Michael Scherer, via Mike Allen, reports that the White House is listening to cheerful historical analogies:

In June, ... White House chief of staff Bill Daley arranged a secret retreat for his senior team at Fort McNair ... Historian Michael Beschloss went along as a guest speaker to help answer the one question on everyone’s mind: How does a U.S. President win re-election with the country suffering unacceptably high rates of unemployment? The historian’s lecture provided a lift for Barack Obama’s team. No iron law in politics is ever 100% accurate, Beschloss told the group. Two Presidents in the past century—Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 and Ronald Reagan in 1984—won re-­election amid substantial economic suffering. Both used the same two-part strategy: FDR and Reagan argued that the country, though in pain, was improving and that their opponents, anchored in past failures, would make things worse. ... The President’s aides, all but resigned to unemployment above 8% on Election Day, now see in Roosevelt and Reagan a plausible path to victory. They intend to make sure voters believe a year from now that their fortunes are improving, and they plan to persuade the American people that a Republican in the White House would be a step backward. ...

This is a reporter summarizing another's reporter's summary of an event no reporter actually attended, so we are looking through the glass darkly. That caveat aside, this sounds like pure delusion. Roosevelt in 1936 and Reagan in 1984 had high unemployment, yes. But they also had very rapid economic growth. Here's the picture in 1936:

And 1984:

These were situations where the public could discern rapid improvement from a bad situation. No such thing is likely to be the case next year. 1936 and 1984 are not good lessons. They're counter-examples, like learning how to handle a drought by studying what happened during Hurricane Katrina.

Again, it's hard to say exactly what the administration thinks these examples mean. The article does report, "Obama will try to divert the public’s frustration with Washington toward his main enemy, the GOP." That is the obviously correct strategy. Americans are very, very unhappy. Obama's task is to persuade them to blame Republicans. Running an election taking credit for, well, anything is a terrible idea.

Shelby Steele today has an extremely amusing broadside against President Obama. The general flavor is captured well in its opening:

If I've heard it once, I've heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly undefined character.

So you can see that Steele really takes in the full spectrum of viewpoints.

Perhaps the most interesting quality of this particular column is that it is an vaporous emission of generalized complaints against Obama and the left -- they hate America, and so on -- lacking any grounding whatsoever. I was able to identify one sentence containing anything close to a concrete reference to an actual decision or statement by Obama:

Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform. Yet once he was elected it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism. There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Street—as if his mandate was somehow to overcome, or at least subdue, American capitalism itself.

This is the sum of the specific references to Obama's record in Steele's column: he hates America because he criticized Wall Street. Does Steele realize how many Americans hate America by this standard?

In any case, there's no other reference to anything Obama has done. It's an entire column built on the assumption that Obama is a radical leftist who hates America. Apparently everybody Steele talks to believes this anyway, so why bother to demonstrate it?

Rick Perry's platform may consist of great heaps of terrifying reactionary obscurantism, but it also features a couple nice little dollops of reassuring liberal reform. Here's one of them:

One solution the governor embraces is to end lifetime tenure — a cornerstone of the Constitution, whose drafters worried far less about activist or senile judges than about meddling tyrants and political pressure. ...

In the book, Perry only alludes to how he would change judicial tenure, referring to a plan that would stagger Supreme Court terms so there’s a retirement every two years. In that plan, justices would get 18-year terms, to ensure that no single president gets to pick a majority of the nine-member court.

The current system of lifetime tenure creates real problems. Huge policy swings hinge on the simple health and longevity of Supreme Court justices. This results in very old justices clinging to their seats until a sufficiently friendly president can take office. It also gives presidents an incentive to nominate the youngest possible justice who can be confirmed, as opposed to the most qualified possible justice. And eliminating some element of the sheer randomness by which each party gets to appoint justices would tend to reduce the chances of the court swinging too far one way or another from the mainstream of legal thought.

It's hard to imagine the incentive structure for any president to propose such a reform -- why volunteer to the the first president whose judicial nominees don't get lifetime tenure? But it is slightly reassuring to see glimmers of sense in Perry's platform.

So the Palin thing didn't completely work out, but I expect the Republican presidential candidate to give this Alaska woman a call:

A 22-year-old Alaska woman said on Wednesday she punched a black bear in the face to save her small dog from being carried off and possibly eaten.

Juneau resident Brooke Collins said she hit the bear Sunday night to save the life of her dachshund, Fudge. She said she discovered the bear crouched down, clutching Fudge in its paws and biting the back of the dog's neck.

"It had her kind of like when they eat salmon," Collins said Wednesday. "I was freaking out. I was screaming at it. My dog was screaming. I ran up to it ... I just punched it right in the snout and it let go."

