The folks behind Secure America Now -- a neoconservatve 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization dedicated to giving you a bunch of irrational anxiety attacks between now and Election Day -- brings us this new ad, complaining that the Obama administration hasn't been Dick Cheney enough in their pursuit of terrorists. This comes despite the fact that by many accounts, the Obama administration has exceeded Cheneyism in ways that even trouble writers at the National Review. (In case you've missed out on current events, the Obama White House has this super-cool club that meets on Tuesdays to decide who shall be killed to death, with drones. These occasions are literally called "terror Tuesdays," in the same way that your kids' high school cafeteria has "taco Tuesdays.")

"Ugh, whatevs!" thinks the lady in this new ad, as she smashes her laptop shut and then does the whole, "Oh, hey, I didn't see you there! Do you have time for an impotent rant about how scared I am?"

This bedraggled suburban lady is terribly aggrieved at the way the Obama administration briefly wanted to try terrorists in (the vastly more effective) civilian courts. Also, President Obama wanted to close Guantanamo and stop torturing people, as recommended by General David Petraeus, one of those "generals on the ground" to whom Commanders-in-Chief are perpetually supposed to be listening.

This might be the only ad you'll ever see that complains aloud, "He shut down the black sites!" This both presumes the formerly CIA-run torture farms were a) preferable and b) actually shut down -- as the Associated Press reported back in April of 2011, the shuttered network of secret prisons ran by the CIA were replaced by a network of secret prisons run by the military's Joint Special Operations Command. This was by design -- as Scott Horton reported for Harper's, "Recall that when Barack Obama was inaugurated, he issued an executive order designed to shut down secret prisons. When the order was finally released, initially expansive language had been narrowed to cover only secret prisons run by the CIA."

But, hey, one shouldn't let facts get in the way of some good old-fashioned fearmongering.

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By now, you've probably heard that Mitt Romney has spent a day in the U.K., where he failed rather miserably at carrying the Star Spangled Banner, making a series of gaffes and blunders that rivaled "The Increasingly Poor Decisions Of Todd Margaret", and which earned brickbats from British Prime Minister David Cameron and London's Tory mayor and Chris Matthews doppelganger Boris Johnson, who delighted a cheering crowd by referring to him as "a guy called Mitt Romney."

Lord knows that even in this special relationship we have with our nation's forebears, there are easy pitfalls into which one can plunge. President Barack Obama, for example, has had a rather difficult time giving gifts to the Brits over the years, famously getting into a spot of bother over a set of DVDs he got for then-P.M. Gordon Brown, that weren't correctly region-coded. (Also, it was a sort of chintzy counter-offer, given that Brown came bearing a pen-holder carved from the wood of the HMS Gannet, the sister ship of the HMS Resolute, from which the desk in the Oval Office was carved.)

And, hey, President George W. Bush and Tony Blair went all-in for a stupid, costly war in Iraq, so, you know ... there are degrees to this sort of trans-Atlantic incompetence.

The most significant error Romney made, from a pure foreign policy standpoint, was blowing up the MI-6 spot by publicly declaring that he'd met with the head of the agency, Sir John Sawers, whose schedule and movements are a closely guarded secret. Most of the other mistakes were largely cultural miscues -- he misused the word "backside," and he referred to Labour Party leader Ed Millband as "Mr. Leader." (This is pretty forgivable, frankly, considering that Milliband, from the standpoint of being able to leave vibrant personal impressions on people, is sort of the U.K. equivalent of Tim Pawlenty.)

The worst mistake, of course, was slagging the London Olympics on the day before the grand debut. This is more than a little bit ironic, considering the fact that concerns Romney cited were concerns that were widely shared by Olympic organizers and their critics at home. And anyway, the Brits have been the leaders in the field of grousing about the London Olympics. In March 2011, the BBC premiered a television mockumentary series called "Twenty Twelve" that depicted the members of the Olympic Deliverance Commission as a gang of bureaucratic incompetents. (It's hilarious! It stars Hugh Bonneville from "Downton Abbey!")

The thing is, though, even though Romney may have been only echoing numerous Brits in his critique of the games, the Brits prefer to be the sole proprietors of their own self-effacement. As Andrew Sullivan put it, "The Brits bitch and moan about everything all the time. They are characterologically piss-takers and doom-mongers, fearing (and predicting) national embarrassment always around the corner. But if a non-Brit joins in the doom chorus, the ranks will close, and the anger will be intense."

This sort of etiquette, by the way, should be standard and understandable on this side of the Atlantic, too. When your Speculatronners welcome people to their home by saying, "Gosh, sorry the place is a wreck," the expected response is, "Oh, don't even worry about it," and not "I find your lack of organization to be disconcerting and I'm not sure you're ready to be homeowners."

Anyway, Romney's mistakes, taken individually, are really small potatoes. Piled at his feet, however, they more-or-less decimated the entire point of his trip to the United Kingdom, and created the one thing that he didn't want and which few, in all likelihood, could have predicted -- a hot, multi-part gaffe-laden news cycle disaster, now popularly known as the Romney Shambles.

But the real question isn't, "Why did Romney navigate these cultural differences with greater precision?" It's "Why is Romney in England, at all?" It was a few Sundays ago that the Sunday morning political-teevee mouth-havers started talking about Romney's "important trip" to the London Olympics, while failing to qualify what on earth was so important about it. It seemed for all the world to be one of the least important things you can do when your best shot at winning the 2012 election is to continually make a case about how you'll handle the domestic economy.

Of course, Romney's trip abroad mirrors a similar "Holidays In The Sun" trip that then-candidate Obama made to the European continent, where he demonstrated that he was able to ... uhm -- what, exactly? That he could stand and walk and talk without falling down? That, too, was an instance of a candidate making some hopelessly superfluous effort at statesmanning. Obama fared better than Romney, in that he did not spectacularly piss off the locals, but his trip abroad mainly managed to provide Sen. John McCain with one of his better ad campaigns -- the famed "Celebrity" ad.

The short answer to why Romney is killing time this summer by jaunting off to foreign locales is that he has far too much time to kill. Romney secured his nomination in a fashion that was fairly rapid in terms of calendar days and yet still seemed like it took forever. And ever since, the campaign has mostly been day after day of picayune political craft, punctuated by occasional daft crap. The press has been gagging for a veep pick -- traditionally an end-of-summer disclosure -- for months now, because they are unlucky enough to have to stay invested in the long summer months of the campaign. Most Americans have smartly taken the summer off from politics.

The irony is that Mitt Romney could really benefit from the way electoral politics is practiced in the nation in which he's currently bumbling and stumbling. Actually, scratch that: America could benefit from the way the Brits play this game. See, while the British version of the "general election" shares many similarities to our own -- such as an easy-to-rile media and rotted-out campaign "consultants," it is blessedly short. It's not a two-year long crap-show of bad taste, poor judgment, and questionable intelligence. (It's only a handful of weeks of that.) And it makes a difference. Joe Klein elucidated the difference rather well back in 2001, writing for the Guardian:

Shorter is better. At the end of an American campaign -- after two years of inanity topped by a 72-hour marathon of mindless state-hopping in an aeroplane that smells like a high-school locker room (close-quarters with American television crews resembles nothing so much as close-quarters with British football fans on a European jaunt; the reek is staggering) -- after two years spent following an American politician, even a brilliant one like Bill Clinton, the best minds turn to mush, addled by a tsunami of junk food and a tour of the world's most dreary motels. The Stockholm Syndrome takes hold; by the end of a campaign, the press corps can, and often does, recite the candidate's stump speech as he delivers it (although Ronald Reagan's harangues were so predictable that the press often would vacate the hall to play Liar's Poker, leaving a designated note-taker behind in the unlikely event that Dutch slipped and "committed" news). After an American election, almost everyone goes to fat farms, rehabilitation centres or the Caribbean. Last year, when it wasn't over even after it was over, there was the additional nightmare of a month in Florida, working, not basking, in Tallahassee, not Miami. So a one-month campaign is very nice.

Look, we're not putting ourselves out there as having a fix for this -- though we'd suggest, amid an inevitable chorus of "We couldn't do that here!" that some limitations could be placed on the timeframe of allowable campaign activity, and the primary system, with sufficient courage, could be reformed -- but it's hard to deny that "shorter" would be "better." Even if you found the idea to be a complete non-starter, I doubt you could rally a crowd of people in the style of Boris Johnson around the shared idea that two years of numbing inanity is good for the country.

A shorter campaign cycle would limit the political media's excesses considerably, and free up more time to actually report on what's going on in the actual country, with the actual humans that live and work and die in it. That could lead a shift in discussion, where our various and sundry economic maladies are treated as something that happens to ordinary people, as opposed to something that impacts the electoral hopes of some permanently affluent political celebrity.

Also, there's a decent chance that the candidates themselves would be a great deal more substantive and searching -- there wouldn't be this inducement to play political games, score
cheap news cycle points, or use the abundance of time to paper over your policies with the turd polish of super PACs or the silver-tongued junk of brand marketers. Candidates couldn't spend month after month dodging questions from reporters, or take so much sweet time waiting to roll out their platform, in fear of what might happen if you show some convictions or make a decision.

And perhaps best of all, the public policy apparatus could function outside the penumbra of the campaign season. We wouldn't look at, say, a decision to deliver some immigration reform by executive fiat as a crass bit of election-year pandering. (And if that was the spirit in which such a policy might be offered, perhaps people would think twice before offering it.)

Of course, in the current arrangement, the top-tier candidates all benefit from these excesses, and would likely prefer that they stayed in place. Which is why I'd point out that if Mitt Romney had only been given a few weeks to campaign, there's no way he would have spent any of it traveling to England, and he would thus have avoided this week's disasters.

And, of course, this campaign would not currently be stuck in the ridiculous place it is right now.

AN UPDATE ON THE RIDICULOUS PLACE THE CAMPAIGN IS STUCK RIGHT NOW:

So, America is now in its second week of "You Didn't-Build That A-Go-Go," and as no one has come up with a way to limit the existence of the month of August, there's not likely to be an end to it any time soon. This is to everyone's detriment, including the Romney campaign, which has made the decision to weaponize a thin selection of the available works of Barack Obama oratory, because a convenient misuse of the pronoun "that," instead of "those," enabled it. As Jon Stewart pointed out on "The Daily Show," if Obama had summoned the obviously intended word "those," it would have grammatically mapped back to the correct antecedent -- "roads and bridges," not built by business owners -- instead of "business," which is obviously built by a business owner.

From the standpoint of pure, concern-free political calculus, it's easy to see why the Romney campaign allowed this lie to leave the barn. As Jonathan Chait points out, it allows Romney to reinforce the idea that "Democrats as taking money from the hard-working white middle class and giving it to a lazy black underclass." And the press enjoys feeding the mischaracterization. After all, the political media largely lives in a "post-concern" world, too, and as long as they can say things like wow, this really reinforces the caricature of Obama, they can fool themselves into believing they are being substantive.

There's something (unkind) to be said about the quality of the initial response from Obama-favoring partisans as well, who quickly unearthed a clip of Romney telling the Salt Lake City Olympic athletes that they didn't achieve their glory on their own. (They had the damnable support of their families!)

