Paul Waldman bets that Obama will be the "last Democratic presidential nominee not to support marriage equality":
While Democrats don't have nearly as many litmus tests as Republicans do, this is almost certain to be something that is expected of anyone who wants to be the party's nominee in four years, and forever after. The really interesting question, though, is how long it takes to get a Republican presidential nominee who supports marriage equality. I'm going to guess it'll be 2024.
The DNC has a field day with Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom's "Etch a Sketch" analogy:
The Dem group American Bridge piles on:
Meanwhile, the Republican group Crossroads GPS preempts Obama's energy tour in key states and on national cable:
By the way, Shelly's contributions to Newt's Super PAC now exceed $16 million.
Previous Ad War Updates: Mar 20, Mar 19, Mar 16, Mar 15, Mar 14, Mar 13, Mar 12, Mar 9, Mar 8, Mar 7, Mar 6, Mar 5, Mar 2, Mar 1, Feb 29, Feb 28, Feb 27, Feb 23, Feb 22, Feb 21, Feb 17, Feb 16, Feb 15, Feb 14, Feb 13, Feb 9, Feb 8, Feb 7, Feb 6, Feb 3, Feb 2, Feb 1, Jan 30, Jan 29, Jan 27, Jan 26, Jan 25, Jan 24, Jan 22, Jan 20, Jan 19, Jan 18, Jan 17, Jan 16 and Jan 12.
If Rubio doesn't look promising, then Bob McDonnell – another name at the top of Washington's A-list – isn't any better:
[The Virginia governor] is still popular, but he’s taken a real hit as a result of his support for laws that seek to coerce women out of seeking abortions (according to the poll, Virginians oppose such laws, 72 to 21 percent). Indeed, as Quinnipiac found in an earlier survey, the unpopularity of these laws have contributed to President Obama’s strong performance in the state. Virginia voters approve of Obama’s job performance, 49 percent to 47 percent. And in a head-to-head matchup against the likely GOP nominee, Mitt Romney, he wins 50 percent to 42 percent for the former Massachusetts governor. What’s more, this is true even if Governor McDonnell is on the ticket as Romney’s vice presidential pick.
Jewish relatives mourns during the funeral of religious teacher Jonathan Sandler and his children Gabriel 4, Arieh 5, and Miriam Monsonego 7, victims of the Toulouse school shooting, at the Givat Shaun cemetery in Jerusalem on March 21, 2012. By Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images.
David B. Grusky blames the first:
There’s much empirical evidence suggesting that Americans are prepared to accept even substantial inequality as long as it’s generated under competitive market rules. It’s therefore wrong to interpret public outrage about CEO pay as a protest against high compensation in and of itself. This outrage is not driven by the class envy about which the GOP presidential candidates so frequently complain. It is, rather, a protest against rationing, corruption, sweetheart deals, and foxes guarding the henhouse. It is a protest, in other words, against the corruption of markets by power. The rush to a tax agenda leaves the corruption untouched and instead fixates on a redistributive band-aid that Americans have never much liked. The market principle is, by contrast, one of our core commitments and a more promising base upon which to take on extreme inequality.
Glenn Loury picks the second – culture:
It doesn’t make much sense to think about rents and market failures when inequality is mainly a product of our impoverished ideas about autonomy, community, and solidarity. The failures here are political, not economic, and they are likely to be remedied only by a politics of cross-class and cross-race solidarity—the kind of politics about which I heard far too little at the Occupy Wall Street rallies I attended.
And Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Stefanie Stantcheva take door number #3:
The bottom line is that rich countries have all grown at roughly the same rate over the past 30 years, in spite of huge variations in tax policies. Using a model in which the response of top earners to top tax rate cuts is due in part to increased rent-seeking behavior and in part to increased productive work, we find that the top tax rate could be as high as 83 percent—as opposed to 57 percent in the pure supply-side model—without harming economic growth.
All three contributions are part of a Boston Review roundtable on inequality and taxes, which you can read in full here.
