Over the weekend, it became clear that Rick Santorum, after months of having been largely ignored, is on track for a top-three finish in the Iowa caucuses. By some measures, the former Pennsylvania senator is coming on so strong in the 11th hour, he has a credible shot at actually winning in Iowa tomorrow.

And how does Santorum know for sure that he’s doing well? Because his Republican rivals who pretended he didn’t exist have started taking shots at him.

Late last week, Texas Gov. Rick Perry went after Santorum over earmarks, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney took on Santorum yesterday over the length of his congressional career.

Though he began his answer by saying that he had not “spent a lot of time trying to describe differences on policy and detail among myself and the other candidates,” [Romney] went on to contrast his background with that of Mr. Santorum and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

“Like Speaker Gingrich, Senator Santorum has spent his career in government, in Washington — nothing wrong with that,” Mr. Romney said. “But it’s a very different background than I have….”

It’s probably safe to assume Romney’s internal polling is similar to what all the other polls are saying: Santorum can’t be ignored anymore.

It’s also hard not to notice that Romney has one stand-by attack for just about all of his rivals. As Nate Silver mentioned last night, “Romney campaign seems to default to the ‘career politician’ line whenever it gets nervous.”

That’s true. When Perry looked like a leading challenger, Romney launched an aggressive “career politician” line of attack. When Gingrich was on top, Romney took the same tack. Now Santorum is closing strong, so he gets the same label. (Two weeks ago, Romney even used this against President Obama.) I have no idea why voters would find this persuasive, but the fact that Romney keeps using the line like a crutch suggests the focus groups must like it.

Regardless, when it comes to the substance, it’s worth noting a pesky detail: Romney and Santorum both first sought statewide office in 1994, when they both ran for the Senate. One was successful; one failed. Indeed, the most notable difference between them is the detail the former governor prefers to overlook: Santorum repeatedly earned voters’ support and has won most of his races for public office, while Romney has struggled with voters and lost most of his campaigns.

Romney, in other words, would be a career politician if only the public liked him more.

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:

* President Obama intends to run against Congress this fall. Given that this might very well be the Worst Congress Ever, that’s not an unreasonable strategy.

* Rick Santorum believes diversity “creates conflict.” That’s ridiculous.

* The president signed this year’s NDAA, but as expected, it came with a signing statement.

* Newt Gingrich, apparently unaware of his entire career, believes politics has “become a really nasty, vicious, negative business.”

* The fact that Rick Perry’s staffers are already blaming one another for the campaign’s failure really isn’t a good sign.

* Where things stand in Iowa.

And on Saturday, we talked about:

* The Des Moines Register’s closely-watched Iowa Poll shows Mitt Romney leading, but Rick Santorum coming on strong.

* Mitt Romney wants to talk about Marie Antoinette. That strikes me as a good idea.

* Last week, Fox News and conservative activists picked a new target: the Girl Scouts.

* Interest in Romney’s tax returns, and his desire for secrecy, isn’t going away.

* Will Congress extend the payroll tax break through 2012? After seeing who Republicans sent to the conference committee, I’m fairly certain the policy will expire in late February.

* In “This Week in God,” we covered, among other things, a fascinating church-state conflict in Illinois, where a major Roman Catholic charity wants to be able to accept taxpayer funds while discriminating against some taxpayers.

* Remember in 1972, when Ed Muskie wept outside the offices of New Hampshire’s Union Leader, and it was, at the time, a political disaster? Crying in politics has come a long way since.

The NYT reports today that President Obama, looking ahead to the November elections, is planning “to step up his offensive against an unpopular Congress, concluding that he cannot pass any major legislation in 2012 because of Republican hostility toward his agenda.” Though the parallels are imprecise, Truman won a second term running against Congress in 1948, and Obama appears eager to do the same.

Indeed, gaming out the coming months, the White House believes the very best we can hope for from Congress this year is a full extension of the payroll tax break — a measure I consider very unlikely to pass — and nothing else.

It would mean the 112th Congress would wrap up later this year with exactly zero meaningful accomplishments. The question then becomes historical in nature: will this go down as the worst Congress in the history of the United States?