That's a pretty great riposte -- if we're out on the third-grade playground playing snaps. On substance, though, it's just another heap of turds. "I'll see your unfair distortion of an unobjectionable sentence of public speaking and raise you with an even more distorted example of the same!" It's just mutually-assured distraction, being perpetrated by people who have such despoiled character that they think nothing of going out in the world and pretending that they do not understand English. Any honest broker should maintain that neither candidate, in either instance, said anything remotely controversial, let alone reprehensible.

But Romney's campaign shoulders the bulk of the blame here, and not simply because of those same third-grade playground rules that dictate that shame should fall hardest on the person who "started it." Romney is -- or he should be -- perfectly capable of elevating the discourse. In his biographic presentation, this is who he puts himself out to be -- an ordinary family guy, a skilled businessman, an efficient manager of a statehouse. That should be a solid foundation on which to build a distinct identity.

But it's pretty clear he doesn't want to build on that. He simply wants to join all of those whose preference for depicting Obama's cautious and incremental brand of policymaking as pure, rabid tyranny really does a great disservice to actual tyrants, and their Great Works.

"You didn't build that," of course, could win an election for Romney. But it will come at a cost. It is, at bottom, a deception. As such, it just sends hemophiliac ideas out into the world, which when cut, leave a permanent blood trail. The businessman featured in his "You Didn't Build That" ad campaign, for example, actually built his business on an awesomely comfy cushion of taxpayer largesse. It's another one of those "creepy, small lies of Mitt Romney," that seem like they needn't have been made in the first place. Why not attempt an actual authentic critique of the Obama economy?

REMEMBER THAT TIME IT SEEMED LIKE MITT ROMNEY WAS PREPARING AN AUTHENTIC CRITIQUE OF THE OBAMA ECONOMY?

Hey, everyone! You remember that book that Noam Schieber wrote, called "The Escape Artists: How Obama's Team Fumbled The Recovery?" Now, that sounds to me like the sort of place where you might try to build an authentic critique about the economic decisions made by the Obama administration. Maybe not a winning one, but one that would at least force a substantive, lively debate. And if I recall correctly, Mitt Romney was reading that book! How did that turn out?

The author of a book documenting the White House's policy making strategy, cited multiple times by GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, says the former Massachusetts governor is using the book to dishonestly accuse President Obama of intentionally harming the economy.

"That is false, in a variety of ways. I don't believe that it's substantively true," Noam Scheiber, author of "The Escape Artists," told TPM by phone Thursday morning.

Among the misrepresentations was a statement Romney made at a campaign appearance, in which he described the book a having been "written in a way that's apparently pro-President Obama." It wasn't. Not at all. And there was no reason in the world to characterize it as such. But it seems that Mitt Romney just cannot resist putting a tiny lie on an otherwise clean shot.

THIS WEEK IN HYPERVENTILATION:

Into our summer-heated cauldron of whimsy, shame, and breathless nonsense this week was dropped a hot, shiny, simmering scooplet from across the pond. In a Daily Telegraph story, an anonymous Romney advisor was responsible for this lede:

In remarks that may prompt accusations of racial insensitivity, one suggested that Mr Romney was better placed to understand the depth of ties between the two countries than Mr Obama, whose father was from Africa.

"We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special," the adviser said of Mr Romney, adding: "The White House didn't fully appreciate the shared history we have".

And so the cauldron boiled over, with goop everywhere, as outrage mounted and denials flew. But from the outset, we saw a series of red flags. First, the source: on a long enough timeline, you'll come to meet many a political keyboardist whose fingertips have been singed rebroadcasting the semi-unreliable to unreliable narratives in the U.K. press, and papers like the Telegraph.

Second, the way the story read to us seemed sketchy -- the frame of "racial insensitivity" was advanced not by the source, but by the paper. It's actually quite banal to simply assert that the U.K. and the U.S. have a relationship rooted in shared "Anglo-Saxon" heritage. It's specifically the only hereditary trait we have in common. Whether you accept the notion that Obama doesn't appreciate it correctly is your argument to make. We personally think it's not true -- we observed, for instance, the president and PM Cameron getting along famously while the prime minister was stateside -- but clearly, if you're a Romney foreign policy advisor, you're not likely to say, "Oh, yeah, Obama gets this key alliance perfectly," in any event, racially-tinged or otherwise.

The final red flag was best summed up by Kevin Drum:

As for the swelling tide of suggestions that this was a racial dog whistle, color me dubious. Does anyone seriously think that the Romney campaign decided that the best way to send a message to southern whites was via a quote to a London newspaper? That's a tough sell.

It's not the first time we've been sold the idea on a Brit-culture-based racial dog whistle, nor is it the first time we've considered it, disregarded it, and felt pretty okay about having done so.

But stories like these have an interesting place in the world of tribal politics, where the only two emotional states are the ecstacy when your guy is winning, and the terror at the thought that your guy might lose. Amid all that fear, there is an understandable tribal desire to find that secret weapon that's going to kill off the enemy before the fight even begins. In 2008, we were treated to many displays of such supposed doomsday devices. The birth certificate claims, the Jeremiah Wright flap, the never-found so-called "Whitey tape" -- all of these were cherished devices of political destruction, which, if pulled from the stone like Excalibur and wielded by the right person, could defeat the enemy.

This sort of desire doesn't particularly fit well with the circumspection that should, ideally, be a hallmark of political journalism. What the tribe demands -- and we see this a lot in the Birther swamp -- is satisfaction. You haven't done your job, as a journalist, until you deliver the story the tribe wants to read.

Which is too bad. In this case, circumspection yielded a likely source for the quote -- a Romney advisor named Niles Gardiner -- who wouldn't own the quote. Eventually, Talking Points Memo got confirmation that Gardiner "was not the source of the 'Anglo-Saxon' quote in the original article." Good news for those who opted out of having a full-square freak-out over this red flag-draped story.

Of course, the really silly thing about all of this is that this Telegraph story wasn't actually necessary. You want to point to Romney allies who've broadly characterized him in terms of racial "otherness" or otherwise "un-American?" They're out there, and they've signed their name to the dotted line. You want to point out how much irrational racial hatred there is out there, being directed at the president? Can do. Want to critique the worrisome people on Romney's foreign policy team? There's nothing stopping anybody. You can subject Gardiner to this as well.

In short, when you can make a great case on credible material, there's nothing that requires a reporter to start making bad cases on flimsy material. Of course, the reason the tribe demands otherwise, is that it's almost August of 2012, and you were supposed to have ended Romney's hopes with your reporting. It doesn't work that way.

KING AND THE CHAMBER: Angus King, the former governor of Maine and current independent candidate for the U.S. Senate, is the odds-on favorite to claim the seat being vacated by Olympia Snowe. And King has famously dithered over which party he'll caucus with, when (and if) he gets there. If we're being charitable here, we'd say that King is looking to be a free-agent when he gets to the Senate, but if we're being honest, it really seems that King just doesn't quite understand how the Senate works.

But regardless, the point is that King is up for grabs, in terms of his future alliances. Which is why it's weird that the Chamber of Commerce seems to want to push him to the left. Per the Portland Press Herald:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has purchased what appears to be close to $200,000 in ads in Maine media markets, according to several public disclosure documents at local stations. The ads target Angus King, the independent former governor who enjoys front-runner status in recent polls.

"While King was governor, state spending skyrocketed to $2.6 billion; the king of mismanagement, when King left office, he left Maine with a $1 billion shortfall," the narrarator in the ad says.

Graphics in the ad label King "the king of spending."

This could really help King make up his mind. Now, in fairness to the chamber, if you undertake an inventory of King's policy stances, it's pretty clear that he's destined to align himself with the Democrats. But if you're holding out hope otherwise, here's a significant thing to know: he's publicly stated that he "might have voted against the Wall Street regulatory overhaul, saying it has caused too much collateral damage with community banks." Why would the chamber not want to at least entertain the idea that King is wooable?

"YOU DIDN'T BUILD THAT" DIVIDE, IN POLLS: Here's the extent to which the "you didn't build that" stuff has aggrieved the electorate so far. According to Gallup, Obama's lowest approval ratings, sorted by occupation, come from "business owners, who disapprove by a 35 percent to 59 percent margin. Who does Obama fare better with? Lots of the people that those business owners employ: professional workers approve 52 percent to 43 percent, clerical/office workers approve 51 percent to 45 percent, and service workers approve 50 percent to 40 percent. If there's a worry for Obama here, it's not that the one-percenters disapprove so much, it's that the 99-percenters don't like him more.

Among all workers, it's a wash: 47 percent to 47 percent.

AMERICA IS PRETTY MUCH DONE WITH THE CAMPAIGN: According to a Pew Research study, anyway:

With more than three months to go before Election Day, most voters already feel that there's little left to learn about the presidential candidates. When it comes to Barack Obama, 90% say they already pretty much know what they need to know about him; just 8% say they need to learn more. A substantial majority (69%) also says they already mostly know what they need to know about Mitt Romney. Only about a quarter (28%) say they need to learn more to get a clear impression of Romney. Combining these two questions, fully two-thirds of voters say they already know as much as they need to about both presidential candidates.

We seem to recall someone suggesting that the campaign season just goes on too long?

VEEPSTAKES: Jeb Bush really, really wants Marco Rubio to be Romney's vice-presidential pick. But then, Jeb Bush really, really likes Marco Rubio a lot more than Mitt Romney.

ELECTORAL PROJECTION: And so we've once again come to the part where your Speculatronners make their trademarked Electoral College projection, which is -- as always -- based on a mix of careful poll study, an analysis of prevailing economic trends, candidates "Klout" scores, and whatever we learned picking through the trash of "soccer moms."

Obviously, this week's big story is Mitt Romney's headlong plunge into Gaffetown during his trip to England. We lean heavily in the direction that eventually, it will not prove to be much of a game-changer. Of course, we're here to try to capture the current state of the race, based upon our best cogitations, so in the immediate sense, Romney's stumbles do tend to glare brightly. Even so, a question that's tough to answer is this: do Romney's mistakes necessarily cause esteem to accrue in Obama's column?

It's a tough matter to divine with any certainty, but here's our prediction. Mitt Romney is not going to win any of the United Kingdom's electoral votes. (Probably!)

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According to the New York Post, President Barack Obama's recent appearance in Portland was organized by a "gay-porn kingpin." The paper is referring to Terrence Bean, an Obama bundler who was "the first gay on Sen. Obama's National Finance Committee." But how do we get to "gay-porn kingpin?" Per the Post:

Bean...is the sole trustee of the Charles M. Holmes Foundation, which owned Falcon Studios, Jock Studios and Mustang Studios, the producers of about $10 million worth of all-male pornography a year.

Oh, my stars and garters! We go on to learn that Holmes actually founded Falcon Studios about forty years ago, and that the studio was "controversial" because it produced "barebacking videos," all before the AIDS crisis. Holmes, himself, passed away in 2000 from AIDS-related illness, and his estate donated $1 million to an LGBT center in San Francisco.

Bean, according to the Post, was the "CEO of Conwest Resources, the holding company that owned Falcon, before Holmes died," and Falcon -- which was sold and now operates as an entity called 3 Media -- "continues to pay off a note to the foundation."

