John Cassidy's Blog, page 101

Obama Poll Dive is Southern Comfort for Mitt

A hotel room in Jackson, Mississippi. Mitt "Bubba" Romney looks in the mirror and practices his southern drawl:

"Howdy Y'all! Great Day in the Mornin'! Think I'll have me some extra cheese grits for breakfast and fried catfish for lunch. Gas is heading for four bucks a gallon, and folks down here are mad as hornets. A few more weeks of this and that silver-tongued Haa-vaahd boy in the White House, well he'll be sweatin' like a hog on the grill…"

In case you didn't hear about it, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, which was released on Monday evening, showed President Obama's approval rating dropping nine points in a month: from fifty per cent to forty-one per cent. During the same period, the President's disapproval rating rose by four points, to forty-seven per cent.

Meanwhile, in Alabama and Mississippi, despite some jibes about his clumsy attempts to portray himself as a good ol' boy, there was more encouraging news for the Mittster. A couple of polls published on Monday suggested that he is still doing surprisingly well—running more or less equal with Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

But first the tumble in Obama's numbers. This is the first time since the beginning of 2012 that his disapproval rating has been higher than his approval rating in the Times/CBS poll. And it is the first time since the start of his Presidency that his approval rating has dropped below forty-three per cent. (See page two in this document outlining the poll results.) That's right. According to this metric, at least, Obama is now less popular than at any point since February 2009.

Could this be a random blip—a product of sampling error? In terms of the scale of the deterioration in Obama's standing, quite possibly it could. The new poll has a margin of error of three points, which means the President's actual approval rating could be anywhere from thirty-eight per cent to forty-four per cent, and his disapproval rating could be anywhere from forty-four per cent to fifty per cent. Clearly, the poll wouldn't have attracted nearly as much attention if it had shown Obama's approval and disapproval ratings running equal, at forty-four percent, which, statistically speaking, could quite possibly be the reality.

But when in it comes to the direction in which the President's popularity is heading—down—the poll is almost certainly reliable. A nine-point fall in the approval rating is well outside the margin of error. Moreover, the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, which was released on Sunday, also showed Obama's approval rating slipping (from fifty per cent a month ago to forty six per cent now) and his disapproval rating rising (from forty-six per cent to fifty per cent).

In the Post/ABC poll, because it has a margin of error of four points, the changes in Obama's standing compared to last month weren't quite statistically significant. (The full results of the poll can be found here.) But when the two surveys are combined, a consistent picture emerges, and it supports the headlines we've been seeing over the past day or so: higher gas prices are starting to bite. According to the Post/ABC survey, just one in four Americans (twenty-six per cent) approves of the way that Obama is handling the situation with gas prices, and two in three voters (sixty-five per cent) disapprove of it.

Anger and frustration over the rising cost of fuel appears to be spilling over into other areas. One might expect Obama's approval rating for handling the economy to have fallen, which it has done in both polls. But the two surveys also show increasing disaffection with the President's handling of foreign policy. In the New York Times/CBS News, poll just forty per cent of respondents said they approved of it, a drop of ten points in a month.

Of course, before Romney can take advantage of this swing in public opinion, he has to nail down the G.O.P. nomination, beginning with recording a strong performance in today's primaries in Alabama and Mississippi, as well as caucuses in Hawaii and American Samoa. As far as the Deep South goes, the picture is still pretty much the same as it was on Sunday, when I wrote my previous post on this topic. The national media is mercilessly lampooning Mitt's efforts to make friendly with the locals. The polling date is favorable. And the whole truth is that nobody has any real idea how the voting is going to turn out.

The research firm Public Policy Polling carried out the two polls that came out on Monday. In P.P.P.'s Alabama survey, the three leading candidates were statistically tied: Romney had thirty-one per cent of the vote, Gingrich had thirty per cent, and Santorum had twenty-nine per cent. In Mississippi, Gingrich was leading Romney by thirty-three per cent to thirty-one per cent, with Santorum on twenty-seven per cent. "About all we know for sure about Tuesday's primaries is that Ron Paul will finish last in them," said Dean Debnam, President of P.P.P. "Beyond that it's plausible that any of the candidates could finish between first and third in both Alabama and Mississippi."

Until I see some actual returns, I will remain skeptical that in either state Romney can record thirty per cent of the vote, something he failed to do in South Carolina, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. The state polls have been wrong before and, as Nate Silver pointed out on Monday, there are particular problems in surveying voters in the Deep South. But you never know. Maybe, just maybe, the Mittster's luck is changing.

Photograph by Win McNamee/Getty Images.

Three Men Out on the Bayou: Will One Fall In?

No big surprises in the primary contests held over the weekend. Rick Santorum's handsome win in Kansas gives him a bit of momentum going into Tuesday's face-offs in Alabama and Mississippi, when another ninety delegates are up for grabs. But Newt Gingrich is also showing signs of life, and at least one new poll suggests that Mitt Romney, widely written off as a WASP interloper, has hopes of pulling off a surprise victory.

In sum, pretty much anything could happen on Tuesday, when caucuses will also be held in Hawaii and American Samoa. Having effectively doomed the Mittster's hopes of wrapping things up on Super Tuesday by predicting a strong showing for him, I'm not going to make a forecast this time. Instead of predictions, here are three possible scenarios, each of which would shake up the race:

1) Santorum Scores TKO over Newt and takes it to Mitt:

Appearing on "Meet the Press" this morning, Santorum was upbeat. Asked if he thought Gingrich should drop out to unify the conservative forces, he said, "You'd have to ask him. We're just going to keep winning, and competing." That's certainly what he did on Saturday in the Kansas caucuses, where he took fifty-one per cent of the vote, defeating Romney by thirty points and Gingrich by thirty-seven.

