It’s simply taken as a given in Republican circles that President Obama enjoys favorable coverage from major media outlets. This is generally pretty hard to believe among non-conservatives, but it’s helpful to take this out of the realm of perception and into more quantifiable analysis.

The Pew Research Center published this report today with some striking results.

Rick Perry received the most favorable coverage of any candidate for president during the first five months of the race, but now Herman Cain is enjoying that distinction, according to a new survey which combines traditional research methods and computer algorithmic technology to code the level and tone of news coverage.

Perry lost the mantle of the candidate enjoying the most favorable treatment to Herman Cain two weeks ago, after the Florida straw poll in which Cain scored a surprise victory. Meanwhile, though he has often led in the polls, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has received less coverage and less positive coverage than the shifting casts of frontrunners — and that remains true even now. He ranks second in the amount of attention received, and the tone of that narrative has been unwaveringly mixed.

One man running for president has suffered the most unrelentingly negative treatment of all: Barack Obama. Though covered largely as president rather than a candidate, negative assessments of Obama have outweighed positive by a ratio of almost 4-to-1. The assessments of the president in the media were substantially more negative than positive in every one of the 23 weeks studied. In no week during these five months was more than 10% of the coverage about the President positive in tone.

The accompanying chart really helped drive the point home:

The image shows coverage by candidate, with those receiving more favorable coverage higher up on the chart. That candidate way down there at the bottom? That’s the president.

Obama’s coverage “has been substantially more negative in every one of the last 23 weeks of the last five months — even the week that Bin Laden was killed,” Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said of the president’s treatment in the media compared with that of the GOP field.

“Liberal” media, indeed.

President Obama spoke in Asheville this morning, as part of the kick off of his bus tour through North Carolina and Virginia, and delivered his jobs speech to a fairly receptive audience. This time, however, he added a new section to his speech, taking advantage of recent developments in the Senate.

After noting that independent economists have projected the American Jobs Act would create nearly 2 million jobs, the president noted, “[I]t turns out one poll found that 63 percent of Americans support the ideas in this jobs bill. So 63 percent of Americans support the jobs bill that I put forward; 100 percent of Republicans in the Senate voted against it. That doesn’t make any sense, does it?”

Obama turned his attention to the new GOP alternative.

“Now, it turns out that the Republicans have a plan, too. I want to be fair. They call — they put forward this plan last week. They called it the ‘Real American Jobs Act.’ The ‘real one’ — that’s what they called it — just in case you were wondering.

“So let’s take a look at what the Republican American jobs act looks like. It turns out the Republican plan boils down to a few basic ideas: They want to gut regulations; they want to let Wall Street do whatever it wants. They want to drill more. And they want to repeal health care reform. That’s their jobs plan.”

Obama proceeded to play a little compare and contrast. Republicans want to help industries pollute; Dems want to put teachers back to work. Republicans want to gut the health care system; Dems think it won’t help the economy to take Americans’ coverage away. And so on.

This is precisely why Democrats have been pleading with GOP lawmakers to present a jobs plan — not just because Dems wanted a target, but because they knew the Republican approach would be a joke, especially when compared to the popular, economist-backed Democratic plan.

Republicans assumed they’d at least get a talking point out of this — those big meanies at the White House keep saying there’s no GOP jobs plan, so Republicans will prove them wrong. But this assumption was backwards — Republicans have given Obama a talking point, allowing him to mock the pathetic GOP agenda and use it prove why Republicans lack any and all credibility on the subject.

The president, referencing analysis published by Greg Sargent last week, added, “[R]emember those independent economists who said our plan would create jobs, maybe as many as almost 2 million jobs, grow the economy by as much as 2 percent? So one of the same economists that took a look at our plan took a look at the Republican plan, and they said, ‘Well, this won’t do much to help the economy in the short term — it could actually cost us jobs.’ We could actually lose jobs with their plan. So I’ll let you decide which plan is the real American Jobs Act.”

Here’s hoping political reporters were paying attention to this. As Greg reported today, “Multiple news orgs reported extensively on the Senate GOP’s jobs plan without soliciting the views of private economists on whether it will do what Republicans say it will do — create growth and jobs. So, a question: Shouldn’t the view of economists on this rather important question — whether Republicans are making a legitimate contribution to the debate about what to do about the short term economic crisis — be part of the discussion here?”

