Now that Berman and Sherman are competitors, they’re struggling to distinguish themselves. There were plenty of contentious moments at a recent debate in Tarzana, California, but the tension was less about ideology than leadership credentials. Was it Berman or Sherman who proposed the toughest sanctions on Iran? Which of them has been a more loyal champion of the entertainment industry? (A Republican candidate stood onstage with them, but neither Sherman nor Berman wasted much energy arguing against his radically different views.)

There are differences in personal style: Sherman talks a bit tougher, while Berman comes across as the elder statesman. But as these highlights from the debate suggest, this election seems to be less about what needs to be done than who is doing it better.

Updated, 6:18 p.m.

Mitt Romney addressed a roomful of Hispanic leaders Wednesday -- and he didn't mention immigration once.

Instead, Romney used the gathering of the Latino Coalition, a conservative Hispanic group, as the venue for the rollout of his education policy, calling for the expansion of school vouchers and attacking President Obama as a puppet of teachers' unions. He described a crisis in American education whose weight is especially borne by minorities and called it "the civil-rights issue of our era." But he made no particular mention of the challenges facing the Hispanic community.

As Romney's speech was winding down, a young woman seated at one of the luncheon tables attempted to raise the subject for him.

Lucia Allain, a 20-year-old undocumented Peruvian immigrant and activist, was quickly ushered out of the room, her outburst unintelligible. "My main point," she said afterward, "was to ask him: You're talking about dreams, the American dream, how every student deserves opportunity in this country. Why can't I continue my dream?" As she spoke, a fellow activist stood behind her with a poster reading, "Veto Romney, Not the DREAM Act."

Romney has said he would veto that legislation, a Senate proposal to allow illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children to achieve legal status -- one of several rightward gestures on immigration he made during the Republican primary that now poses a challenge as he attempts to woo Hispanic voters as a general-election candidate.

Thus far, Romney's strategy appears to be to stick to his major overall themes -- education, the economy -- and hope they resonate with all voters, including Hispanics. But advocates, including those in his own party, say he won't get far without addressing immigration head-on at some point.

The evidence was right there at the venue where Romney spoke Wednesday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Marco Rubio, the Florida senator who is one of the Republican Party's brightest hopes and a top contender to be Romney's running mate, spoke a couple of hours after Romney and addressed the issue frontally.

Rubio spoke movingly of the parents and grandparents who'd sacrificed so their children could have better lives. He called the country's immigration system "broken" and lamented the plight of "hundreds of thousands of young people that have grown up among us, who find themselves in an undocumented status through no fault of their own ... and yet, because of partisan politics, we've been unable to figure out a way to accommodate them within the confines of our heritage as a nation of laws, but also our legacy as a nation of immigrants."

"We are but a generation removed from a very different life," Rubio added. "It's not fair for the story of America to end with us."

Romney has yet to take a position on Rubio's proposal for a Republican version of the DREAM Act, which faces long odds in the Senate. He has touted the idea of "self-deportation" for illegals -- immigrants' advocates view this as a euphemism for making life so unpleasant for the undocumented that they are forced to leave -- and called for a fence along the Southern border.

To be sure, immigration is not the only issue of importance to Hispanic voters. In one recent national poll, conducted by charter-school advocates, 73 percent of Latinos called improving the economy an extremely high priority, while 61 percent cited education; just 37 percent put reforming immigration at that level of importance. But the perception that Republicans have singled out Hispanics with their harsh immigration rhetoric remains a major obstacle for the party -- a sign, to many, that the GOP would rather placate its vocal anti-immigrant base than expand its electoral tent.

Now, Hispanic Republicans hope Romney can repair the damage. But to do that, they say, he'll have to confront the elephant in the room. "I have no doubt Hispanics have been alienated during this campaign" by the candidates' immigration rhetoric, New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez, told Newsweek recently. "But now there's an opportunity for Gov. Romney to have a sincere conversation about what we can do and why."

Ana Navarro, a Florida-based Republican consultant and Rubio adviser, said Romney is going to have to talk about immigration at some point. "There's no doubt that education is a top-priority issue to Latinos," she said. "But immigration is one of those issues that does not go away."

For Hispanic Republicans like Navarro, it has been frustrating to watch the party squander its potential opportunity with a group that stands to play an ever greater role in the electorate in the coming years. George W. Bush made major inroads with Hispanics, thanks in part to his moderate stance on immigration, but those gains have been largely wiped out in the anti-immigration fervor that has engulfed much of the party since then. A new poll released Wednesday showed Obama leading Romney by 34 points among Hispanics nationally.

Romney has left himself some wiggle room on immigration by quietly declining, even during the heat of the primary, to embrace the mass deportations favored by the far right. Rubio, in an interview Wednesday with Fox News' Greta Van Susteren, said Romney's support for "self-deportation" should be read as an alternative to the government rounding up and deporting immigrants. But even if Romney does start trying to soft-pedal his immigration stance, it's doubtful he'll get away with it. In 2008, John McCain's long history of moderation on immigration did him little good after he tacked rightward on immigration to win the GOP presidential primary -- and Democrats spent millions on TV and radio ads reminding Hispanic voters of that fact.

Romney has agreed to speak at a conference of Hispanic officials in Florida next month, on the same program as Obama, it was announced Wednesday. That will provide him with another opportunity to tell the Latino community where he stands; the question is whether he will take it.

One of the members of the audience for Romney's speech Wednesday was Roger Campos, the president and CEO of the Minority Business RoundTable and chairman of the U.S. Hispanic Youth Entrepreneurship and Education Fund. He praised Romney's speech for its education proposals, which he described as crucial to the future of the American economy. But as for whether Romney could win Hispanic votes, Campos was doubtful -- because of immigration.

"It is a real challenge with Hispanic voters because of the immigration-reform issue," he said. The problem, he said, is the message Republicans have sent with proposals that seem "knee-jerk reactionary," like building a border fence.

Eventually, "I'm sure [Romney] will deal with that issue and address it," Campos said.

Jackie Calmes of The New York Times brings a heartwarming story today about a visit by Jacob Philadelphia, then 5, to the Oval Office three years ago. His father Carlton was finishing up a two-year stint on the National Security Council, and the family was invited to take a photograph with the president. While there, Jacob spoke up:

"I want to know if my hair is just like yours," he told Mr. Obama, so quietly that the president asked him to speak again.

Jacob did, and Mr. Obama replied, "Why don't you touch it and see for yourself?" He brought his head level with Jacob, who hesitated.

"Touch it, dude!" Mr. Obama said.

As Jacob patted the presidential crown, Mr. Souza snapped.

"So, what do you think?" Mr. Obama asked.

"Yes, it does feel the same," Jacob said.

"[T]he photo is tangible evidence of what polls also show: Mr. Obama remains a potent symbol for blacks, with a deep reservoir of support," Calmes writes. "As skittish as White House aides often are in discussing race, they also clearly revel in the power of their boss's example."

Presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney laid down a benchmark for his presidency on Wednesday, telling Time magazine that he would get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent or less in his first term.

"I can't possibly predict precisely what the unemployment rate would be after one year," Romney said in an interview with Mark Halperin. "I can tell you, after a period of four years, by virtue of the policies we'd put in place, we'd get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent -- perhaps a little lower, depends in part upon the rate of growth [around] the globe, as well as what we're seeing here in the United States."

Setting benchmarks can be perilous. President Obama is still getting hammered over an early projection by his advisers, based on economic indicators that later were revised to be much worse, that a stimulus package would keep unemployment to 8 percent. It has finally fallen to 8.1 percent after reaching a high of 10 percent in October 2009.

Romney struggled in the Time interview to say exactly why his work at Bain Capital would help create an environment for job creation, arguing that it was his "experiences in totality" that have prepared him to run the United States better than the current occupant of the White House.

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"My whole life has been learning to lead -- from my parents, to my education, to the experience I had in the private sector, to helping run the Olympics, and then of course helping guide a state. Those experiences in totality have given me an understanding of how America works and how the economy works," Romney said in the interview. "I happen to believe that having been in the private sector for 25 years gives me a perspective on how jobs are created -- that someone who's never spent a day in the private sector, like President Obama, simply doesn't understand."

The former Massachusetts governor's record at the helm of Bain has been a subject of recent debate as the Obama campaign and its allied super PAC, Priorities USA, have launched ads featuring workers who were laid off from companies as the private-equity firm reaped large profits. Obama has said that Romney's Bain career focused on maximizing profits for investors and did not prepare him for the presidency.

As Halperin pressed Romney for specifics, he pointed to his all-of-the-above strategy to increase American energy production as a means of reviving the manufacturing sector. The connection to Bain? He said that the cost of energy was important to the creation of a steel company called Steel Dynamics that Bain helped launch in Indiana.

Romney repeatedly sought to turn his answers into a critique of Obama and to compare their experiences. He did not say he welcomed the scrutiny of his own business record. "Mark, what I can tell you is this: The fact is that I spent 25 years in the private sector. And that obviously teaches you something that you don't learn if you haven't spent any time in the private sector," he said.

Back in the fall, a team put together a spot for interim San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee -- featuring MC Hammer, Twitter's Biz Stone, the Giants' Brian Wilson, and will.i.am -- that Chris Good rightly dubbed "the best campaign ad of the year" in this space. Lee went on to win the mayoralty on a permanent basis, becoming the first Asian-American to hold the job.

Now the same ad team (though sadly not the same cast) is back with a spot in support of Proposition 29. For non-Californians, that's a ballot issue that seeks to increase the tax on a pack of cigarettes by a dollar to $1.87, raising a projected $735 million in revenue and paying for cancer research, smoking-reduction programs, and tobacco-law enforcement. The hike would move the Golden State well up the list of per-pack taxes, but still place it far behind New York ($4.35) and with a lower rate than a host of other states, such as Alaska, Maine, and Michigan ($2.00). The measure is backed by the American Cancer Association and American Lung Association, and opposed by anti-tax groups like Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform.

Unsurprisingly, it's also opposed by tobacco companies. That's where this ad comes in, with tongue-in-cheek endorsements: "I support Big Tobacco because I their ads ... and so do my kids," a mother intones. A farmer deadpans, "I support Big Tobacco because they killed my wife, and that's one less mouth to feed."

A much larger increase failed in 2006, but polling suggests Prop 29 may pass. As for the ad, our verdict: It's a fun, sharp way to make a point, and issue ads are inherently harder to make funny than candidate spots. Still, needs more hammer pants.

If Romney beats Obama at the ballot box, conservatives will hail him as a conquering hero, like Beowulf after he slayed Grendel. By the time he took the oath of office, Romney could feel much more secure about his support from conservatives than he did during the Republican primary. Given the amount of money it takes to campaign in the modern era, serious primary challenges to sitting presidents are unlikely. A President Romney could very logically make the calculation that conservatives are more or less stuck with him.

Each one of the key items on the conservative agenda (repealing and replacing Obamacare, overhauling the tax code and passing substantial reforms to the nation's entitlement programs), independently, would trigger an epic confrontation in Washington. Knowing what we know about Romney's aversion to political risk, it's fair to wonder whether he'd be reluctant to get involved in such bitter partisan battles, especially early in his presidency. He may prefer to pass a series of smaller, less controversial, bills to rack up mini-victories while assuring conservatives that he'll get to the bigger stuff later. Over the course of the presidential primaries, persistent skepticism among conservatives continued to force Romney to embrace policies that his initial instinct was to avoid, particularly on Medicare reform. This is clear evidence of Romney showing responsiveness to conservatives. But as the race moves out of the primary, their bargaining power could recede.

In November, 2008, media reports strongly suggested that President Obama intended to name John Brennan as CIA Director. But controversy over Brennan's recent history -- he was a Bush-era CIA official who expressly advocated "enhanced interrogation techniques" and rendition -- forced him to "withdraw" from consideration, as he publicly issued a letter citing "strong criticism in some quarters" of his CIA advocacy.

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Former Secretary of State Colin Powell had some tough words for Mitt Romney's foreign-policy positions on Wednesday, saying that calling Russia the U.S.'s the No. 1 geopolitical foe was wrong.

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"Come on, Mitt, think," he said on MSNBC's Morning Joe. "That isn't the case." He continued saying that the foreign affairs community has been taken aback by some of the presumptive Republican nominee's positions.

Powell, who served under President George W. Bush and endorsed then-Sen. Barack Obama in 2008, also called into question Romney's choice for foreign-policy staffers. He said many of them were extreme.

"I don't know who all of his advisers are, but I've seen some of the names and some of them are quite far to the right," he said. "And sometimes they might be in a position to make judgments or recommendations to the candidate that should get a second thought."

Powell made a clear emphasis on education and building infrastructure for the future of the U.S. He has not said whether he would support the president for a second term.

Obama hasn't played the game that he promised. Instead, the game he has played has been exactly the game that Hillary Clinton promised and that Bill Clinton executed: striking a bargain with the most powerful lobbyists as a way to get a bill through -- and as it turns out, the people don't have the most powerful lobbyists. As I watched this strategy unfold, I could not believe it. The idealist in me certainly could not believe that Obama would run a campaign grounded in "change" yet execute an administration that changed nothing of the "way Washington works."

But the pragmatist in me also could not believe it. I could not begin to understand how this administration thought that it would take on the most important lobbying interests in America and win without a strategy to change the power of those most important lobbying interests. Nothing close to the reform that Obama promised is possible under the current system; so if that reform was really what Obama sought, changing the system was an essential first step.