If Santorum were to triumph in Alabama and Mississippi, he would be well positioned to pick up Missouri next Saturday and then challenge Romney in Illinois on Tuesday, March 20, in what would effectively be a repeat of the Michigan and Ohio contests, but one, possibly, without Gingrich as a factor. Then it would be on to Louisiana four days later, and Maryland, Wisconsin, and Washington, D.C., on April 3. These five contests are all ones Santorum could reasonably hope to win, and between them they have more than two hundred delegates at stake.

But Santorum isn't basing his campaign on arithmetic alone: he's looking for the Big Mo. "This isn't a mathematical formula," he said to David Gregory, dismissing the suggestion that he can't hope to pick up enough delegates to defeat Romney. "The race has a tremendous amount of dynamism." There is some truth in Santorum's words. But for him to have any hope of running the table, he first has to defeat Gingrich handily on Tuesday—an outcome that is by no means assured. A pair of Rasmussen polls published on Friday showed the two conservatives effectively tied in both Alabama and Mississippi.

2) The Triple Lazarus Story: Newt Rises Again

Rather than campaigning in Kansas, where he picked up just fourteen per cent of the vote, Gingrich has been stomping around Alabama and Mississippi promising to make yet another comeback. "I think we'll win both," he told Chris Wallace, on "Fox News Sunday." "I think we're probably pulling ahead in both states."

Especially in Alabama, which is contiguous to his home state of Georgia, there is a bit of evidence to back up the former Speaker's bluster. "Gingrich is coming on strong in Alabama and his numbers are still rising," said Thomas Vocino, director of Alabama State University's Center for Leadership & Public Policy, which released a poll on Friday showing Gingrich tied with Romney and ahead of Santorum. "His support was declining five weeks earlier (according to the center's February poll) and now Gingrich appears to be the comeback candidate, at the expense of Santorum and Romney."

If Gingrich were to win both contests on Tuesday, he would have high hopes of picking up Louisiana a week later. But the decision to move the Texas primary back from the first week of April to the end of May was a big blow to his hopes of staging a resurrection. With the support of Governor Rick Perry, Gingrich was planning to build a case in the Lone Star state that he is more than the Mouth of the South. With the revised schedule, it's not clear, even in a favorable scenario, where he would go after Louisiana.

3) "Morning Y'all": Good Old Boy Mitt Sweeps Mississippi

Despite the widespread mockery that attended his attempts to eat grits and affect a Southern drawl, it's not out of the question. Much of the G.O.P. establishment in the Magnolia State is backing him, including Governor Phil Bryant, who announced his endorsement on Friday, saying he was encouraged by "Governor Romney's conservative policies on key issues like more American energy development, cracking down on illegal immigration, and putting in place job creation policies that will jumpstart our economy."

Friday also brought the Rasmussen Mississippi poll, carried out before Bryant's endorsement, which showed Romney leading Gingrich and Santorum by eight points: he had thirty-five per cent of the vote, they each had twenty-seven per cent. One might suspect this was a rogue poll. Two factors mitigate against that. Since the poll's margin of error was four per cent, Romney's lead was statistically significant. Moreover, Rasmussen's Alabama poll also showed Romney running strongly there: he was statistically tied with Gingrich and Santorum.

A Romney victory in Mississippi, or even a strong second place finish, would provide a big boost to his campaign, and it would be quite a shock. As we all know, the rap on Romney is that he can't appeal to ardent conservatives, downscale blue collar Republicans, and evangelicals. Mississippi has lots of all three. Per capita income is just three-quarters of the national average, and well over half of the Republican electorate consists of born-again Protestants. I have a hard time believing Romney is finally going to make inroads among these types of voters, but we shall see.

Above: Supporters of Santorum listen to a speech in Springfield, Missouri, on Saturday. Photograph by Whitney Curtis/Getty.

Facebook Global Hegemony Extends to TNR

Congratulations to Chris Hughes, the Facebook alum, on taking over The New Republic, the venerable but eternally cash-strapped political magazine that was founded by Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann, and which, over the past thirty years has served as a home and incubator to a galaxy of journalistic talent, including (this in no particular order, so don't whine if your name comes near the end): my colleagues Hendrik Hertzberg, Dorothy Wickenden, Ryan Lizza, David Grann, and Margaret Talbot; Michael Kinsley, Leon Wieseltier, Sid Blumenthal, Margaret Carlson, Charles Krauthammer, Fred Barnes, Bob Kuttner, Mort Kondracke, the late Michael Kelly, Andrew Sullivan, Jacob Weisberg, Timothy Noah, Mickey Kaus, Jeffrey Rosen, Lawrence Kaplan, Peter Beinart, Franklin Foer, Jonathan Cohn, Jonathan Chait, John Judis, Charles Lane, Noam Scheiber, and the late great Henry Fairlie, who at one point, if I am not mistaken, actually lived in the office.

As that list of names indicates, the political contents of TNR have varied quite a bit over the years—from old-school liberal (Hertzberg) to neo-liberal (Weisberg) to neo-con (Krauthammer) to conservative (Sullivan in his pre-Iraq incarnation), but a couple of things have remained constant. The magazine has generally supported the Democratic Party, and it has staunchly backed Israel, pretty much regardless of its policies.