That need not be a rhetorical question. This isn’t a matter of opinion; we’re talking about demonstrable facts, as bolstered by independent economic analysis: the White House jobs plan would make an immediate, positive difference, and the Republican jobs plan wouldn’t help at all.

From a solely political perspective, is there any angle to the debate over jobs that’s more important than this?

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) sat down with Fox News’ Chris Wallace yesterday, and the “Fox News Sunday” made an effort to get the Republican leader to talk about job creation in a little depth. We know what GOP officials think about the issue, and while Wallace went out of his way to lend credence to Republican talking points, he at least tried to find out why.

The host asked, for example, “Let’s look at the president’s job’s plan, which was blocked in the Senate this week. Here it is — $245 billion in tax cuts in incentives, $140 billion in new spending on infrastructure and aid to states, $62 billion in aid to the unemployed. Question: what’s wrong with that plan?”

Cantor avoided answering directly, claiming that people on “both sides of the aisle” resisted the bill, before arguing, “We’re not going to be for tax increases on small businesses. [Obama] knows that.”

The president’s jobs bill cut taxes on small business. The oft-confused Majority Leader got this key detail backwards.

Cantor added that both sides should “work together” on Republican ideas like the “Plan for America’s Job Creators.” As we talked about last week, even the right should be able to understand that the GOP “plan” is a transparent joke.

Wallace proceeded to press Cantor on each of the key parts of the American Jobs Act, asking, “For or against it?” Starting with infrastructure investments, Cantor wouldn’t support public spending, but would support “redoing the permitting process.”

How about $35 billion for states so that they don’t have to lay off teachers, police and firefighters? Cantor rejected the very idea because the funds “are the type of programs that the president advocated in the stimulus program.” That’s not an answer, but the Republican leader seemed to think it was.

When the discussion turned to the Republican alternative, Wallace asked why Cantor why his approach would be more effective. Cantor couldn’t say. It led to this exchange:

WALLACE: All right. But here’s the issue: the president points out that Moody’s Analytics, one of the top economic consulting firms, scored his plan, figured at what impact it would have, and says it would add 1.9 million jobs next year and grow the economy by an addition 2 percent…. Congressman Cantor, do you have an independent analysis that shows how this plan would grow the economy and add jobs?

CANTOR: First of all, I would say as to the Moody’s economist that the president speaks to, they and their chief economist was the one that predicted that the stimulus program would keep unemployment from rising above 8 percent. So, I think we need to raise some questions about that assessment of his.

WALLACE: In fairness, he was an economic adviser to John McCain in 2008, Mark Zandi, and the fact there’s a lot of the private economic firms that say whether it’s 1 percent or 2 percent growth, a million jobs, 2 million jobs, that it would have some stimulative affect.

CANTOR: Let’s look at this. There has —

WALLACE: Here’s a question, do you have independent scoring of what your plan does?

Cantor didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

There’s an opportunity here for a simple exercise: the parties present plans to create jobs, and allow them to be subjected to independent scrutiny. Make the results available to the public: which plan boost the economy more, create more jobs, lower unemployment more, etc. The Obama White House is clearly ready for this.

But Republicans aren’t. As we discussed last week, shouldn’t it tell the political world something important when there are two alternatives to job creation, and one is terrified of economic analysis and examination?

For folks below a certain age, Robert Bork’s name is probably only vaguely familiar. Ronald Reagan nominated the right-wing jurist to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987, launching one of the fiercest and most important nomination fights in generations. Bork, by the way, lost that fight — the Senate concluded his ideology was simply too extreme for the high court.

That was the correct call. Bork had, after all, endorsed Jim Crow-era poll taxes, condemned portions of the Civil Rights Act banning discrimination in public accommodations, and argued against extending the equal protection of the 14th Amendment to women, among other things.

A quarter-century later, it’s not news that Bork is still an extremist. His bizarre ideology is relevant, however, given his role in Republican presidential politics.

How about the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment? Does [Bork] still think it shouldn’t apply to women?

“Yeah,” he answers. “I think I feel justified by the fact ever since then, the Equal Protection Clause kept expanding in ways that cannot be justified historically, grammatically, or any other way. Women are a majority of the population now — a majority in university classrooms and a majority in all kinds of contexts. It seems to me silly to say, ‘Gee, they’re discriminated against and we need to do something about it.’ They aren’t discriminated against anymore.”

If Bork seriously believes discrimination against women is a thing of the past, he really needs to get out more — or at least have a conversation with Lilly Ledbetter.