Americans, who are ultimately responsible for creating this mess, are already inclined to think so. A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found 42% of the public sees this Congress as “one of the worst ever” — the highest percentage on this particular question the poll has found since it started asking it 22 years ago. Indeed, there’s ample polling evidence to suggest that while Congress, as an institution, has never been popular, we’re currently suffering through the least popular Congress ever.

NPR had an interesting report this week, pondering “just how bad” congressional conditions have become.

In modern history, [Thomas Mann, senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington] says, “there have been battles, delays, brinkmanship — but nothing quite like this.” […]

Mann acknowledges there have been worse times for Congress, but he reaches back a very long way for a comparison.

“There were a few really bruising periods in American congressional history, not only the run-up to the Civil War, but also around the War of 1812,” he says.

If we were only talking about gridlock, this Congress would merely be cover-your-eyes awful. Americans elected a Democratic president, a Democratic Senate majority, and the most right-wing Republican House majority since the dawn of the modern American party structure. That the legislative process has come to a screeching halt is not at all surprising — there is no overlap among their competing agendas, and GOP officials now look at ideas celebrated by moderate Republicans as akin to communism.

But what makes this Congress truly atrocious is the gridlock compounded by everything else: the debt-ceiling fiasco, the first-ever downgrade of U.S. debt (attributed almost entirely to ridiculous Republican intransigence), the near-shutdowns, the resignations, the refusal of one party to compromise, the wholesale abandonment of institutional norms and traditions, and the procedural abuses that make the legislative process itself a pathetic joke.

We reached the point this year at which we applaud wildly when lawmakers manage to keep the government’s light on, and hope desperately that Congress resist the temptation to make national conditions worse.

Revisiting a piece from a while back, Matt Taibbi had a fantastic cover story for Rolling Stone in October 2006 about the Republican-led Congress, shortly before Democrats won both chambers.

“These were the years,” Taibbi wrote, “when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula — a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.”

The article included one of my favorite all-time quotes: Jonathan Turley told Taibbi, “The 109th Congress is so bad that it makes you wonder if democracy is a failed experiment.”

It seemed literally impossible at the time, but five years later, we appear to have found a Congress that’s even worse.

For an incumbent president, eager to avoid blame for the farce Washington has become, running against this institution seems like a fairly sensible move.

Zeke Miller has a piece this morning arguing that Rick Santorum may excel in the Iowa caucuses, but given the campaign’s message, he’ll likely struggle to compete just about everywhere else.

To help prove the point, Miller points to quotes like these.

Indeed, Santorum appeals to Iowa voters with a mix of unusual lines that won’t play outside the Hawkeye State.

“Diversity creates conflict. If we celebrate diversity, we create conflict,” Santorum told the audience in Ottumwa.

I mean, really. Who says things like this?

Even among those who celebrate uniform homogeneity most realize that the American ethos finds an inherent good in diversity. E pluribus unum … a nation of immigrants … strength through diversity — these are staples of American thought and have been for generations.

“If we celebrate diversity, we create conflict”? What?

This, of course, isn’t the only thing that’s likely to stand in Santorum’s way once the dust settles in Iowa. The former senator has invested enormous energy in the Hawkeye State — Santorum is the only candidate to visit every county in Iowa — but the focus and lack of resources have left him with no meaningful prospects anywhere. Santorum has no national network and no meaningful campaign infrastructure outside Iowa, and though he’d likely get a significant boost if he manages to finish first on Tuesday, it’s tough to see a single other primary or caucus state where the Pennsylvanian can expect to be competitive.

And that would be the case even if Santorum had a fantastic message. As “diversity creates conflict” helps demonstrate, he doesn’t even have that.

As expected, President Obama yesterday signed the Defense Authorization bill that largely funds the military. And as expected, this year’s NDAA came with a signing statement.

President Obama … said that although he did not support all of it, changes made by Congress after negotiations with the White House had satisfied most of his concerns and had given him enough latitude to manage counterterrorism and foreign policy in keeping with administration principles. […]

The White House had said that the legislation could lead to an improper military role in overseeing detention and court proceedings and could infringe on the president’s authority in dealing with terrorism suspects. But it said that Mr. Obama could interpret the statute in a way that would preserve his authority.