Every now and then the GOP does something that feeds the otherwise false narrative of political extremism....

Since the political class is attempting to define the GOP as insane and redefine "moderation" as anything President Obama favors, Republicans do themselves no favors by targeting a useful government purpose.[!!!]

 3. Facebook left nothing for the common investor. The insider pig pile of PE firms and celebrity Silicon Valley angels took it all...When Microsoft when public in 1986, its market value was $780 million. Microsoft's market value would rise more than 700 times in the next 13 years. Bill Gates made millionaires of thousands of ordinary public investors. When Google went public in 2004 at a $23 billion valuation, it left less on the table for you and me. Still, if you had invested in Google then and held your stock, you would be sitting atop a 9x return. Zuckerberg and his Facebook friends took it all.

 The Senate Democrats' 22 to 22 split illuminated the influence that presidential politics and red-state, blue-state considerations play in a party struggling to end nearly a decade of unbroken GOP control of Congress. Among those opposing Roberts were presidential aspirants who typically veer to the center but now are eyeing the liberal activist groups that will play key roles in Iowa, New Hampshire and other early-voting states in 2008. They included Sens. Evan Bayh (Ind.), Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.). Also voting no were two senators facing potentially tough reelections next year in states with powerful left-leaning groups: Maria Cantwell of Washington and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan. Maryland's Democratic senators voted against Roberts.
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Democrats voting for Roberts included several facing reelection contests next year in states that Bush carried twice: Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Bill Nelson of Florida, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia and Kent Conrad of North Dakota.

A majority of Kentucky's 120 counties voted against Obama in the state's Democratic presidential primary, opting instead for "uncommitted." Big margins in Louisville and Lexington saved the president from the supreme embarrassment of actually losing the state, not that his overall 57.9 to 42.1 percent victory is anything to write home about...

Chalking this up only to race may be an oversimplification, although there was exit poll data in 2008 that indicated it was an explicit factor for a sizable chunk of voters. Perhaps Obama's race is one of several markers (along with his name, his background, and the never-ending Muslim rumors, his status as the "liberal" candidate in 2008) that low-income white rural voters use to associate him with a national Democratic Party that they believe has been overrun by affluent liberals, feminists, minorities, secularists and gays - people and groups whose interests are being serviced at the expense of their own.

But although no one doubts that race may be a factor, exit polling suggests that the opposition to Obama goes beyond it. And seasoned political observers who have studied the politics of these areas say race may be less of a problem for Obama than the broader cultural disconnect that many of these voters feel with the Democratic Party. 

"Race is definitely a factor for some Texans but not the majority," said former congressman Charles W. Stenholm (D-Tex.). "The most significant factor is the perception/reality that the Obama administration has leaned toward the ultra-left viewpoint on almost all issues."

Americans have few moral qualms about birth control or gambling. They think wearing fur, the death penalty, and abortion are more morally acceptable with porn. And they think suicide, polygamy, and human cloning are more moral than cheating on your spouse.

Inspired by the recent political debate over insurance coverage for contraception, Gallup this month included birth control in its regular survey of Americans' moral beliefs. Rick Santorum notwithstanding, the poll found that Americans overwhelmingly believe contraception is moral: 89 percent said it was morally acceptable, the highest rating of any of the morally questionable behaviors tested. Even among Catholics, 82 percent approved of birth control. No wonder Democrats were convinced they had a winning issue in the contraception debate -- even though the debate was about larger issues of religious freedom and government compulsion, there simply aren't a lot of people who sympathize with moral objections to birth control.

But the really fascinating data in the poll was in the way it ranked Americans' attitude toward a variety of other potential sins.

Gambling and divorce, both frowned upon in old-time religion, are now broadly accepted, with less than a third of the public disapproving of either. But Americans' judgment of infidelity is harsh: 89 percent find the notion of married people cheating on their spouses morally unacceptable. (Tell that to Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Anthony Weiner, and all the other cheating pols.) That's more than disapprove of human cloning and polygamy (86 percent each) or suicide (80 percent).

Fur-wearing and stem-cell research are largely accepted (about 60 percent each), while slim majorities approve of gay sex and out-of-wedlock births (54 percent each). A majority, 51 percent, finds abortion morally unacceptable. (Not surprisingly, there are major partisan differences in the moral judgment of all of these.) And Americans are surprisingly disapproving when it comes to porn: Nearly two-thirds say it is morally wrong. Based on the contents of the Internet, that seems to be a qualm that's routinely and easily overcome.

A labor official in South Carolina found a unique way of taking out her frustration with the state's Republican governor, Nikki Haley: She put her face on a piñata and gave it a whack.

"It's a child's game, and as anybody can see, I'm smiling," Donna Dewitt, the outgoing president of the South Carolina AFL-CIO, told National Journal after a video circulated on the Internet showing her taking a bat to the governor's face imprinted on a piñata. And though she insisted the piñata was not any sort of political statement, Dewitt added, "She's been whacking at us for two years and I'm just going to take a whack back."

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In the video, Dewitt calls out, "What I will say, you know, she looks like a tough old girl here!" A voice off-screen says, "Well whack her harder ... Wait until her face comes around." After two hits with the bat, and a "Whoop!" on Dewitt's part, the piñata falls.

The incident occurred at a Saturday meeting of the South Carolina Progressive Network, a group of about 60 organizations that Dewitt co-chairs.

Haley, who has voiced her dislike for unions and has been sued by the International Association of Machinists and AFL-CIO, wrote on her Twitter and Facebook pages, "Wow. I wonder if the unions think this kind of thing will make people take them seriously." Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey said, "There is no place for that in civil public discourse, and that video no more represents the people of South Carolina than union bosses represent our workers."

Here's the most important figure to remember during the sudden debate over the merits of the private equity industry: $102 million. That's the total amount the securities and investment industry -- in other words, Wall Street -- has contributed to federal candidates through March of this election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Here's the second most important figure to remember: Roughly $40 million of that has landed in the pockets of Democratic candidates. That kind of financial muscle helps explain the backlash against President Obama as he takes on Republican Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital, and the tightrope Obama is walking as he tries to keep the money flowing even as he dismisses Romney's job as no qualification to be president.

Most of the Democrats going public with their concerns have personal ties to private equity: Steve Rattner, Obama's former "car czar," a veteran Wall Street financier; former congressman Harold Ford, who has worked at Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley since leaving Congress; and Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who has received -- the Washington Post reported -- contributions from financial firms and has relied on them to help reform schools in his city.

They and other Democrats no doubt have legitimate concerns about their party becoming branded as anti-business - a politically hazardous label the Romney campaign is eagerly promoting. But there's likely as much or more fretting about an important source of campaign cash going dry. Democrats can examine their own president's fundraising to find a cautionary tale about the perils of crossing Wall Street.