We can rest assured that under Hughes the magazine will vigorously endorse Obama—during the 2008 campaign, he helped run the President's digital efforts. On the subject of Israel, things aren't so clear. Marty Peretz, the longtime owner and major domo, imposed the editorial line, which editors bucked at their peril. Going forward, Peretz's role is a bit unclear. A story in the Washington Post said that he will continue to serve on an advisory board, but the head of that board, Laurence Grafstein, put out a statement that sounded very much like thank you and goodbye:

Of course, as we usher in an exciting new era we take a moment to express our collective gratitude to Martin Peretz, who has been and will continue to be a legendary force in American letters and, more than that, a wonderful friend. Under his guidance TNR has been left more often than right and right more often than wrong. Marty has also been a selfless mentor to generations of leading writers and editors. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.

Hughes himself hasn't indicated any big changes. In a letter to the magazine's readers announcing his new role, he wrote: "The New Republic has been and will remain a journal of progressive values, but it will above all aim to appeal to independent thinkers on the left and the right who search for fresh ideas and a deeper understanding of the challenges our world faces."

If he has any sense, Hughes will try and broaden TNR's appeal by recruiting more women and minorities and oddballs to write for the magazine, and by extending the range of subjects it covers. Over the years, it has often appeared to be run like a political debating club for Ivy League males. That was fine for the smart young men lucky enough to be admitted; to the rest of the population it was a bit off-putting.

Using some of the fortune he acquired by dint of having the good luck to be Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard roommate—in a 2006 piece, I wrote about the early days of Facebook—Hughes will, doubtless, beef up the magazine's online presence, a strategy that has served the National Review well. He may be tempted to move the whole thing online. Unless he wants to spend more of his money, that could be a mistake. About the only revenue that outfits like TNR generate comes from subscriptions, and people remain reluctant to pay for an online magazine.

Taking a broader view, not very much has changed. For decades, magazines like TNR have been subsidized by rich industrialists and financiers. (Peretz's former wife was an heir to the Singer sewing-machine fortune.) Increasingly, the subsidies are coming from Silicon Valley. For every dollar that the new media takes away from the old media with one hand, it gives back a few cents with the other…

Jobs Report Offers Glimmer of Hope to G.O.P.

I've been saying for months now that the improving economy is likely to see Obama reëlected. Today's employment report, which showed February was another month of healthy job growth—payrolls increased by 227,000—doesn't alter my view, but it does contain a hint of much-needed encouragement for Mitt Romney and the Republicans.

Despite the decent payroll figures, which also saw the numbers for January revised up, the unemployment rate held steady at 8.3 per cent last month. This was the first time in sixth months that the rate hadn't fallen, and it suggests that the period of rapid declines may be coming to an end.

Why did the unemployment rate stay the same when employers created more than two hundred thousand jobs last month? More people entered the workforce, leaving the number of people unemployed almost unchanged, at 12.8 million. The "participation rate," which is the proportion of the working-age population that is employed or looking for work, rose from 63.7 to 63.9.

From an overall perspective, this is good news. The fact that more people are entering (or reëntering) the labor force reflects rising confidence about the state of the economy. During the recession, millions of people stopped looking for work: many of them retired early because they didn't think they could find a job. Now, some of these people are once again perusing the help-wanted listings and sending out résumés.

Still, the politics of this jobs report could end up hurting Obama a bit and helping the Republicans. If over the next few months more people reënter the labor force, the unemployment rate is likely to remain stalled, despite the fact that the economy is definitely in better shape than it was six months ago. And if the recent surge in gas prices crimps demand and causes the economy to slow down, the unemployment rate could even go back up a bit.

To the extent that headline figures dominate public perceptions, this is important. Clearly, a situation in which the unemployment rate gets stuck above eight per cent would be much more favorable to the Republicans than one in which it trended down below that symbolically important figure. And even a small uptick in the unemployment rate would allow the G.O.P. candidate to argue that Obama's "Morning in Americia" rhetoric is massively overblown.

In January 2009, the month the President was inaugurated, the unemployment rate stood at 7.8 per cent. At the time, the Obama transition team predicted, in a report written by Christy Romer and Jared Bernstein, that the stimulus would prevent the rate moving above eight per cent. As long as the unemployment rate remains above eight per cent, Republicans will feel like they have some hope. (That the Romer-Bernstein memo was put together at the end of 2008, when the full horror of the recession wasn't yet clear, will inevitably get lost in the debate.)

The White House, of course, will argue that this was another strong report, and that things are still getting better. Objectively speaking it will be right. Since September, the economy has created almost 1.2 million jobs. Over the past three months, job growth has averaged almost 245,000.

These figures come from the Labor Department's survey of firms' payrolls. Its survey of households shows even stronger job growth—428,000 new jobs last month alone, and nearly 3.6 million since this time last year. Most economists regard the payroll survey as more reliable: the sample size is much bigger. But it may be failing to pick up all the jobs being created in the small-business sector and in the black economy.

Still, given all the good economic news over the past few months, the folks at Romney HQ will regard this report as not nearly as damaging to them as it could have been. Setting aside the headlines, two things will be encouraging them:

1. The participation rate could theoretically rise quite a lot further, putting a temporary floor under the unemployment rate. In December 2007, at the beginning of the recession, it stood at 66.0—more than two percentage points above where it is now.

2. The economy still has a long way to go before it could be classed as healthy. As the Economix blog at the Times pointed out this morning, there are still about 4.5 million jobs fewer than there were at the start of the recession. "(A)fter shedding some 8.8 million jobs in about two years, the economy has generated about 3.45 million in the ensuing two years."

I still think the trend is Obama's friend—and that it is likely to be decisive. But this stuff bears watching, especially if the rise in gas prices starts to bite.

Photograph by Scott Eells/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Memo to Mitt: Let Romney Be Romney

Mitt, let's be honest: we've had our ups and downs over the last few months. I wrote all that stuff about your taxes and what you did at Bain Capital. I've poked fun at your hair, your manner of speech, and your economic proposals. But now I've got your best interests at heart, truly.