The Weekly Standard, as you might surmise, loved this story, and it has since helped push it around the blogosphere, at every turn cementing Bean as a "gay-porn kingpin." Obviously, it is regrettable to see job creators defamed in this fashion. Why must the Weekly Standard punish wealth and success?

But there's something awfully confusing about this story. Isn't Holmes the "gay-porn kingpin," in this scenario? Well, yes. Terrence Bean, I'm sorry to say, didn't build this business!

To the insinuating, let's add some fact-finding. "Terry Bean serves as the executor of the estate of Charles P. Holmes, an old friend who died of AIDS over a decade ago in 2000," a spokesman for Bean Investments told The Huffington Post. "As a favor to his dying friend, Mr. Bean agreed to ensure that the proceeds were distributed to charities making life better for LGBT people and people living with AIDS. The estate sold Falcon Studios in 2004 and has been distributing the proceeds to these various charities for several years."

"Mr. Bean did not, and does not, have any operational control or interest in Falcon Studios beyond managing a profitable sale on behalf of Mr Holmes estate," the spokesman added.

Okay, because it was sort of sounding like Bean, you know, didn't actually make any porn. Which is sort of an essential pre-requisite for being referred to as a "gay-porn kingpin." What Bean has done is ensure that Holmes' estate remains profitable so that it can continue to donate to the sort of philanthropic causes that he came to support late in his life, including AIDS charities and foundations that serve the interests of the LGBT community.

The stock purchase agreement detailing this transaction, obtained by The Huffington Post, confirms these accounts. All of Holmes' porn empire holdings were collectively known as Conwest Resources. After he passed away, these properties fell into Bean's control as the manager of his estate. Bean sold the whole kit and kaboodle -- including all inventory, infrastructure, and real estate -- to 3 Media for $9.05 million. So Bean, as the estate manager, now has $9.05 million to manage according to Holmes' wishes, which involved establishing a foundation whose profits went to the aforementioned charities.

Bean's involvement in a gay-porn empire, then, was limited to finding a buyer for it at the request of his friend and client. I kind of wonder what's so scandalous or irresponsible here!

Bean's role as the executor of Holmes' estate has, in the past, proven to be a sticky wicket for some. As the Post notes, Oregon governor Ted Kulongowski returned a donation from him, fearful of the "taint." But Bean has happily donated money to members of both parties, without incident.

So, that's July 26, 2012 -- the day I had to explain what a "porn kingpin" actually does.

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As we've said before, the first set of tasks in a political campaign are simply summarized: Define yourself, define your opponent, define the stakes of the race. The 2012 race has been fairly interesting thus far, in that the challenger candidate, Mitt Romney, has not seemed able -- or perhaps the right word is "willing" -- to engage in these tasks.

For his nominal allies, it has not been an easy spectacle to watch. That said, there's some indication that Romney has figured out that he's supposed to be doing at least some of this sort of work.

For some time now, conservatives have been somewhat aggrieved by the way the Romney camp hasn't done much to establish his core identity in the race. We've sort of generically dated the beginning of this outpouring of discontent with Peggy Noonan's June 1 op-ed, in which she wrote, "Mr. Romney has to give us a plan. He has to tell us his priorities. To lead is to prioritize, to choose."

From there, it became rather popular for conservative pundits to raise the same concerns. The matter escalated considerably when Team Obama Re-Elect mounted its attacks on Romney's history with Bain Capital, and Romney responded by ... conceding the space to Obama's allies to make the attacks.

Things came to a head this week, when Charlie Cook's observations on the matter started off the news cycle with this detonation:

The strategic decision by the Romney campaign not to define him personally -- not to inoculate him from inevitable attacks -- seems a perverse one. Given his campaign’s ample financial resources, the decision not to run biographical or testimonial ads, in effect to do nothing to establish him as a three-dimensional person, has left him open to the inevitable attacks for his work at Bain Capital, on outsourcing, and on his investments. It’s all rather inexplicable. Aside from a single spot aired in the spring by the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future, not one personal positive ad has been aired on Romney’s behalf. The view that any day or dollar spent on talking about anything other than the economy is a waste has been taken to such an extreme that Romney has no positive definition other than that of being a rich, successful, and presumably smart businessman. People see and feel the reasons for firing Obama every day in the economic statistics and the struggle that so many Americans face daily. The Romney campaign seems focused on reinforcing a message that hardly needs reinforcing, while ignoring a clear and immediate danger to its own candidate’s electability.

Businessweek's Joshua Green followed hard upon this with an article about Romney's "wimp factor," and the news cycle evolved into a steady drumbeat of GOP figures badgering Romney for his failure to release tax returns -- a tangential matter, but one that still related to Romney's unwillingness to fill the vacuum.

But now that the murmur had built itself into a din, the Romney camp finally acted. Its initial response, however, was a little lacking: Romney's team indicated that it was poised to go "full Breitbart" and resurrect the old, wild-eyed nonsense of the 2008 campaign. The name "Tony Rezko" got dropped on a conference call. Campaign surrogate John Sununu got deep into the Dinesh D'Souzan weeds, calling Obama un-American. The Romney camp seemed, for a time, to be genuinely poised to unleash a barrage of negativity -- the kind that frosts the affections of independent voters. As Kevin Drum put it: "Operation 'Piss Off Mitt' Seems to be Working."

We eyerolled, "Wow, Obama should be so lucky." But the luck didn't endure, and after a couple decent weeks on the offensive, the president gave Romney the material he needed to get off his duff and start hustling again, when Obama, riffing on a set of themes concerning the interplay between government and the public's largesse in making the private sector a success, offered up this statement: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."

Slate's Dave Weigel traced the way that statement slowly made its way into Romney's consciousness. It doesn't really need to be said that we've got another one of those examples of merely poor phrasing that ballooned into a reductio ad absurdum political weapon.

At the same time, is anyone really surprised that Obama wields this sort of language with considerably less deftness than, say, Elizabeth Warren? The irony here is that while Romney wants to depict Obama here as the embodiment of class warfare run amok, the president actually does not have a deep connection to or facility with these kinds of populist arguments. But he ends up getting portrayed by Romney as a wilder, more radical version of himself, anyway.

But Romney was smart to seize the moment and make hay. He ends the week with all those tormentors on the right off his back and back to cheering him from the sidelines.

The one thing we'd point out, however, is that Romney is still reacting instead of acting. Sure, the points you score when your opponent turns the ball over get counted. They're not unimportant.

But Romney still needs to start creating his own shots. And he still needs to take a proactive stance on defining who he is at his core and what he wants to do. David Brooks still wants Romney to provide an affirmative defense of Bain Capital(ism).

Peggy Noonan, in all likelihood, still wants priorities. The fact that it seemed as if the first nonpassive move for members of the Romney camp was to briefly rush off into 2008's fever swamp is telling; they don't seem to actually have a plan, yet.

PRIMARY COLORS

Or maybe Romney does have a strategy? It could be that the lesson that the Romney camp has extracted from the primary season is that he can withstand all manner of personal attacks so long as he has 10 times the amount of cash on hand at the right moment to drown out his competition. That's easy enough to do when you're facing Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich and they're either close to skint or upside down in debt.

But Obama will have cash to toss around, too -- even at the end. In general, we're not inclined toward this strategy. But candidates with the sort of wealth that Romney commands are very rare. For all we know, the rules don't apply.

THE BAIN OF FACT-CHECKERS

Is everyone done talking about Bain Capital, yet? Ha, ha: No. Not by a long shot. That's a product of Romney providing the press with an interesting puzzle to solve and then not filling in any of the details affirmatively, when he's been given a million chances to do so.

So, the extant question is and shall remain: What involvement did Mitt Romney have with Bain Capital during the period he was tending to the Olympics. The Romney camp's generic response has been to wave the matter away by saying that he had no time to do anything else but bring bobsledding to America, a curious admission from a guy seeking the ultimate multitasking job.

Still, it's sort of understandable. Bain Capital is presumably staffed by capable managers who can tend to the matters of Bain Capital whether Romney is micromanaging their efforts or not. Everyone can get their head around that. It's still pretty clear that Romney's involvement with Bain is not "the null set," however. His name went on various and sundry filings, he was offered up as the Head Capitalist in Charge to various regulators, and there were presumably moments when Romney was briefly briefed on how things were going.

Romney has been periodically under attack for the goings-on at Bain during his Olympics work, dating back to his gubernatorial bid. His defense is well-worn and was sufficiently backed up so that when the attack came again from Team Obama Re-Elect, fact-checkers were well-armed to slap Romney's tormentors with Pinocchios.

Funny thing, though, about reporters. They keep reporting. And over the past few weeks, they've been working at adding to what we know about Romney's Bain involvement and when Romney was involved.

Brendan Nyhan noted that this matter has demonstrated that our fact-checking industry has limits to its utility. Fact-checkers, Nyhan observed, often "help create controversies that paradoxically increase the attention paid to misleading charges." That, in turn creates incentives for political dark artists to "intentionally make misleading claims" in order to run up the "earned media" scoreboard.

Nyhan went on to point out that it's important to remember that fact-checkers and reporters are not on the same team, and that even as the fact-checkers were rendering judgments, reporters were picking over the ticktock of Romney's involvement with Bain, and taking up Romney's "lack of consistency in describing his role at Bain in the 1999-2002 period."

This week, Daily Intel's Jonathan Chait sort of got caught between and betwixt with the Bain story as it was developing, and responded to the new revelations with his typical thoughtful candor. When Chait started off on his effort to explain "What's True and False in Obama's Bain Attacks," he came down hard on Obama: "President Obama and his allies instead have attacked Romney’s record itself," wrote Chait, "And what they’re saying is, on the basis of the facts available to us, untrue."

In the hours after Chait published, however, a lot of interesting new facts became available. Chait went back and added an update: "Numerous revelations today cast severe doubt on Romney's claim to have abandoned any role with Bain in 1999. I'll reevaluate again soon, but as of now it looks like the rigid distinction between Bain's work before his leave of absence and after -- the distinction that forms the basis of all the fact-checkers' judgments that Obama's ad is false -- has crumbled."

So here's one important lesson: We too often give fact-checkers the "final say" on an issue. We shouldn't necessarily do that, though. Reporters are still reporting!

Nyhan moved to this question, posed by Nick Baumann: "Is it possible that even without day-to-day managerial control, Mitt Romney may bear some moral or personal responsibility for the actions of Bain Capital post-1999, given that no one is disputing that he benefited financially from its actions and that his name was on the door? Is that question even fact-checkable?"

And Nyhan responded thusly:

The answer to the latter question, in fact, is no, which highlights the second limitation of fact-checking. Readers are often frustrated with the narrow and seemingly pedantic nature of fact-checking by watchdogs like PolitiFact and Factcheck.org, which typically focus on the specifics of a given claim rather than the larger issue or debate in question. But there’s a good reason for the narrow focus of the genre -- broader questions about significance and responsibility are simply beyond their purview and cannot be answered within the realm of facts.

Right there is the path forward to the larger and more interesting question for Romney. Does Romney not believe in what Bain was doing? Does he disagree with the business practices that were practiced during the 1999-2002 period? Did Bain suddenly become something in which he could no longer take pride? Something that would prompt him to make the claim that he had "retroactively retired?"

