this sort, that's a sign of why you need regulation. That's a sign of why you need a safety net. So, I think this is an argument for the Volcker rule when this promulgated.

KING: And some would say though, can you regulate that greed then combined with stupidity?

FRANK: Yes. You can regulate in this sense. You can, in the first place say, we don't want you to get so over your head that you are not going to be able to pay what you owe other people. You know, the old story is, if somebody owes you -- if you owe somebody $1,000, he can tell you what to do. If you owe him $100 million, he has to worry about you.

We do have rules that say we don't want you to get indebted to the point where they are years ago where we have to worry about your collapse, because you hurt other people. KING: As you know, this is playing out in the middle of a campaign year in which the other side, your critics -- the critics of your legislation say, not only let's have tighter legislation as you just said, they want to repeal the thing all together.

Do you think this maybe will give them pop?

FRANK: Well, I don't think it will change their opinion. There is a theological concept. I am not a great theologian. I know there is a theological concept called invincible ignorance in which a strong enough faith binds you to any facts to the contrary. I think that's where I got with some of my colleagues. But it will certainly weaken their credibility.

Let me give you one specific thing, John. The Republicans are trying to put a bill through the house who tries very hard to pack, although they have the majority, which would say that if an American institution through a foreign subsidiary engages in derivative transactions, it is not subject to our regulations. That's what we are talking about here.

JPMorgan chase and American institution doing things through a foreign subsidiary. We are saying that might have an impact. I think frankly they are going to have a harder time pushing this bill than they did before. And it just discredits their whole notion that these institutions don't need any regulation.

Again, I stress, JPMorgan chase, this isn't countrywide. This is in a rogue institution. It's a well running institution and shows you the inherent riskiness and danger in what they do.

KING: Well, people who have memories of 2007 and 2008, Congressman might be asking themselves this question.

Is it just JPMorgan Chase? Or if it is happening there, is it happening elsewhere and might be go through all that all over again?

FRANK: Well, the answer is, it may very well be happening elsewhere. But, we won't go through that all over again. Because we do have rules in place that will prevent that. For one thing, even JPMorgan chased to, the Volker rule hasn't gone into effect but requirements that they have a bigger capital base are there. That is the banks today, thanks to the rules imposed on them, are better able to withstand losses because they have more money set aside.

KING: Congressman Barney Frank, democrat from Massachusetts, I appreciate your time tonight, sir.

FRANK: Thank you. 

And the gloomier outlook extends across party lines, including a steep decline in the share of Democrats who call the economy "good," down from 48 percent in February to just 31 percent now.

Almost two-thirds of Americans — 65 percent — disapprove of Obama's handling of gas prices, up from 58 percent in February. Nearly half, 44 percent, "strongly disapprove." And just 30 percent said they approve, down from 39 percent in February.

These findings come despite a steady decline in gas prices in recent weeks after a surge earlier in the year. The national average for a gallon of gasoline stood at $3.75, down from a 2012 peak of $3.94 on April 1.

U.S. presidents have limited ability to affect gas prices, which are determined in international markets. However, the party out of power always blames whoever is president at the time for high gas prices, as Republican Mitt Romney is doing now and as Democrat Obama did in 2008 when George W. Bush sat in the Oval Office.

Of all the issues covered by the poll, Obama's ratings on gas prices were his worst.

The public's views tilt negative on his handling of the overall economy, 52 percent disapprove while 46 percent approve. In February, Americans were about evenly divided on his handling of the issue.

The economy is the No. 1 issue in the presidential race, thanks to the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression and one of the shallowest-ever recoveries.

While the recession officially ended in summer 2009, unemployment remains stubbornly high, at 8.1 percent in April. Some 12.5 million Americans are out of work.

The increasing skepticism toward the recovery tracks a weakening overall economy as measured by the gross domestic product, and matches economic growth downgrades by many economic forecasters.

Against this background, the weak economy looms as a huge liability for Obama, and any drop in public confidence in his ability to deal with it can threaten his re-election prospects. Although Obama held broad advantages over Romney on handling social issues and protecting the country, when it came to the economy about the same percentage said they trust Romney to handle it as trust Obama.

Mindful of Obama's vulnerability, Romney focuses frequently on the economy, suggesting that his business background makes him the candidate who can create jobs. Like most Republicans, he blames Obama's policies for making the economy worse.

Obama acknowledges that times remain hard for many, but says conditions are slowly improving. He suggests the best chance for full recovery is if voters stick with him.

Heather Beckman, 29, of Lantana, Fla., is a Democrat who said she's undecided about her vote but leaned to Obama. She believes the president can put the economy back on track, but not by himself. "At some point, the Republicans and Democrats have to come together to turn the economy around. As well as the rest of the country."

However, Republican Roni Lovell, 68, of Edgewood, Wash., said Romney's the one to help the economy turn the corner. "He has helped some really big companies come out of their financial woes," said the retired school administrator. "Obama has proved he can't do it and it's time someone else gives it a try."

The poll shows that optimism on an economic recovery earlier this year has all but stalled. The share of Americans describing the economy as "good" dropped 10 points since February, to 20 percent. Two-thirds see the economy as "poor" and about one in seven say it's somewhere in between. And just 22 percent say the economy got better in the past month, down from 28 percent saying so in February.

Democrats remain more optimistic about the economy in the coming year than do independents and Republicans, but still, the percentage that is hopeful for improvement in the next year dipped 10 points since February.