The last thing I (or most other reporters on the campaign) want is for you to limp in and out of Tampa like a dog with distemper and then get a hellacious shellacking in November. What we want is a decent race—something interesting to write about and justify our expenses. So listen up Mitt, and pass the message to all those folks you've got working for you up in Beantown. If you don't act fast, you're going to be looking in the mirror and seeing John Kerry or Bob Dole staring back at you.

Let's start by looking closely at the product you're selling. That means you: Willard Mitt Romney, b. March 12, 1947. All of the other stuff—policy positioning, messaging, ad strategies, ground game—has it's place, but first and foremost voting for a Presidential candidate involves answering a personal question: Do you like and trust this man enough to choose him as the next President of the United States?

Your basic problem is that when many people look at you they don't see a man at all. To borrow the memorable words of Jon Huntsman, they see "a perfectly lubricated weather vane"—a hollow figure that blows with the wind and has all the spontaneity and heart of a recorded train timetable. That's the reason the attacks on you by Santorum and Gingrich are having such a devastating impact on your favorability ratings.

It isn't that people believe everything they say—as you rightly point out, they are career politicians, after all. It's more that people don't have a strong impression of who you are, of what's at your core. When they see another attack on you they don't have anything to bounce it up against.

In allowing this situation to arise, you are committing the cardinal error of allowing your opponents to define you. I know, I know, you had good reasons for surgically reconstituting yourself like Humphrey Bogart in "Dark Passage." In a party that is increasingly downscale, conservative, and evangelical, you were very rich, very moderate (by G.O.P. standards), and very Mormon. But the price you are now paying for looking like a soulless phony is too high. It's time to let people see some of the real Mitt—and, actually, it isn't all bad.

Yes, you're a prep-school kid turned leveraged-buyout tycoon with about as much grasp of what ordinary people go through as Michael Bloomberg or your new pal Donald Trump. Being rich and out-of-touch hasn't hurt them. Americans admire wealthy and successful people—and they also like the idea of having a leader who's so rich he can't be bought off by the banks, or the unions, or anybody else. That's the key to Bloomberg's success. He's about as warm and cuddly as you are, but New Yorkers think he's a straight shooter—or they did until pretty recently.

Being rich can be an advantage rather than a disadvantage. But you need to show people that you worked for it, in your own way. As a sometime financial writer, I know what it's like to be a young associate at BCG or Bain—the mad hours, the all-nighters, the weekends away from your wife and kids. Most voters don't know anything about it. Tell them. Get your wife and co-workers to talk about all the effort you put it in. Writers like me won't give you any credit for it, but ordinary voters will see it.

Next, make a virtue of being a moderate conservative. At the moment, the public thinks you are pandering to the right-wing nuts. Even the right-wing nuts think that. Let's face it: they aren't going to support you in this primary whatever you do. It's time to start distancing yourself from them and playing to your strength: you've already shown you can scrape to the nomination without them. And after that? What are they going to do? Vote for Obama?

I am not suggesting you appear with George Soros or send a charitable donation to Planned Parenthood. But it's time to portray yourself as what you are: a practical businessman—one with conservative instincts, but one who also believes in deciding individual issues on their merits, without any ideological baggage. That's your calling card for the general election, and it's been ripped.

Don't be so worried about being depicted as a closet liberal. You pay fifteen per cent tax; you've been married to the same women for forty-odd years, you acted as a lay bishop in your local church, and you were cruel to your dog. People aren't going to mistake you for Barney Frank.

On the subject of your Mormonism, it's clearly central to your life. By trying to downplay it, your campaign has contributed to the impression that inside of you there is a big void. If what's really there is a strong set of Mormon ethics, now is the time to start talking about them: the praying, the tithing, the service in the community, the centrality of Jesus Christ, the effort to live seeking out new converts. Yes, you'll alienate a few more evangelicals, but that's a small price to pay for showing some genuine beliefs, and some genuine feeling.

Republicans want to like you. They respect your smarts, and they think you've got the best chance of beating Obama. But even though you've been on the trail for almost a year, for almost six years really, they still don't think they know who you are. That's the danger and the opportunity you face.

Mitt: it's time to tell them the truth. Let Romney be Romney.

Photograph by Lauren Lancaster.

G.O.P. to Mitt: We Still Don't Really Like You

Growing up in Leeds, West Yorkshire during the nineteen-seventies, I used to dread any of my school friends discovering my date of birth. The custom at my school, and many others like it, was to make birthday boys go "through the mill." At recess, all the other boys in the class would line up in two rows facing each other. The unfortunate celebrant would be forced to run between the two rows while being punched, kicked, elbowed, kneed, and subjected to verbal taunts. If he made it to the other end without curling up into a ball or breaking into tears, he would be rewarded with a little ironic cheer.

Something makes me doubt that Mitt Romney ever went through the mill at Cranbrook Schools, the élite academy he attended in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. But he now must know what it feels like. Every time it looks as if it's his big night, and he's about to establish himself unequivocally as the face of the G.O.P. in 2012, the Party's foot soldiers inflict more punishment on his patrician form.

So much for the theory I rehearsed yesterday that Romney might effectively wrap it all up on Super Tuesday. At about ten-thirty last night, I was thinking of taking the Delta shuttle up to Logan this morning and throwing myself into Boston Harbor along with Mitt, who, at that stage, was still about seven thousand votes behind in Ohio. With Santorum having already picked up victories in Oklahoma and Tennessee, it was looking like South Carolina and Colorado all over again for America's least favorite leveraged-buyout tycoon. The only places he had won were his own state of Massachusetts; Virginia, where his sole competition was Ron Paul; and Vermont, where his victory margin appeared to be smaller than expected.

