Well, that may be putting it too strongly, but I do believe that, on a purely personal level at least, the Mittster may well be the least appealing presidential candidate in my lifetime. He oozes insincerity, shallowness, and arrogance; those qualities would be less than awesome in any political environment, but the latter is particularly grating in an economy like this one, where so many are struggling. Worse, not only does he totally lack a common touch, he doesn’t bother to attempt it. The fake populist shtick George W. and especially George H.W. Bush indulged in could be annoying and awkward — remember pork rinds? — but I give them credit for trying. That in itself showed some humility and made them seem a little more human.

But Mittens, at this point, is beginning to emit the strong whiff of a loser. You can almost smell the blood in the water; his own staff has already started bitching to the press about turmoil within the campaign, and even his putative supporters are writing columns comparing him to Thurston Howell III. The only demographic that seems genuinely enthusiastic about the guy are the Mormons, for understandable reasons. But I think there’s an increasing sense among Republicans that they have got a gold-plated turkey on their hands. In public, most Republicans are keeping their counsel for now, but once the election returns are in, I strongly suspect the knives will be out.

Years from now, if people want to understand just what was so awful about MItt Romney, the film below (H/T: Melissa McEwan) would not be a bad place to start. Awkward doesn’t even begin to cover it; as McEwan says, the man is a social trainwreck. A fun drinking game would be to watch the video and take a belt whenever he unknowingly insults someone. Keep in mind that the YouTube below was released in early 2012, so it misses such golden moments from the Mittens highlights reel as “I like to fire people,” gratuitously insulting the cookie maker, trashing the Brits during his alleged “charm offense” at the London Olympics, his cheap shots at the Obama administration during the recent crisis in the MIddle East, and, last but not least, his infamous remarks about 47% of Americans being moochers and looters who are not “entitled” to food. Enjoy!

Here are some articles and blog posts that are making their way across the internets that I enjoyed, and that you may enjoy as well:

— Naomi Wolf’s recently published biography of her vagina sounds perfectly awful, but it does have the virtue of having inspired some of the sharpest, funniest, and most delightful book reviews I’ve read in many a moon. There are far too many such reviews out there for me to link to them all, so I will single out two for special praise. First, at Time magazine’s website, the fine health writer Maia Szalavitz patiently debunks Wolf’s embarrassing pseudoscientific drivel, and elegantly summarizes what the most up-to-date, fact-based research has to say about the real science of men, women, and sex.

Second, in an impassioned piece over at the New Statesman, British feminist Laurie Penny makes a compelling case that Naomi Wolf’s “celebrity faux feminism” represents everything that’s wrong with a certain kind of “feminist” writing: the way it tends “to provoke without challenging, to create spectacle without creating solutions to the real and pressing problems facing three billion women and girls across the world because of their gender.”

— More feminist fun: the New Yorker humor writer Jenny Allen takes some satirical pokes at helicopter parenting and the cult of true motherhood.

— Also in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell has written a chilling piece about the sociopathy of pedophiles. Using Jerry Sandusky as a case study, Gladwell describes the ruthless and infernally clever ways pedophiles work at being “likeable,” and the calculated way they exploit human beings’ propensity to trust and to give people the benefit of the doubt. It’s a powerful piece, although Scott Lemieux’s point that Gladwell is too easy on Joe Paterno and Sandusky’s other enablers is well-taken.

— Over at Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell makes the case for Stephen King as “an important left-wing public intellectual,” and damn if he doesn’t (mostly) convince me.

— And speaking of matters literary, in the London Review of Books one of my favorite writers, Terry Castle, reviews a fascinating-sounding new book about three early-to-mid-20th century lesbian pioneers: British fashionista Madge Garland, American heiress and intellectual Esther Murphy, and Cuban-American screenwriter Mercedes de Acosta, who had one of the all-time great love lifes (her paramours included Dietrich and Garbo). The opening vignette of Castle’s piece is priceless, and it gets better from there. Here’s a taste:

For same-sex desire, she [author Lisa Cohen] implies, has as much to do with introspection as it does with carnality, and in the ‘inopportune ardour’ of her subjects she recognises the potential for a certain radical mental freedom. It makes sense: to embrace one’s sapphic feelings - to come out to oneself - is necessarily to rethink the world. For not only is one made at once to confront one’s apparently permanent alienation from the ‘normal’ or mainstream, one finds one has to adjudicate, in the most piercing and personal way, on a raft of ethical, religious and scientific questions. Are one’s desires felonious or unnatural, as most traditional belief systems (distressingly) continue to insist? Or are they something rather more benign - simply a ‘variant’ expression of human sexuality? If the latter is the case, couldn’t one view same-sex passion, in turn, as a perhaps useful evolutionary adaptation? As an age-old demographic reality, possibly hardwired into the souls of some, that actually enriches and diversifies human civilisation? Such questions are unavoidable and pressing; for no matter how timid and law-abiding one is by nature, at the moment of self-recognition one suddenly finds oneself conspicuously in the wrong in the eyes of much of the world - caught out in a posture of stark and shocking defiance. By merely existing, it seems, one does fairly spectacular damage to entrenched collective presumptions about sexuality and society.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported on an alarming new study: researchers have documented that the least educated white Americans are experiencing sharp declines in life expectancy. Between 1990 and 2008, white women without a high school diploma lost a full five years of their lives, while their male counterparts lost three years. Experts say that declines in life expectancy in developed countries are exceedingly rare, and that in the U.S., decreases on this scale “have not been seen in the U.S. since the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918.” Even during the Great Depression, which wrought economic devastation and severe psychic trauma for millions of Americans, average life expectancy was on the increase.

What are the reasons for the disturbing drop in life expectancy among poor white folks, and in particular for the unusually large magnitude of the decline? According to the Times, researchers are baffled: one expert said, “There’s this enormous issue of why … It’s very puzzling and we don’t have a great explanation.” Undoubtedly, the increasing numbers of low-income Americans without health insurance is a major contributor factor. Researchers also say that lifestyle factors such as smoking, which has increased among low-income white women, play a role; poor folks tend to engage in more risky health behaviors than their more affluent counterparts.

I will offer an alternative hypothesis, one which is not explicitly identified in the Times article: inequality. In the U.S., the period between 1990 and 2008, which is a period that saw such steep declines in life expectancy for the least well-off white people, is also a period during which economic inequality soared. Moreover, there is a compelling body of research that suggests that inequality itself — quite apart from low incomes, or lack of health insurance — is associated with more negative health outcomes for those at the bottom of the heap. One of the most famous series of studies of the social determinants of health, Britain’s Whitehall Studies, had as their subjects British civil servants, all of whom health insurance and (presumably) decent enough jobs. Intriguingly, these studies

found a strong association between grade levels of civil servant employment and mortality rates from a range of causes. Men in the lowest grade (messengers, doorkeepers, etc.) had a mortality rate three times higher than that of men in the highest grade (administrators).

read more »

One scattered but interesting week, to be followed by, well, who knows? I hope to begin writing a bit more about non-presidential political contests as polling and other information becomes more readily available.

For now, here are some final news items before I prepare for a visit by my father, step-mother and brother tomorrow:

* Early, in-person voting began today in Virginia, South Dakota and Idaho, with ten other states beginning to accept absentee ballots. So from here on out, polls won’t be entirely hypothetical.

* Gerson column a lot more serious “friendly” critique of Romney and GOP than Noonan’s: he blasts “libertarian nonsense” on poor that Republicans have adopted.

* Ryan fans fret Romney campaign has reduced him to “mini-Mitt.” Did they expect Mitt to become “maxi-Paul?”

* At Ten Miles Square, Larry Bartels discusses research showing undecideds beginning to break to Obama.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer notes real college graduation rates—including part-time as well as “traditional” students—a lot lower than we realize.

And in non-political news:

* Host Jimmy Kimmel promises “genuinely weird stuff” at Sunday’s Emmy Awards.

That’s all from me, folks! Tomorrow Kathleen Geier returns for Weekend Blogging, so you can expect her usual outside-the-box perspective.

I hope to have my family members picked up at SFO and back home in time for the Georgia/Vanderbilt kickoff.

Here’s a video that includes a brief clip of James Brown performing at Sanford Stadium way back in the day; I was actually there. Sigh.

Selah.

As regular readers know, the Washington Monthly has a long history of seeking out and publicizing innovative approaches to public policy challenges, particularly in the area of higher education. That’s what Kevin Carey did in last year’s College Guide issue of the magazine in a piece on the future of college admissions that focused on a very promising organization called “ConnectEDU.” It aimed at a voluntary national data-driven system that would help aspiring students identify and apply to the best possible college environments for them, while helping colleges develop diversity and accomplished entering classes.