Fewer than one in three expect their household's economic fortunes to improve in the coming year, down from 37 percent in February. Eighteen percent see their finances as worsening, up from 11 percent in February.

And 35 percent expect the unemployment rate, which has been inching down for months, to start going back up. Thirty percent thought that in February. Independents are closer to Republicans than Democrats on that issue, with only 18 percent of independents and Republicans optimistic that the jobless rate will improve, while 40 percent of Democrats expect it to.

For now, Obama remains popular. His approval rating stands at 53 percent. But a stalling recovery could cause it to slide.

The AP-GfK poll was conducted May 3-7 by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Communications. It involved landline and cell phone interviews with 1,004 adults nationwide and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points. 

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

The Obama campaign is opening its 24th campaign office on Friday in Bethlehem — it opened its 23rd in York on Wednesday — and running a one-minute TV ad, while Mitt Romney’s campaign is getting ready to hire staff and the state party is planning to open its first coordinated campaign offices as early as next week.

Obama’s campaign, which launched its website and began organizing volunteers in April 2011, has been mobilizing volunteers, holding voter registration drives and sponsoring phone bank nights. It also has a “truth team” of local officials to respond to Romney’s campaign.

An Obama campaign spokeswoman in Pennsylvania, Jennifer Austin, would not say how many staff the organization has hired in Pennsylvania thus far, although a review of the campaign’s website suggests that it has at least two dozen.

Michael Barley, executive director of the state Republican Party, said campaign structures are built and volunteers are identified, and that now it’s a matter of restarting communication and getting the grassroots message out. The national party has hired a staff “victory director” to help oversee the party’s coordinated efforts in phone banking, door knocking and enlisting more volunteers.

Victory in Pennsylvania — and with it, the right to claim the state’s 20 electoral votes, tied for fifth-most in the nation — is probably more crucial to Obama than Romney. In 2008, Obama beat Republican John McCain by 10 percentage points in Pennsylvania.

Harry Truman in 1948 was the last Democratic presidential candidate to lose Pennsylvania but win the election, while Republican George W. Bush lost Pennsylvania twice — in 2000 and 2004 —on his way to two terms as president.

One recent independent poll showed Obama with a lead in Pennsylvania, 47 percent to 39 percent — a much stronger performance by the Democrat than in two other large swing states measured by the poll, Florida and Ohio.

The poll, by Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, surveyed 1,168 Pennsylvania voters from April 25 to May 1 and carried a sampling margin of error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

The intensity of the campaign in Pennsylvania will depend on how close the race is.

The presidential race in Pennsylvania could easily cost tens of millions of dollars and include spending by organizations called super PACs. As a result of a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision that erased many campaign-finance regulations, such groups can collect unlimited contributions from corporations, unions and individuals.

The 2010 U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania won by Pat Toomey cost more than $50 million, including spending by the candidates, political parties and outside groups in the general election and the bruising Democratic Party primary in which Joe Sestak beat fifth-term Sen. Arlen Specter.

“All kinds of groups, all kinds of crazy groups that don’t have to disclose their donors or disclose who they are will be able to pour their money into the race,” said state Sen. Daylin Leach, D-Montgomery, who is leading the Democratic campaign effort in state Senate races.

Obama’s ad in Pennsylvania is part of a $25 million, nine-state ad campaign that began Monday. Romney’s campaign and a pro-Romney super PAC, Restore Our Future, spent heavily on ads in the first half of April until GOP primary rival Rick Santorum suspended his campaign. 

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

“[P]olitical scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have long tracked historical trends in political polarization, said their studies of congressional votes found that Republicans are now more conservative than they have been in more than a century. Their data show a dramatic uptick in polarization, mostly caused by the sharp rightward move of the GOP.”

Mann and Ornstein are referring to data generated by Poole and Rosenthal’s famous DW-NOMINATE program -- one of the great achievements of modern political science. Poole and Rosenthal’s results regarding polarization have received a fair amount of media attention lately, popping up on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” NPR, and in the work of the American Prospect’s outstanding analyst Jamelle Bouie. The claim that Republicans are mostly to blame for the increase in polarization is usually accompanied by the claim -- also based upon DW-NOMINATE data -- that Republicans are now more conservative than they have been at any point since the 1880s.

This is a misapplication of DW-NOMINATE. As we’ll see below, DW-NOMINATE scores don’t really tell you how conservative or liberal a member of Congress is, at least not in the sense that most pundits use the term. It tells you how conservative or liberal a member of Congress is relative to other members of Congress. The latter is useful information, to be sure, but it really is an important distinction to be aware of.

Before explaining why I think this is a misapplication of DW-NOMINATE -- at least as pundits are using the data -- I should give a basic account of where I’m coming from in the big picture. On the one hand, I’m happy to see more rigorous analytical techniques make their way into political journalism. Having spent 18 months of my life applying a first cousin of DW-NOMINATE (known as OC, or Optimal Classification) to measure Supreme Court voting patterns for my master’s thesis (portions of which are paraphrased for this piece), my initial reaction was that the increased use of it was a good thing.

On the other hand, I’m concerned about relatively sophisticated statistical techniques like regression analysis and DW-NOMINATE being increasingly used by a journalist class that doesn’t really understand the assumptions or limitations behind them. With some of these techniques, journalists and their audience simply aren’t equipped to tell whether a technique is being misused or not. The result can be embarrassing misapplications, which the audience is then ill-equipped to analyze critically.