And we can extract a pretty important question from Chait's work as well -- to be directed at the Obama campaign. As Chait wrote, "The existence of a 'larger truth' does not justify the Obama campaign’s ads that assume a role that they haven't proven and probably isn't accurate." Our question would be "Did the Obama camp know that there was enough left for reporters to uncover, beyond what the fact-checkers had found, when they made the attacks? If so, did the Obama campaign help those reporters out? If not, didn't they just luck out, after playing fast and loose with the facts?

NEW POLLING WOES FOR OBAMA

So, welcome, everyone, to the end of the Bain attacks life cycle of effectiveness. (Maybe.) This week is ending with a spate of bad polling news for Obama. Once again, the race is tightening, with Romney taking a lead in the latest CBS/New York Times poll. (Once again, Obama's ahead in the Fox News poll and behind in the New York Times poll, making everyone question their tribal politics.)

As Sam Stein reported, Obama's having trouble with the economy. (As always, we'll point out that Obama's "trouble with the economy" is not the same "trouble" that the rest of you are experiencing.):

Romney leads Obama among respondents by a margin of 49 percent to 41 percent on who can best handle the economy and jobs. People who think the economy is getting better dropped from 33 percent in April to 24 percent now -- owed largely to a series of bad jobs reports.

Obama is perceived as the candidate who can best help the middle class, with 52 percent citing the president on that question, including 15 percent of Republicans. But even then, he gets a heaping of blame for not turning the economy around. Almost two-thirds of respondents said the president's policies contributed to the economic downturn. Only 17 percent of respondents said the president's policies on the economy were "improving it now."

Per Stein: "The economy, in short, is drowning out the political conversation surrounding Romney's private equity career, at least on the national level." Of course, that is as it should be. And the "Bain attacks" should be understood in this context: They are a tactical gambit, designed to give Obama time and space to close the gap on the larger matter of the economy.

Additionally, the "Bain attacks" should be understood as part of a larger series of strategic moves that will eventually end in a poorly defined Romney holding the bag for a whole slew of unpopular GOP "solutions." Already, Team Obama Re-Elect is moving to a discussion of what Romney would do to Medicare, which is the next part of a longer game plan.

Still, the nation is now leaving the fiscal quarter that political science has found is most critical to voters as they decide on whether they'll leave Obama in charge or not. Was the economy particularly awesome during these past three months? Not really.

There's also something to be said about how costly a negative attack can be on the negative attacker. (Though we'd gently criticize this piece from The Week -- which takes up that matter -- for persisting in its belief that Obama, in 2008, wasn't a negative campaigner. He was.)

MOVING AROUND THE WEALTH

Rich people are doing very awesomely. As Ezra Klein reported (and graphed), "in 2010, 93 percent of income gains went to the top 1 percent."

In other words, the very rich had a bad 2009, but an incredible 2010. Their share of national income bounced back to 19.77 percent. So inequality is marching upward once again. And there’s reason to believe this will keep going.

It sure seems awfully silly that Joe the Plumber was so concerned over Obama's talk of "moving the wealth around." The wealth is clearly moving in the precise direction Joe the Plumber wanted. (Which is, specifically, "away from actual plumbers.")

A SIGN OF GARY JOHNSON’S POTENCY?

Interesting confluence of small-ball news stories this week. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson is polling at about 5 percent nationally. In New Mexico, where he served as governor, he's up to 13 percent. Meanwhile, President Obama's lead in New Mexico, over Romney, is shrinking.

According to the conventional wisdon, this isn't what's supposed to be happening. Johnson is supposed to help deliver New Mexico's votes to Obama. But Johnson has never characterized himself as an election-year spoiler and has always maintained that he'd pull votes from both Romney and Obama.

As Johnson told our own Lucia Graves, "The idea is to actually win." He's not crazy for suggesting this was possible. Unlike the lion's share of vapid, third party efforts (looking at you, Americans Elect!), Johnson has been very careful, thoughtful, and specific in defining the ways he presents a contrast to both the big party candidates.

You can read Lucia's interview with Johnson here.

ELECTORAL PROJECTION

Okay, time once again for your Speculatronners to make their trademarked Electoral College projection, which is -- as always -- a mix of careful poll study, an analysis of prevailing economic trends, guesstimates and careful study of animal entrails under the guidance of experienced augurs from ancient legend.

So, this week, the economy is dragging Obama down. Romney is faring better in New Hampshire and Virginia. Obama shows life in Nevada and Wisconsin. New Mexico's tightening. So, we'll go with this:

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Last week's ad from Obama for America -- the "Firms" spot that made use of Mitt Romney's warbling, pitch-averse rendition of "America the Beautiful" -- received so much coverage for its execution and technical excellence that one could almost imagine we were standing on the threshold of a new era of political ads with exacting production values and a skillful, nuanced use of sound and editing.

Fortunately for everyone, the Democratic National Committee arrived just in the nick of time to remind us that political ads will remain the venue of tedious hacks.

Just as all the talk of the "Firms" ad was dying down, the DNC released a pair of ads of its own, titled "Mitt Dances Around the Issues Volume 1" and, as you might surmise, "Mitt Dances Around the Issues Volume 2." You know, like Guns N' Roses' "Use Your Illusion, Vol. 1 and 2." Except terrible.

Apparently the point that the DNC wanted to make with these ads is that Romney was ... uhm, well ... dancing around certain issues: his tax returns in the first spot, and his various responses to the auto bailout in the second. Rich territory to mine, certainly. But all you'll remember from this pair of ads is the goofy, torturous music and constant cutaways to the same two or three shots of Rafalca -- Ann Romney's dressage horse, which is headed to the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

After watching the ads, you will probably look back on both and be gobsmacked to learn that each only lasts about a minute. They seem like they take forever.

Well, in addition to being poorly executed, ineffective and painful to watch, these DNC ads ended up offending Ann Romney, which doesn't seem like the most necessary thing to do and is fairly awkward anyway, because Ann Romney uses her horses as therapeutic relief from multiple sclerosis. So, as ABC News' Jonathan Karl reports, the DNC has had to apologize for these ads:

"Our use of the Romneys' dressage horse was not meant to offend Mrs. Romney in any way, and we regret it if it did," DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse told ABC News. "We were simply making a point about Governor Romney's failure to give straight answers on a variety of issues in this race. We have no plans to invoke the horse any further to avoid misinterpretation."

Yes, they probably just should have "invoked" the points they were trying to make about tax returns and auto bailouts, instead of burying them under unlistenable music and goofy dressage footage.

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Over at the Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky reflects over this week's Veepstakes wranglings and his colleague Peter Boyer's recent article over the not-yet-invited-to-the-convention Sarah Palin, and wonders why Romney hasn't extended the invitation to the former governor of Alaska:

Her phone hasn't rung yet. I don't understand it. She's Numero Uno with the very voters who distrust Romney. If they can trot her out there for 10 minutes, and write remarks (and make her stick to them) that say in essence, "You don't have to love Mitt Romney, but you do have to vote for him," I'd think that Romney would want that very much, especially if the religious conservatives are belly-aching about a veep choice who isn't "one of us."

Who's going to fill that slot otherwise? The buffoon Herman Cain? Rick Santorum, who became popular for about six weeks only because he wasn't Mitt Romney and whom few people give much thought to otherwise? Rick Perry, who vaporized under the slightest scrutiny and left his mark on the race by not being able to remember a list three items long? There's no one of stature except for Palin. And if I'm using "Palin" and "stature" in the same sentence without irony, that gives you an idea of how bad things are.

It's interesting to note that Tomasky's operating under the assumption that the only people who can fill a space that might otherwise be occupied by Sarah Palin are those who ran against Romney for the GOP nomination. There's no doubt that Palin, who's already off to a good start as a 2012 endorser, has kept her brand in better shape than those whom Romney defeated during his march through the primary calendar. But it actually hadn't occurred to me that any of the vanquished candidates would provide a prime-time presence at the convention.

Let's recall who Sarah Palin was at the time John McCain selected her to be his running mate: She was a state governor with a reputation in conservative circles as a reformer. Flash forward to 2012, and it's even truer now that the pride of the GOP is found in the statehouses they control, among governors who enjoy a similar "reformer" reputation, without all of Palin's silliness. The new stars in the firmament are governors like Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Tom Corbett, Nikki Haley, Bob McDonnell, Susana Martinez, Bobby Jindal and Jan Brewer.

For Republicans, this is where all the action is. These are the people who fought public sector unions at home and the Affordable Care Act in the courts. They're the ones making the economic arguments that Romney will want to say he'll bring to Washington if he's elected. Their faces tell the story of ethnic and gender diversity that the GOP wants to tell. And they don't bring the baggage -- or the terrible approval ratings -- of their colleagues in the House and Senate. (The downside? They also box Romney in on immigration reform, although this probably doesn't matter one whit to the GOP base.)

Whether Romney authors the decision or has it authored for him, I'd expect those folks to be doing most of the heavy lifting, in terms of speaking at the Republican National Convention. This doesn't necessarily rule out Palin's participation, but put yourself in Reince Priebus' shoes for a minute: When you can book these names, do you really need Sarah Palin?

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Maggie Haberman reports that for the second time, the host committee responsible for spreading the good cheer about the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina has referred to the venue for Thursday night's speech from President Barack Obama as "Panthers Stadium."

"Panthers Stadium," if I recall correctly, is where the Dillon Panthers of the "Friday Night Lights" teevee series play. Certainly this would be a bold and transcendental move, to have the last night of the convention take place in a fictional town in Texas. But that's not actually happening. Rather, the folks behind the convention would just prefer to play down the actual name of the Carolina Panthers' home field -- Bank Of America stadium.

Per Haberman:

A host committee spokeswoman didn't respond to an email. But it's not like the stadium was ever called Panthers Stadium - first opened in 1996, it was Carolinas Stadium, and later Ericsson Stadium. Then the current corporate iteration.

The closest connection the venue has to the name "Panthers Stadium" is the fact that it's owned by "Panthers Stadium, LLC."

One can understand why the Democrats would prefer not to remind people of Bank Of America. For the past two years, BofA has earned the honor of being Consumerist's Second Worst Company In America (it finished behind BP in 2011, and EA in 2012.) The bank's CEO, Brian Moynihan, is habitually whiny about all the criticism that's constantly hurled at his bank -- criticism that's well earned, by the way -- so perhaps it's for the best that the Democrats just want to leave him out of it completely. Of course, not mentioning Bank Of America is probably good for Team Obama Reelect, too, in that it won't be constantly calling attention to words like "foreclosure" or "bank."

But still, "Panthers Stadium?" I already know what Fox News is going to do with that.

UPDATE: Dan Murrey, the Executive Director of the Convention host committee assures me that they are not embarrassed by the association with Bank Of America, at all. He sends along a statement:

Bank of America has been a great local partner and supportive of Charlotte's efforts to host the 2012 Convention. Anyone who takes the time to visit our website will see that we have no problem referring to Bank of America Stadium. We also refer to it as Panthers Stadium from time to time, the more informal local nickname of the stadium.

The thing is, downplaying the connection to Bank Of America really makes a lot of sense.