It's like Palin but better -- she not only takes on animals, but does it empty-handed. And she has even less political experience.

Jonathan Last argues no. He tallies up Romney's mixed record of winning elections in Massachusetts with his poor record during the 2008 primaries, and concludes:

I’d argue that his electoral prospects are even worse than they look from his won-loss record. Here’s why:

(1) Romney made his political career out of his “close” 17-point loss to Ted Kennedy. But keep in mind that to only lose by 17, he spent $7M of his own money. But more importantly, this was the 1994 midterm election—so he got blown out during the biggest Republican wave in half a century.

(2) The high-point of his electoral career was the 2002 MA governor’s race, where he took 49.77%. Even in the biggest win of his life, he couldn’t capture more than 50% of the vote.

(3) It’s funny that Romney’s line of attack on Perry seems to be that Perry is a “career politician” because he’s been in elective office since 1984. Well, Mitt Romney would have been a career politician too, if only voters would have let him. He’s been running since 1994. His real gripe about Perry is actually, “Hey, that guy wins all the time! No fair!”

I think this is somewhat unfair to Romney. Running as a Republican in Massachusetts is hard. Rick Perry couldn't win statewide office there if he were running against Lee Harvey Oswald. What's more, Last tallies up Romney's primary record as if each race were a separate election. In reality, the primaries are all connected with each other, and a loss in one place makes further losses more likely.

Still, he's not wrong about the big picture. Romney has trouble attracting core supporters because he is so transparently political, as Scott Galupo explains:

You can practically hear the clanging and buzzing of Romney Robotic Manipulation technology:

What are Rick Perry's political weaknesses?

Ding!—Extreme rhetoric on constitutionality of Medicare and Social Security—Beep-Beep-Ding!—From border state; soft on immigration—Ding!—[Making necessary adjustments in left hemisphere of RomneyBrain]. ...

flip-flopping isn't necessarily a fatal flaw. It's when voters trust neither your flip nor your flop—that's when you're toast.

Flip-flopping isn't fatal. But it is true that voters make broad judgments about politicians that amount to more than a mere tallying up of issue stances. The best politicians create a successful persona.

I think Romney is a below-average presidential nominee, but that this has been obscured by the competition, which he towers above. Rick Perry would be a really bad nominee, and Michelle Bachmann a horrible one. In 2008, I considered Romney the weakest possible nominee of the Republican field. Now he's the strongest, and not because he's done anything better. To put it differently, if the 2008 version of John McCain -- the popular war hero whose many breaks against the Bush administration were fresh in voters' memory -- were the nominee, he'd be a very strong favorite to win.

 -- Maybe one reason Jewish Republicans like Romney is that he too is a religious minority. 

-- The truth behind the "CEOs who make more than their  companies pay taxes" study.

-- Our heroic ambassador to Syria. 

-- The kerfuffle over the timing of Obama's job speech is almost a parody of the pathologies of political discourse. 

I feel that Hamilton, Ohio has been the home of numerous incidents like this:

A repeat public indecency offender has been arrested for allegedly engaging in "sexual activity" with a pink inflatable swimming pool raft, according to Hamilton police.

Edwin Charles Tobergta, 32, was arrested at his Harmon Avenue home early Sunday after he was spotted in the act in an alley in the 1800 block of Howell Avenue behind a residence, a police report shows.

A male witness, who owns the raft and lives in the home near the alley, told Hamilton Police Officer William Thacker he shouted at the suspect to stop.

Tobergta took the raft and fled, the report states.

In other Ohio news, this happened:

Rick Perry, in his anti-Obama spiel, drops in some interesting New Deal revisionism:

“What’s dumb is to oversee an economy that has lost that many millions of jobs, to put unemployment numbers that over his four years will stay probably at 9 percent, to downgrade the credit of this good country, to put fiscal policies in place that were a disaster back in the '30s and to try them again in the 2000s,” Perry said on Sean Hannity’s radio show. “That’s what I consider to be the definition of dumb.”

The previously-marginal notion that Franklin Roosevelt worsened the Depression has rapidly hardened into conventional wisdom within the vanguard of the conservative movement. (In 2009, I wrote a review essay about the phenomenon.) But it's remained largely hidden from the political stage. My suspicion is that most Americans consider the New Deal a great success, and Franklin Roosevelt a great president. Indeed, the full political force of the conservative backlash has mobilized the belief that President Obama is taking away good, earned benefits from middle-class Americans and giving them to the undeserving poor.

I could see why this would put Perry in good stead with conservative Republican activists. But does he really want to run in the general election against Obama as Roosevelt?