The president, for example, said that he would never authorize the indefinite military detention of American citizens, because “doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a nation.” He also said he would reject a “rigid across-the-board requirement” that suspects be tried in military courts rather than civilian courts.

Congress dropped a provision in the House version of the bill that would have banned using civilian courts to prosecute those suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda. It also dropped a new authorization to use military force against Al Qaeda and its allies.

There are many who can speak to the merit of the White House’s arguments in far more detail than I can, but for those interested, the signing statement itself is online in its entirety.

For more background, here’s an item on the NDAA that I published a couple of weeks ago.

Kevin Drum flagged a Newt Gingrich quote yesterday that’s almost hard to believe. In fact, I watched the video just to make sure the Republican wasn’t misquoted in the print piece.

“Politics has become a really nasty, vicious, negative business and I think it’s disgusting and I think it’s dishonest,” Gingrich told ABC News aboard his campaign bus in Iowa.

I’d genuinely love to know whether the disgraced former House Speaker is so far gone, he literally doesn’t remember his own record. As Kevin noted a month ago, Gingrich is largely and personally responsible “for the poisonous state of partisan politics in America today.”

To be sure, Gingrich didn’t invent toxic partisanship, but looking back over the last three decades, no individual did more to create our nasty, vicious, and negative political climate than Newton Leroy Gingrich. Indeed, no one else comes close.

Hearing him complain about political maliciousness is akin to Mitt Romney complaining about dishonest rhetoric — it requires a stunning lack of self-awareness.

Speaking of Gingrich, Matt Bai has a lengthy item on the disgraced former House Speaker in the New York Times Magazine today, and it includes this jaw-dropper.

Gingrich says now, in what may be a characteristic bit of revisionist history, that it was clear early on that he needed to break free of his highly paid and conventional consultants, and that he and his wife, Callista, actually took their much-maligned Greek vacation last June — a pleasure trip in the middle of what was supposed to be his ramp-up as a candidate — in order to provoke a confrontation with the campaign’s leadership. (Gingrich later added that he really needed to see the Greek fiscal crisis up close.)

I’d love to know what it would take for a serious person to believe this. Gingrich’s new line is that he, just three weeks after launching a presidential campaign, decided to go on a luxury cruise to Greece. He did this in order to (a) infuriate his own staff, who had foolishly hoped the presidential candidate would start campaigning for the presidency, and who subsequently quit in disgust; and (b) be a tourist in a country facing a fiscal crisis.

We’ve all heard plenty of after-the-fact spinning to explain away embarrassments, but this clearly belongs in the “you’ve got to be kidding me” category.

It’s never a good sign when a presidential campaign’s insiders begin dishing dirt on their colleagues before voters start expressing their preferences. Take Rick Perry’s team, for example.

Four months ago, the Texas governor was the frontrunner and expected to excel in Iowa. Today, Perry appears likely to finish fourth or fifth, and may soon face questions about the long-term viability of his campaign.

It’s against this backdrop that Politico has a fairly-long piece on Perry’s advisers who’ve “begun laying the groundwork to explain how the Texas governor bombed so dramatically in a race that he seemed to control for a brief period upon entering the race in August.”

Their explanations for the nosedive come against the backdrop of a campaign riven by an intense, behind-the-scenes power struggle that took place largely between a group of the governor’s longtime advisers and a new cadre of consultants brought on this fall. In the end, the outsiders won out — and ever since have marginalized Perry’s longtime chief strategist while crafting a new strategy in which the Texan has portrayed himself as a political outsider and culture warrior.

In a series of interviews with POLITICO, sources close to the campaign depict a dysfunctional operation that might be beyond saving because of what they describe as the political equivalent of malpractice by the previous regime. […]

In a blistering indictment, sources close to the operation describe a new team that was stunned to arrive in October and find a campaign that wasn’t executing the most rudimentary elements of a modern presidential campaign: no polling or focus groups, no opposition research book on their own candidate to prepare for attacks and debate prep sessions that were barely worth the name.

It’s hard to know for sure whether this is entirely true or campaign pros trying to cover their butts, but if Perry and his team, as recently as October, didn’t see the need for polling, oppo, or debate prep, it’s no wonder they seemed so inept.