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Hey, kids! Do y'all remember the Republican Party's presidential primary season, which took place way back in the early months of 2012? If it rings a bell, you probably remember that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was the "winner" of the primary, having notched the required number of delegates to officially earn the GOP nomination. So Mitt Romney is basically done with the GOP's primary process. But that doesn't mean that the GOP's primary process is necessarily done.

Indeed, this weekend, at the Riverside Golf Club in Grand Island, Neb., the Nebraska Republicans will be holding the last of the nation's state conventions. As the always reliable folks at The Green Papers describe it, "Congressional District Caucuses made up of the State Convention delegates from each of Nebraska's 3 congressional districts choose the 9 district National Convention delegates (3 per congressional district). The State Convention as a whole selects 23 (10 base at-large plus 13 bonus) at-large delegates to the Republican National Convention."

Once this is over, then it's basically full steam ahead for Tampa, Fla., and the Republican National Convention. But what happens in Grand Island over the weekend could result in the Tampa convention being a whole lot more interesting than Mitt Romney wants. And as you might expect, the central figure in this bit of final-act drama is Texas congressman and habitually disruptive presidential candidate Ron Paul.

See, as NBC News' Anthony Terrell reports, "If Paul wins a plurality of delegates in Nebraska this weekend, his name will be put forth as a nominee versus Mitt Romney in Tampa." But wait, you are saying, how did he pull this off, given that the only primary-vote plurality he "won" was in the U.S. Virgin Islands? Well, you weren't paying attention to the various processes that have occurred in many of the states whose primaries you may have presumed were won by other people. The Paul campaign's big successes have come after the votes were counted and the media had moved on to shinier things.

While no one was paying much attention, Paul ended up with a majority of the delegates from four states, exploiting the sort of complicated state convention process that Nebraska is wrapping up this weekend. And as Terrell notes, if Paul pulls off the same feat this weekend, he actually crosses a threshold that entitles him to all sorts of interesting privileges:

According to RNC Rule 40, Paul needs a plurality of delegates from five states for his name to be put forth for nomination at the convention. The Texas Congressman has won a majority of state delegations in Iowa, Maine, Minnesota and Louisiana. If he is nominated, Paul will be allotted fifteen minutes to deliver a speech at the convention before the first round of balloting.

Now, according to Paul supporters on the ground in Nebraska, their chances of pulling Nebraska into Paul's column are remote. Laura Ebke, who is running Paul's delegate efforts there, tells ABC News' Chris Good that by her "rough count," the Paulites "have a significant minority," but a minority nonetheless. All the same, Paul's supporters are maxing out their efforts, and they have a plan that they hope to execute:

First, meet up the night before to get everyone on the same page about who to vote for, including the convention chair. Second, get to the convention several hours ahead of everyone else to avoid being caught in line during registration. Third, vote for the convention chair.

The Daily Paul writer says “Stay sharp and show up in force!” The writer then orders Mr. Paul’s supporters to make sure that the convention chair is put up for a vote, and tells them to make sure voting machines are not used to count delegate votes.

That's from the Capitol Column's Natalie Littlefield, who goes on to note that state party officials in Nebraska are gearing up for a potentially bumptious crowd of Paul supporters. As has been the case at other state conventions, the Paul supporters have not submitted quietly to the notion of Romney being the GOP's nominee.

What happens if Paul notches his fifth state and gets submitted for consideration as a nominee in Tampa? Well, in all likelihood, it merely delays Romney's eventual coronation -- Romney will have, in all likelihood, the needed number of delegates to win the nomination. But Paul suspects that he has more support on the convention floor than advertised: Paul Harris of The Guardian reports that "Paul's team has publicly estimated that they may have as many as 500 supportive delegates at Tampa, even though many of them will be officially committed to voting for Romney."

In any event, it's been well known for some time that Paul's supporters plan to descend on Tampa in force. Should their candidate earn the right to give a speech at the convention, it will be a moment they'll celebrate. And if it looks like Paul isn't getting the full measure of what he's entitled to in Tampa, trust me -- it will be hell with the lid off.

UPDATE: Jon Ward has the complete skinny on RNC Rule 40, here. Of particular interest: no matter what happens in Nebraska, Paul's supporters on the convention floor already have the leverage they need to force some chaos in the process that officially nominates the vice president. Per Ward:

Republican officials are still waking up to the fact that Paul loyalists -- who control the majority of delegates in Maine, Minnesota and Iowa, and have sizable contingents in a number of other states -- could very likely enter Paul's name into nomination for vice president. This would force a roll call vote where each delegate of each state is polled on the floor of the convention.

[...]

For example, if Romney chose Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) as his vice presidential pick, but the Paul forces leveraged their impressive foothold in several states to nominate Paul from the floor, then someone like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla) could emerge as the preferred pick for many delegates as the convention goes into a roll call vote. And Rubio's name could be entered into nomination, in addition to Paul's, if a plurality of five states voted to nominate him.

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Thanks to a Vanity Fair article by Nicholas Shaxson detailing the "the murky world of offshore finance" and Mitt Romney's "pretty strange" offshore holdings, the unsettled issue of the presumptive GOP presidential nominee's tax returns is back in the news.

Remember how it briefly became a thing during the primary season? Oh, what a time it was. At one of the 4593 debates hosted by CNN, Mitt Romney promised that "as has been done in the past, if I'm the nominee, I'll put [my tax returns] out at one time, so that we have one discussion of all of this." He offered assurances that he has "paid full taxes" and was "honest in his dealing with people." It fell to Newt Gingrich to make the obvious admonishment of Romney: "If there's anything in there that's going to help us lose the election, we should know it before the nomination, and if there's nothing in there, why not release it?"

As Shaxson reported, it was this "intense goading" that finally led to Romney releasing his 2010 return and a 2011 estimate. But this disclosure didn't exactly mirror the standard set by Romney's father, who famously released twelve years of tax returns with the explanation: “One year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show.”

Of course, in fairness to Romney, it was what he did release that spurred further interest in his familiarity with exotic tax havens. Per Shaxson: "A $3 million Swiss bank account appeared in the 2010 returns, then winked out of existence in 2011 after the trustee closed it, as if to remind us of George Romney’s warning that one or two tax returns can provide a misleading picture."

So, it looks like the "one discussion of all of this" is going to happen now. But as Justin Sink reports for the Hill, Romney gave an interview on Radio Iowa in which he assured everyone that there wasn't anything to see here:

"I don't manage them. I don't even know where they are," Romney said. "That trustee follows all U.S. laws. All the taxes are paid, as appropriate. All of them have been reported to the government. There's nothing hidden there."

I think the whole point though, is that he's hiding the tax returns which totally have nothing hidden in them?

(By the way, the folks over at the Tax History Project have the tax returns for various 2012ers on file for your perusal. President Barack Obama's go back to the year 2000. Vice President Joe Biden's go back even further. Ironically, for all the hassle Newt Gingrich gave Romney, Romney's actually disclosed more tax information than the former speaker, who maybe has a tax haven on the moon, who knows?)

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Your Speculatroners knew that we'd be leading off our wrap-up of this week in the 2012 campaign with a discussion of the Supreme Court's ruling on health care reform, an analysis of the fallout from it and the way it will reshape the race. Of course, like just about everyone else, we were all but primed to expect the Roberts Court to strike down, at the very least, the individual mandate, if not the law in its entirety. Obviously, that didn't happen. But the decision that was rendered, nevertheless, alters the landscape in significant ways -- ways that are perhaps more interesting than had the law been sent to the dustbin.

Obviously, the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision more or less upholds the status quo. There are some interesting wrinkles to come in the way this tax on "free riders" will be implemented, and in the states' ongoing bargaining over Medicare. But, on balance, those Americans who stood to benefit from the protections of the law remain on the path to those benefits.

And the maintenance of the status quo will continue to present the same challenges for Team Obama Re-Elect. It's getting a little repetitive to keep pointing this out, but we'll mention it again: polls on the entirety of "Obamacare" tend to run against President Barack Obama. At the same time, polls on the component parts of the bill tend to be broadly favored by the public. If it seems like a strange disconnect, let's remember that the Affordable Care Act's greatest problem is that too few people know what it does. This is a phenomenon that was well-captured by The New Republic's Alec MacGillis, who traveled to a free clinic in Tennessee and met many people who did not even know that there was a law out there from which they stood to benefit.

Of course, if you listen to Mark Halperin -- which you should stop doing! -- you might be convinced that the worst thing that could have happened to Obama is for the Supreme Court to leave his law in place. This is, to our estimation, a hot load of bovine alimentary leavings. There's no benefit, whatsoever, to having your signature legislative victory incinerated by the Supreme Court. This is just the Beltway media indulging themselves in the game of counter-intuition -- a classic trope of political pundits who are always playing that game of "clever-clever" one-upsmanship that ends up pointlessly mystifying the political process. As Jeffrey Toobin remarked: "In...politics and the rest of life, it’s always better to win than lose. Winners win, and losers lose." Does Obama have a challenging path to re-election? Absolutely. But it's much harder withour the Affordable Care Act.

And the easiest way of explicating that fact is to remember what might have been if the SCOTUS had thrown out the law. That would have placed both Obama and Romney on the hook for answering the question, "So what are you going to do now?" Obama doesn't need to answer that anymore. He can spend the rest of the campaign making up for "Obamacare's" polling deficits. From his standpoint, it's a luxury. Romney, on the other hand, is still on the hook.

This is not to say that Romney doesn't extract some advantage from the Supreme Court ruling. If you're a voter who hates the Affordable Care Act but was waffling on whether to turn out for Mitt, given his long history of deviating from the conservative norm, you've got no choice now but to support Romney with full throat or open heart. It's the only scenario that gets the Affordable Care Act repealed.

And while the Supreme Court wrecked the chances of tossing Obamacare by the boards, there was still a reward that the GOP could extract from the wreckage -- it can now hammer down on the "mandate-is-actually-a-tax" issue, and contend that Obama's health care reform breaks a 2008 campaign promise to not raise taxes on the middle class. This is a message that Romney has already started to send. But it's not what he would have preferred -- in the days leading up to the court's decision, Romney clearly wanted to advance the idea that Obama had spent three years of his term working on something that was plainly unconstitutional.

Still, the simple fact of the matter is that Romney now faces the larger challenge. He's promised to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act. If he's elected, he'll obviously have the assistance of his GOP congressional colleagues who, by then, may have majorities (but, critically, not super-majorities) in the House and Senate. But for the time being, he is "repeal and replace's" only hope. And now, he'll have to map out a plan for both sides of that equation. (Assuming, that is, that reporters will hold Romney responsible for the replacement.) Those are the sorts of policy specifics that Romney has long labored to keep out of sight, for the obvious reason that once he exposes them, Team Obama Reelect can go on the attack.

We think that the decision has thus opened up a new and interesting faultline in the campaign to come. But as always, we're cognizant of dissenting views on the matter, and in this case, Jonathan Bernstein has some compelling reminders:

And yet . . . this election will not be fought over health care. Oh, it’s an issue, as it always is, but with 8 percent unemployment, it’s not going to be what swing voters are hearing about. And don’t forget — those swing voters weren’t the ones keeping a tab open on SCOTUSblog this morning; they may see a headline, but they aren’t paying much attention to any of this even when it’s dominating the news. And by next week, and then August, and then October, the Affordable Care Act isn’t going to be dominating the news anymore, and most swing voters will barely be aware that there is a health-care reform law.

