The Obama campaign did something interesting today. Instead of dwelling exclusively on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital, they drew attention to his record in the only public-sector job he’s ever held, as governor of Massachusetts. Here’s Eric Kleefeld’s report:

The Obama campaign fired back at Mitt Romney’s speech Wednesday on education, in which Romney put forward school choice proposals, holding a conference call with reporters in which they tied “Romney economics,” of short-term gains, to their opponent’s positions on education.

“Mitt Romney might not want to talk about his lackluster record in Massachusetts, but it’s an important window into what he would do as president,” said Obama campaign national press secretary Ben LaBolt, criticizing Romney for having sought cuts to early literacy programs, and for sharp increases in public college tuition during his term as governor.

Once the primary season ended, and there were no rival Repubican candidates around to talk about RomneyCare, it was easy to forget that the man actually held a public office. And while he had a decent record on health care policy, it wasn’t all a smooth ride with fine results. I’m sure there’s a fat oppo research file somewhere in a hard drive in Chicago that could supply lots more detail. Let’s hear more of that.

As I noted briefly yesterday, Rex Cutting of Market Watch created quite a buzz with a chart-loaded column showing that federal spending has been increasing at the lowest levels since the 1950s since Barack Obama got (limited) control of the federal budget. He explicitly acknowledged that his numbers excluded FY 2009, since part of that fiscal year and most of the fiscal decisions were made before he took office:

What people forget (or never knew) is that the first year of every presidential term starts with a budget approved by the previous administration and Congress. The president only begins to shape the budget in his second year. It takes time to develop a budget and steer it through Congress — especially in these days of congressional gridlock.

The 2009 fiscal year, which Republicans count as part of Obama’s legacy, began four months before Obama moved into the White House. The major spending decisions in the 2009 fiscal year were made by George W. Bush and the previous Congress.

Conservative gabbers mostly ignored Cutting’s article, until AEI’s James Pethokoukis took a wack at it, arguing that the right measurement wasn’t the rate of spending growth but the absolute levels of spending as a percentage of GDP that have prevailed under Obama and previous presidents. Bush looks better than Obama according to Pethokoukis approach because he is evaluated according to the average spending levels during his administration, not where they wound up.

Interestingly enough, Pethokoukis concedes Obama inherited “over-spending” from Bush, but argues he was a crazy spendthrift for not reversing the trends, using a very deep and highly analytical analogy:

Obama chose not to reverse [Bush’s] elevated level of spending; thus he, along with congressional Democrats, are responsible for it. Only by establishing 2009 as the new baseline, something Republican budget hawks like Paul Ryan feared would happen, does Obama come off looking like a tightwad. Obama has turned a one-off surge in spending due to the Great Recession into his permanent New Normal through 2016 and beyond.

It’s as if one of my teenagers crashed our family minivan, and I had to buy a new one. And then, since I liked that new car smell so much, I decided to buy a new van every year for the rest of my life. I would indeed be a reckless spender.

Like I said: very deep and highly analytical. I guess Pethokoukis doesn’t spend much time listening to Mitt Romney, who thinks the economy is still in terrible, terrible shape, which would indicate that if “one-off” spending was appropriate in 2009, perhaps it still might be today. More importantly, I hardly think refusing to cut automatic stabilizer spending (the main areas of domestic spending increase since 2009), particularly for safety net programs where increased spending is a matter of higher enrollments by people in need rather than higher benefits, is analogous to buying a new car every year. If you must compare it to auto purchases, I’d say keeping the old car running is a closer match. Pethokoukos also doesn’t mention that a recession depresses GDP, making spending (which is affected both by population growth and by higher demand for public services) a higher percentage even if nothing else happens. But I guess he thinks anything other than austerity represents a “binge.”

As he often does, Ta-Nehisi Coates makes an important and fundamental point about the frequent suggestions that white hostility to Barack Obama is “not just about race” (and that’s generally from the left-of-center folk who are willing to suggest it’s ever at all “about race”):

The problem with these formulations is that they are utterly ahistorical. There is no history of racism in this country that chalked “up only to race.” You can’t really talk about stereotypes of, say, black laziness unless you understand stereotypes of the poor stretching back to 17th century Great Britain…. You can’t really talk about the Southern slave society without grappling with the relationship between the demand for arable land and the demand for labor. You can’t understand the racial pogroms at the turn of the century without understanding the increasing mobility of American women….