Sometimes between the idea and the reality, “falls the shadow.” Curious about how ConnectEDU was working out, Sebastian Jones and Daniel Luzer did a follow-up interview with the outfit’s CEO in July, and hearing some disappointing results, did some additional inquiries with students, schools and ConnectEDU. Their update was published yesterday at Ten Miles Square, and they report ConnectEDU is unable to document much progress at all in achieving its ambitious goals.

Check out both the original piece and the update. The idea behind ConnectEDU still makes perfect sense. But it’s unclear whether it’s the right time, or the right organization, to bring college admissions fully into the twenty-first century.

Much of the reaction to today’s release of 2011 tax returns and a “summary” of ten prior years of Romney taxes by his accountants revolves around (a) the relatively low effective tax rate he paid (14.1%); (b) his decision against taking the full charitable deduction to which he was eligible in order to keep the effective tax rate about the 13% figure he’s decided on as the minimum he’s paid in the past; and (c) the timing of the release, on the traditional “dump bad news” day of Friday.

None of that particularly fascinates me. I’m more interested in some other questions: (a) why release this stuff on the very week Mitt made unfortunate headlines on taxes? (b) why release a “summary” of earlier tax returns which only increases interest in seeing the details? and (c) what are the exemptions or deductions taken in previous years that the campaign seems so determined to hide?

If, as seems the case, this is all part of some planned “run out the clock” strategy for dealing with questions about Mitt’s wealth (or as he would have it, “success”), finances, and taxes, it appears to be based on the dubious assumption that the public sympathizes with Romney here and will give him the benefit of the doubt unless someone comes up with something illegal, unpatriotic, or at least highly unseemly. Methinks it’s Romney, not his critics or opponents, who has the “calendar” problem right now.

It reminds me of a University of Georgia basketball game I once attended near the end of Coach John Guthrie’s tenure, when the Dawgs seem to be stalling late in a game when they trailed by a bucket. “Hey Guthrie!” shouted a leather-lunged student near me. “Look at the scoreboard! We’re behind!”

The latest intramural brouhaha in the GOP centers on the unlikely figure of my favorite columnist, the ineffably successful Peggy Noonan.

Earlier this week, you may recall, she penned a column (or a blog post, as it was styled, presumably because her rambling comments could not be edited, or were so urgent as to require immediate publication) that lashed Mitt Romney’s campaign for “incompetence” and then wandered around whatever keyboard or cocktail napkin she was drafting it on before settling on the suggestion that Romney deliver a “big speech” in Brooklyn. Yes, Brooklyn.

Anyhow, this act of heresy produced sufficient heartburn in the Romney campaign or amusement among her superannuated Republican cronies that she followed up today with a new blast at Team Mitt. This time around, perhaps with the aid of an editor, she produced an actual on-the-record quote from a “corporate strategist” who analyzed Romney’s mistakes at considerable, if unoriginal, length. Having teed up this moment (like all moments for many MSM pundits) as crucial, Noonan delivered herself of another Big Idea for Mitt, which is about as plausible as a redefining speech in Brooklyn: Romney needs his very own Jim Baker to take control of his campaign. Indeed, she may be (her crystalline prose leaves this unclear) be urging Romney to bring on the actual Jim Baker to take control of his campaign. Since Baker is 82 years old, I don’t think that’s happening. But putting that aside, the idea that Mitt Romney is going to bring in some Yoda to turn his campaign upside down with just over six weeks until election day is, well, the sort of thing only Peggy Noonan could say.

More generally, this Aging Republican Establishment obsession with alleged staff errors is a pretty good indicator these folks haven’t a clue about the structural problems facing Mitt, who rendered himself virtually immobile in winning the GOP nomination over a weak field and now has no record to run on, and an agenda he’s afraid to talk about—totally aside from having the least attractive persona of any GOP nominee since Nixon. Mitt doesn’t need a “new CEO,” Peggy; he needs a new biography, a new personality, and a new party—you know, one that doesn’t either demand he loudly promote a suicidal policy agenda, or sit around carping about how he doesn’t do things like Ronnie.

A pretty large crowd is gathering all along the Monterey Bay to get a glimpse of the Space Shuttle. I’m loyally here at my computer, serving up these mid-days bites:

* Fox’s Chris Wallace goes after Peggy Noonan’s “conservative bona fides” after her recent criticisms of Team Mitt. But, but—she learned at the feet of Reagan!