Remember, while there are a few political scientists who behave like partisans once they enter the public arena, the vast majority don’t. What occurs instead is what we’ve seen with regression modeling. These techniques all have certain assumptions and limitations built into them -- with which political scientists are familiar. When they speak to each other, there’s no need to list all of the caveats. The problem is that this manner of speaking is habit forming, and when addressing the general public, these assumptions and limitations really do need to be explained. All too often, however, they’re glossed over.

So it’s important to set forth at least a rudimentary explanation of what DW-NOMINATE is and how it works before analyzing this particular application. DW-NOMINATE grew out of a disenchantment with interest group ratings (think Americans for Democratic Action or American Conservative Union scores) as a measure of ideology. Interest groups typically cherry-pick 20 or so “key” roll call votes out of hundreds cast in Congress, and rate legislator ideology on this basis. Political scientists had noted that these scores often failed to grasp complexities in a legislator’s voting patterns, and could artificially place a lawmaker on the extremes of Congress.

DW-NOMINATE represents an attempt to rectify this by looking at every vote cast in a given Congress. Rather than starting with a pre-conceived notion of what a conservative vote would look like and picking and choosing votes to evaluate based upon that notion, DW-NOMINATE attempts, in essence, to reverse-engineer the “ideology” from the votes, without looking at the content of the votes themselves (stick with me here).

So how do we do this? DW-NOMINATE proceeds under the assumption that legislators who occupy similar positions on the ideological spectrum will vote together more frequently than they will with legislators who hold dissimilar positions on the ideological spectrum. In other words, because Bernie Sanders votes with Barbara Boxer frequently, and votes with Tom Coburn infrequently, we may conclude that Sanders and Boxer occupy similar ideological spaces, and that Sanders and Coburn occupy dissimilar ideological spaces.

By plugging in all votes from a given Congress, the DW-NOMINATE program in essence measures the similarities and dissimilarities in members’ voting patterns, and then assigns these legislators “scores” that measure where they would fall in a given Congress.

Rather than giving a primer in linear algebra, a simple example from my thesis may be more productive. The following is the raw data I used for the 1938 Supreme Court term. A vote with the majority is classified as a “1,” a vote against the majority is a “6,” and a failure to vote is classified as a “9.” By placing the votes in rows by the justice casting them, and in columns for each opinion (for Congress, the columns represent roll call votes), a matrix is created. Note that there are no unanimous votes -- DW-NOMINATE actually excludes unanimous votes, for reasons I won’t go into (a necessary shortcoming that can actually skew its perceptions of polarization).

This is quite literally all that DW-NOMINATE ever “sees.” Just to re-emphasize what these data are, however, here’s a more user-friendly depiction of the first 11 votes.

Just a simple glance at the “raw” matrix indicates that Justices Black and Douglas rarely voted with Justices McReynolds and Butler (who vote together in every instance except two). Indeed, McReynolds and Black never voted together on a split decision during the entire 1938 term. Thus, they represent the two poles. In the middle are Justices Roberts, Hughes, Reed, Frankfurter, and Stone, in descending order of likelihood of voting with McReynolds and Butler. Thus, the expected order would go something like McReynolds, Butler, Roberts, Hughes, Reed, Frankfurter, Stone, Douglas, and Black.

DW-NOMINATE-based programs perform the analysis much more precisely than our eyeballing of the data (although in the 1938 term, the result was exactly what our eyeballing suggested it should be), though with 435 legislators casting over 1,000 votes, the analysis is much more involved. Based upon these voting pairs -- how frequently members vote with each other -- DW-NOMINATE will also estimate “ideal points” for each legislator, which is essentially the “ideological score” that everyone is referring to when they discuss DW-NOMINATE. These typically fall between -1 and 1.

If you’ve been skimming this, now’s the time to stop doing so, as I’m about to stop speaking “geek.” There are three important limitations to the program. First, you are probably wondering: “Is -1 liberal or is -1 conservative?” The answer is “DW-NOMINATE doesn’t tell you.” It simply tells you how the legislators should be rank-ordered, relative to each other, and how far apart they are from each other in terms of ideology. We have to fill in the “conservative” and “liberal” labels based upon our real-world understandings of the legislators.

This isn’t a problem today, as we know that Bernie Sanders is a liberal and Tom Coburn is a conservative. Identifying the poles is therefore easy. But what about in the 1880s? What do “conservative” and “liberal” mean in that context? As discussed later, it is difficult to say.

Second, you are probably thinking: “But do we really need to look at all roll call votes? I don’t care how someone votes on the motion to proceed to the highway bill.” This is a more serious objection. NOMINATE absolutely weights votes on renaming post offices the same as the vote on the 2010 health care bill. You can see why this type of completeness might be important for political scientists hoping to divine granular distinctions between legislators, but might not be useful for purposes of general punditry.

In fact, this “completeness” might make things look more polarized than they really are. Ever since the mid-1970s, votes in the House for the “rule” and against motions to table or to recommit on bills have been more or less taken for granted as a matter of party loyalty if a member wants to progress in the House. It really is a big deal when a member casts a vote against the party on these. By including all of these votes, which are frequently party line votes even if the final vote is not, DW-NOMINATE can tend to make it look like liberals and moderates (or conservatives and moderates) within a party agree on more than they really do. This also goes to another problematic assumption behind DW-NOMINATE, which is that legislators cast “sincere” votes, e.g. they vote purely with regard to ideology and not with respect to other things, like logrolling, party loyalty, or cornhusker kickbacks.