In sum, there is very little about racism that can be chalked “only up to race.” Chalking up slavery, itself, only to race is a deeply distorting oversimplification. The profiling that young black males endure can’t chalked up “only to race” either. It’s also their youth and their gender. Complicating racism with other factors doesn’t make it any better. It just makes it racism. Again.

So Mitt Romney gave Mark Halperin an interview today, and it’s mostly composed of Romney dodging questions about the specifics of his economic plan, and the specific preparation his business career has given him to serve as president. This, of course, is interesting insofar as he keeps monotonously saying the economy is the only issue that matters, and that his business experience shows why we should trust him to “fix” it.

Mitt did make one bit of news that’s probably going to haunt him: a prediction that he could get the unemployment rate down to 6% by the end of his four-year term. As Steve Benen quickly pointed out: (1) 6% is 2% above the rate Romney called problematic earlier this very month; and (2) CBO is estimating the unemployment rate will go down to 6% by 2016 if no one does anything new about it. He’s promising to do a crappy job that any old body could do.

But there were two other answers he gave that I found intriguing: Asked why things would improve during his first year in office, here’s what he said:

Well you’d see a very dramatic change in the perspective of small businesses, entrepreneurs, middle-size businesses, and perhaps even some large multinationals. They’d say, you know what, America looks like a good place to invest again, a good place to take risk, a good place to hire again.

Wow, this is a “confidence fairy” that doesn’t even need to see any action; just one look at the manly visage of Mitt Romney, and the money will start flowing again!

And second, when asked about why he’s not proposing big first-year spending cuts, he answered:

[I]f you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course.

Keynesianism! Keynesianism! Call Jim DeMint! Romney’s not for immediately balancing the budget! Romney thinks public-sector jobs are real! Romney doesn’t think the confidence fairy would offset spending cuts!

On top of everything else, unless the transcript is wrong, Mitt referred to the “Democratic Party,” not the “Democrat Party.”

I think this may be the last non-Fox interview Romney grants for a while. If even Halperin can screw you up, it’s time to stick to the stock speech.

National Review’s current cover story, by Kevin Williamson, claims to expose the “outright lie” that the two major parties “switched roles” on civil rights for African-Americans during the 1960s. It is in fact a pretty audacious piece of revisionist history that combines an over-simplified “revelation” of pre-1960s Democratic hostility towards or indifference to civil rights (which no one, to my knowledge, has ever denied) with a twisted take on what both parties were doing in 1964—all in the service of the strange, frantic conservative effort to project liberal charges of contemporary racism onto liberals themselves.

Jonathan Chait and (at Ten Miles Square) Jonathan Bernstein have already written extensive refutations of Williamson’s abuse of the historical record. Bernstein notes that Williamson’s generalizations about Democrats ignore the support for civil rights among non-southern Democrats that grew steadily from the New Deal (remember how much trouble Eleanor Roosevelt’s outspokenness on the subject caused her husband?) and Fair Deal (remember the 1948 Convention when a civil rights plank touched off the Dixiecrat movement that nearly derailed Harry Truman’s re-election?) on and eventually reached critical mass in the early 1960s. Chait provides this excellent summary of the “mainstream” view of the subject and Williamson’s unsuccesful revision:

The mainstream, and correct, history of the politics of civil rights is as follows. Southern white supremacy operated out of the Democratic Party beginning in the nineteenth century, but the party began attracting northern liberals, including African-Americans, into an ideologically cumbersome coalition. Over time the liberals prevailed, forcing the Democratic Party to support civil rights, and driving conservative (and especially southern) whites out, where they realigned with the Republican Party.

Williamson crafts a tale in which the Republican Party is and always has been the greatest friend the civil rights cause ever had. The Republican takeover of the white South had absolutely nothing to do with civil rights, the revisionist case proclaims, except insofar as white Southerners supported Republicans because they were more pro-civil rights.

It’s this last argument by Williamson that I most want to comment on. Prior to 1964, southern white Republicans were a hardy minority built on the Mountain Republicanism of regions that had opposed the Confederacy and middle-class business-oriented city-dwellers. While neither faction was loudly racist, nor were they champions of civil rights, either. Not all Democrats were virulently racist, but the virulent racists were all Democrats. As V.O. Key demonstrated in his classic study, Southern Politics, the most race-sensitive white southerners, centered in the Black Belt regions of the Deep South, stuck with the White Man’s Party even as other southerners defected to the GOP in 1920 (over Prohibition) and 1928 (over Prohibition and Al Smith’s Catholicism). In 1948, these same racists heavily defected to the Dixiecrats in a protest against the national Party’s growing commitment to civil rights. They mostly returned to the Democrats after that uprising, until 1964, when they voted almost universally for Barry Goldwater, purely and simply because Goldwater had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Four years later most of them voted for the race-centered candidacy of George Wallace, and four years after that just about every one of them voted for Richard Nixon. These were not people attracted to the GOP, when they were, because it was “pro-civil rights,” as Williamson asserts, or because they favored that party on any other issue. It was all about race, which is why, for example, the GOP percentage of the presidential vote veered insanely in Mississippi from 25% in 1960 to 87% in 1964 to 14% in 1968 to 78% in 1972.