All in a day's work:
Alexis is disoriented:
[S]trangely, in seeing through another's eyes with fire raging all about, I find myself drawn back to a different fiction: videogames.
If you grew up in the last twenty years, you will know the helmet cam vantage point from the first-person shooters you've played: Doom, Quake, Goldeneye, Counter-Strike, Halo, Gears of War. So, it's a strange sensation watching the firefighter move through the house. You feel as if you should be able to direct his actions. Crouch, kneel, fire. Presented with what it's like to walk in another person's boots, and my mind reprocesses myself into the scene and reinserts my (false sense of) agency.
Chait wonders why Romney's favorables are at historic lows:
The main reason, I suspect, is that the Republican Party is extremely unpopular. The Bush years deeply discredited the GOP, and while Republicans were able to make gains in 2010 by default, as the out party during an economic crisis, they did nothing to rehabilitate their image. Indeed, they have embraced even more unpopular positions than the ones that George W. Bush advocated. Romney has taken up the banner of cutting Medicare in order to make room for lower taxes for the rich, and that’s an incredibly unpopular trade-off.
Douthat admits that Romney has made mistakes:
The problem wasn’t just that Romney kept putting his foot in his mouth with comments in the "I like to fire people" vein. It was that even when he wasn’t blundering, he didn’t have clear and fluent answers to entirely predictable questions about Bain Capital’s business practices, his own taxes and investments and other wealth-related subjects. Presumably the Romney camp didn’t expect these kind of questions until the fall campaign, but that’s a poor excuse for a candidate who’s been effectively running for president since 2007.
More on Mitt's weakness here.
Are a growing population:
At the most basic level, poor people living in suburbs face challenges gaining access to services they need, because the municipalities they live in are unaccustomed or even hostile to providing them, or are simply unable to do so. Suburbs, with their thin safety nets, are not well equipped to handle the rising demands for help. Local food pantries in suburbs across the nation are stretched beyond capacity to meet the needs of the new poor. The Parma Heights Food Pantry in Ohio served thirty-six families in 2007 and now must meet the needs of 260 families.
Marty Lederman argues that the legal debate over the healthcare mandate can't be separated from the rest of the healthcare bill:
We did not have a decades-long, contentious national debate about whether to impose a requirement that individuals maintain health insurance. That great debate, and the ACA that Congress enacted, were centrally about how to ensure that all individuals could afford health care and, in particular, how to create a private, market-based insurance mechanism to achieve that objective, one that (like employer plans and Medicare) does not discriminate against individuals based on their medical conditions or history.
As such, the Community Rating and Guaranteed Issue provisions are indeed the central, primary provisions of the Act—as they are in the laws several states have enacted in attempts to accomplish those same ends. What the experience of those states demonstrated, however, particularly in contrast with the Massachusetts experience, is that those core provisions could not work—indeed, they would be counterproductive to the ends the legislature intended—if not accompanied by a requirement to maintain insurance before one develops exorbitantly expensive health care needs. To suggest that Congress enacted the Community Rating and Guaranteed Issue provisions in order to “expand its constitutional authority” to enact section 5000A [ie the health insurance mandate] is therefore a basic cart-before-horse error, a fundamental misunderstanding of the ACA and its history
The secret to Santorum's success and why he has a good shot at winning in Louisiana this Saturday:
Santorum has braided together a powerful coalition of national Evangelical leaders with a committed grassroots army — anti-abortion activists, home-school groups, Tea Partyers, and so on — who are drawn to his faith-laced message. … Throughout the primary, Santorum has collected an outsize share among the Evangelical communities — a fact some observers attribute as much to his competition as to his charisma. "The deep rooted suspicions of Mormonism trump vestigial suspicions of Catholicism," says Randall Balmer, a professor of religious history at Barnard College. Santorum’s favor among this network of pastors — the "grass tops" — has been critical. Their support filters down to the grass roots in communities where churches are the backbone of social interaction.
The Dish 