* Herman Cain modestly allows as how he’d have a “substantial lead” if he were the nominee.

* Jim DeMint publicly toys with shattering boycott on financial help for Todd Akin.

* Paul Ryan goes heavily into Eddie Haskell routine, promising seniors to save Medicare from mean old Obama, at AARP confab. Gets booed, though.

* Speaking of Paul Ryan, Weigel’s got a review up of Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike.

And in non-political news:

* Wal-Mart to become first multinational retailer in India.

Back after some chores.

If you are in the mood for a good jeremiad, check out Conor Friedersdorf’s eloquent tirade at Atlantic today about the contemporary conservative movement’s abandonment of fact-based reasoning, and its tolerance of hucksters and charlatans. When you read this excerpt, keep in mind that Friedersdorf is a right-leaning pundit who is frequently critical of Obama, Democrats and the left:

At minimum, it’s possible to imagine a coalition where sound argument was valued enough to render the most vile ad hominem and the most hair-trigger heretic-shaming beyond the pale. Instead Rush Limbaugh and Erick Erickson remain among the right’s most influential voices. Fox News is movement conservatism’s go-to information source; its big boss, Roger Ailes, profited from airing lunatic conspiracy theories from Glenn Beck that no one can defend, but he hasn’t been discredited. And that’s just the realm of AM radio and cable television….

National Review’s readers have been exposed to the argument that President Obama is allied with our Islamist enemy in a “Grand Jihad” against America; in Forbes, Dinesh D’Souza set forth the thesis that Obama’s every action is explained by a Kenyan anti-colonial ideology that overwhelms all else. I mention those magazines not because they’re worthless, but because both publish good stuff, and employ a lot of talented people who are more than smart enough to see through this nonsense….this madness gets published in venues where David Frum is deemed beyond the pale….

Breitbart.com has spent much of the Obama Administration giving its readers the impression that ACORN, the board of NPR, and the question of whether or not the NAACP is racist are urgent priorities for the right. In doing so, it elevated a young man with a hidden camera who tried to lure a female reporter on a boat, intending to seduce her on hidden video and then humiliate her with the footage. Despite that, the young man remains a hero to many movement conservatives.

You get the idea. Much of Friedersdorf’s anger involves the impact of low standards for conservative discourse on the intra-conservative debate. He’s as concerned about the self-deception (and for some, perpetual silence in the face of lies) of conservatives as much as the effort to deceive others.

Indeed, Friedersdorf’s whole departure point is the speedy abandonment of the kind of healthy, post-defeat debate conservatives needed after 2008. Instead, they rapidly came up with an explanation of their electoral problems that led to an even greater disdain for facts and reason than that which so notably characterized the Bush administration, and ruthlessly imposed it on each other and on the entire Republican Party.

If Republicans lose again on November 6, it will be fascinating to see if anything changes on the Right, or if instead, as so many conservatives have done after every losing GOP election since 1964, they blame the nominee for insufficient ideological rigor and ruthlessness. I’m guessing it will take at least one more sound beating before—to use the president’s hopeful phrase—the “fever breaks.” And if, as occurred in 2010, there’s an intervening conservative victory before the next presidential cycle, this could go on for a good long while.

When someone like Ezra Klein publishes a post with the title, “The poll results that explains the election,” I sit up and take notice. Here’s what he has to say, and it’s very interesting:

Washington has been a bit perplexed by President Obama’s small but persistent lead in the polls. His administration would seem to fail the “Are you better off than you were four years ago” text. And presidents who fail that test lose, right?

But perhaps that’s the wrong question. We focus on the question “Are you better off than you were four years ago” because we assume voters aren’t sophisticated enough to vote based on the right question, which is “are you better off than you would have been if the other party’s candidate had won the presidency four years ago?”

The conventional wisdom: Voters don’t do counterfactuals. “It could have been worse” is a losing message. That’s been the Romney campaign’s theory of the case, certainly, and many in the media have bought it. But perhaps we’re not giving voters enough credit.

The new Allstate/National Journal/Heartland Monitor poll tested this directly. First, they asked the standard “are you better off now than you were four years ago?” A plurality said they were not. Then they asked, “are you better off because Obama won in 2008″? A plurality said they were.