The third, and most important, limitation is this: a score of -.5 means is that a member is quite liberal but only (a) relative to other people voting in that particular Congress and (b) relative to the issue agenda of that Congress. The scores have no absolute, fixed meaning.

This can have important implications. Consider the following example: Thirty-one Southern Democrats served in both the 71st Congress (1929-30) and the 76th (1939-40). Their median score in the 71st Congress was -.165. In the 76th the median was -.085. All of them except three saw their scores migrate “rightward” during this time period. One legislator, Fritz Lanham of Texas, who represented Fort Worth and some surrounding counties from 1919 to 1947, swung from negative .139 to positive .114. In other words he went from voting mostly with Democrats to voting mostly with Republicans (at least on economic issues; for reasons beyond the scope of this article, DW-NOMINATE effectively filters out racial issues in this time period)!

The explanation most would immediately reach for here is that the Southern Democrats became more conservative in response to Franklin Roosevelt. This is possible. But it is also possible -- and consistent with the historical record -- that they didn’t shift at all. Instead, we should consider that the House was populated with many more relatively liberal members from 1929 to 1939, and that the issue agenda changed from a conservative Republican one, which the Southern Democrats opposed, to a progressive Democratic one, which the Southern Democrats also opposed. Going from mostly opposing conservative Republican legislation to mostly opposing the legislation put forward by their progressive brethren would create an illusion of movement on the part of the Southern Democrats in terms of their absolute conservatism, when in reality they stayed the same. DW-NOMINATE simply gives us no particularly useful tools for discriminating between these competing explanations.

This brings us Mann and Ornstein’s claims, which I think we can now dispense with rather quickly given this understanding of what DW-NOMINATE actually does. One simply cannot say that Republicans are the most conservative they’ve been since the 1880s, because the DW-NOMINATE scores are created without any fixed meaning. A legislator with a score of .2 in 1880 could actually be quite a bit more conservative, based upon our current understanding of “conservative,” than one who received a score of .7 in 2010. Put differently, a legislator with a score of .2 in 1880 would almost certainly never have voted for Medicaid; a similarly situated legislator today would almost certainly vote to renew it.

In fact, the historical record suggests that while there are some similarities between the basic Republican platform in 1880 and today, on other issues such as free trade, the differences are quite radical (and the Republican position on free trade today would have been considered “liberal” in the 1880s). In fact, it’s debatable whether Republicans should even be assigned the conservative pole in the 1880s, or that the Democrats should be assigned the liberal pole (which would also make the current Democratic caucus the most liberal one in history as well), given the strength of laissez-faire “Bourbon Democrats” in the Democratic Party during this time and the Republican Party’s position on internal improvements and spending on things like education.

For the same reason, while the DW-NOMINATE data can show that the current Congress is the most polarized in history (since that is a relative measurement), they cannot really show us who is to blame for that polarization. Without any lodestone to hold the “center” steady, we can’t tell who has moved the farthest away from that “center.” And because we have a pretty good sense that the center shifts from Congress to Congress, especially when control of that body changes hands, it becomes almost impossible to make meaningful comparisons between even two Congresses, let alone over the course of multiple decades.

Again, to illustrate this point, DW-NOMINATE suggests that Congress became much less polarized in the 1920s and 30s, which is probably true.  But it suggests that both parties moved toward the center (and that both Northern and Southern Democrats, on average moved toward the center).  There simply isn't any support for the idea that the Democrats in the 1936 Congress were, on average, more conservative than Democrats in the 1926 Congress, at least in the sense that contemporary pundits use the term.  But as the agenda moved leftward, the rise of the Conservative Coalition has the effect of pulling both parties toward the center, even though, overall, both were probably becoming more liberal.

DW-NOMINATE remains a powerful tool, especially if you keep its limitations in mind and are looking at discrete Congresses (or really are interested purely in polarization). It even sheds interesting light on realignment theory. But it really doesn’t do any of the things the popular press is claiming it does, at least not particularly well. 

Sean Trende is Senior Elections Analyst for RealClearPolitics. He can be reached at strende@realclearpolitics.com.

How it must have eaten away at him to be the first African-American president, yet not associate himself with what has been deemed the foremost civil-rights issue of the age. To be a progressive in favor of all things “forward,” but retrograde on marriage. To know that his stance was a transparent charade and see it treated as such by the lefty opinion makers he respects most.

To watch his sloppy, unserious second-in-command get all the credit for moral courage by forthrightly endorsing gay marriage on “Meet the Press” while he clung to his artful dodge.

As an act of personal catharsis, the president’s statement of support was in an appropriately first-person key: I, me and my. He had favored gay marriage back in 1996 when it was out on the fringe. He was one of the few people on the planet who flipped into opposition as gay marriage became more mainstream.

For a while, he invoked his faith in justifying his opposition, then he said he was “evolving,” which everyone understood to mean he would embrace gay marriage as soon as he wasn’t running for re-election anymore.

The Obama team likes to say Mitt Romney’s flip-flops show he lacks a core. Obama’s long spell of deception on gay marriage shows he has a core, but one that he has devoted much of his national political career to obscuring.

The president’s willingness finally to say what he believes increased the sense among gay-marriage supporters that final victory is inevitable. History with a capital “H” is on their side. The 21st century itself is practically synonymous with gay marriage.

Although this smug confidence will envelope Obama as he campaigns in such lucrative precincts as George Clooney’s living room, it badly overstates gay marriage’s prospects.