On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, Al Sharpton et al., could hardly hide their smirks. The filmmaker Michael Moore didn't even try to. "What does it say about Romney that he can't even beat the guy who couldn't file the papers," he asked, referring to Santorum's failure to get on the ballot in Virginia and complete all the necessary forms in Ohio. "This is the biggest clown show." Over on CNN, Paul Begala, an equally objective judge, opined: "He's just not very good at this. He's just not a very good politician."

The late surge in Romney votes in the suburban precincts around Cleveland and Cincinnati saved me an airfare, and saved Romney a lot more than that. But nobody outside the battalion of consultants, fixers, and flacks who are on the former Bainie's payroll could say that Super Tuesday turned out to be anything like the knockout blow he had been hoping to land on his opponents.

Yes, when the final tallies are in, Romney will have accumulated more delegates than anybody else—about two hundred and thirty, according to the Wall Street Journal—and his slow but remorseless march to the nomination will still be on track. That is what Romney was referring to in his distinctly lackluster victory speech, when he said, "Tomorrow, we wake up and we start again." Unless Newt Gingrich drops out quickly and endorses Santorum—not much chance of that: see below—it remains virtually impossible to see how Mitt can be denied the nomination. But, oh, what a painful victory march it is turning into.

The first inklings that it was going to be a long night came early. Fifteen minutes after the polls closed in the east, the networks hadn't called Virginia and Vermont for Romney. He ended up with generous victory margins in both of these states—twenty per cent in Virginia, fifteen per cent in Vermont—but not the landslides he might have hoped for. (Later in the evening, he would go on to score huge victories in Massachusetts and Idaho.) Based on exit polls, the only state the networks were able to call immediately was Georgia, where the local hero Newt Gingrich had won big.

Then came news Santorum had triumphed easily in Oklahoma, and also in Tennessee, where recent polls had showed a competitive race. Combined with the news from Georgia, this confirmed what has been evident for a while: Romney has a big problem in the South, and it is related to his Mormonism. In Tennessee, which is hardly a hick state, an exit poll showed that more than three in four voters said the candidate's religious beliefs mattered to them a great deal or somewhat, and in this group Santorum defeated Romney by almost two-to-one: forty-five per cent to twenty-three per cent. In Oklahoma, almost half of the voters were evangelicals, and Romney trailed Santorum in this group by seventeen points: forty-seven per cent to thirty per cent.

If the chicken marsala dinner that Romney was meant to be enjoying at his son Tagg's home to celebrate his return to Beantown wasn't tasting very good, worse was to come. Who should appear next but Newt Gingrich, from his victory party in Atlanta, railing against "the forces of Wall Street"? With Callista by his side, as ever, old block head reminded everybody of the grave injustice inflicted on him in Florida, saying: "It's one thing to have lots of money. It's another to use that money to lie."

Actually, as things turned out, Gingrich's victory in Georgia was the second best thing that happened to Romney last night. When Newt announced, "In the morning, we are going onto Alabama. We are going on to Mississippi. We are going on to Kansas," you could almost hear the glasses clinking at Romney HQ. For now, at least, their man would retain the advantage of having a divided opposition. If Newt is going to be persuaded to drop out in the interests of uniting the conservative forces, it is probably going to have to involve sedation—or, at the very least, an edict from Shelly Adelson.

Santorum spoke from Steubenville, a small city in southeastern Ohio, near his native Pennsylvania. He delivered his usual blather about how the United States was under grave threat from enemies within—Obama and the Democrats. At one point, he went so far as to compare this election to the Second World War, saying, "It is a different battle, but no less of a battle for the basic liberties on which this country is founded." Standing on a packed stage with him were his wife, his ninety-three-year-old mother, six of his seven kids, and many other members of his his extended clan, one of whom has ten brothers and sisters, he said. At last, we knew what sort of place America would be if Santorum's aversion to contraception became official policy: a very crowded one.

Now all eyes were on the Buckeye State, where the early returns showed Santorum leading by more than fifteen thousand votes. The exit poll showed why. He was running ahead of Romney in the following groups: voters under the age of fifty, voters without a college degree, voters who earn less than a hundred thousand dollars a year, independent voters, Tea Party supporters, and evangelical Christians. That is quite a list. As Romney is discovering, even in the G.O.P. it is pretty difficult to lock up the Presidential nomination when the only voters you can rely on are rich, educated, older people—i.e. folks pretty much like Mitt and his pals!

Karl Rove, at least, still has his back. As midnight came around and Romney's vote tally in Ohio finally edged ahead of Santorum's, the Republican svengali said on Fox News, "A win is a win is a win." That, certainly, is true. But this was a win in which Romney outspent Santorum by five or six to one, and in which his campaign machine rolled out everybody from Donald Trump to Eric Cantor to carry him over the finish line.

Meanwhile in largely forgotten North Dakota, where Romney didn't have this sort of effort behind him, but where he had won in 2008, Santorum defeated him by sixteen points. To be sure, as the last pundits called it a night, Romney appeared to be heading for a win over Ron Paul in Alaska, to bring his victory tally for the night to six. But that might be his last win for a while. The next four mainland states to vote are Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, and Missouri—precisely the sort of heartland and southern states where the front-runner has struggled.

For Romney, it seems, the pain of success is never-ending.

Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

Mitt's Super Tuesday: Could He Wrap Things Up?

For weeks now, I and many others have been saying that the results of Super Tuesday won't be decisive—that the bruising G.O.P. nomination battle is likely to drag on into May or June, and maybe even until the convention, in August.