But the salience here comes with appreciating what Bork is currently up to. Ian Millhiser noted, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney chose Bork to serve as the co-chair of his “Judicial Advisory Committee.”

Whatever Bork might have been, however, he is now nothing more than an angry old man who long ago resigned his federal judgeship and faded into obscurity. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is a leading presidential contender and could potentially be in a position to select new Supreme Court justices. Before anyone casts a vote for or against Romney, the former governor should explain clearly and without reservation why he selected a top legal advisor who believes that gender discrimination no longer exists and that the Constitution has nothing whatsoever to say about it — and Romney must be equally clear about whether he plans to appoint judges and justices who share Bork’s dismissive attitude towards discrimination.

That seems more than fair. If Romney announces this afternoon that he’s parting ways with Bork, and no longer wants anything to do with his extremist ideology, I’ll be duly impressed. If Romney blows it off, I’ll wait for campaign reporters to press the former governor for a coherent explanation.

Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain has used his stump speech recently to address what he sees as “a crisis of illegal immigration.” As part of his pitch, Cain has talked up a border fence that will kill those trying to cross, though yesterday, he claimed to be kidding.

At two campaign rallies in Tennessee on Saturday night, the Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain said that part of his immigration policy would be to build an electrified fence on the country’s border with Mexico that could kill people trying to enter the country illegally.

But by Sunday morning, in a dramatic change of tone, Mr. Cain, a former restaurant executive, said he was only kidding.

“That’s a joke,” Mr. Cain told the journalist David Gregory during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where he was asked about the electrified fence. “That’s not a serious plan. I’ve also said America needs to get a sense of humor.”

Two things. First, the notion that an ostensible presidential candidate would try to find humor — over and over again — in killing immigrants isn’t encouraging.

Second, Cain wasn’t kidding. TPM posted this video from MSNBC this morning, showing the candidate’s remarks.

For those who can’t watch clips online, Cain told a cheering audience, “We’ll have a real fence: 20 feet high, with barbed wire. Electrified. With a sign on the other side that says, ‘It can kill you.’ … Then I get criticized. ‘Mr. Cain, that’s insensitive.’ What do you mean, ‘insensitive’? What’s insensitive is when they come to the United States, across our border, and kill our citizens, and kill our border patrol people. That’s insensitive. And I’m not worried about being insensitive to tell people to stop sneaking into America.”

The right-wing candidate made the same argument in multiple appearances.

“That’s a joke” isn’t exactly a compelling response.

Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that won’t necessarily generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers:

* Campaign donations from Wall Street are picking up at the presidential level, and the financial industry appears to be rallying behind Mitt Romney in a big way.

* Hoping to recalibrate his presidential campaign, Rick Perry delivered a policy speech in Pittsburgh the other day, focusing on energy policy. The Texas governor, believe it or not, apparently thinks the nation will be fine if we just drill a whole lot.

* There was a report this morning that Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) is preparing to endorse Romney in the Republican presidential race, prompting DeMint and his staff to push back aggressively against the rumors.

* The open U.S. Senate race in Virginia continues to be the nation’s most competitive race, and a new Richmond Times-Dispatch poll shows former Gov. Tim Kaine (D) with a narrow edge over former Sen. George Allen (R), 44% to 42%.

* Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign is very nearly broke, having raised $4.51 million, but having spent $4.18 million.

* Michele Bachmann’s presidential campaign has about $1.3 million left in the bank after spending nearly $6 million in the third quarter.

* The latest polling in Nevada shows Romney with a modest lead in one of the early nominating states, with the former governor up by five over Herman Cain, 31% to 26%.

* And in Utah, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is urging Rep. Jim Matheson (D) to take on Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). To that end, the DSCC released a Anzalone Liszt showing Hatch with a modest six-point lead over Matheson in a hypothetical match-up, which reinforces the notion that Hatch is vulnerable next year.

We know the so-called Tea Party “movement,” once riding high, has seen its support falter of late, as evidenced by polls showing the American mainstream far more aligned with Occupy Wall Street. These activists and their leaders are, it seems, still at the center of the contemporary Republican power structure, but what does the future hold for the Tea Party?

In a piece in the upcoming print edition of the Washington Monthly, Colin Woodard reports on Tea Partiers’ waning influence, but with a specific focus on geography. The editors’ summary of the story helps set the stage for an interesting piece:

As 2010 drew to a close, the Tea Party looked like a truly national movement, racking up congressional seats and governor’s mansions not just in traditionally red states like South Carolina, but in the Northeast and Midwest as well.