Or, you’ll read that this decision will invigorate liberal activists because they won or conservative activists because they lost. Ignore that. Could it conceivably be true? I suppose, but no one knows, and, more to the point, if there’s one thing that political parties are incredibly good at, it’s getting their activists excited when a close election is coming. So any effect here is going to be marginal at best.

True: the economy is still where all the action is, and Obama can ill afford a slip in the direction of the recession that, ironically, spurred him to the White House in the first place. Still, all it takes for health care reform to become an interesting part of the campaign is for enough reporters to ask Romney a simple question: "What will you put in Obamacare's place?"

WE'VE SAID IT BEFORE, BUT IT BEARS REPEATING: It remains amazing that we've come to this point. Mitt Romney created "CommonwealthCare" in Massachusetts. At the time, it was a singular bit of innovative governance, with all the trimmings that the GOP normally like to brag about: they'd implemented a plan that came straight from one of their top think-tanks, they got it passed with bipartisan support, and they co-opted an important Democratic party issue -- universal health care. Romney's reward? He ascended to the presidential contender level of politics. Health care reform brought Romney to that dance.

And four years later, Romney's dancing partner has been stranded at the ball, with Romney pretending he'd never met her. We've said it before: Romney may be known as a flip-flopper, but the biggest story in his political career is the way the conservative world flopped on him.

Regardless of what you think of Romney, or his health care innovation, we think that if you endeavor to walk a mile in his shoes -- the shoes that have been worn down from having to flee his biggest accomplishment -- you'd probably get a despairing feeling down in your guts. It's sort of remarkable that in an age where reporters can get all kinds of confidants and colleagues to open up anonymously about things, we still don't know the story of what it was like for Romney to have to bail on "RomneyCare." If there's a tale there, it's being guarded closely.

Perhaps one day, we'll hear more about this, maybe in some chapter of a David Maraniss biography to come. To our mind, it's a pretty interesting example of the power of tribal politics to obliterate convictions and accomplishments, and how we are -- as a nation -- the lesser for it.

THE POPULARITY OF POPULISM:

Jonathan Martin's big think piece this week, titled "Democrats go AWOL in class war," makes the case that Democrats have been pretty slow to embrace economic populism on the campaign trail. "These days," he writes, "it’s possible to count on one hand the number of unapologetic populists in the U.S. Senate and, besides Elizabeth Warren, there are few more on the horizon."

Martin continues:

For the fighting left, it is a frustrating puzzle. If ever there was a moment for a good, old-fashioned class war, at first blush it seems now should be the time. Yet even after the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, there are few politicians preaching, or practicing, the old-time religion. The Occupy Wall Street movement, leaderless and without clear aims, is petering out as quickly as it sprang up and seems destined to have scant impact on the politics of 2012.

Martin identified a number of factors that seem to be impeding the Democrats from embracing the possibilities of class warfare: the ongoing anemia of the labor movement, the need for tall dollars in the Super PAC age, Obama's own tendency to favor elites, and the simple fact that populism is just not as popular among Democrats as it once was.

The Obama administration has never really taken to broad class war arguments, and their hesitancy to get in the thick of a populist argument manifests itself in myriad ways. Obama's not exactly pally with the Occupy Wall Street crowd. We have what's supposed to be a sweeping piece of financial regulatory reform in the Dodd-Frank bill that's actually fairly flawed and, in many ways, toothless. Obama's still questing for that Wall Street boodle, and the reactions of some of his Democratic colleagues to his attacks on Romney's record at Bain have been a reminder that many prominent Democrats are dependent on financial sector lucre.

And anyone who's seen that video of Elizabeth Warren tearing apart Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has probably wondered: "Aren't these two both important Obama appointees? If so, whose side is Obama on?" (SPOILER ALERT: It's Geithner's.)

Still, it's fair to say the Obama campaign is nevertheless steeped in populism. In order to flip the campaign script from a "referendum election" to a "choice election," Team Obama Re-Elect has to keep warning against Romney as a return to Bush-era economic policies and the devastation they caused. And as Talking Points Memo's Benjy Sarlin was quick to point out in response to Martin's piece, Vice President Joe Biden has been out on the hustings, playing the role of the Obama team's class-war colonel.

Can the circle be squared? Sure, as long as you keep in mind that populist rhetoric is not the same as populist policy. You can probably count on Obama linking Romney to Bush, and his surrogates making hay with his Bain Capital career, his woeful jobs record, and the way his titanic wealth distances himself from ordinary people until the night before election day. And depending on what Romney offers in terms of his own policies, there could be more class war rhetoric to come.

But will the President outline a plan to do something about income inequality, the ongoing foreclosure crisis, or holding 2008's Wall Street scofflaws to account? We think you know the answer to that question. But the election year is still quite young!

BAD NEWS BEARS: You know, GOP governors, they have careers they need to consider, too. And there's many of them that would prefer to remind their constituents that they were the one in the driver's seat when those flickers of recovery finally started to shine in their state. The problem is, Mitt Romney's not letting them do that. As Greg Sargent reports:

A few weeks ago, Terry Branstad, the Republican governor of Iowa, went public with his complaints about the Romney campaign’s tendency to hype the bad economic news in his state. Branstad questioned the Romney camp’s release of a web video highlighting the plight of the unemployed in Iowa — where the unemployment rate of 5.1 percent is significantly lower than the national average.

“My state is seeing significant growth,” Branstad said. “We are doing very well.”

The Romney camp, by contrast, were running attack ads that presented Iowans as being "concerned about their future in the Obama economy," and heavily touting this woeful refrain: “Nearly One In Five Iowans Experienced Economic Insecurity In 2010, A 26-Year High." In Florida, there were tales of a similar tension, in which it was reported that the Romney campaign had asked Florida Governor Rick Scott to refrain from talking up his state's economic improvements.

Our question: isn't Romney missing a better weapon, here? Branstad and Scott are Republican governors, like Romney. They both want to brag on their states' recoveries. Wouldn't the smart thing for Romney to do is tell voters that he's the guy to bring those economic gains to their state?

VEEPSTAKES: Whose stock is rising in the race to be Mitt Romney’s running mate? Tim Pawlenty! Wait, seriously, The Hill’s Christian Heinze? Apparently so. And the big reason why is that Obama’s Bain attacks have paid dividends in the swing states, and so Romney might want someone a little less associated with green eyeshades and a little more relatable to people who like the words “downscale” and, for some reason, “meatpacking”:

During his presidential campaign, Tim Pawlenty was fond of regaling voters with stories of growing up in the downscale meatpacking areas near St. Paul, Minn. In one exemplary interview with Politics Daily last year, he rather dramatically underscored his blue-collar roots by invoking phrases like “fingernails dirty,” “grit and stuff of real life,” “truck driver,” “lunch-bucket,” “Gordie Howe,” “puked,” “pro-beer,” “scrapper,” “John Mellencamp” and “Springsteen.

Yes, that truly is an exemplary interview, in that TPaw managed to cram in all of those buzzwords into a single conversation, just like all authentic men who work the soil of America.

(Heinze also says Mike Huckabee’s stock is rising in the veepstakes, with the only real problem there being the fact that Mitt and Mike cannot stand one another.)

THE SPECULATRON ELECTORAL MAP PROJECTION

This week, we continue our seer-like process of electoral map projecting, which is -- as always -- a mix of careful poll study, an analysis of prevailing economic trends, coin flips, and guided tours of our subconsciousness undertaken whilst tripping on ayahuasca.

This week, we’re feeling the good news for Obama from the Quinnipiac polls in Florida and Ohio. We’re also feeling like the gains Romney was reportedly making in Michigan and Wisconsin may be more than just outlier noise. There’s talk of a deadlock in New Hampshire, and new life for Obama in Virginia. This week, we’ll give Romney the former and Obama the latter. And as Romney’s supposedly dying in the swings at the moment, we’re going to give Obama credit out West. The result is our most Obama-favorable prediction yet. It is also the strangest electoral map we’ve ever drawn. Our advice: short this prediction. (SPOILER ALERT: That will always be our advice.)

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Who would be the better commander-in-chief to have presiding over our army of drones in the event of an alien invasion? This is a not-real question that we are not-really asking ourselves all the time these days.

But, given the fact that we now celebrate President Abraham Lincoln as the original vampire slayer and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now asked to account for its strategies for a zombie rampage, it seems natural that the folks at the National Geographic Channel would poll Americans on their feelings about extraterrestrial enemies ahead of the debut of their new "Chasing UFOs."

(Premiering this Friday, "Chasing UFOs" follows three UFO hunters, proving once again how extraordinary the United States is, considering that in a period of economic downturn, three people can still do UFO chasing as their actual job.)

What have National Geographic's polling exploits discovered? First of all, lots of people believe in extraterrestrial life: "More than 80 million Americans are certain that UFOs exist." What's more is that most of these citizens are predisposed to believe that the aliens mean us no harm, despite the fact that Stephen Hawking has warned that this is not likely.

According to National Geographic, "most citizens would not mind a minor alien invasion, because they expect these space-age visitors to be friendly -- like the lovable character depicted in Steven Spielberg's popular film 'E.T.'"

What is a "minor invasion," anyway? Probably the interplanetary version of the Iraq war, in which Lrrr of the planet Omicron Persei Eight tells his people that conquering Earth will be a cakewalk, only to discover how easy it is to get bogged down in all the ensuing sectarian violence. Don't worry, Lrrr! "Counterinsurgency strategy" will probably prove to be feasible, one of these days!

The poll also found good news for President Barack Obama, I guess!

In regards to national security, nearly two-thirds (65%) of Americans think Barack Obama would be better suited than fellow presidential candidate Mitt Romney to handle an alien invasion. In fact, more than two in three (68%) women say that Obama would be more adept at dealing with an alien invasion than Romney, vs. 61 percent of men. And more younger citizens, ages 18 to 64 years, than those aged 65+ (68% vs. 50%) think Romney would not be as well-suited as Obama to handle an alien invasion.

It's interesting that the male-female "gender gap" in most of 2012's polling doesn't show up as strongly in the event of an alien invasion, so perhaps this could be the inspiration for the most awesome "October surprise" in the history of the country.

The topic of alien life doesn't often come up during the presidential cycle, but it's worth recalling that during the 2008 campaign, Congressman Dennis Kucinich was forced to answer questions about a claim he made about seeing a UFO while in the company of Shirley MacLaine. That question was put to Kucinich at a presidential debate by Tim Russert, a celebrated professional journalist.

(The "UFO Lobby," which is a thing that exists in America, told our own Sam Stein that it preferred a Hillary Clinton-Bill Richardson presidential ticket, despite Kucinich's vital experience with their issues.)

On "The Daily Show," John Oliver asked former presidential contender Herman Cain to "role-play" what he would say to the American people if he, as president, had to address the populace from "the smouldering remains of what used to be the Oval Office." Cain was really, really good!

Cain responds to the aliens question at the 4:58 mark.

National Geographic also learned that in the event of an alien invasion, the poll's respondents would probably seek assistance from the Hulk, instead of Batman or Spiderman. This demonstrates that the simplicity of the Hulk's messaging ("Smash!") has broader populist appeal than that of the rest of the Avengers, who largely approach national security emergencies by having a lengthy, internecine debate over leadership and the nature of power sharing.