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Sorry for the light posting this a.m.; had a family member in surgery back in Georgia (he’s okay) and was a little distracted. Anyway, here’s some lunch treats for an extremely slow news day:

* Katie Couric issues “open invitation” to Sarah Palin to appear on her new daytime TV show. Why would she want to be trapped and persecuted again?

* AZ SecState Ken Bennett backs off threat to remove Obama from ballot, even sort of apologizes. Ridicule sometimes works.

* But in other news from AZ GOP Birther fever swamps, Sheriff Joe Arpaio sends “posse” to Hawaii to examine Obama birth certificate.

* Kathleen Parker joins the pity party for Chief Justice John Roberts, who is being persecuted by mean old liberals.

* Artur Davis, who’s been popping up on the pages of National Review, reportedly mulling party- and state-switch to run as Republican for Congress in Virginia. That’ll show those Alabama Democrats!

And in non-political news:

* Yglesias notes Mark Zuckerberg actually did himself—not his company or its investors—quite well in Facebook IPO.

Back in a bit.

I wrote earlier about a Gallup poll dubiously showing an abrupt change in self-identification on the abortion issue. There’s also a new WaPo-ABC poll showing an even more dramatic change in African-American attitudes towards same-sex marriage:

Overall, 53 percent of Americans say gay marriage should be legal, hitting a high mark in support while showing a dramatic turnaround from just six years ago, when just 36 percent thought it should be legal. Thirty-nine percent, a new low, say gay marriage should be illegal.

The poll also finds that 59 percent of African Americans say they support same-sex marriage, up from an average of 41 percent in polls leading up to Obama’s announcement of his new position on the matter. Though statistically significant, it is a tentative result because of the relatively small sample of black voters in the poll.

Perhaps this finding is an outlier, but it’s a big enough shift that it might reflect some significant movement, even if it’s less than the numbers indicate.

Just last week at TNR John McWhorter expressed the hope that the president’s announcement of support for same-sex marriage would have a particular impact on his fellow African-Americans, if only because “he is no longer giving tacit approval to a prejudice in the African-American community that becomes more awkward and regrettable by the year.” Maybe it’s already happening.

Even as Mitt Romney and his campaign surrogates seek to hypnotize persuadable voters with the repetitive drone of “economy…economy…economy” and suggest Mitt would spend all his time doing whatever it is presidents supposedly do to “fix” the economy, Paul Ryan has other ideas. At the Ronald Reagan presidential library yesterday, Ryan indicated that if Republicans win control of Congress in November, they’ll take it as a “mandate” to, well, enact his budget. Indeed, in a nod to his surroundings, Ryan paralleled what he and his allies intended to do with Reagan’s first year in office.

Well, the very idea sends chills down my spine.

Younger readers won’t remember this, but what the Reaganites, under the strategic direction of his budget director, David Stockman, were able to do in 1981 was pretty much unprecedented. Seizing on an unusual application of the obscure budget procedure known as “reconciliation,” the White House was able to enact a year’s worth—maybe two or three years’ worth—of legislation in one bill on an up-or-down vote. The use of reconciliation for giant budget packages has gradually declined over time, but it remains the ideal vehicle for getting big, complicated, controversial measures through Congress on a wave of hype and sloganeering—and without Senate filibusters. All it requires is a plan, party discipline, and united control of Congress and the White House. Republicans have already got the Ryan Budget, and have already demonstrated they are willing to vote for it almost unanimously. All they need now is the Senate and the White House. And Ryan’s laying the groundwork with GOP opinion-leaders to ensure they understand that the “unfinished business” of the Reagan Administration—the destruction of the New Deal/Great Society legacy—will be at hand in 2013.