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Obama was king of Wall Street fundraising four years ago, hauling in more than $15 million from the industry, according to CRP. Republican presidential nominee John McCain managed just $9 million. But Obama raised that money before pushing through tightened regulation in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, leveling a series of perceived personal slights at the financiers themselves, and presiding over a still-sputtering economy (for a full account of the president's Wall Street money problems, read this New York Times Magazine feature). In the aftermath, his financial prowess has been greatly diminished.

Through April, CRP found the president had raised just $3 million from securities and investment firms. Romney, a veteran of the business, had more than doubled that total, collecting $8.5 million in contributions.

Obama can still bank on single-night, $15 million fundraisers with George Clooney. He's got another potential record-breaker on tap June 4 with Bill Clinton. Even so, he has taken great pains to distinguish his questioning of Romney's record at Bain from an attack on private enterprise itself.

"My view of private equity is that it is set up to maximize profits, and that's a healthy part of the free market," Obama told reporters Monday in Chicago. "I think there are folks who do good work in that area. And there are times where they identify the capacity for the economy to create new jobs or new industries, but understand that their priority is to maximize profits. And that's not always going to be good for communities or businesses or workers."

The delicate distinction Obama was trying to make has been largely lost -- maybe because the Romney campaign doesn't let a day go by without repeated references to Obama's "attacks on free enterprise."

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Here's a good example of the sort of political attack that Cory Booker referred to as "nauseating" during a much-ballyhooed Meet the Press appearance on Sunday:

This is not [an] attack on free enterprise ... I don't take contributions from payday lenders, if I know it. I refuse to do that. That's free enterprise, but there's something about that enterprise that I have a problem with. And there's something about raping companies and leaving them in debt and setting up Swiss bank accounts and corporate businesses in the Grand Caymans. I have a real, serious problem with that.

We all know how this will end: Romney's campaign will condemn it, Obama's team will follow suit, and Clyburn will probably offer a minimally sincere apology. (The South Carolinian is no stranger to controversial remarks.)

Though this resembles the standard one-day kerfuffles that have characterized the campaign, there's an interesting background to it: the generational divide between black politicians in the Democratic Party. On one side are older, hardball-playing populists like Clyburn (b. 1940) and Ron Rice (b. 1945), the man who lost to Booker in the 2006 Newark mayoral race and crowed with "I told you sos" Monday, accusing the man who beat him of being beholden to corporate interests. On the other are younger politicians like Booker (b. 1969), who don't fall into the same populist mold and are often accused of being smug by their elders. Obama (b. 1961) himself has encountered this divide, most notably in his losing House campaign against elder statesman Bobby Rush (b. 1946) in 2000. Residual tension emerged again in 2008, when Jesse Jackson memorably expressed a desire to castrate the candidate for "talking down to black people."

Now, as he often does, Obama is seeking to split the difference, pledging to keep hammering Romney on his business career while saying he's not attacking the private equity industry. That may or may not work for him, but the generational divide will only widen over time.

On Sunday, the Democratic mayor of Newark, N.J., tried to point out that the presidential campaign has gotten awfully brutal awfully fast.

Naturally, Cory Booker promptly got slammed.

But the point Booker was trying to make wasn't only about the legitimacy of attacking private equity -- it was that the tenor of the presidential campaign on both sides has become "nauseating to the American public." In saying so, he touched on something potentially even more unspeakable among Democrats: the idea that the slash-and-burn tactics of Obama's reelection campaign mark a definitive departure from the promise to change politics for the better.

"My outrage and really my frustration was about the cynical negative campaigning, the manipulation of the truth," Booker told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Monday night, noting the irony of the fact that his plea for civility had been promptly turned into a partisan weapon. "And so here [Republicans] are plucking sound bites out of that interview to manipulate in a cynical manner, to use them for their own purposes."

Many a requiem has been written for "that hopey-changey thing," as Sarah Palin so memorably dubbed it. And to be sure, much of the griping about the president's harsh tone is the disingenuous phony outrage of Republicans who would prefer not to be its targets. But as Obama embarks in earnest on his second presidential campaign, deliberately invoking the echoes of 2008 as he does so, the contrast with his old image is especially stark.

From the beginning, the president's reelection campaign has taken a brutal, no-holds-barred approach that's sharply at odds with the conciliatory image that was the central predicate of Obama's entire pre-presidential political career. Whether or not the specific issue of Bain Capital ought to be off limits -- Booker has taken pains to clarify he doesn't think it should be -- there's no denying that Obama's 2012 campaign has seized every opportunity to turn the campaign toward sharply personal attacks of a type that the 2008-vintage Obama would surely have recoiled from. From Romney's treatment of his onetime pet dog to his high-school pranks to his income-tax rate, from the "war on women" to the "war on caterpillars," from "I like being able to fire people" to "I'm not concerned about the very poor," no potential controversy has been too petty, too rhetorically overblown or too out-of-context to be exploited to the hilt.

None of this is shocking -- it's how the game is played. But Obama once ostentatiously refused to play it. In June 2007, for example, when Obama's primary campaign distributed a memo titled "Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)" detailing Clinton's connections to India, Obama publicly upbraided his staff, calling it "a dumb mistake" and "unnecessarily caustic." As the New York Times put it at the time, "The memo...raised quesitons about Obama's claims that he is above attack politics, which are epitomized by secretly distributing opposition research about a rival."

These days, the Obama campaign distributes harshly critical research memos as a matter of course. And the idea that it might be any other way is viewed as pollyannaish handwringing, or worse, doing the other side's bidding.

"This election, like all other elections, is going to be a choice between two candidates, two records, two visions for the country," the Obama campaign's press secretary, Ben LaBolt, said when asked about the campaign's sharp tone. "We have not heard an affirmative vision from Mitt Romney."

Democrats outside the campaign defend this approach as simple realism.

"The criticism of President Obama for the first year and a half on the left was that he wasn't fighting hard enough," Democratic consultant Karen Finney said. "From the perspective of the campaign, they are fighting hard."

Others point out that negative campaigning has always been a part of politics, and campaigns do it because it works.

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"This is going to be an extremely negative campaign because it's going to be a close campaign, but that's not new," said Democratic consultant Steve Elmendorf, whose presidential-campaign experience goes back to Mondale '84. "A lot of people on both sides will say, 'Oh, this is awful, people are attacking each other,' but the reality is all campaigns work to take negative information about their opponent and make it part of the public discussion. The other reality is, voters process that information, and it changes their views."

It's also true, as Booker pointed out in his pox-on-both-houses critique, that these tactics are embraced with equal gusto by Romney, the Republicans, and their army of well-funded super PACs. In the face of such firepower, it would be suicidal, Democrats argue, to unilaterally disarm.

"I lived through the Republican assault on Max Cleland, sitting in a wheelchair with one limb because of his service defending his country in Vietnam," said Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons, who served as communications director for the former Georgia senator who lost his 2002 reelection after his opponent ran an ad calling him soft on terrorism that featured images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. "I think the Republicans are full of shit" to complain about negativity.