It wasn’t just one problem that derailed Perry’s campaign, but I’d argue it was immigration policy — the in-state tuition, followed by the governor’s “have a heart” comment — that largely caused his precipitous decline. But consider this problem in light of the behind-the-scenes trouble: if Perry’s campaign were competent, the team would have expected the criticism on this issue, crafted a coherent response, and avoided the backlash in September. It’d likely be a very different race today.

But the combination of naivete, hubris, and incompetence led to a campaign that was practically “set up for failure.”

“They put the campaign together like all the other Perry campaigns: raise a bunch of money, don’t worry about the [media coverage], don’t worry about debates and buy the race on TV,” said a top Perry official. “You have to be a total rube to think a race for president is the same as a race for governor.”

Oops.

We talked last night about the sought after results of the Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll, which, not surprisingly, continue to show a competitive contest. Let’s briefly revisit where things stand just two days before caucus-goers make their preferences known.

The DMR poll effectively shows two tiers: three top-tier candidates who stand a chance of winning in Iowa (Romney at 24%, Paul at 22%, and Santorum at 15%), and three second-tier candidates who hope Iowa doesn’t derail their entire campaign (Gingrich at 12%, Perry at 11%, and Bachmann at 7%). It’s counter-intuitive, but the order of the bottom three may very well end up mattering more than the order of the top three — Santorum will get a boost no matter where he ends up in the top tier, while poor showings among the second-tier candidates may knock one or more candidates out of the race altogether.

Also note, of course, that there’s still room for even more changes — Santorum was third overall, but as the Register’s pollster, J. Ann Selzer, noted, he was a very strong second in the final two days the poll was conducted. The possibility of Santorum winning Iowa now seems perfectly plausible.

Alexander Burns’ observation last night also rings true:

The poll is obviously good news for Mitt Romney as well as Santorum, and a late, authoritative survey like this one can also end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy as voters narrow their options to a subset of candidates viewed as possible winners.

Right. More than 40% of likely caucusgoers “say they could still be persuaded to change their minds,” and given the number of social conservatives in Iowa, talk of the late “Santorum surge” could very well produce a snowball effect. One of the main problems plaguing Santorum for months was the impression that his campaign just wasn’t going anywhere — and now that he’s the talk of the town, it seems more than likely that the former senator will not only pick up some late undecided Republicans, but also support from Perry and Bachmann, who are competing for the same GOP constituencies.

And what about Romney? By all appearances, the former governor is feeling very confident about his chances in Iowa, and he clearly goes into Tuesday as the apparent frontrunner, but even his support comes with caveats. Remember, Romney dropped the pretense weeks ago about whether he’s competing to win in Iowa, and he’s now invested considerable amounts of time, money, and energy to come out on top. And yet, even after Romney has made these efforts in Iowa, and become the clear frontrunner at the national level, he still can’t break his 24% ceiling, and his support is effectively at the same level as it was in October.

As we discussed a few months ago, some polls matter more than others. In Iowa, the Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll is widely considered the gold standard for Hawkeye State polling, and therefore gets considerably more attention than other surveys in the state.

And with that in mind, and the caucuses just a few days, here’s what the race for the Republican presidential nomination looks like in Iowa:

1. Mitt Romney: 24% (up seven points since early December)
2. Ron Paul: 22% (up four points)
3. Rick Santorum: 15% (up nine points)
4. Newt Gingrich: 12% (down 13 points)
5. Rick Perry: 11% (up five points)
6. Michele Bachmann: 7% (down one point)

Jon Huntsman, who was at 2% a month ago, was not mentioned in the Register’s report this evening.

The results, however, come with a very important caveat: the Iowa Poll was conducted Tuesday through Friday, and the results from the first two days were quite different from the last two days.

[T]he four-day results don’t reflect just how quickly momentum is shifting in a race that has remained highly fluid for months. If the final two days of polling are considered separately, Santorum rises to second place, with 21 percent, pushing Paul to third, at 18 percent. Romney remains the same, at 24 percent.

“Momentum’s name is Rick Santorum,” said the Register’s pollster, J. Ann Selzer.

A couple of other tidbits jump out from the results. Perry, who insists he has a great ground game in Iowa, appears to have recovered from his free fall and has seen his support nearly double over the last month. Paul’s 22%, meanwhile, is the best he’s done in an Iowa poll so far this year, as is Romney’s 24%.