History is littered with the wreckage of causes pronounced inevitable by all right-thinking people. The failed Equal Rights Amendment looked inevitable when it passed Congress in 1972 and immediately 30 states ratified it. Opposition to abortion that was supposed to inevitably wither away is as robust as ever.

The forces favoring gun control seemed unstoppably on the march when Congress passed the Brady Bill and the assault-weapons ban in the 1990s, but there are more protections for gun rights now than two decades ago.

Gay marriage’s inevitability hasn’t been evident to the voters in 31 states who have written into their constitutions that marriage is between a man and a woman. The latest is North Carolina, where 61 percent of voters embraced the traditional definition of marriage in a referendum. North Carolina isn’t Mississippi. Obama won North Carolina in 2008, and Democrats are holding their convention there.

Nationwide, no referendum simply upholding traditional marriage has ever lost, and even in Maine, voters in 2009 reversed a gay-marriage law passed by the legislature.

These state constitutional provisions constitute irreducible facts on the ground. Reversing them by democratic means will be the work of a generation. For the foreseeable future, the country will be largely traditional on marriage, with enclaves of same-sex unions as boutique blue-state institutions lacking full legitimacy.

Rather than waiting for the tide of history to do its inexorable work, advocates of gay marriage really want the Supreme Court to impose their new definition of marriage. Inevitability’s full name is Anthony McLeod Kennedy, the swing-vote justice who is perfectly capable of remaking marriage by judicial fiat.

There’s no doubt that supporters of gay marriage have made progress, but they shouldn’t congratulate themselves yet. Their cause is still subject to events, such as Obama’s fate this fall. If the president’s newly frank support for gay marriage costs him crucial swing states, his coming-out party will be seen — inevitably — as more a setback to the cause than a watershed.

But after Joe told David Gregory of "Meet the Press" he was "absolutely comfortable" with homosexuals marrying, Barack Obama could not maintain his credibility with the cultural elite if he stuck with the biblical view that God ordained marriage as solely between a man and woman. The biblical view had to go.

Obama had to move, or look like a malingerer in secularism's next great moral advance into post-Christian America.

Consider. Obama had an appearance coming up on "The View," where Whoopi Goldberg would have demanded to know why he lacked the courage of Biden's convictions. He has a $40,000-a-plate fundraiser at George Clooney's, where the Hollywood crowd would want to know why he does not end discrimination against homosexuals.

He has appearances lined up before gay activists raising millions for his campaign. Monday, his press secretary was pilloried for his feeble defense of Obama's now-abandoned position.

His hand was forced. Yet the stand Obama took could cost him his presidency. Same-sex marriage may yet be a bridge too far, even for a dying Christian America.

On the plus side for Obama, his decision is producing hosannas from the elites and an infusion of cash from those who see same-sex marriage as the great moral and civil rights issue of our time.

But Obama may also have just solved Mitt Romney's big problem: How does Mitt get all those evangelical Christians and cultural conservatives not only to vote for him but to work for him?

Obama, by declaring that homosexual marriages should be on the same legal and moral plane as traditional marriage, just took command of the forces of anti-Christian secularism in America's Kulturkampf. And Nov. 6, 2012, is shaping up as the Antietam of the culture war.

Obama's second problem is that he may soon be seen as America's champion of same-sex marriage, but an ineffectual advocate. For Obama can do nothing, as of now, to impose homosexual marriage on the American people.

Thirty-one states have voted to outlaw it. A constitutional amendment supporting same-sex marriage could not win a majority of either house of Congress, let alone the necessary two-thirds of both.

Hence, Obama is going to spend six months winning cheers by calling for same-sex marriage. But the price of those cheers will be the rallying of millions of opponents of homosexual marriage, who will fight this battle where they are winning it, at the state level.

Only six states have approved homosexual marriage, while 30 have imposed a constitutional ban. In North Carolina, a ban not only on same-sex marriage but also civil unions, though opposed by Obama and Bill Clinton, carried on Tuesday with 61 percent of the vote.

Republican turnout in North Carolina's primary was up half a million, the highest in history. And this is a state Obama carried in 2008, a state whose largest city, Charlotte, will host Obama's convention.

Even in liberal California in 2008, while John McCain was getting a smaller share of the vote than Barry Goldwater in 1964, Proposition 8, restricting marriage to men and women, won.

How does Obama propose to win this battle?

He has one path to victory -- the Supreme Court.

The New York Times, declaring that homosexuals' right to marry is "too precious and too fragile to be left up to the whim of states and the tearing winds of modern partisan politics," is looking to the court as the last, best hope to impose same-sex marriage on the nation.

Can't trust voters, can't trust elected legislators, can't trust Congress. Homosexual marriage, says the Times, is too important to be left to democratic decision. The republic must be commanded to accept it by unelected judges who serve for life and against whom the people have no political recourse.

That process of judicial tyranny has begun. A California judge has overturned the decision of California's voters to ban gay marriage, and his ruling is headed for the high court.

The Supreme Court thus will tell us whether this issue is to be decided democratically by voters and their elected state and federal legislators, or dictatorially by themselves.

Four liberal activists on the Supreme Court -- Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor -- are probably ready to declare that homosexual marriage is a constitutional right, as their predecessors declared abortion to be a constitutional right.

But Obama needs one more justice. If elected, he will get it, and same-sex marriage will be forced on all of America. If Romney wins, the Supreme Court will likely leave the issue of same-sex marriage to be decided by the people and their elected representatives.