"This is not the time for us to be having a sensitive, introspective moment about a critique of Mitt Romney's business record," Simmons added. "Give me a break. News flash: There's negativity in campaigns."

If anything, the professional political class seems gratified and relieved that Obama has finally dropped what seemed to many to be a haughty, professorial pretense -- and a political inconvenience.

"I never thought that his approach was a long-term sustainable approach," Simmons said of Obama's onetime calls for civility. "I think the moment of 2008 was a unique moment, and we've returned to the mean. This is the way things go. This is what presidential campaigning is in the 21st century. Republicans would give no quarter whatsoever in going after anything like this."

Nonetheless, it's worth remembering how central a part of Obama's brand civility was. The speech that launched him as a national figure in 2004 was a call for unity that decried the slicing of the country into "red states" and "blue states." The uplifting premise of his 2008 campaign was a promise to get beyond the old, contentious political divisions. Sure, he was never as pure as he pretended to be, and he did what he had to do to get elected. But people really believed this stuff -- including Obama's own people, who carefully guarded the specialness of his brand.

Until very recently -- within the last year -- the keepers of the Obama flame were still working to preserve the post-partisan pose, even when it proved politically costly. Throughout 2009 and into 2010, political staffers chafed at the White House's insistence that they take the high road, recalled Ed Espinoza, who was a regional political director for the Democratic National Committee at the time.

Faced with a Republican minority that had quickly adopted a strategy of total obstruction, "We told them, 'We have to hit back,'" Espinoza recalled. "They said, 'We're not going to go that road. We're post-partisan.' So we stood there and we got clobbered. We got our asses handed to us at every turn. But the response was, 'We can't respond. It lowers us to their level.' So they beat us up and they weakened us going into [the 2010 midterm elections]."

In the final months before November 2010, Obama did step up the partisanship somewhat, railing against Republicans for "sipping on a Slurpee" after "driving the economy into a ditch." But even after the midterm shellacking, the post-partisan dream was not yet dead.

Throughout early 2011 -- a period soberingly punctuated by the shooting of then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords -- the DNC was under orders to hold back from directly criticizing congressional Republicans, with whom Obama was trying to deal. As Noam Scheiber recently reported in The New Republic, a planned political assault on the first version of the Ryan budget last spring was squelched by aides who feared it would dynamite the debt-limit negotiations.

But then the debt-ceiling talks blew up, an event that was, by all accounts, the breaking point for both Obama personally and his team. Since then, bipartisan compromise has been out the window, and all-out war has been the order of the day.

"We tried the post-partisan thing. It wasn't working, and that's where the carpet bombing comes in," Espinoza said. "We know the Republicans are not going to stand down. They're not going to play nice. They're going to fight dirty, so the Obama campaign is braced for it, and they're going on offense early."

Some Democrats acknowledge that there are potential costs to the tough new tone. By framing the election so aggressively as voters' choice of who they like least, Team Obama is tacitly admitting that the president's positive pitch isn't a persuasive one. And the embrace of rough-and-tumble politics is sure to discourage many of Obama's true believers from 2008, who, however naively, took seriously his claim to being a different kind of politician.

But in these polarized times, the president's team has concluded, the high road is a luxury they can no longer afford. Besides, to many Democrats, Obama's promise of a more high-minded, less divisive approach was never much more than a nice line.

"It was the right thing to say. It's always a good thing to appeal to people's better angels," said one Democratic presidential campaign veteran who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But it is tough to sustain that in this day and age."

To those, like Booker, who fret about negativity, this strategist responded: "Quit your whining and help us beat the other guy. If you want to stay home and blog about how disappointed you are, see how you feel when President Romney is sworn in."

Plans to deal with this problem by simply asserting that we will choose to control spending in the future by, for example, distributing vouchers for health care with declining aggregate value as a percentage of GDP as compared to current expectations (a conservative idea), or that we will have a government agency that will make health-care availability decisions that will achieve the same aggregate spending path (a liberal idea), are mostly beside the point. These are proposals for ice cream sundaes for me today, and a strict diet for somebody else tomorrow.

Ronald Reagan is often portrayed in hagiographic terms -- as the patron saint of the modern Republican party, to his partisans, or mockingly as "Saint Ronnie," a huckster prophet, to his detractors.

The comparison will get a bit more literal with the sale of a true medieval-style relic. A British company, PFC Auctions, is currently entertaining bids for a vial of the late president's blood; the bidding closes on Thursday and, as of writing, was approaching $12,000. The blood was collected in 1981, when deranged would-be assassin John Hinckley shot the president in Washington, D.C. The sale has elicited predictable disgust and outrage, both in the public and on the part of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. "If indeed this story is true, it's a craven act and we will use every legal means to stop its sale or purchase," John Heubusch, the foundation's executive director, said in a statement. (It has also elicited equally predictable jokes: "Is it too late for the vial of Reagan blood to run for the GOP nomination?" "The appropriate thing to do with the Reagan blood would be to trickle it down on some poor people.")

But as grotesque as the auction might be, it's hardly surprising. The still-young United States -- deprived of the bones, blood, and fading locks of centuries-old saints, as well as a state church to celebrate them -- has long made a habit of fetishizing relics from our late presidents instead. After Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865, a famous photograph of the bloodstained sheets in Washington's Peterson House where he had lain entered popular circulation, and artifacts were distributed. The bed in which he died is now in the Chicago History Museum. A stained pillow ended up in the Peterson House, and a chair went to the Henry Ford Museum. But as James Swanson wrote in Bloody Crimes, a stained coverlet in the photograph disappeared, apparently taken by souvenir hunters.

The other most famous presidential victim of an assassin's bullet is no different. Earlier this year, the hearse that carried John F. Kennedy's body from a Dallas hospital to Air Force One in November 1963 sold for the eye-popping sum of $160,000. The pink suit splattered with his blood that Jackie Kennedy wore -- which has been described as "a sacred relic of a national nightmare" -- is stashed in the National Archives. It was donated anonymously and won't be on view until 2103, although the continued obsession with all things Kennedy suggests there will be an audience for it even then. Meanwhile, the National Museum of Health and Medicine, which has just reopened in suburban D.C., contains a vertebra from James A. Garfield, complete with a hole from the bullet that killed the 20th president.

With luck, America won't see a president assassinated anytime soon, although that will only increase the value of the few pieces of macabre merchandise we have. Meanwhile, the Reagan vial may be distasteful, but it's as American as mom, baseball, and apple pie -- or perhaps supply-side economics, winning one for the Gipper, and jelly beans.

"Please don't use the presently existing literature as established fact," warned H.R. Haldeman, the former White House chief of staff to Richard Nixon, at a symposium on the Nixon presidency convened at Hofstra University in November 1987. "There's an enormous amount of gross inaccuracies in most of the present views regarding the totality and the specific segments of the Nixon presidency."