On the eve of the voting in ten states, with four hundred and thirty-seven delegates at stake, an alternative scenario is looming—one that's much more favorable to Mitt Romney. With Rick Santorum's support seemingly falling away in many places, following his defeat in Michigan and a barrage of negative publicity about his religious views, it is now quite conceivable that Romney could do well enough for the Republican Party panjandrums, desperate to put an end to the internecine warfare, to hail him as the nominee-elect.

If this does happen, the primaries in other states will continue, of course; and Romney will take some quite some time to reach the threshold of more than eleven hundred delegates that he needs to formally assure himself of the nomination. All of tomorrow's states allocate delegates on a proportional basis, which means that nobody can establish an insurmountable lead. But with the eventual result beyond doubt, much of the rancor and media interest would go out of the race. The focus of the story would switch from "Romney versus Santorum" to "Romney versus Obama," which is where the Mittster and the Republican National Committee have wanted it placed from the beginning.

With a lot of new polling data released over the past forty-eight hours, the outlook for tomorrow is becoming clearer. In four states, Romney is virtually certain to record the biggest voting share: Idaho (heavy Mormon presence), Massachusetts (home state), Vermont (moderate state), and Virginia (Santorum and Gingrich aren't even on the ballot). Romney is also favored to win Alaska and North Dakota, both of which he took in 2008, although no recent polling has been carried out in either of those states. Conversely, he has little chance of winning Georgia, where home-town boy Newt Gingrich continues to hold a big lead.

The battleground states are Ohio and, surprisingly enough, Tennessee and Oklahoma. Only a week ago, Romney was trailing in all three. But, following his victory in Michigan and Arizona, the polls started turning in his favor, and against Santorum. A weekend victory in Washington State maintained Romney's momentum, and Santorum doesn't have the money or the organization to do much about it.

Let's assume the Mittster wins all six states he is favored in: Alaska, Idaho, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Vermont, and Virginia. If he scores a big comeback victory in Ohio and also manages to pick up a surprise win in Oklahoma or Tennessee, he will be well placed to declare the national contest virtually over. If he's somehow able to win all three of these states, it will really be knockout blow.

In terms of the media narrative, much depends on Ohio, where the latest polls show a tight race. But Romney appears to have the momentum. For example, a week ago, a Quinnipiac poll showed him trailing Santorum by seven points: twenty-nine per cent to thirty-six per cent. Today, the same organization released a new poll, which has Romney ahead by three points: thirty-four per cent to thirty-one per cent. "Just as he did in Florida and Michigan, Romney has erased a sizable deficit a week before the primary to grab the momentum in the final 24 hours," said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

In Tennessee, too, things seem to be moving in Romney's favor. Until recently, he was badly behind there. Two polls taken before last week's primaries in Michigan and Arizona showed Santorum up by close to twenty points. A new survey from We Ask America, which was published on Monday, actually has Romney leading Santorum by a point—thirty to twenty-nine—a statistical tie. Another new survey, this one from Public Policy Polling, has Santorum retaining a five-point lead—thirty-four to twenty-nine—but it also shows late deciders breaking in Romney's favor.

If Romney wins Tennessee, where roughly two-thirds of the voters are evangelicals, it will be a big shock—and a huge fillip for his campaign. Even if he runs Santorum close there, it will be a very good result for him—and more than enough for the G.O.P. establishment to declare him sufficiently acceptable to conservatives.

Oklahoma, for decades a bastion of conservatism, remains Santorum's best hope of a win in the South. (That's where the Census Bureau places it.) On Sunday, he jokingly adopted it as his Super Tuesday home state. A poll from American Research Group carried out late last week showed him retaining a healthy eleven-point lead over Romney among Oklahoma Republicans: thirty-seven per cent to twenty six per cent. But, over the weekend, Senator Tom Coburn, a conservative stalwart and opponent of gay marriage, endorsed Romney. It seems unlikely that a single endorsement could cost Santorum the state, but we'll see.

A week ago, a Santorum loss in either Tennessee or Oklahoma seemed unthinkable. That such possibilities are even being discussed shows how far things have moved in Romney's favor. It's not just the polls, and it's not that social conservatives have suddenly shed their suspicions of Romney. But there seems to be general feeling in the G.O.P., certainly in its upper reaches, that it's time to call a halt to the circular firing squad. When the voting starts tomorrow, it looks like Romney will be the beneficiary of that calculation.

Illustration by Bob Staake.

What About Israel's Nukes?

In case you'd forgotten about them—and that wouldn't be hard, given how seldom their existence is mentioned in public debates—Israel has perhaps a hundred nuclear weapons, maybe even a few times more than that, and it has the capacity to launch them from underground silos, submarines, and F-16 fighter bombers.

Outside of the Israeli defense ministry, very few people know precisely how many nuclear-armed missiles the country has. According to a non-classified 1999 estimate from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, which was cited in a 2007 bulletin from the Federation of American Scientists, Israel had between sixty and eighty nuclear warheads. More recent estimates say the figure is considerably higher.

The London-based Institute of Strategic Studies says Israel has "up to 200" warheads loaded on land-based Jericho 1 and Jericho 2 short- and medium-range missiles. Jane's, the defense-information company, estimates that the over-all number of warheads is between a hundred and three hundred, which puts the Israeli nuclear arsenal roughly on a par with the British and French capabilities. And some of these warheads are widely believed to have been loaded onto the new Jericho 3 intercontinental ballistic missile, which has a range of up to four thousand five hundred miles—meaning it could theoretically strike targets in Europe and Asia.