This distinction is important not just because it represents a “referendum” that Obama sort of wins, or at least does not lose. It also shows that the Romney campaign’s strategy of detaching (or at least discouraging from the polls) “disappointed” Obama voters who are suffering from “buyer’s remorse” isn’t working. To put it another way, voters remember more than the “hope” Obama inspired in 2008, or the “change” he promised; they also remember the yawning economic abyss that seemed to open up about this time four years ago, and how completely feckless the 43d president and the Republican nominee to succeed him seemed to be in the face of it all. In other words: they are not as stupid as the Romney campaign seems to believe they are, and can’t be forced to put a hatpin through their frontal lobes and just vote based on the disappointments of a difficult four years, forgetting all else.

It won’t have any bearing on this election cycle, and isn’t making big headlines. But in the “struggle for the soul of American Christianity” that has long been a subtext of our political culture, the selection of an obscure man to an unimportant-sounding post by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops could be a pretty big development. Amy Sullivan explains at TNR:

The appointment of a new executive director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development doesn’t sound like earth-shaking news to most people. But social justice Catholics (as opposed to the abortion-firsters) have been awaiting the announcement ever since the bishops’ longtime anti-poverty lobbyist John Carr announced in June that he would be leaving after 25 years in the role….

Earlier this week, the USCCB announced that Jonathan Reyes would replace Carr at the conference. Reyes has most recently led Catholic Charities in the Denver Archdiocese. But in Catholic circles, he is better known for having co-founded and served as the first president of the Augustine Institute, an unaccredited Catholic graduate school in Denver that has no women on its faculty. However, the institute does have a number of faculty with degrees from Steubenville University in Ohio, the Liberty University of Catholicism. Steubenville made national news in May when it became the first Catholic institution to sue the federal government over the contraception mandate, even though the school would almost certainly be covered by the administration’s “religious employer” exemption.

Perhaps the most relevant piece of Reyes’ background is his position as a protégé of Archbishop Charles Chaput, who served in Denver until his recent appointment to the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Chaput, you may remember, was one of a handful of Catholic clerics who declared in 2004 that John Kerry should not receive communion because of his support for abortion rights. The archbishop gave an interview to the National Catholic Reporter last week that all but endorsed the Romney-Ryan ticket, and he joined a small group of Catholic leaders who have sought to defend Paul Ryan and his enthusiastic support for cutting funds to social programs.

After noting that Reyes has nothing remotely like the stature of his predecessor, National Catholic Reporter’s Michael Sean Winters commented:

[A]t a time when there are obvious divisions within the hierarchy regarding which public policy issues should be emphasized, and how those issues should be framed, it seems to me imperative to have selected someone who was not so obviously aligned with one wing of the current ideological divisions within the Church.

It’s another step down the road to a political alignment of the Catholic hierarchy—if not necessarily the clergy or the laity—with the political Right.

Hey, have ya heard all the Beltway buzz about “Boston” being a rolling ball of panic-stricken, back-stabbing madness? Not true, it seems: WaPo’s Dan Eggan reported last night that according to a FEC filing, the Romney campaign is so pleased with itself that it paid its top brass sizable performance bonuses just after the Republican National Convention.

Today Politico’s Tarini Parti reports these bonuses were actually planned compensation for Romney’s earlier primary victory. You know: pay-for-performance, the Bain Way and all.

If, however, you buy my (and as noted this morning, Ron Brownstein’s) theory that the campaign’s strategic decisions during the nominating contest are precisely the source of Mitt’s problems in the general election, then maybe those bonuses are premature. Reckon there’s a “clawback” provision if everything goes south on November 6? After all, if these fine Republican political professionals are being rewarded for the often-dirty effort to bury Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, perhaps it’s worth a reconsideration if it turns out they were digging Mitt’s grave as well.

I’ve been increasingly fascinated by the extent to which the latter-day Republican idolatry of “job-creators” reflects not simply disdain for people “dependent on government,” but also for those dependent on job-creators for a paycheck. From GOP rhetoric, you’d never know working stiffs contribute anything to the U.S. economy, but you would definitely know they are a big problem whenever they join a union or expect job security or resist any public or private concessions their employers claim are necessary to keep them from closing down or moving elsewhere.

Paul Krugman offers another good example of this mindset that I had not focused on:

[C]onsider Mr. Romney’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. What did he have to say about American workers? Actually, nothing: the words “worker” or “workers” never passed his lips. This was in strong contrast to President Obama’s convention speech a week later, which put a lot of emphasis on workers — especially, of course, but not only, workers who benefited from the auto bailout.