A brilliantly efficient chief of staff -- his communications operations marked a quantum leap over his predecessors' and helped shape the modern presidency -- Haldeman wound up disgraced, serving 18 months at Lompoc Federal Prison in his native California for his role in the Watergate cover-up. Few in the saga were more thoroughly vilified. At Lompoc, this devout Christian Scientist and former J. Walter Thompson executive, a man described by historian Richard Reeves as "a pre-computer organizational genius," toiled as a sewage chemist. Haldeman recalled at Hofstra how he used "the unenviable luxury of substantial time on my hands" to devour, in his cell, the established literature on Nixon and Watergate.

Armed with three highlighter pens of different colors, he underlined in red every statement of fact he knew, "of my own personal and absolutely certain knowledge," to be false. The color blue Haldeman used to highlight sentences he knew, with equal certitude, to be true. And yellow was reserved for those claims that even Haldeman, the White House aide who spent the most time in Nixon's Oval Office, could neither verify nor refute. "It was a fascinating exercise," he said -- and with discernible glee, he would tell you the book with the highest percentage of red lines, the lowest truth quotient: 1974's The Palace Guard by Dan Rather and Gary Paul Gates.

****

The gauntlet Haldeman threw down to scholars and historians a quarter-century ago was finally picked up last month. With unprecedented authority and devastating consequences, similarly fastidious scrutiny -- color-coding and all -- was belatedly applied to the most influential and celebrated Watergate book of them all: All the President's Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. This brave feat was performed in New York magazine, in its publication of excerpts from a new biography of legendary Watergate-era Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee was written by Jeff Himmelman, a thirty-something writer who had formerly served as a research assistant to both Bradlee and Woodward. And accompanying the article -- wham-o! - there it was: a graphic that deconstructed, line by line, page 212 of All the President's Men and used four different colors to do it. Except in this case, all of the colors highlighted statements Himmelman, knew to be false -- or at least highly misleading.

The passage in question recounted Bernstein's furtive December 1972 interview with a Washington, D.C., woman whom Himmelman -- using long-lost documents from Bradlee's own archives -- confirmed to have been a Watergate grand juror. In the passage, however, Bernstein had slyly led readers to believe that this source, whom he dubbed "Informant Z," was an employee of the Nixon White House or its 1972 campaign arm, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP). Moreover, Woodward and Bernstein had spent decades -- decades! -- denying they had received information from any Watergate grand jurors.

Meanwhile, Himmelman also unearthed a 1990 interview with Bradlee in which he expressed profound misgivings about Woodward's whole story of his dealings with his shadowy Watergate source, Deep Throat. "Did that potted [plant] incident ever happen?" Bradlee mused, about the notion that Woodward used to move his flowerpot around on his balcony to signal for meetings with Deep Throat. Likewise, about Woodward's rendezvous in an Arlington, Virginia, parking garage with Deep Throat, Bradlee wondered: "One meeting in the garage? Fifty meetings in the garage? I don't know how many meetings [there were] in the garage." He added: "There's a residual fear in my soul that that isn't quite straight."

Within minutes of their publication online, Himmelman's excerpts touched off a media furor. Twitter was afire and the online community was astonished at the audacity of the younger man's patricide. Book reviews appeared alongside straight news articles reporting on Himmelman's revelations, complete with public statements by Bradlee and Woodward -- often as not, disparaging of Himmelman, a young man who had once practically lived with these people.

Despite the furor, the paucity of living individuals still knowledgeable about Watergate and the sheer number of Himmelman's Watergate bombshells combined to prevent his findings from receiving the kind of engaged critical attention, let alone acclaim, they deserved. Indeed, the vigor with which Woodward fought to prevent these disclosures from surfacing -- a series of tense personal encounters chronicled, in aching detail, by his former protege -- confirms their importance. Thanks to Himmelman, America's most revered journalist -- and by some measures her most successful non-fiction author -- felt the earth move under his feet a bit. And that doesn't happen to Bob Woodward very often.

The stuff about Bradlee naturally generated more buzz. Memories of his portrayal by Jason Robards in the film version of All the President's Men still linger. In his public statements about the Himmelman book, Bradlee sought to tamp down the controversy by arguing, in effect, that Woodward's scorecard in Watergate, the "details" about Deep Throat notwithstanding, was mostly exemplary. The Old Guard must have been on the right side of history because, as Bradlee's wife Sally Quinn noted in her statement: "Nixon resigned."

Ultimately, however, the disclosures surrounding Bernstein's interview of the grand juror, "Informant Z," warrant more attention than the deep residual fear tormenting Ben Bradlee's soul. In theory, they are probably equally significant, because both sets of disclosures go to the heart of the question: What can you believe of what these guys wrote? Some of this has to do with freshness. Surely it is newsworthy to learn that no less a figure than Bradlee, who directed the Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of Watergate, was as troubled as the Watergate revisionists by the dubiety of Deep Throat. But Woodward's details on Deep Throat -- actually, not mere "details," but important elements of what lawyers would call foundation -- have long been under assault. Author Jim Hougan cast the first critical eye, back in 1984, in his monument of revisionist research Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA. The party Bradlee joined -- in an uncharacteristically late arrival for the salty dog who regularly downed scotches with Jack Kennedy in the White House -- has been underway for a quarter century.

Bernstein's Z memo, however, was wholly new. The least of its revelations is the exposure of Woodward's and Bernstein's long deception about their dealings with the Watergate grand jury; the aged reporters now maintain that was all to protect their source. The real eye-opener is that color-coded, sentence-by-sentence deconstruction of All the President's Men. Among the previously unpublished treasures in Bradlee's archives was the seven-page memorandum Bernstein typed out to record his interview of Z. That document can now be juxtaposed with the account of the event in All the President's Men, On page 212 of the book, Z was quoted as saying, "My boss calls it a whitewash." From the Bernstein memo (small wonder no copy of it is included with the rest of the Woodward and Bernstein papers at the University of Texas) we learn that Z's full quote was: "My boss called it a whitewash, and he doesn't even have the facts" (emphasis added).

Forget the fact that Bernstein lopped off the second part of the quote, which is damning enough. The worst of it is: Now that we know this woman was a grand juror, and not an employee of the Nixon White House or CRP, who cares what her boss thinks? She could have worked at a pet store for all we know! In context, though, with her having been introduced with the le Carré-esque moniker "Informant Z," identified as a woman who "was in a position to have considerable knowledge of the secret activities of the White House and CRP," Bernstein's chopped-off quote leads the reader to think some wise man of the Nixon administration, Z's sage boss, was troubled by all the criminality there. It's beyond misleading.