And yet, twelve months later, the Tea Party’s power seems to be melting away in much of the country. Tea Party-supported governors in states like Maine and Wisconsin find themselves beset by controversy over their radical agendas and incredibly unpopular with voters. Meanwhile the broader movement, once deemed unstoppable, seems to be running out of gas.

As Colin Woodard explains in the upcoming November/December issue of the Washington Monthly, this was predictable. The Tea Party’s agenda and credo may have struck a brief chord nationwide, but they are only truly at home in certain regions of the country, like the Deep South, that have historic affinities for such politics. In other regions, the movement’s tenets are anathema to centuries-old social, political, and cultural traditions that few of us fully understand.

In his piece, Woodard illuminates a hidden political geography of America, dividing the country into 11 distinct regions whose radically different characters have always set the terms of national politics and always made extremist movements a tough sell. Understanding these regions, he argues, will be key if progressives want to form a winning coalition going forward.

Read Woodard’s story “A Geography Lesson for the Tea Party.”

Also note, Woodward will be talking about his book at the Arizona State University Washington Center in DC tonight. Those interested can RSVP here.

And for more on the subject matter, Michael Lind and Ed Kilgore had an interesting debate recently about whether the Tea Party is or is not a fundamentally Southern phenomenon. Lind makes the case for Tea Partiers’ limited regional appeal, while Kilgore argues it has broader appeal. The Woodard piece largely points to a middle ground.

President Obama spoke in D.C. yesterday at the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial dedication, and if you missed the remarks, they’re well worth watching.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Obama’s speech was a fitting tribute to Dr. King and his legacy, but watching the dedication, it seemed the president was drawing some subtle parallels — or perhaps not-so-subtle parallels — between those who complained about the pace of progress a half-century ago, and those who do the same today. “Progress,” the president explained, “was hard.”

“We forget now, but during his life, Dr. King wasn’t always considered a unifying figure. Even after rising to prominence, even after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. King was vilified by many, denounced as a rabble rouser and an agitator, a communist and a radical. He was even attacked by his own people, by those who felt he was going too fast or those who felt he was going too slow; by those who felt he shouldn’t meddle in issues like the Vietnam War or the rights of union workers. We know from his own testimony the doubts and the pain this caused him, and that the controversy that would swirl around his actions would last until the fateful day he died.

“I raise all this because nearly 50 years after the March on Washington, our work, Dr. King’s work, is not yet complete. We gather here at a moment of great challenge and great change. In the first decade of this new century, we have been tested by war and by tragedy; by an economic crisis and its aftermath that has left millions out of work, and poverty on the rise, and millions more just struggling to get by. Indeed, even before this crisis struck, we had endured a decade of rising inequality and stagnant wages. In too many troubled neighborhoods across the country, the conditions of our poorest citizens appear little changed from what existed 50 years ago — neighborhoods with underfunded schools and broken-down slums, inadequate health care, constant violence, neighborhoods in which too many young people grow up with little hope and few prospects for the future.

“Our work is not done. And so on this day, in which we celebrate a man and a movement that did so much for this country, let us draw strength from those earlier struggles. First and foremost, let us remember that change has never been quick. Change has never been simple, or without controversy. Change depends on persistence. Change requires determination.”

Perhaps the parallels were unintentional, and I wasn’t supposed to notice them, but hearing Obama talk about the pace of change, recall the criticism King faced from his own allies, and emphasize the importance of persistence to achieve meaningful progress, it occurred to me this is a message the president probably hopes those who supported him in 2008 keep in mind in advance of 2012.

Postscript: Obama added, by the way, “As was true 50 years ago, as has been true throughout human history, those with power and privilege will often decry any call for change as ‘divisive.’ They’ll say any challenge to the existing arrangements are unwise and destabilizing.’” If the change parallels were a subtle message to the left, I’m inclined to think this was a hint to the right and the political establishment.

The New York Times’s Nick Kristof had a great column over the weekend on the Occupy Wall Street protests, which he seems to understand better than most establishment pundits. He notes some stunning statistics, including the fact that the 400 wealthiest Americans “have a greater combined net worth than the bottom 150 million Americans,” and the top 1 percent “have more wealth than the entire bottom 90 percent.”