Thus everything is up for grabs this November: the House, the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court and whether we still call the United States of America God's country.

Game on! 

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

New internal e-mails disclosed by the House Natural Resources Committee this week show that a supposedly exculpatory report on the administration's doctored drilling moratorium analysis -- issued by the Department of Interior's Inspector General's office -- was itself incomplete, misleading and unsubstantiated. Even more damning, the documents reveal that the White House actively blocked investigators and refuses to comply with subpoenas.

Now, as one senior IG agent warned his bosses, "the chickens may be coming home to roost."

A quick refresher: After the BP oil spill in 2010, the White House imposed a radical six-month moratorium on America's entire deepwater drilling industry. The overbroad ban -- inserted into a technical safety document in the middle of the night by Obama's green extremists -- cost an estimated 19,000 jobs and $1.1 billion in lost wages.

The anti-drilling administration based its draconian order on recommendations from an expert oil spill panel. But that panel's own members (along with the federal judiciary) called out then-eco czar Carol Browner for misleading the public about the scientific evidence and "contributing to the perception that the government's findings were more exact than they actually were." Browner and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar oversaw the false rewriting of the drilling ban report to completely misrepresent the Obama-appointed panel's own overwhelming scientific objections to the job-killing edict.

Federal judge Martin Feldman in Louisiana blasted the Obama Interior Department for defying his May 2010 order to lift its fraudulent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. He called out the administration's culture of contempt and "determined disregard" for the law.

Ever since, GOP watchdogs have attempted to hold administration officials accountable for the drilling ban fraud. In November 2010, the DOI Inspector General issued a report cited by Salazar to argue that any editing of the drilling ban report was unintentional and mistaken. But e-mails from IG senior agent Richard Larrabee released by the House Natural Resources Committee flatly contradict Salazar.

"I truly believe the editing WAS intentional -- by an overzealous staffer at the White House. And, if asked, I, as the case agent, would be happy to state that opinion to anyone interested," Larrabee wrote.

He noted that the IG report failed to mention that investigators were unable to independently validate e-mails supplied by Salazar's office -- and that the report was "simply silent" about how the White House blocked investigators' attempts to interview one of Browner's chief henchmen, Joe Aldy. "Well, it will be interesting to see if anyone picks up on these things, or cares about them," Larrabee wrote.

Well, House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings, R-Wash., cares. In a letter to the DOI Inspector General's office, Hastings blasted the stonewallers who have hid in the dark for more than a year. "The IG report is being used by the Obama Administration and others as a defense that this matter has already been investigated and resolved. These emails contradict that claim and raise new questions on whether the IG's investigation was as thorough and complete as it should have been," Hastings wrote.

The actual drafts of the drilling moratorium report and the communications between senior Interior Department officials and White House political appointees remain out of public view. "To date, the Interior Department has never had to disclose documents to the IG or to Congress," Hastings noted. "Despite the President's pledge of transparency, this Administration has not answered questions by anyone on how this decision was made that forced thousands of Americans out of work and cost millions of dollars in lost economic activity."

This election isn't just about jobs, jobs, jobs. It's about the lies, lies, lies that have led to massive job destruction -- and the ruthless corruptocrats using our tax dollars to whitewash their radical green agenda. 

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

The Louisiana governor has a tendency to speak faster than his audience is able to think, so when it came time to deliver the Republican response to President Obama's first address to a joint session of Congress in 2009, the most important speech of Jindal's political life, he made sure to take it slow.

What resulted was an oratorical disaster.

On live national television, Jindal spoke in a jarring, singsong pitch that replaced his natural rapid-fire monotone. Even longtime friends found it difficult to concentrate on what he was saying, and the reviews were almost uniformly withering.

The man who had been regarded as the future of the Republican Party was suddenly the butt of a national joke.

“The delivery was absolutely awful,” Jindal recalled of the notorious speech in a phone interview with RCP from his Baton Rouge office on Wednesday. “But if you look beyond the delivery and actually look at the substance, the whole point of my speech at that point in time was to say that the president is proposing a nearly $800 billion stimulus plan. Our country can’t afford this level of spending and borrowing.”

And with that, Jindal launched into a blizzard of statistics on the growth of the GDP, a list of negative outcomes of health care reform and, for good measure, a quotation from Napoleon Bonaparte about leadership before finally coming up for air several minutes later.

Members of the Louisiana press corps have learned over the years to ask the governor multiple questions at once, as the only way to avoid spending the better part of a press conference listening to his take on every nuance of a single topic.

Even the briefest conversation with Jindal leaves no doubt that he is deeply knowledgeable and passionate about policy, but less immediately clear is whether he has the right stuff to take the next step in a national political environment in which attention spans are short.

After being widely written off as a potential national figure following that 2009 debacle, Jindal did not attempt to reinvent himself. Instead, he reverted to the policy-obsessed wonkiness and disarmingly polite appeal that come naturally to him.

Surprising the skeptics, Jindal has enjoyed a quiet re-emergence as a popular second-term governor, a highly coveted surrogate for out-of-state Republicans, and a likely name on Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential short list.

Thus far, he has not been among the trendiest picks to become Romney’s running mate, as was the case four years ago -- before John McCain chose a different young conservative with a reputation as an ethics crusader.