Ever since the 1960s, when Israel constructed its first nuke, successive governments have refused to acknowledge the existence of its weapons program—an official stance known by the Hebrew word for opacity, amimut. And it isn't just a matter of non-acknowledgement. Israelis who reveal details about the weapons program can face prosecution and lengthy prison terms. In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, a former nuclear technician, gave photographs he had taken of the Negev Nuclear Research Center, near the city of Dimona, in the Negev desert, to the Sunday Times of London. After the publication of Vanunu's story, Mossad agents snatched him from Rome, where he had been lured on vacation, and returned him to Israel. There he served eighteen years in jail, eleven of them in solitary confinement.

Avner Cohen, the Israeli-American historian who, in 1998, published a scholarly history of the Israeli nuclear program, "Israel and the Bomb," didn't meet that same fate. But when he returned to Israel in 2001, for an academic conference, he was subjected to fifty hours of questioning by the security arm of the Ministry of Defense about his sources and his motives in writing the book. And in 2002, Yitzhak Yaakov, a former head of the Israel Defense Force's weapons-research program, received a suspended sentence of two years after writing his memoir. "This entire thing is a nightmare for me," Yaakov said, during his trial. "I wake up in the morning and remember that I was interrogated for espionage. I was told that I was worse than Vanunu and my wife is Mata Hari."

Now that Israel is threatening to bomb Iran's undeclared nuclear research program—a program that the American intelligence services don't believe to have progressed to the stage of attempting to construct actual warheads, according to the Times—the pretence continues. Take this 2010 interview in The Atlantic with Benjamin Netanyahu, by my former colleague Jeffrey Goldberg:

Netanyahu would not frame the issue in terms of nuclear parity—the Israeli policy of amimut, or opacity, prohibits acknowledging the existence of the country's nuclear arsenal, which consists of more than 100 weapons, mainly two-stage thermonuclear devices, capable of being delivered by missile, fighter-bomber, or submarine (two of which are said by intelligence sources to be currently positioned in the Persian Gulf). Instead, he framed the Iranian program as a threat not only to Israel but to all of Western civilization.

It is, of course, up to the government of Israel to formulate its policies based upon its view of the country's self-interest. And, surely, the United States must do the same thing. In his speech to AIPAC yesterday, President Obama said this:

A nuclear-armed Iran is completely counter to Israel's security interests. But it is also counter to the national-security interests of the United States. A nuclear-armed Iran would thoroughly undermine the nonproliferation regime that we've done so much to build. There are risks that an Iranian nuclear weapon could fall into the hands of a terrorist organization. It is almost certain that others in the region would feel compelled to get their own nuclear weapon, triggering an arms race in one of the world's most volatile regions.

In what was a lengthy speech, there was no mention of Israel's nuclear weapons, or of its long-standing refusal to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Has any American president publicly acknowledged these facts? In his latest book, "The Worse Kept Secret: Israel's Bargain with the Bomb," Avner Cohen refers to a meeting in September, 1969, between President Richard Nixon and Golda Meir about Israel's clandestine nukes.

No written record of or oral testimony about what transpired at this meeting is known to have survived, so what the leaders discussed remains shrouded in mystery. In retrospect, we can say that it was at this meeting that amimut as strategic posture mutually supported by Israel and the United States came into being. The Nixon-Meir meeting is the birthplace of the bargain.

At a time when the Israeli lobby in this country, with the coöperation of the Republican candidates, is exerting pressure on the United States to support Netanyahu's hard line on Iran, it might be time to revisit this bargain. It wouldn't necessarily change much. The regime in Tehran is a deeply unpleasant one, and many of our other allies, including Britain, France, and Saudi Arabia, are also determined to prevent it from joining the nuclear club. But publicly acknowledging what everybody already knows about Israel—that it's one of the world's nuclear powers—would make the United States less vulnerable to the charge of double standards.

The Newt Factor: Will He Quit and Back Santorum?

Newt Gingrich—remember him? Southern crooner. Fat boy. Head shaped like a cardboard box. Bit of a ladies man. He was all over the charts in the nineties and made a successful comeback a few months ago with "The Massachusetts Moderate," but then tanked with his followup, "Meet Me in Jacksonville." Well, next week his label, Adelson Beats, is putting out a new track. Actually, it's a remake of an old song that Ray Charles and others recorded: "Georgia on My Mind."

As recently as six weeks ago, Newt was the frontrunner. Now he has dropped out of sight and retreated to his home state, where he will make what could be a final stand on Tuesday. His hopes of staging another grand comeback, which would see him sweeping through the South, have now receded. Recent polls suggest Rick Santorum, his rival for the not-Romney spot, is trouncing him in Oklahoma and Tennessee, which both vote on Tuesday. For example, a survey of Republicans in the Volunteer State, carried out by Middle Tennessee State University and published on Wednesday, showed Santorum with forty per cent of the vote, Romney with nineteen per cent, and Gingrich with just thirteen per cent.

Only in Georgia is Newt still ahead—a SurveyUSA poll earlier this week showed him with a fifteen-point lead over Santorum and a sixteen-point lead over Romney. Hence his decision to camp out in Georgia for most of this week, hoping to cement his position there. "Let me just be clear: I have to win Georgia, I think, to be credible in the race," he said at a business breakfast in Atlanta a couple of days ago. "If I win Georgia, the following week we go to Alabama and Mississippi. I think I'll win both of those. And we have a good opportunity to win Kansas."