One of the Gallup’s many longitudinal surveys asks Americans if they consider themselves “pro-choice” or “pro-life.” It’s a question of limited significance if not backed up by definitions (Who’s against “choice?” Who’s against “life?”), but perhaps still an interesting measurement of “brands.”
The last time Gallup conducted this survey, in July of last year, 49% self-identified as “pro-choice” and 45% as “pro-life.” That’s pretty much in line with where things have stood for the last decade-and-a-half, except for a strange finding in 2009 which suddenly showed a 51/42 “pro-life” advantage. Now the strange finding is back, with a sudden, inexplicable 50/41 pro-life advantage. The sharp drop in pro-choice self-identificaition since the 2011 survey extends across all party identification categories, so it’s not just a matter of Republicans hearing months of anti-choice propaganda during a presidential primary season.

So what does this mean? Probably nothing at all. The poll is likely an outlier, as the one in 2009 clearly seemed to be, particularly given the unusual stability over time of public opinion on abortion. But whatcha want to bet the Gallup headline gets a lot of attention, without much if any context, in certain precincts of the media? It’ll be fun to watch.

I’m a little embarassed by the fact that in twelve or thirteen posts yesterday I didn’t get around to mentioning it was a primary day in Kentucky and Arkansas. You will forgive me, I hope, a lack of excitement about the “story” of the president’s weakness in these two states (and in other border states with large fossil-fuel energy industries and relatively few African-Americans), since I’ve been reading about it since the 2008 primaries. Yes, it’s a bit odd for an incumbent president to get under 60% of the vote in his own party’s primary anywhere, but this is, as Politico’s Charles Mahtesian puts it, Obama’s “region of doom,” and I’m sure his campaign is happy all these states will have just one more opportunity to register their lack of regard for Barack Obama.

The one interesting result from last night was a surprisingly easy primary win for a protege of Rand Paul’s in an open Republican congressional district in Kentucky. But Paul had some outside help. You think Super PACs are having an impact on presidential politics? Check this out from the Louisville Courier-Journal:

[Thomas] Massie came into the race largely unknown in the district’s population center of Boone, Kenton and Campbell counties but was able to overcome his lack of name recognition by scoring a couple of big name endorsements and getting the backing of several tea party organizations.

He also got more than $500,000 worth of backing from a super PAC called Liberty for All, which was funded almost entirely by a 21-year-old Texas college student with an inheritance. The group ran ads supporting Massie and criticizing Webb-Edgington and Moore.

Marc Wilson, a supporter of Webb-Edgington, criticized the group after the ballots were counted

“It’s a shame that a Texas libertarian super PAC could come in and invade the Republican Party to buy a congressional seat,” he said.

Wow. Wonder if the kid down in Texas turned in a term paper to his poli sci class entitled “How I bought a congressional seat in Kentucky.”

Here’s a song that should have become somebody’s campaign anthem: X’s “See How We Are.” I saw them perform this at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, on a double bill with the late Warren Zevon. Very good times.

Nothing like a quick romp through Tudor history to bring the day to a close! But here are some news leftovers:

* No surprise here, but worth noting that Gallup reports 82% of U.S. Catholics find birth control “morally acceptable.” I doubt they are talking about the rhythm method.

* At WSJ’s MarketWatch, Rex Nutting notes that federal spending since Obama got hold of the wheel has risen at slowest pace since Ike’s first term.

* At Ten Miles Square, Jonathan Bernstein discusses rising age of incoming senators in recent years.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer assesses five different avenues for dealing with out-of-control student loan debt.

* At TNR, Tim Noah shreds David Brooks’ argument that private equity firms like Bain represent a “reform movement.”

And in non-political news:

* Inventor of TV remote control device dies at 96.

Back tomorrow morning, hoping that Bookergate will be gone for good, along with all these defenses of Bain Capitol as a place filled with the milk of human kindness.

Selah.

My friend and fellow amateur Tudor Religious History enthusiast Sarah Posner beat me to the punch on this topic, but she’s right: there are some problems with the Catholic Bishops’ decision to link their campaign for what they call “religious liberty” (or more specifically, a broader exemption from insurance regulations they don’t like) to the memory of St. Thomas More, via a “Fortnight for Freedom” series of events next month that begin on More’s feast day (also that of St. John Fisher, another Tudor prelate executed for treason, probably on stronger grounds, by Henry VIII) and conclude on Independence Day.

There are three basic problems raised by the More precedent.