This desecration of that holiest of sacred texts raises the question: What about the rest of the book? If we can't believe the assertions about Deep Throat -- and there is much there that is demonstrably untrue, of which the flower pot is only the beginning -- and we can't believe the portrayal of Informant Z, then what can we believe? How might the rest of All the President's Men -- indeed, the entirety of the Woodward-Bernstein canon -- fare under such strict Haldemanian scrutiny? It is, for honest and courageous researchers, a future avenue of enormous scholarly potential.

In The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, I offered another example: the famous September 29, 1972 Washington Post story in which it was alleged that John Mitchell had controlled a secret GOP fund, endowed with hundreds of thousands of dollars, that was used to sabotage Democrats. It was this story that really ratcheted up the Post's coverage of Watergate and which elicited Mitchell's famous threat -- Bernstein had awakened him, late at night, to secure his comment -- to the anatomy of Post publisher Katharine Graham. In all the Watergate testimony and trials that followed, however, no evidence was ever produced to show that Mitchell controlled such a fund. The Watergate special prosecutors never included anything remotely like it in their indictment of Mitchell.

It's amazing that Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee all lived to see this moment, this small but significant piercing of the armor of the Washington Post/Watergate/ATPM narrative. A shocking, wounding heresy by the highest-ranking defector from Woodwardia ever to make it to the other side, and with an assist from Bradlee himself! Heady days!

****

The advent of ProQuest and the Internet assures that future generations will likely be more open than Woodward and Bernstein's contemporaries to principled revisionism about Watergate and the Nixon presidency. Each new archival discovery -- and Himmelman's sensational work underscores that the field of Nixon Studies is still in its infancy -- will receive the crowd-sourcing treatment, producing a new, if not always intellectually rigorous, kind of hyper-scrutiny.

And the conservative intellectual establishment that didn't exist in the Nixon era -- the establishment he used to sit in the Oval Office and demand that his aides to get busy building, the think tanks, media outlets, and advocacy groups that materialized about a decade too late to defend the president's Silent Majority, the Haynsworth and Carswell nominations to the Supreme Court, John Mitchell's campaign for law and order, Henry Kissinger's conduct of the Vietnam War, and the other controversial aspects of Nixon's right-of-center regime -- these engaged conservatives will be among those pouring over, and publicizing, the never-ending revelations of Watergate. There is every reason to believe their mark will prove more enduring than those made by H.R. Haldeman's highlighters.

]]>http://Theatlantic.feedsportal.com/c/34375/f/625835/s/1f99a164/l/0L0Stheatlantic0N0Cpolitics0Carchive0C20A120C0A50Cwhy0Ebradleegate0Ematters0Ewoodward0Eand0Ebernsteins0Edeception0C2574870C/story01.htmhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AtlanticPoliticsChannel/~3/aOz2guJo7yg/story01.htmThe MSNBC host attacked Cory Booker for breaking with the Democratic Party line. As a journalist, he ought to celebrate truth-telling.<img width='1' height='1' src='http://Theatlantic.feedsportal.com/c/34375/f/625835/s/1f9814d0/mf.gif' border='0'/><br/><br/><a href="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/134204791807/u/49/f/625835/c/34375/s/1f9814d0/a2.htm"><img src="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/134204791807/u/49/f/625835/c/34375/s/1f9814d0/a2.img" border="0"/></a><img width="1" height="1" src="http://pi.feedsportal.com/r/134204791807/u/49/f/625835/c/34375/s/1f9814d0/a2t.img" border="0"/>Tue, 22 May 2012 14:38:22 GMTtag:theatlantic.com,2012-05-22:mt-257499PoliticsMSNBCConor FriedersdorfThe MSNBC host attacked Cory Booker for breaking with the Democratic Party line. As a journalist, he ought to celebrate truth-telling.

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

The perpetual outrage machine of the 2012 campaign alit Monday on Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who said on Meet the Press on Sunday that he found the negativity of the campaign "nauseating," including his own party's attacks on Romney's past work in private equity.

As Booker partially backtracked, the Obama campaign declined to let up on the issue, holding a conference call to push the story of yet another company Bain Capital took over and profited from while laying off workers and eventually driving it into bankruptcy. Republicans, meanwhile, attempted to use Booker's words as validation for their claim that Obama is attacking capitalism, with the Romney campaign swiftly rolling out a web video decrying "President Obama's attacks on free enterprise" and featuring Booker.

By the end of the day, the president himself had weighed in, calling the Bain issue "part of the debate that we're going to be having in this election campaign about how do we create an economy where everybody from top to bottom, folks on Wall Street and folks on Main Street, have a shot at success."

So who won this round? (And can we call the resulting trophy the Booker Prize?) I asked two smart strategists -- a Democrat and a Republican, both unaffiliated with the presidential campaigns. Each called the debate for his own side, but not without some criticism.

John Feehery, Republican strategist, former congressional aide:

"This issue is going to be a liability for Romney. It just is. But I think, at the end of the day, because Obama is seen as anti-capitalistic, they may be able to win this fight. This comment from Booker is a gift from heaven, because it gives them a talking point. They're going to take that clip, and whenever Romney's attacked by the Obama campaign they can use it to say, 'These attacks are ridiculous, just listen to Obama supporter Cory Booker.' This is not the last we've heard of this thing. This is the only major argument the Obama campaign has -- that you shouldn't hire Mitt Romney to be president because when he was CEO, he fired people. They have nothing else to talk about. They can't talk about his record, or else they would be doing that."

"I thought the Obama campaign was making a really poor case on this issue until I saw the president just now at his press conference. That's the way you do it. That's the way you talk about it. We can't survive as a party in the long run being labeled anti-business .... If this turns into a referendum on Romney, we are happy as a party, and the last few days have been a referendum on Romney. People have been talking about his role at Bain, and I'm not sure they've always been talking about it the right way, but anytime that's what we're talking about is a better place to be. The president said it better than his ads have: If his rationale for being president is his stewardship of a company whose sole mission was to make profits at any cost, that's fair game, because that's not what a president does."

Republicans often accuse President Obama of being divisive, whether he's talking about tax rates for the wealthy or the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. One adviser to Mitt Romney, GOP strategist Ed Gillespie, calls Obama "one of the most divisive presidents in American history." Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida upped the ante last weekend when he said that "we have not seen such a divisive figure in modern American history" since Obama took office.

Please. Tell that to Abraham Lincoln or, if we're limiting ourselves to modern history, to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, or George W. Bush.

Especially tell it to Bush, who holds six of the top 10 spots on Gallup's "most polarizing presidents" list. It's calculated by the annual difference between a president's approval in his own party and the opposition party. Ranked by the size of the gap, Bush is Nos. 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and 10. Obama holds slots 4 and 6, while Clinton and Ronald Reagan are ranked 7th and 9th, respectively.

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Rubio's statement in particular, with its reference to "modern" American history, carries echoes of the proverbial defendant who killed his parents and begs the court for mercy because he's an orphan. Why is Obama so divisive? Could it have anything to do with the no-compromise, no-surrender approach of today's Republican Party?