As my Times colleague Catherine Rampell noted a few days ago, in 1981, the average salary in the securities industry in New York City was twice the average in other private sector jobs. At last count, in 2010, it was 5.5 times as much. (In case you want to gnash your teeth, the average is now $361,330.)

More broadly, there’s a growing sense that lopsided outcomes are a result of tycoons’ manipulating the system, lobbying for loopholes and getting away with murder. Of the 100 highest-paid chief executives in the United States in 2010, 25 took home more pay than their company paid in federal corporate income taxes, according to the Institute for Policy Studies.

Kristof also notes that the common assumption — economic inequalities are simply the price of admission for an economy as large and powerful as ours — appears to have it backwards.

In his important new book, “The Darwin Economy,” Robert H. Frank of Cornell University cites a study showing that among 65 industrial nations, the more unequal ones experience slower growth on average. Likewise, individual countries grow more rapidly in periods when incomes are more equal, and slow down when incomes are skewed.

That’s certainly true of the United States. We enjoyed considerable equality from the 1940s through the 1970s, and growth was strong. Since then inequality has surged, and growth has slowed.

If I’m being completely honest, there was a point a few weeks ago at which I thought OWS needed to be more specific about an agenda. The most effective movements are those that are focused and striving towards clear goals. Occupy activists haven’t been, and still aren’t.

But Kristof’s column reminds me why that thinking was mistaken. Protestors aren’t demanding Congress pass a bill or approve a specific reform. They’re shining a light on systemic problems that can’t be fixed with one bill or one reform.

It’s not about economic inequality, or TARP, or the need for tax fairness, or stagnant middle-class wages — it’s about all of it and then some.

Kristof concluded these inequalities are “a cancer on our national well-being.” It would appear OWS is seeking a very broad cure.

President Obama is set to launch a three-day bus tour across North Carolina and Virginia today, continuing to push his jobs agenda. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), making his 12 millionth appearance on a Sunday show yesterday, told CNN’s Candy Crowley that the president should spend more time in D.C.

“It is time the president came off the campaign trail, sat down and negotiated and talked with us and see areas of common ground.”

I get the sense political reporters find this kind of message persuasive. A White House press conference late last week, a reporter asked the president why he doesn’t “sit down with members of Congress to see if you can’t reach compromise” on a jobs bill. The week before, at another White House press conference, two different reporters pushed the same argument, insisting that Obama isn’t “negotiating” enough.

This is all terribly silly, but since it’s apparently not obvious to the political establishment, let’s set the record straight.

The president has pleaded with congressional Republicans, more times than the White House would like to admit, to work with him in good faith — not just on economic issues, but on anything. It’s proven to be pointless. Indeed, it’s been worse than pointless — the failed outreach has occasionally made Obama look weak; it’s infuriated his base; and Republicans have, without fail, refused to meet him anywhere close to half-way. McCain wants the president to try negotiating? Obama already has. It didn’t work because Republicans slapped away his outstretched hand and refused to even consider compromise. In several cases, Obama has even endorsed GOP ideas, only to discover that Republicans no longer support their own policies if the president agrees with them.

As a consequence, the president is now trying something different — he’s taking his message to the public and he’s trying to create conditions that would pressure Congress to be responsible for a change.

I can appreciate the appeal of compromise, but the circumstances matter. Obama presented a serious jobs plan, endorsed by voters and economists, which included ideas from both parties. How many Republicans expressed even tacit support for the bill? Zero. How many Republicans expressed a willingness to work with the White House on possible alternatives? Zero.

For his part, McCain presented a jobs blueprint last week that included tax cuts, a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the total elimination of the Affordable Care Act, the total elimination of Wall Street reform safeguards, the end of EPA enforcement of clean air measures, and a tax repatriation holiday for international corporations.

Does this sound like a policymaker interested in negotiation and areas of common ground?

In case you’re curious, in the CNN interview, Crowley offered no pushback against McCain’s argument.

Herman Cain talked to Fox News’ Neil Cavuto on Friday, and welcomed questions about his familiarity with international affairs. “I hope they continue to think that I am foreign policy dumb until the right time, they will find out I’m not foreign policy dumb as they think,” he said.

The right time, apparently, wasn’t yesterday’s appearance on “Meet the Press.”

When [host David Gregory] then asked Cain whether he was a “neoconservative,” the presidential hopeful admitted he had no idea what Gregory was talking about.