But the real story here appears to be the sharp increase in Santorum’s support in the contest’s closing days. Note: the best the former senator has done in a DMR poll this year is 6%. Now, at least over the last couple of days, Santorum is at 21%.

Best of all, there are still two days of campaigning to go, and 41% of likely caucusgoers “say they could still be persuaded to change their minds.”

Update: Here’s some additional analysis of where things stand in Iowa, including a look at Romney’s underwhelming frontrunner status, and the possibility of Santorum benefiting from a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As Ed Kilgore noted yesterday, the Washington Monthly is unique in its devotion to reviewing the latest books on politics, policy and public affairs. If politics is your passion—and if you’re reading this blog, I presume it is—then you really should be reading our reviews (expertly provided, I should add, by our book review editor—and my wife of 25 years—Kukula Glastris). In fact, calling them “reviews” often doesn’t do them justice—many are extensively reported essays and analytic pieces, and some of the best thinking and most delightful writing in the magazine can be found in them.

This past year, we published over two dozen reviews, on everything from the space program to the origins of the American Left. You’ll find links to a sampling below. If you already read our reviews, or if you take a look here and like what you see, I hope you’ll consider supporting us. We’re in the midst of our annual year-end fundraising drive, so click here and toss in a few bucks—$10, $20, $30, $50, whatever you can afford. Donations to the Monthly are tax-deductible—we’re a non-profit outfit, and really appreciate and rely on the help we get from readers to continue to do what we do.

Dumbing Down Darwin
Robert Frank’s effort to explain the lessons of evolution without offending libertarian sensibilities.
By James K. Galbraith

They Shall Reap the Whirlwind
How religious zealots in the Israeli government are supporting a new generation of extremist settlers who hate the Israeli government.
By Joshua Hammer

From William Lloyd Garrison to Barry Commoner
Why the left’s despair over Barack Obama has deep historical roots.
By Jacob Heilbrunn

Goodnight Moon
Will America ever escape the shadow of Apollo?
By Charles Homans

Tiller’s Killer
What the murder of a late-term abortion doctor does and does not say about the anti-choice movement.
By Ed Kilgore

Bangkok on the Nile
Middle East reformers would do well to study Thailand for lessons in how not to build a democracy.
By Joshua Kurlantzick

Valley Forged
Early American counterfeiters and their heirs on Wall Street.
By Jamie Malanowski

Justice Served
U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’s thirty-five-year tenure was marked by intellectual rigor, lack of pretension, and the firm belief that absolutism had no place on the bench.
By Michael O’Donnell

The Great Terror
In his masterful new history, Timothy Snyder portrays Stalin’s and Hitler’s mass exterminations as flip sides of the same genocide—one that was both more horrible and less unique than we thought.
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

It’s a campaign tactic that’s been around for a long while, but Mitt Romney seems eager to perfect it: identify the candidate’s most damaging flaws, then project those flaws onto the candidate’s rivals. This week offered a classic example.

Mitt Romney on Thursday sought to portray President Barack Obama as out of touch with the struggles of everyday Americans — a charge he himself has often faced — by comparing the president to a former French queen who was overthrown during the French Revolution.

“When the president’s characterization of our economy was, ‘It could be worse,’ it reminded me of Marie Antoinette: ‘Let them eat cake,’” Romney said, referring to the infamously dismissive remark toward the poor attributed to the queen.

As Jon Chait noted, this is “in keeping with his favorite method of deflecting attacks.”

Romney anticipates his greatest vulnerability, then peremptorily lobs the charge against his adversary. That way, when his opponent uses the charge it’s repetitive.

Romney first deployed this technique against New Gingrich. He has deployed a furious assault against what was briefly his chief adversary, painting him as a flip-flopper who has wavered on abortion and even supported health care reform in Massachusetts. Gingrich was left stammering helplessly in response. After sifting through the charges and counter-charges, all the Republican voters knew was that you had two candidates accusing each other of flip-flopping and trying to help sick people get health insurance. The natural next step is to open his general election campaign by portraying Obama as a callous aristocrat.

At this point, anything’s possible.