But interviews with several Republican leaders and private conversations with people close to both Romney and Jindal suggest plenty of reasons to believe things might play out differently this time. Though the nation’s first Indian-American governor may be flying a bit under the radar in the VP speculation game, his chance of being selected may be as good as any of the more buzzed-about prospects.

“He’s certainly on the short list as far as qualified people that could be a complement to Governor Romney,” said Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, who endorsed the now-presumptive nominee in early February and speaks weekly with his advisers. “Governor Romney’s hallmark is his ability to turn things around, whether the Olympics here in Utah, or turning around Massachusetts when he was governor, or turning around businesses from failure to success -- that’s certainly going to be a big part of his platform, and Bobby’s done that as governor of Louisiana.”

Though the years since that 2009 speech have been undeniably fruitful for Jindal on the legislative front, it was his leadership during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill that helped solidify his reputation in Louisiana and rejuvenated his standing among national Republicans as a party heavyweight.

“Competent” is perhaps the word admirers use most frequently to describe Jindal after “brilliant,” and his ability to get things done was a trait he demonstrated throughout the crisis in the Gulf region. For weeks, Jindal was a near-constant figure at the frontlines of the spill, and he hit the right political notes with Republicans by frequently butting heads with the Obama administration, demanding that federal officials be more proactive in their response and taking matters into his own hands when he deemed doing so appropriate.

“The difference between him after the BP oil spill and his Democratic predecessor [Gov. Kathleen Blanco] after Katrina could hardly have been more stark,” Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour -- whose neighboring state suffered a lesser impact from the most recent environmental disaster in the Gulf -- told RCP. “He was decisive, he was knowledgeable, and he was working hard for his people. There was never any question -- there was no uncertainty.”

Barbour, who considered a presidential bid last year and remains one of the most well-connected members of the national Republican establishment, said he had “no idea” whom Romney would pick as his running mate but praised Jindal as “extremely capable” and “genuinely knowledgeable about public policy.”

“Plus he’s a very nice guy -- pretty family and a good person,” Barbour said. “He’s just got a tremendous capacity.”

Barbour was one of several Republicans interviewed for this story who downplayed apprehensions about Jindal’s communications skills -- concerns that continue to simmer as Romney’s eventual running mate will be called upon to inject new energy into his campaign.

“I remember people saying in 1992 about Bill Clinton, ‘The only thing anybody really knows him for is that terrible speech he made at the Democratic convention in 1988,’ ” Barbour said. “That didn’t turn out to be the only thing they knew about him. The same’s true with Bobby.”

An All-American Story

Jindal’s politically potent recipe of rare intellectual capacity, driving ambition, and disarming humility have won him admirers in Washington since his late-adolescence.

Former Louisiana Congressman Jim McCrery still recalls the day more than 20 years ago when a summer intern who called himself Bobby walked into his office and stood with his hands folded politely in front of him.

McCrery remembered the Brown University undergraduate from the impressive application that he had submitted the previous spring.

Almost all of the congressman’s interns were the sons and daughters of major supporters from his northwestern Louisiana district. Jindal, by contrast, was from outside the district in Baton Rouge and lacked politically relevant family ties.

What he did have was a desire to stand out.

“Congressman, I really appreciate the opportunity to be here in Washington and to be one of your interns,” McCrery recalled Jindal saying. “For the last few days, I’ve been in the back of the office doing the filing and sorting and all of those things, and I don’t mind doing that, but I was just wondering, while I’m here, if you could give me an assignment.”

Impressed with the intern’s pluck but skeptical of his earnestness, McCrery replied with a challenging task for the bright-eyed young man -- who had not yet reached the legal drinking age -- to complete during his free hours: “Write a paper on Medicare and how you solve it.”

Jindal thanked the congressman and said that he would get right on it. Two weeks later, the eager intern plopped down a fat document on the lawmaker’s desk.

“I read it, and it was excellent,” McCrery said. “For him to grasp as well as he did the Medicare program in such a short period of time was nothing short of amazing. It was an early indicator of how far this young man might go in life.”

As the counterweight to a presidential nominee blessed with wealth and privilege, Jindal’s stirring life story as the child of Indian immigrants -- who bestowed upon himself at the age of 4 the all-American name of the youngest son in “The Brady Bunch” -- could be especially appealing.

A Rhodes scholar who helmed the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals -- the state’s largest agency -- at the almost absurd age of 24, Piyush “Bobby” Jindal’s aptitude and credentials for the nation’s second-highest office would be difficult for anyone to question seriously.

Like Jindal, Romney was an academic overachiever who may never have been the life of the party but was the kind of kid that moms hoped their daughters would bring home one day, and the two men are similar in mind-set and temperament.

Though he does not share Romney’s decades of business experience, Jindal did have a brief post-collegiate stint working as a business consultant at McKinsey & Company before entering politics, and he shares the Bain Capital co-founder’s hyper-analytical approach to governing.

Unlike Romney, who faced likely defeat in Massachusetts had he chosen to run for a second term, Jindal has remained overwhelmingly popular in his home state. In October of last year, he was re-elected with a whopping 66 percent of the vote in Louisiana’s nonpartisan blanket primary system.

Asked on Wednesday about the top priority for his second term in Baton Rouge, which began in January, Jindal had a simple answer: education reform. And then he spent the next nine minutes (in an interview scheduled to last 10) describing in detail the legislation he pushed through last month to overhaul teacher tenure, expand access to charter schools, and create a coordinated early childhood education system in his state.