What would happen if friendly aliens arrived, bearing the gift of universal health care? This is not something that National Geographic polled, but I think it's pretty certain that should that scenario arise, powerful health care lobbies would team up and murder all of the ETs.

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As Mitt Romney's campaign has pursued its strategy in these late spring-to-early summer months, there's been one glaring gap: specifics. No one really has much of an idea what Romney wants to do in terms of policy or what issues he particularly wants to prioritize.

Pundits have noticed. Let's recall Peggy Noonan's admonishment to Romney: "Mr. Romney has to give us a plan. He has to tell us his priorities. To lead is to prioritize, to choose." This is a sentiment that's filtered into the Sunday morning political discussion.

And reporters have been bedeviled by Romney's studied avoidance of precision: Check out Alexander Burns' chronicle of grade A stonewalling that reporters received from Romney spokesman Rick Gorka after the Supreme Court issued its ruling on Arizona's immigration law.

For the time being, I've seen Romney's avoidance of these matters as a delaying strategy. By putting off the moment he announces his plans, priorities and promises for as long as possible, he denies Team Obama Re-Elect a target at which to shoot, while he can pummel away at the economic downturn. That's left the Obama campaign with a few options: attacking Romney's record as the governor of Massachusetts (a tricky proposition, given that this record includes the health care reform idea Obama borrowed) and his record at Bain Capital (equally tricky, as the Democrats have plenty of people in their ranks who seek campaign cash from private equity titans).

But NBC News Political Unit's First Read pulls some interesting data from the guts of the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that might force the Romney camp to challenge its assumptions:

Romney remains largely undefined, according to our poll. Although it shows that only 6% of respondents don't know who Romney is, just 20% say they "know a lot" about him, versus 43% who say the same about Obama. (To be sure, Romney's percentage here is comparable to Obama's when he was running for president at this same point in 2008.) In addition, a majority of Romney supporters -- 58% -- say their vote is more AGAINST Obama than FOR Romney. That's compared to a whopping 72% of Obama supporters who say their vote is more FOR Obama than AGAINST Romney. "[Romney's] a known name but an unknown person," says NBC/WSJ co-pollster Peter Hart (D). "They just haven't related to him."

You can pretty much hear Noonan saying, "I told you so." What makes matters worse for Romney is that the vacuum he's been permitted to open has been very well filled by the negative ads that Obama has launched in the swing states, ads that went heavy on attacking -- that's right! -- Romney's record at Bain, as First Read reported:

Among swing-state respondents, 18% say what they've seen and heard about Romney's business record gives them a more POSITIVE opinion about the Republican candidate, versus 33% who say it's more NEGATIVE. That's compared to the national 23%-to-28% margin on this question. The obvious conclusion here is that the negative TV ads pummeling Romney in the battleground states -- like here and here and here -- are having an impact.

Now, part of Romney's calculus here might be the confidence he has that on a long enough timeline, he's going to be able to inundate these swing states with more ads than Obama and his affiliated super PACs can match. But it still seems that Romney is going to have to risk defining himself, for himself, sooner rather than later. This could be a big lift for the risk-averse Romney.

By the way, remember back when the Obama team launched those Bain attacks and the Beltway media completely dismissed them as a total bust in advance? The folks at First Read never got on that bandwagon, recognizing that those attacks weren't pitched to an audience of media elites. They were right, props to them.

At any rate, this all gets potentially exciting tomorrow after the Supreme Court renders its decision on the Affordable Care Act and we're either left with a void to be filled or a re-energized GOP bent on repealing the bill. What does Romney want to replace the health care reform law with, if anything? This could force Romney's policy specifics into the light or it could be the next great 20 question stonewall from a campaign representative.

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Below, a Spotify playlist to guide you through some of Romney's greatest hits:

During the primary season, it was impossible to ignore the loud lamentations from prominent GOP figures that the field of the pre-primary season was not the one for which they had hoped. And it took a while for them to learn to accept that Mitt Romney was going to be their party's 2012 standard-bearer.

There were very late calls for some savior candidate to enter the race -- such as Gov. Chris Christie, Gov. Mitch Daniels, Sen. Marco Rubio or Rep. Paul Ryan. This was the party's talent -- a mix of experienced veterans and emerging stars -- and for various reasons, they all had opted to stay on the bench.

For the most part, those guys have not done much lamenting of their own. If they regret not having jumped into the race, they haven't expressed it in depth. They have all stood up to be good soldiers in the fight to have Romney elected in November, and none of them seem to want to dwell on what might have been.

That is, until this week, when another member of 2012's benchwarmer class opened up about the experience of not jumping into the race: former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. He had much to say about the state of the GOP and its antipathy toward his cherished policies, like immigration reform -- all of which interrupted the narrative. And Bush presented President Barack Obama with an opportunity to respond tactically, which he did today (see below).

All those guys, Jeb included, had reasons to sit this one out, though some were more obvious than others. Marco Rubio made it repeatedly clear, for example, that he was not going to abandon the Senate career he has just begun for the White House. And Paul Ryan doesn't really have any use for the Oval Office; he's projecting a considerable amount of political power from an easily defended House seat.

For the rest, we'd posit that their decision to stay out was pretty simple since 2012 has been shaping up to be a heated, unforgiving slog in the Tea Party trench and that was no place for these men, who shared something in common: a slight bend toward conciliatory politics. Mitch Daniels, for example, floated the idea of a "social truce" -- in which the most divisive subjects in right wing politics would fall by the wayside so a debate could be forged on deficits and tax reform.

And while Christie had the reputation of being a tough talker, he would commit the unpardonable sin of conciliation as well; he's not against collective bargaining, for example, and he had appointed and defended a Muslim judge.

If these benchwarmers needed evidence that they had made the right decision, they got it when they watched how Rick Perry got treated in the primary debates. Perry was the guy who everyone thought could knit up the different strains of the GOP base, all while attracting mega-donors. Problem was, Perry had convictions, many of which concerned the humane treatment of Mexican immigrants. For this sin, he was punished. And somewhere, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was probably watching.

In terms of his presidential portfolio, Jeb Bush has ample baggage, a lot of which he has obtained by dint of the fact that he shares a last name with two other former presidents. Naturally, his brother's presidency -- which isn't much held in high regard these days, even by his nominal ideological allies -- is a problem for him. But Jeb's been more or less successful in maintaining his brand as "the smarter son." The larger difficulty, of course, has to do with timing and the electorate's fatigue with family dynasties. But Jeb was facing headwinds that went far beyond the familiarity with his bloodline.

Jeb's larger problem was twofold. First, he remains deeply committed to immigration reform, at a time when the GOP base has become swollen with nativist crackpots. Second, he still feels a deep longing for the age in which his father governed, when heated debates forged compromises and the system had not been corrupted by naked brinksmanship. You can be quite sure that Jeb remembers that his father raised the debt ceiling nine times. His brother did so on seven occasions. Neither was ever faced with the prospect of the opposition destroying the global economy to score cheap political points.

So Bush decided to open up about this stuff at a breakfast with reporters, sponsored by Bloomberg View:

"Ronald Reagan would have, based on his record of finding accommodation, finding some degree of common ground, as would my dad -- they would have a hard time if you define the Republican party -- and I don’t -- as having an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement, doesn’t allow for finding some common ground," Bush said, adding that he views the hyper-partisan moment as "temporary."

"Back to my dad’s time and Ronald Reagan’s time -- they got a lot of stuff done with a lot of bipartisan suport," he said. Reagan "would be criticized for doing the things that he did."

Bush did mention -- and later had to re-emphasize this point -- that he felt that both parties were reponsible for the "hyper-partisan moment," but the larger point about his party's lacking a place for people like him was the obvious takeaway. And he pointedly picked a fight with anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist and his famous pledge that now governs the GOP: "I ran for office three times ... The pledge was presented to me three times. I never signed the pledge. I cut taxes every year I was governor. I don’t believe you outsource your principles and convictions to people.”

Naturally, rather than ponder the truth of what Bush was revealing, his comments became the latest story of the Off-Message Surrogate (Jeb is, nominally, a Romney endorser) who was a drag on the horsey race. And there was an ample dose of speculation that Jeb was setting himself up for 2016 -- an idea that implies a lack of confidence in Romney's ability to win.

New York magazine's Jonathan Chait argued that Bush is "clearly engaged in an effort to position himself as the next leader of the Republican Party."

To understand what Bush is saying, you need to anticipate how the party might diagnose the causes of a loss in 2012, and then you can see how he is setting himself as the cure. Bush has been publicly urging Republicans to moderate their tone toward Latinos and to embrace immigration reform. Here is the one issue where Republicans, should they lose, will almost surely conclude that they need to moderate their party stance. The Latino vote is both growing in size and seems to be tilting ever more strongly toward the Democrats, a combination that will rapidly make the electoral map virtually unwinnable. Indeed, the body language of the Romney campaign suggests it already regrets the hard-line stances on immigration it adopted during the primary.

Chait made the best possible argument here, but we're not sure that the GOP is going to be allowed to act on this diagnosis. Obviously, if Romney prevails, he will be the GOP's nominee in four years (barring, of course, the possibility that Romney experiences some terrific political misadventure).

But if Romney loses, Bush has nowhere to go, either. Should Romney fail to unseat President Barack Obama in November, the howling for a True Conservative standard-bearer will grow beyond the means of measure. This howling began when the RINO of the GOP base's nightmares, Sen. John McCain, failed to win in 2008. Romney, with all his past forays into moderate policymaking, has to walk a very fine line. If he fails, it will only confirm what the Tea Party has been saying all along. And they'll remember all of Jeb Bush's heresies.

“This was probably my time," Bush said in an interview on "CBS This Morning," "There’s a window of opportunity, in life, and for all sorts of reasons.”

Jeb Bush missed his window -- if he even really had one. He remains a political figure with pedigree, accomplishments, passions and convictions. But he can't go anywhere with them. Jeb Bush is now a man without a time, without a place, and there's nothing left for him to do but join Dick Lugar in the Fraternity of Stranded Men and sing sad songs about the world they once knew.

COROLLARY TO JEB BUSH'S LAMENTATIONS

Bush's criticisms caused something of a sensation in the media and sparked infighting within the GOP. How can Team Obama Re-Elect respond tactically? You just saw how: Friday morning President Obama announced that by executive order, the deportations of young, DREAM Act-eligible immigrants will cease and they will be granted work permits instead.

It's a gutsy move on the part of the administration. The obvious criticism will come in references to the larger unemployment crisis: It will be argued that Obama is compounding the matter by introducing new competitors into the job market. These competitors are, of course, already in the job market competing, but that's not likely going to matter much to the GOP, who will label this as a naked grab for the Hispanic vote. (We're guessing it will be largely lost on everybody that Obama has already won this voter bloc.)

How to respond to this criticism? Maybe by playing clips of Jeb Bush, over and over again. Obama's action today goes right to the heart of Bush's lamentations. Bush believes in a humane approach to immigration and he sees GOP obstruction as an impediment to policymaking. Obama's move advances the former while circumventing the latter. (Obama also pulls a classic "co-opt the other side" move, effectively neutralizing Marco Rubio's ownership of the issue, leaving Rubio no way to criticize anything other than the process. "We can't wait," is how Obama will respond to that.)