It takes quite a bit of chutzpah for any candidate to campaign this way. For crying out loud, Romney accused Gingrich of taking both sides of every issue and being an unreliable champion of far-right causes. How does one even intellectually process something like this? Is it the result of a pathological lack of self-awareness, an assumption that voters are idiots, the belief that the media is hopelessly incompetent, or some combination of all of them?

But this Marie Antoinette line is arguably even more beautiful. Romney — who, by the way, speaks fluent French and spent nearly three years in France — amassed an enormous fortune thanks to a vulture-capitalist firm known for breaking apart companies and firing their American workforces. Despite a quarter-billion in the bank, and several mansions (one of which he intends to quadruple in size), Romney is running on a campaign platform that includes slashing public investments that benefit working families (including the total elimination of funding for Planned Parenthood), massive tax breaks for the very wealthy, repealing safeguards that protect the public from Wall Street recklessness, and calling for more foreclosures on those American families struggling to keep their homes.

Two weeks ago, Romney told PBS he’d like to see President Obama stop criticizing “Wall Street” and “insurance company executives” altogether. Yesterday, he debated whether he meets the “classical” definition of “a Wall Street guy.”

Romney thinks it’s funny to joke about being unemployed; he finds it inconvenient when he doesn’t have anything smaller than a $100 bill in his wallet while on the campaign trail; he doesn’t blink when offering to make a $10,000 bet; and he considers a $1,500 a year tax cut for the typical middle-class family to be a meaningless “band aid.”

This guy wants to compare Barack Obama to Marie Antoinette?

If votes are awarded on the basis of audacity, Romney should go ahead and start drafting his inaugural address.

Update: A couple of emailers remind me that Romney also intends to repeal the Affordable Care Act, taking health coverage away from millions. “Let them eat cake,” indeed.

Conservatives’ antipathy towards the Girl Scouts has generally been found on the fringes. In 1994, for example, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family published a memorable attack on the Girl Scouts, insisting the group “lost their way” after the Scouts made a religious oath optional for membership. (For the religious right, faith shouldn’t be voluntary; it should be mandated on children by authority figures demanding vows of allegiance.)

I can’t find it online anymore, but back in 2005, Amanda Marcotte had a great item about various paranoid voices on the right, complaining about “radical lesbian feminists” having taken over the Girl Scouts.

In general, most of the American mainstream ignored all of this, and the Girl Scouts were not caught up in the right’s culture war. But just over the last few days, conservatives’ hostility seems to have reached new heights.

The right-wing media closed out 2011 by attacking the Girl Scouts of America for, in the words of Glenn Beck website The Blaze, publishing a book that “refers young readers to Media Matters for America as one of the primary sources for debunking lies and deceit.” Fox News led the charge, devoting more than 15 minutes over two days and three programs to the GSA’s “liberal ideology,” including its purported ties to Planned Parenthood.

It was a quite week for these attacks. The cast of “Fox & Friends” told viewers the Girl Scouts have a “liberal bias”; a co-host of Fox News’ “The Five” called the Girl Scouts’ book “indoctrination”; and CNN contributor Dana Loesch not only lamented the “moral decline” of the Girl Scouts, she also suggested conservatives should stop buying their cookies as a form of political protest.

Comedy Central responded with the appropriate derision.

Don’t be fooled by those cute little outfits or merit badges. The Girl Scouts aren’t just selling you a pack of cookies — they’re selling you a pack of lies, with a light coating of toasted coconut communism. Why do the Girl Scouts teach survival skills? It’s clearly an attempt to build some kind of liberal tween militia. Volunteering and “helping” others? Just another strategy to mobilize the working poor and other key Democratic voting blocs.

We need to shield our nation’s girls from this dangerous organization and stop them from drinking the Kool-Aid, no matter how well it washes down those Thin Mints.

This was, in case it’s not obvious, sarcasm.

Unfortunately, this story does not have a happy ending. In a statement, Girl Scouts of the USA confirmed this week that future editions of its materials will not refer readers to Media Matters.

The conservative freak-out appears to have worked.

Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry expressed some interest in Mitt Romney’s elusive tax returns last week, and the Democratic National Committee is trying to keep the story going this week.