Obama's tenure has been framed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's bald remark to National Journal that "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." That doesn't leave much room for negotiation. In fact it's a prescription for confrontation.

Consider an alternative reality like the one Bush encountered in 2001, when Democrats helped him pass his tax cut and education-reform bills. In this world, Republicans would have collaborated with Obama on a stimulus package, a health-care overhaul, and deficit reduction that included both tax increases and entitlement cuts. And GOP senators would not have blocked a nominee whom even they said was qualified, simply because they don't like the agency the nominee was supposed to lead -- a first, according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. (That would be Richard Cordray, who became head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after Obama bypassed Congress).

It is hard to imagine how a president could NOT be divisive when he's being caricatured by many in the loyal opposition as a radical socialist who hates the rich and the free market, and who may have been born in Kenya to boot.

We are not talking about the fringe here. Among those still asking if Obama was born in Hawaii is Ken Bennett, Arizona's secretary of state. Mike Huckabee has made confusing statements about Obama being raised in Kenya (under the influence of relatives he barely knew or had never met). Newt Gingrich has said Obama holds a "Kenyan, anti-colonialist worldview" but has pretended to be "moderate" and "reasonable," and has "played a wonderful con."

Is race at the root of this? Maybe a bit, for some, but presidents don't have to be black to be divisive. Some on the right speak fondly these days of Clinton, who once declared that "the era of big government is over." But back in the day, conservatives despised him. He was investigated over Whitewater and Vince Foster's suicide along with his extracurricular sexual activities. Long before his impeachment trial, some political foes even accused him of murder.

Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq, combined with liberal caricatures of him as a swaggering, out-of-his-depth cowboy, made polarization inevitable. And then there are of course FDR, whose New Deal policies in the teeth of the Great Depression sparked ferocious backlash, and Lincoln, whose ideas led to a period so divisive it nearly tore one nation into two.

As it happens, two of those three are now considered among our greatest presidents. Maybe Republicans shouldn't try so hard to hang that word on Obama.

Facts matter, Montana Attorney General Steven Bullock argues to the Supreme Court in ATM v. Bullock, defending a state court decision upholding Montana's ban on independent corporate expenditures, which defies Citizens United. The plaintiffs/petitioners in ATM argue that Montana's high court acted in "blatant disregard" of its duty to follow Supreme Court rulings on constitutional rights, Bullock notes. But "that can only be true if facts are irrelevant." The fact is that Montana's law is effectively consistent with Citizens United, he argues: As a practical, factual matter, it operates to impose disclosure requirements that Citizen United upheld; and unlike the abstruse, federal regulatory scheme at issue in Citizens United, Montana law is "minimally burdensome" and enforced through civil rather than criminal sanctions.

It seems unlikely that the Supreme Court will be persuaded by this effort to distinguish Montana's ban on corporate speech from the federal ban struck down only two years ago. (Justices Ginsburg and Breyer, who dissented in Citizens United, joined in issuing a stay of the Montana court ruling, noting that state courts are bound by Supreme Court decisions.) The Court's Citizens United majority seems equally unlikely to reconsider, narrow its ruling, and limit the First Amendment rights of corporations to engage in political speech, although Breyer and Ginsburg have urged them to do so, citing the "huge sums currently deployed to buy candidates' allegiance."

Facts matter, supporters of Citizen United reply to its critics, and the fact is that corporations are responsible for only a small percentage of the "huge sums" deployed in the 2012 election. Individuals have contributed most of the funds. In fact, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell points out (in an amicus brief authored by Floyd Abrams) the "corporate tsunami" predicted (and alleged) by Citizen United opponents "simply did not occur."

"There are now facts that bear on the concerns expressed by (Citizens United) critics," the McConnell brief stresses:

A review of FEC records for independent expenditure-only committees -- i.e. the so-called Super PACs -- supporting the eight leading Republican Presidential candidates has evidenced minimal corporate involvement in the 2012 election cycle ... not a single one of the Fortune 100 companies has contributed a cent to any of these eight Super PACs ... of the entire $96,410,614, (contributed to the Super-PACs,) 86.32% was contributed by individuals, 12.87% by privately held corporations and less than one percent -- 0.81% -- by public companies.

These are the facts often trivialized or ignored by opponents of Citizens United, many of whom should and probably do know better. Consider the amicus brief submitted by Free Speech for People (et al.). It stresses recent, overall increases in independent expenditures and generally conflates corporate and individual spending, referencing "super-PACs funded by the corporate and wealthy elite" and citing large expenditures by individuals, like Sheldon Adelson, to buttress arguments against Citizens United.

Why? If Citizens United were reversed tomorrow, Sheldon Adelson would retain the right to spend his money on electoral speech. The amount of money contributed by relatively few individuals so far, and expected to be contributed before November, may be unprecedented (and takes several non-profit organizational forms in addition to the "super PACs"), but the individual right to contribute it was recognized by the Supreme Court back in 1976, in Buckley v Valeo. That's a fact.

But factoids dominate this debate, and, by now, it is probably futile for me to continue contradicting them. The belief that Citizens United imbued Adelson and others with the right to indulge in independent political expenditures is pervasive and probably un-correctable. It is now an article of faith among reformers that that Citizens United is directly responsible for outsized, independent expenditures. Facts matter to Citizens United critics, except when they don't.

Consider this claim disseminated by NPR in a report on the recently aborted anti-Obama/Rev. Wright ad proposed to billionaire Joe Ricketts: "Even if the content of this proposal is dead for now, the concept illuminates something new in 2012. Since the Supreme Court opened the doors to unlimited spending by outside parties, any billionaire with an idea can try to tilt the scales."

How soon they forget. In 2004, six years prior to Citizens United, a few billionaires with ideas funded the swift boating of John Kerry, which helped "tilt the scales" for George W. Bush (and, as the McConnell brief notes, George Soros "spent over $24 million supporting Democratic candidates that same year."). Indeed, decades prior to Citizens United, before a billion was the new million, rich people were trying to "tilt the scales," as veterans of the 1968 McCarthy presidential campaign, funded by a few rich liberals, can attest.

Today, super-rich conservatives are committing vast sums to defeating President Obama and delivering the Senate to Republicans. Super-rich liberals are holding back, partly out of disdain for the process, Democratic candidates lament. So it's not surprising that Democrats tend to favor campaign-finance restrictions while Republicans oppose them.

Money talks, critics of Citizens United complain (all the while insisting that money isn't speech.) But if Republican money effectively buys votes, don't blame the Court, and don't just blame the Koch brothers. Blame the voters as well. Independent expenditures can't exert undue influence on a skeptical, informed electorate not susceptible to the bombast, melodrama, or sentimentalism of political advertising. Can a handful of billionaires buy the election? Perhaps, when facts don't matter.