Obama's move also comes at a time where Time magazine is about to send an issue to the newsstands carrying (our former Huffington Post colleague) Jose Antonio Vargas' cover story on the real lives of undocumented immigrants. Between Jeb Bush's comments at the beginning of the week and the conversation that Vargas is likely to spark at week's end, Obama had the perfect opportunity to make this move.

THE NEW PHASE OF ROMNEY SKEPTICISM

As we mentioned before, we're long past the part of the election season when the GOP establishment's general distrust of Romney can be measured in constant calls for a savior. Romney's won the primary, and he's looking more and more like a guy who will push the race to a close finish. Romney is basically out of the "proof of concept" phase of his campaign. But before he fully hits the marketplace, Republicans still have some tires to kick and some suggestions to make.

Politico's Maggie Haberman rounded up what she termed "The Republican family Feud" this week, noting that "Republicans are beginning to realize Romney can win, but acceptance of that is coming slowly." Jeb Bush figures prominently in her explication. Strategists swarm and make their case and William Kristol is waiting to see something specific from Romney, she said:

The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol suggested the intraparty critics are simply giving voice to what many in the party feel right now -- that Romney needs to work harder to build his own case.

“At some point, people do look up and say, ‘OK, I’m convinced that President Obama doesn’t quite get it … Time to look at Mitt Romney. I’m worried they may not have quite enough in place when it’s time to look at Mitt Romney where there is a coherent set of policies.”

Kristol echoed Peggy Noonan in that regard, and as we've noted previously, Romney is biding his time and withholding these specifics in order to deny Team Obama Re-Elect an avenue of criticism.

But the aspect of all this that we'd like to emphasize is that the emerging intra-party critique of Romney is a concern over how bold he's willing to be. This past Sunday, Gov. Mitch Daniels and Gov. Scott Walker took care to give this urging voice. On "Fox News Sunday," Daniels said, "The American people, I think, will rightly demand to know something more than he's not President Obama."

And Walker added to this on "Face the Nation" by invoking a specific concept. During his appearance on "Face the Nation," Walker sounded similar themes. "I don't think we win if it's just about a referendum on Barack Obama ... I think people like [Wisconsin Rep.] Paul Ryan and others hope that he goes big and bold." Later, he added, “Romney’s got a shot if the R next to his name doesn’t just stand for Republican, it stands for reformer, if he shows my state and he shows Americans that he’s got a plan to take on those reforms.”

This is an old worry, revived -- that Romney is too risk averse and vision impaired to be much more than a guy who'll tinker around the edges. Walker, having been victorious in what's been deemed to be the second-most important election of 2012, gets to put the pressure back on Romney. Of course, what Walker terms to be "reform" also includes policies that aren't too terribly popular.

This week, the Democrats can point to Ron Barber's victory in the special election for former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' old seat as one in which they prevailed by making the argument that they would fight to preserve Medicare and Social Security. So as much as Romney's semi-skeptical allies may hope Romney risks going bold, the Democrats also share those same hopes.

THE BELTWAY MEDIA DIVIDE ... AGAIN

As we've said, over and over again, one of the ways the economic crisis has been exacerbated is the failure of the Beltway media to get beyond their bubble long enough to understand that the economic downturn is not just something that affects the electoral hopes of affluent politicians who, while they may or may not get elected (or re-elected) to office, will generally not be exposed to the grinding, grueling realities of economic dislocation. Your prominent media figures see no value in having "access" to poor, ordinary Americans, so they remain background abstractions in the horse race melodrama.

Another great example came in the aftermath of twin economic speeches by Obama and Romney this week. As the Washington Post's Greg Sargent pinpointed, your world-famous political media types couldn't be bothered to do much more than offer pithy pans or praise for whichever speech they hated or liked. They engaged mainly in a polite game one-upsmanship -- a battle of "I'm so effing savvy" meditations that emphasized how the "message" might shape the horse race.

Fortunately for everyone, the media on the ground in Ohio felt a particular reponsibility to serve their readers, and so there was a completely different type of journalism that got practiced. Per Sargent:

Interestingly, the local papers in Ohio covered Obama’s speech yesterday, and Romney’s rebuttal to it, as a clash of economic visions. This is how it was framed on front page after front page, according to a roundup of front pages forwarded to me by a Democrat frustrated with Washington coverage of the speech.

Now, Sargent figures that the local reporting might favor Obama. We're not as concerned by that as we are impressed how the consituents of this journalism were served. Discussing the twin speeches as a clash of different ideas, actually grappling with underlying issues, helping readers to make choices -- this is all more important than a lengthy, no-stakes chitchat session in the cable news salons. You don't need to watch the cable newsers twiddle their desiccated wit glands for another round of "who has the prettiest mouthgasm." These local papers have websites; please go visit them. They will welcome your custom.

(Let's remember, of course, that the Beltway media thought those attacks on Bain were just terrible! Ordinary human Americans disagreed.)

BERKLEY TO OBAMA: CALL ME MAYBE: Here's a story that breaks a trend: In Nevada, Rep. Shelley Berkley is running neck and neck with Republican Sen. Dean Heller in a race for his Senate seat. And unlike many Democratic senatorial candidates we could name (including some former BFFs like Sens. Claire McCaskill and John Tester), Berkley is actually hoping that Obama will come and campaign with her. Slate's Matt Taylor explained the dynamic:

Polls show Obama quite strong in the Silver State, whereas Berkley is stuck in a tie. Her strategy will be to latch on to the president at every opportunity, hoping some of the energy (and massive support from young and African American voters) behind his re-election bid rubs off on her own campaign.

Convenient! After all, Obama still has a good chance of winning Nevada, so he'll probably spend all kinds of time out there. Missouri and Montana? Yeah, not so much.

THE VEEPSTAKES

Sen. Rob Portman continues to look like the ideal partner for Romney, at least in terms of his finances. The Hill's Kevin Bogardus reported that according to the recent round of financial disclosures that were released this week, Portman's wealth has climbed, his debts have decreased, and that looks good for the second name on the ticket. Paul Ryan's also getting rich off his government job, with a personal wealth that's into "the seven figures."

THE SPECULATRON ELECTORAL MAP PROJECTION

This week, we continued our complicated process of electoral map projections, which as we said last week is a mix of careful poll study, an analysis of prevailing economic trends, druidical divination, and at least one session where we take peyote and go on a "spirit journey."

It seems clear -- to everyone, frankly -- that the five states to watch are Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia. In general, we had a better feeling about Obama's chances in Virginia this week. But while we more or less thought that Romney's good polling news out of Wisconsin was more noise than signal, we decided that we wouldn't ignore it. So this week, we throw Wisconsin back in Romney's column, and WHAT DO YOU KNOW, LOOK WHAT HAPPENED!

Admit it, if this happened, you would probably be all, "Well, that figures."

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Jonathan Capehart took a look at the same Karen Tumulty piece I discussed earlier today, and reaches some of the same conclusions -- "No one does panic like Democrats" -- that I did. But Capehart takes the time today to drill one of Tumulty's contributors in particular, Emory University clinical psychologist Drew Westen, for a diagnosis of President Barack Obama's messaging that gives Capehart an "eyeroll."

As Tumulty wrote:

Obama’s “fundamental error,” Westen said, was not blaming former President George W. Bush and conservative lawmakers early enough and often enough in his term for creating the country’s economic troubles before he got into office.

Capehart notes that Republicans have been "hammering Obama for his propensity to blame President George W. Bush" for at least as long as Obama has been hammering his predecessor for wrecking the economy, which has been more or less "for all time."

He goes on to cite two examples of the ample coverage that's been given to Obama's blaming Bush, and concluded by noting that "poll after poll after poll showing that the American people and Obama are in sync on the question of blame."

So, Capehart proves his point, and I will confirm that Westen's conclusions are, indeed, eyeroll-worthy. But let's also note that Capehart has hit on what is actually something of a puzzling component in Obama's messaging -- as the country is now "in sync" with blaming Bush, what value is there in continuing to harp on it?

I don't really believe that there's any pulpit that's "bully" enough to move the masses in a single speech, but I do think that if you repeatedly take to the bully pulpit to repeat and reinforce basic ideas convincingly enough, this painstaking effort can gradually shift opinion. Which is all the more reason to stop using the bully pulpit to continue to try to convince people to believe something that they already believe. Around the 3,467th time you're told that the Obama administration inherited a recession, you get a case of the eyerolls, too.

Obama is set to deliver a big speech on the economy tomorrow, and Greg Sargent has suggestions of his own on how to draw the right contrast. Blaming Bush, and the dilemma it poses, figures prominently in Sargent's analysis:

The problem Obama faces: He must talk about the past, at least to some degree, in order to explain (1) why the recovery has been slow and difficult; and (2) why what he intends to do about it is better than what Romney would do about it, i.e., a return to policies that have already failed us. In other words, to draw the very contrast Democrats want to see, Obama needs to look backward and forward. This will give Republicans something to attack (he’s blaming Bush!) and it could give nervous Dems something to second guess further. But this strategic dilemma seems unavoidable.

Sure, it may seem unavoidable, but I think that if Team Obama Reelect wants to succeed, they should challenge themselves to avoid continually pointing back to the year 2008 on the calendar and focus on what's at hand. It's a hard task to undertake, sure. But what can I say? It's not supposed to be easy!
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The Make-Up Call: Michael Barbaro was roundly crapped upon for that story about how all of Mitt Romney's La Jolla neighbors thought Romney was a jerk. So, he quickly adjusts and pens a big water-carry piece about how Romney's totally going to "turn the tables" on Obama and paint the incumbent as the guy who's really the owner of a gargantuan mansion with a car elevator out of touch with normal Americans. Yes, I'm casting aspersions, but not without cause: As Jonathan Bernstein points out, Barbaro pretty clearly excused himself from doing any critical thinking. [New York Times; The Plum Line]

This Day In Meaningless Political Data Points: John Avlon notes that Mitt Romney is going to lose all of his "home states," which are Massachusetts, California and Michigan. Avlon says this is "uncharted strategic territory" because "never before has a presidential candidate written off their home state." Okay. So what? Can he still very capably get to 270 in the electoral college? Yes? Okay, cool, I don't care. [Daily Beast]

On The Other Hand: Romney's inability to cope with the phenomenon of intermittent doughnut appearances will actually matter slightly more than the fact that he's from Massachusetts. [Slate]

Book Of Mormon: Alex Pareene has this funny feeling that when liberals say they don't want a Mormon president, they mostly mean they don't want Mitt Romney to be president. But, you know, I'll have to check my sources to make sure Senator Harry Reid won re-election in 2010 to be certain. [Salon]

That's A Clown Kicker, Bro: There are many pieces of reporting out there that might include a statement like, "A spokeswoman for Massachusetts Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren did not immediately return an email seeking comment." But this is the only one that includes that line for the purposes of pointing out that you should not take the reporter seriously ever again. [The Daily Caller]

Political Mythbusting: Jonathan Bernstein debunks five myths about "swing states." (Though I'm going to still disagree with No. 3.) [The Plum Line]

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