For those who can’t watch clips online, it’s a 40-second video noting that every major Republican presidential candidate in the post-Watergate era — and if we go back a little further, this includes George Romney in 1968 — has released their tax records. Mitt Romney, at least for now, refuses.

In releasing the video, DNC National Press Secretary Melanie Roussell explained the likely rationale for Romney’s reluctance: “It would show that on the millions of dollars in income he enjoys each year, Mitt Romney pays a lower tax rate than teachers, fire fighters, police officers or other middle class wage earners. Mitt Romney will tell you that it’s not required by the law that he release his returns but when he’s advocating for policies that benefit the wealthy and the well-heeled, voters have a right to know what conflicts he might have with his own finances.”

Romney has, in fact, repeatedly told interviewers that he’s not “required by law” to release his returns. That’s true. The problem for Romney, though, is that every nominee from both parties did it anyway, not because it’s mandatory, but because they thought it was the right thing to do.

We can only speculate as to exactly why the former one-term governor is so reluctant, but it’s a pretty safe bet that Romney doesn’t want the public to know he pays a lower tax rate than middle-class workers. Because Romney still collects seven-figure checks from his vulture-capitalist firm, he benefits from the “carried interest” loophole, which taxes private equity and venture capital income at a lower, 15% rate, as compared to 35% on ordinary income.

As we discussed the other day, it creates a dynamic that Romney would prefer to downplay:

1. Mitt Romney is worth $250 million.

2. He got rich by laying off American workers.

3. He pays a lower tax rate than you and the rest of the middle class.

4. He wants to be president so he can keep it this way.

For what it’s worth, some in the media are beginning to find this interesting. (When presidential candidates start hiding things, it’s inevitable that reporters will get at least a little curious.) Yesterday Romney sat down with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and, in response to several questions, said he’d “consider” releasing his tax returns “if I become president.” In other words, after the election Romney might do what every other modern candidate has done before the election.

Whether Romney’s preference for secrecy proves untenable remains to be seen, but my hunch is the longer he drags this out, the bigger the problem will become.

Last week, after a needlessly-contentious process, Congress approved a two-month extension of the payroll tax break. As part of the agreement, a conference committee will try to come up with an agreement to extend the cut through the end of 2012.

I’ve been rather pessimistic about the likelihood of success, and yesterday, the odds got worse.

The Senate Republican leader announced Friday that he had chosen three of his colleagues to try to thrash out a bipartisan deal on payroll taxes, unemployment benefits and Medicare.

The three Republican senators will join four Democratic senators and 13 House members on a conference committee wrestling with the issues, which tied the Senate in knots for more than two months.

The newly named Republican conferees are Senators Jon Kyl of Arizona, Michael D. Crapo of Idaho and John Barrasso of Wyoming.

These aren’t three senators you’d appoint to a conference committee if you want to be constructive. These are three senators you’d appoint to a conference committee if you want to be destructive.

Kyl, for example, was instrumental in sabotaging the super-committee process, and was described by Democratic negotiators as “walking napalm.” Crapo and Barrasso, meanwhile, are two far-right senators who’ve never demonstrated any willingness to accept concessions on anything.

What’s more, note that the House GOP leadership has already announced its conferees, most of whom have already said they don’t want a payroll-cut extension no matter what concessions Democrats are willing to make.

The conference committee will technically have until March 1, when the cut expires, but as a practical matter, they’ll have to wrap up a deal well before then, giving both chambers a chance to debate and vote on an agreement.

Of course, the likelihood of there even being an agreement now borders on fanciful. Republican participants won’t be willing to compromise, and most of them don’t fear failure since they oppose tax breaks for the middle class on principle.

What about the risk of being blamed? Remember, as far as GOP leaders are concerned, the process itself offers cover. Instead of last week, when House Republicans became the clear villains, when the conference committee struggles to come up with a bipartisan solution, the party will find it easier to spread the blame around.

“It’s not our fault,” GOP leaders will say. “We tried to work with Democrats on a deal, but one didn’t come together. Oh well.”

For Republicans, it’s the best of all possible worlds: middle-class taxes would go up, the economy would take a hit, public disgust for Washington would be renewed, and the media would feel obligated to say “both sides” failed to reach an agreement.