Jindal cited with palpable enthusiasm a slew of statistics about budget cuts, state payrolls, and the reversal in a decades-long brain drain from Louisiana, all under his administration. He also was eager to expand the parameters of his agenda in a manner that evoked a Romney stump speech.

“There’s one view that our primary focus should be all about redistributing wealth and that the reason people are suffering is because other people are doing well, and we need to manage the slow decline of this great country and become more like Europe,” Jindal said. “There’s a second view which says . . . your last name, your Zip code, your race, your gender, your income, should not determine your outcome as an adult in America -- that if you’re willing to work hard and get a great education, you should be able to pursue the American dream.”

Added Political Value

Though he is only 40, Jindal is already one of the more experienced Republican governors in the country, having been in office for 4 ½ years after serving three years as Louisiana’s 1st District representative in the U.S. House.

While several of Romney’s potential running mates are known primarily for their work in Washington, the presumptive nominee’s core message in each of his two presidential runs suggests that he will be inclined to reinforce his own credentials by picking an outsider with a managerial background as his running mate.

Able to point to a long list of accomplishments in a state with a constitutionally strong governorship, Jindal is among those who most clearly fit the bill.

“A lot of the thrust of the Romney campaign is going to be that on the other side you have flash and dash and big speeches, but we need someone who can run a country,” said one Republican consultant who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It’s not just, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ It’s going to be, ‘And do you think these guys can make it better over the next four years?’ And in order to double down and make sure that answer is ‘no,’ I think there’s a pretty good chance he would pick someone with executive experience.”

Jindal may not provide Romney with an edge in a key swing state or a clear boost in a critical demographic, but his Southern twang and firm entrenchment within the culturally conservative base of the Republican Party could boost the ticket among many conservatives who are enthusiastic about beating President Obama but have been lukewarm about their own candidate.

Though Romney’s need to firm up his right flank is not considered his most pressing concern among advisers in Boston, gun-owners -- a critical group in key swing states, many of whom are Reagan Democrats and present a particularly appealing pickup opportunity for Romney -- are a potentially decisive voting bloc that Jindal could help activate.

The gun lobby paid close attention to Romney’s speech at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in St. Louis last month after years of a rocky relationship with the former Massachusetts governor. (In his failed 1994 Senate run, Romney boasted that he didn’t “line up with the NRA,” and famously -- and unpersuasively -- said during his first presidential run that his hunting experience amounted to shooting “small varmints.”)

Jindal, on the other hand, has been a hero to the gun lobby since 2006, when he sponsored the so-called “Katrina Bill” that barred law enforcement officials from confiscating privately owned guns during federal emergencies and has continued to win accolades from gun-owners as governor.

“I can’t think of a governor who’s done more to stand up and protect the Second Amendment than Bobby Jindal,” Chris Cox, the NRA’s chief lobbyist, told RCP. “I don’t pretend to know who Gov. Romney will pick as his running mate, but when it comes to the Second Amendment, Bobby Jindal’s a great champion.”

Saying the Right Things

With unimpeachably conservative credentials on social issues like abortion, in addition to his well-known bona fides on taxes and fiscal policy, Jindal remains a hot commodity on the national Republican fundraising circuit.

His most recent travels have taken him to political events in Colorado, New Mexico, New York, New Jersey, and Utah. This week alone, he headlined an Alabama Republican Party function on Thursday and is slated to address the Oklahoma Republican convention on Friday.

Louisiana Democrats, an increasingly endangered species in the state after having dominated its politics for generations, have taken note and argue that Jindal mistook his electoral triumph against token Democratic opposition last year for a sweeping mandate that does not really exist.

“His national ambitions clearly drive the agenda here, and people recognize the price that the state as a whole is paying for it, and I think there’s growing dissatisfaction bordering on resentment,” said Louisiana Democratic Party communications director Mike Stagg. “This is the longest he’s stayed in any job he’s had in his adult life. Had it not been for the BP disaster in 2010, he’d already be bored with being governor.”

Louisiana’s legislature is currently in session, and Jindal is quick to mention that he is spending most of his time in-state.

During the early Republican primary fight, he was a prominent backer of Texas Gov. Rick Perry and did not formally endorse Romney until last month -- after his virtual clinching of the nomination had been firmly established. But that recent history is unlikely to affect his standing as a potential VP pick.

Jindal’s advisers say that he truly has been keeping his proverbial head down and focusing on the work in front of him, and members of his inner circle pride themselves on avoiding the constant soft-selling to key Romney officials and the national media that the teams of other vice-presidential prospects sometimes engage in more conspicuously.

Asked “the question” about whether he’d accept the No. 2 slot if it were offered, Jindal’s response is notable only for its avoidance of a direct answer.

“I’ve got the job that I want,” he told RCP. “I think it’s presumptuous to speculate on all of this. The reality is he will select whoever he thinks will do the best job if called upon to step into the job as president.”

It is, of course, the standard answer among potential running mates -- who would almost certainly accept the position but are careful not to come across as overeager.

Still, Jindal has a way of conveying convincingly that he really would rather talk about current policy debates and his accomplishments in Louisiana than speculate about a topic that only a tiny group of people has any real insight into.

“He’s not trying to get the job,” one close observer of Louisiana politics said. “The people who are highest on the VP list publicly tend to be people who are trying to get the job.”

It’s precisely the mind-set that could endear him to Romney. 

Scott Conroy is a national political reporter for RealClearPolitics. He can be reached at sconroy@realclearpolitics.com.