First, as Posner notes, comparing More’s execution to the ignominy of having to indirectly subsidize health insurance for contraception is absurd on its face, and belies the artificial hysteria the Bishops are trying to arouse:

The very idea that providing women with insurance coverage is somehow tantamount to the terror and violence inflicted on both sides in Reformation England—or to the historical cataclysm that was Henry’s schism from Rome—is so absurd I’m stunned as my fingers tap across my keyboard. If we’re going to spend the next five and half months discussing whether Barack Obama is like Henry VIII, well, God help us.

Second, More was battling with Henry VIII over Rome’s spiritual jurisdiction over England’s state church, as opposed to Henry’s claim of Royal Supremacy. I don’t believe the Bishops are arguing the Vatican should control religion in America, and I don’t believe Obama is trying to appoint Bishops, confiscate monastic property, dictate forms of worship, etc. The whole conflict is entirely non-analogous.

And third, St. Thomas More, despite the highly attractive reputation he has for Americans of every or no faith via Robert Bolt’s 1954 play A Man For All Seasons (subsequently made into a 1966 film that won six Oscars), was not exactly an apostle of religious liberty or freedom of conscience. As Henry’s chancellor, he was a very enthusiastic torturer and persecutor of “heretics,” particularly anyone bearing the virus of continental evangelical Protestantism. He was especially renowned for his relentless efforts to secure the execution of William Tyndale, the great evangelical Bible translator, succeeding (according to most accounts) in having Tyndale burned at the stake near Brussels. So far as I am aware, More never recanted of any of these acts; he went to his beheading for what he perceived as orthodoxy, not religious liberty; his protestations in defense of “conscience” were limited to the allegation that he was defying the King by his silence over the Oath of Allegiance.

More’s dubious value as a role model has not, notes Posner, escaped the notice of the Bishops’ would-be evangelical partners in the crusade for “religious liberty:”

The evangelical homeschooling advocate and lawyer, and founder of Patrick Henry College (aka “God’s Harvard”), Michael Farris, wrote a book highly critical of More’s abuse of Tyndale, whom he portrayed as the forerunner of American religious liberty.

If nothing else, the Bishops’ invocation of More shows they need some help with their ecumenical communications. If those fast friends Richard John Neuhaus and Chuck Colson were still around, I doubt this mistake would have been made.

By the time the “Arab Spring” broke out, the old neoconservative claim that the U.S. invasion of Iraq would embolden pro-Western democratic forces in the Middle East to come alive was dead as a doornail. Still, many Americans from different political persuasions harbored vague feelings of pride that somehow we had inspired the uprising, either through our general example or via the use of social media that we like to think of as “ours.”

But as Wall Street Journal media reporter Keach Hagey notes in her review (from the May/June issue of the Monthly) of a new book on the Arab Spring by Georgetown University’s Marc Lynch, the main thought about America in the minds of most protestors in the various uprisings was how much they disliked our Middle Eastern policies. And while social media were important, they owed little or nothing to their American usages, and were no more important than indigenous media sources like Al Jazeera:

Lynch has long had a special focus on Al Jazeera and the role that the media plays in shaping Arab public opinion. For him, a few falling dictators are less important than what he sees as “a powerful change in the basic stuff of the region’s politics”—a new, media-enabled reality where regimes have to listen to their publics. If experts seemed surprised by the contagiousness of the uprisings, he argues, it was because they did not understand the unique media conditions in the Arab world that bound together separate national struggles into a single narrative.

Lynch traces the roots of this shared media space back to former Egyptian Pres-ident Gamal Abdel Nasser and his use of Voice of the Arabs radio in the 1950s and ’60s to spread pan-Arabism. But Lynch points to this same tumultuous period, dubbed the “Arab Cold War,” as a warning against irrational exuberance among the current moment of pan-Arab unity. Then, like now, mass protests flooded the streets, governments fell, and the region felt swept up in pan-national movement. But none of that tumult led to democracy. On the contrary, it led to decades of despotism, censorship, and the ever-present threat of detention and torture by the secret police.

Still, the independence of most contemporary media from state control is encouraging to the prospects of social change and democracy, Lynch says. But it may not be that encouraging for American influence in the region, thanks to longstanding misteps, most notably by George W. Bush’s administration, whose policies Lynch regards as “a disaster.” And although Lynch advised the Obama campaign in 2007 and still has strong White House ties, he’s not that bullish on the current administration’s approach, either.

You should read Hagey’s whole review, and then Lynch’s book. There’s more about the strategic implications of the Arab Spring, and what the United States needs to do to improve both its image and leverage in the Middle East. It’s not as though the region’s problems are about to go away, or stop mattering.