“I’m not sure what you mean by neoconservative,” said Cain. “I am a conservative, yes. Neoconservative — labels sometimes will put you in a box. I’m very conservative.”

“But you’re familiar with the neoconservative movement?” asked Gregory.

“I’m not familiar with the neoconservative movement,” admitted Cain. “I’m familiar with the conservative movement. Let me define what I mean by the conservative movement — less government, less taxes, more individual responsibility.”

Dan Drezner, after scrutinizing Cain’s collected efforts to address these issues, concluded that the presidential hopeful “hasn’t the faintest clue what to do when it comes to American foreign policy.”

That seems more than fair. I wouldn’t expect Cain, who’s never worked in government at any level and has no background in international affairs, to dazzle audiences with his expertise in international affairs. But he’s now been a presidential candidate for four months, presumably long enough time to, say, read a book about contemporary foreign policy, or at least hire some advisers who could walk him through the basics.

“I’m not familiar with the neoconservative movement”? Seriously? Was Cain not keeping up on current events throughout the Bush/Cheney presidency?

Also note, if this were just one embarrassing exchange on “Meet the Press,” it’d be easier to overlook, but for months, Cain has made clear that he doesn’t understand foreign policy in any way, and arguably doesn’t even think he should. Walid Zafar posted some of Cain’s “greatest hits” in this area, including Cain’s belief that oil drilling might prevent Iran’s nuclear capabilities, his indifference towards strategically important countries like Uzbekistan, and his unfamiliarity with China. A couple of others come to mind, including Cain having no idea what the Palestinian right of return is, and his concession that he can’t speak to U.S. policy in Afghanistan because he doesn’t “know all the facts.”

Foreign Policy’s Joshua Keating added last week, “Rather than fake knowledge about this world, he by and large simply expresses contempt for it.”

I realize the economy is easily the most important issue on the policy landscape, but it’s discouraging that Cain’s ignorance on foreign policy is not an automatic deal-breaker.

About a week ago, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) became the first congressional leader to condemn the burgeoning Occupy Wall Street movement. Now, he’s taking a rhetorical detour.

Reading from a prepared text on Oct. 7, Cantor told a right-wing audience, “I for one am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country.” In apparent reference to Democrats sympathetic to OWS, he added, “[B]elieve it or not, some in this town have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against Americans.”

A few days later, Cantor tried (and failed) to make the case that Tea Partiers are legitimate, Occupy demonstrators are not.

Republican pollsters must have told him this kind of talk was a bad idea, because all of a sudden, the oft-confused Majority Leader has discovered some areas of general agreement with the protesters.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said repeatedly Sunday that Republicans agree that too few people control too much wealth in America.

“We know in this country right now that there is a complaint about folks at the top end of the income scales, that they make too much and too many don’t make enough,” Cantor said during an appearance on Fox News Sunday, toning down his earlier criticism of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

“We need to encourage folks at the top of the income scale to actually put their money their work to create more jobs so we can see a closing of the gap,” he added.

This marks a shift, not in Republican policies, but in how GOP leaders talk about their policies. As Cantor now sees it, the concerns of the “mob” are not without merit. He told Fox News the “growing frustration … is warranted.” How gracious of him.

The problem, of course, is that Cantor’s message to these outraged protesters is, in effect, “The best way to address your grievances is to approve more regressive, far-right economic policies.”

The status quo is tilted to reward wealth? Middle-class incomes are stagnant? The gap between rich and poor has reached scandalous proportions? Millionaires pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than their working-class staff? There’s no end in sight to the jobs crisis? Never fear, Cantor says, all we need now are more of the kind of policies that created these messes in the first place.

If we just adopt an agenda that “encourages folks at the top of the income scale,” he said, conditions will improve. Give them even more tax breaks, coupled with deregulation that frees them from the burdens of worker-safety rules and clean-air safeguards, and eventually, the wealth will trickle down to everyone else.

Problem solved.

This is how Republicans plan to communicate their agenda to those concerned with tax fairness and economic inequality. GOP leaders are simply counting on large swaths of the populace being easily fooled.

We covered a fair amount of ground over the weekend. Here’s a quick overview of what you may have missed.

On Sunday, we talked about:

* The more Americans are frustrated by Wall Street’s excesses, the better it will be for the Democrats’ 2012 strategy.

* Republicans were wrong about DADT repeal. How about some accountability?

* Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) is Congress’ most moderate Republican. That’s not saying much.