And when Mr. Romney waxed rhapsodic about the opportunities America offered to immigrants, he declared that they came in pursuit of “freedom to build a business.” What about those who came here not to found businesses, but simply to make an honest living? Not worth mentioning.

I don’t have the numbers handy, but I’m guessing a pretty high percentage of immigrants to the United States over the decades have lived and died as wage earners.

Now no one expects Republicans to offer many rhetorical bouquets to the horny-handed sons and daughters of toil. That’s just not who they are. But at a time when the economy is supposedly the overriding issue in public life, and conservatives are demanding a return to what they call economic and fiscal fundamentals, you’d think there would be some accounting for how labor contributes to growth and national well-being. Instead honest labor is treated as insignificant unless it is personally conjoined with capital, and otherwise is an inexhaustible commodity to be secured by “job-creators” as cheaply as is possible, in the U.S. or around the world. You almost wonder why Republicans even bother to talk about “jobs.” Those are simply the incidental bounty of the creative genius of the capitalist, a gift to the dull and improvident non-capitalists whose lives make no real mark on the world.

It would be nice if white working-class voters, quite a few of whom do not own their own businesses, began to notice what GOP politicians actually think of them.

As a useful corrective to the Beltway tendency to over-attribute political trends to the last two or three things that have happened, but without falling prey to the zombie-eyed indifference to actual politics of the social science Fundamentalists, Ron Browstein’s latest column for National Journal traces Mitt Romney’s struggles to specific strategic decisions he made during the primaries:

Of all Romney’s primary-season decisions, the most damaging was his choice to repel the challenges from Perry and Gingrich by attacking them from the right—and using immigration as his cudgel. That process led Romney to embrace a succession of edgy, conservative positions anathema to many Hispanics, including denouncing Texas for providing in-state tuition to the children of illegal immigrants; praising Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law; and, above all, promising to make life so difficult for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants that they would “self-deport….”

But that’s not all. Having limited his potential vote among Hispanics, Romney also hemmed himself in among certain categories of white voters:

Romney’s inability to dent Obama’s support among Hispanics (or other minorities) means the GOP nominee probably can’t win without attracting at least 61 percent of white voters. Yet a second early decision has greatly compounded that challenge. Through the primaries, Romney embraced an unreservedly conservative social agenda (such as defunding Planned Parenthood and allowing employers to deny contraception coverage in health insurance plans), especially after Santorum emerged as his principal rival. That positioning helps explain why polls consistently show Obama drawing a majority of college-educated white women—not only the most socially liberal sector of the white electorate but also the fastest-growing. If Obama can hold a majority of those women and match his 80 percent with all minorities in 2008, Romney would have to carry two-thirds of all other whites to win—as much as Ronald Reagan won among those remaining voters in his 1984 landslide.

Brownstein also notes that Romney endorsed a 20% high-end tax cut as he was trying to nail down the nomination, and wrongly concluded that his ability to survive attacks on his record at Bain Capital among sympathetic primary voters inoculated him on that issue. All in all, Romney won the nomination in a way that made a general election victory far more difficult than it might have been.

Romney’s decisions during the primaries also reflected a conspicuous lack of confidence that he could impose his will on his party. Instead, he serially accommodated himself to the cresting demands of a GOP base that emerged from the 2010 election excessively confident that the country was ready for the most conservative agenda since at least Reagan in 1980. If Obama wins a second term despite all his vulnerabilities, that ideological hubris will loom larger than any of Romney’s flubs and stumbles now.

Regular readers know this is pretty close to my take for many months now: the big story of the 2012 cycle is the radical lurch of the GOP led by an excited activist “base” convinced it’s within striking distance of reversing much of the progressive policy legacy of the last century. It’s wound up with a presidential nominee it doesn’t like or trust, so it has made and even now continues to make demands on him that make a general election appeal exceptionally difficult. Self-constrained ideologically while possessing zero moral compunctions, the Romney campaign is relying as always on vast sums of money backing ever-more-violent and heavily-targeted assaults on his opponent.

The way I’ve been putting it lately is that Mitt Romney’s sick relationship with his own party is dominating a contest that was supposed to (from a Republican point of view) be “about” Obama and the economy. Romney can still slither his way through the minefield he’s created for himself, but Brownstein’s right, he can’t undo his “original sins” from the primaries.