* The Obama administration’s scrapping of the CLASS Act may have been mildly embarrassing, but it was also an example of good governance.

* How much does Rush Limbaugh hate President Obama? Enough to side with Ugandan terrorists and broadcast their propaganda.

And on Saturday, we talked about:

* A growing number of seasoned DC veterans believe our political system is struggling badly with “the basic functions of government.” It’s time for Americans to care.

* Herman Cain claims to be running for president, but his public schedule suggests otherwise.

* The more Anita Perry weighs in on the presidential campaign, the less it helps her husband, Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

* When President Obama takes a victory lap in Michigan, it’s well deserved — his policy rescued the American automotive industry.

* It looked like Sen. Scott Brown’s (R-Mass.) plagiarism problem would be an embarrassing one-day story. It’s actually proving to be a little worse than that.

* And in “This Week in God,” we talked about, among other things, a breakthrough indictment against a Kansas City bishop, who’s now facing criminal charges after allegedly looking the other way after one of his priests targeted children for sexual abuse.

Of all the parts of the Republican agenda, the one that seems the most politically problematic is the plan to let Wall Street have free reign, effectively allowing the financial industry to do whatever it pleases, just three years after the industry nearly collapsed the global economy. It just doesn’t seem like a vote-getter.

Sure, far-right audiences tend to applaud when Republican presidential candidates attack Dodd-Frank, but how much public clamoring is there, really, for politicians who promise to serve as champions of hedge fund managers and the Wall Street elite? Which voters are supposed to respond well to candidates who boast, “Vote for me: banking lobbyists have my cell phone on speed dial”?

In the context of the presidential race, literally all of the Republican candidates — the ones invited to the debates, anyway — want to eliminate all of the safeguards approved in 2010, but this seems to pose an even more acute problem for Mitt Romney. He not only wants to lift any measure of accountability for the financial industry, he’s also from that industry — Romney got very wealthy heading up a vulture capitalist fund, which made money by breaking up companies and firing their American workers.

It appears these details have not eluded the attention of President Obama’s team.

President Obama and his team have decided to turn public anger at Wall Street into a central tenet of their reelection strategy.

The move comes as the Occupy Wall Street protests gain momentum across the country and as polls show deep public distrust of the nation’s major financial institutions.

And it sets up what strategists see as a potent line of attack against Republican front-runner Mitt Romney, a former investment executive whom Obama aides plan to portray as a wealthy Wall Street sympathizer.

In theory, it should be political suicide for any national candidate to run a platform that vows to go easy on Wall Street. The industry was wildly unpopular even before the OWS protests, and the demonstrations have only served to reinforce the anger that much of the American mainstream still has towards those who brought down the economy.

But when it comes to Republican presidential nominating contests, “federal regulations” are about as popular in GOP circles as gay Mexican abortion doctors, so every candidate, even Jon Huntsman, is vowing to eliminate the entirety of last year’s reform legislation, the most sweeping since the New Deal.

That puts the entire field on record: a vote for the Republican presidential ticket is a vote for fewer industry safeguards, and a return to the conditions that allowed the 2008 crash to happen in the first place. Add in Romney’s background at Bain Capital, the fact that Wall Street is delivering massive donations to Romney by the truckload, and astounding photographs like this one, and you have the makings of a “GOP = Wall Street” cycle in 2012.

By most measures, Romney is the strongest Republican candidate, but if voters are basing their decision in part on frustrations with Wall Street, a Romney nomination could very well be a gift to the Democratic Party.

To be sure, the Dems’ strategy is not without flaws. Plenty of OWS protesters have no use for Democratic candidates, including the president, who is seen by some on the left as overly cozy with the industry, even though Wall Street hates him intensely. Some have gone so far as to recommend giving up on voting, even if that means more power in the hands of those who’ll do more to help those they’re protesting against.

The opportunity, though, remains the same. The White House has already begun embracing economic populism more enthusiastically recently, and GOP vows to help protect Wall Street from those big bad Democrats and pesky safeguards only makes things easier for Obama’s team.

“We intend to make it one of the central elements of the campaign next year,” Obama senior adviser David Plouffe told the Washington Post. “One of the main elements of the contrast will be that the president passed Wall Street reform and our opponent and the other party want to repeal it…. I’m pretty confident 12 months from now, as people make the decision about who to go vote for, the gut check is going to be about, ‘Who would make decisions more about helping my life than Wall Street?’”

I’ve heard of far worse strategies.