It isn't inconceivable that this scenario will come to pass. Even if it did, Newt would still have virtually no chance of becoming the G.O.P. nominee. As of now, he has twenty-nine delegates. Were he to win Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Kansas, the maximum possible number of delegates he would have is two hundred and thirty-five. And as a practical matter, achieving that total is out of the question: all four of the states he is targeting allocate delegates proportionally. If Newt were to win, say, forty per cent of the vote in each of them, which would be a very strong performance, he would end up with perhaps a hundred and twenty-five delegates. To win the nomination, a candidate needs to accumulate more than eleven hundred. (To be precise, he needs eleven hundred and forty-four.)

Which raises the question: What is Newt really trying to achieve?

If his goal is to raise his public profile and insure a profitable future for himself as a public speaker, consultant, and conservative philosopher-in-chief, it might make sense to take his campaign as far as it can go. If more national television debates take place, which seems quite likely, he will have more opportunities to display his wit and learning. As long as he can keep his petulance in check—something he failed to do in Florida—that is all to the benefit of Newt Inc.

But what if, as many G.O.P. operatives suspect, Newt's true ambition is to inflict mortal damage on Romney, the man who, in his mind, denied him the opportunity to be President? Wouldn't it then be in his interest to call off his campaign pretty soon and throw his support behind Santorum?

As long as Newt stays in the race, he is splitting the conservative vote and helping Romney to win the nomination with a plurality rather than a majority of the G.O.P. supporting him. In Michigan, where Gingrich didn't even campaign, he got sixty-five thousand votes, which was six and a half per cent of the total cast. If even half of those people had pulled the lever for Santorum, and the rest had voted for Ron Paul or stayed at home, Santorum would have won.

Similar logic applies in many other states. In Ohio, for example, Santorum is up by four points in a new Quinnipiac poll, which means the race is very close. But according to this poll, Gingrich still has seventeen per cent of Ohio Republicans behind him. If he dropped out, it's probably fair to assume that most of these people would switch to Santorum, who would then be home free.

As of today, there is no sign of Newt abandoning the race over the weekend. But if he gets crushed everywhere except Georgia on Tuesday, he will have to sit down with Callista and with Sheldon Adelson and reconsider his options. And one of those options, surely, must be calling it quits and swinging his support behind Santorum.

Woe Is Mitt: Contraception, Tolstoy, and Taxes

Right about now, Mitt Romney must be wondering why he got himself into this darn race. After winning in Michigan and Arizona on Tuesday, he might justifiably have expected to get a bit of a break from the carping about his campaign by pundits and fellow Republicans.

Not a chance.

On Wednesday, he was moved to reverse himself after off-handedly suggesting, in a radio interview, that he might not support a wacko Senate amendment that could limit the availability of contraception through health-care plans. In a party grounded in empirical reality, Romney's statement that he wouldn't support Senator Roy Blunt's measure, which, in any case, was voted down Thursday, would have been taken as a positive: the American public overwhelmingly supports the practice of insurers paying for contraception. But many Republicans no longer dwell in the everyday world. They inhabit an alternative universe of right-wing talk-radio hosts, evangelical preachers, and radical Presidents intent on foisting their secular values upon God-fearing Americans. Hence Romney's embarrassing U-turn, in which he protested that he had misunderstood the question.

Thursday brought news of another potential snub to the Bible-bashers and social conservatives, this one on the part of Romney's wife of forty-three years, Ann. On Pinterest, a social-media site popular with women that she joined last week, Mrs. Romney listed "Anna Karenina" as one of her favorite books. Shock! Horror! Probe! For anybody but a Republican Presidential candidate, this, too, would have been something to celebrate: Ann Romney is evidently a reader of discernment and sophistication. But the image of a would-be First Lady curling up with Tolstoy's epic tale of extramarital love was more than some online pundits could resist. "Mitt Romney's devoted wife—Mormon convert, mother of five, would-be first lady of the United States—champions a chronicle of … an open marriage?" Virginia Heffernan, a columnist at Yahoo! News, asked. When Heffernan asked Zac Moffatt, the digital director of the Romney campaign, about the addition of "Anna Karenina," he said, "That, I can't speak to."

Finally, there is now quasi-official confirmation that Romney's revamped tax-cutting plan, which he unveiled to a nearly empty football stadium last week, could well amount to yet another Republican giveaway to the rich.

The non-partisan Tax Policy Center, in an update released today, concluded that under the parts of Romney's plan that he has spelled out people in the top ten per cent by income distribution would gain, in dollar terms, more than thirteen times as much as middle-income Americans. For those in the top one per cent, the gains would be more than a hundred times as large. Expressed as a percentage of pre-tax income, the divergence in outcomes is less dramatic, but the Romney proposals still appear highly regressive.

The key table in the report takes into account Romney's proposals to slash all income tax rates by a fifth, to further reduce taxes on investment income, and to abolish the alternative minimum tax and the estate tax. If these suggestions were enacted, the typical middle-income household would see its taxes reduced by $2,054 (4.4 per cent). Households in the top quintile would get a tax cut of $26,845 (12.6 per cent). Households in the top one per cent would get a tax cut of $231,971 (18.5 per cent). For those lucky few in the top 0.1 percent, the Romney tax cut would come to $1,124,318 (21.7 per cent).

A couple of significant qualifications should be stated. Firstly, these calculations assume that the Bush tax cuts expire as planned in 2013. In an alternative exercise, The Tax Policy Center assumed that current policies, including the Bush tax cuts, remain in effect. Under this scenario, the gains for the rich would be a bit smaller, but so would the gains for the middle class: households in the top quintile of the income distribution would see their after-tax incomes jump $16,134 (7.2 per cent); households in the middle quintile would enjoy a gain of just $810 (1.2 per cent).

Secondly, and more importantly, these calculations don't include the impact of broadening the tax base by limiting or eliminating tax shelters, such as the deductions for mortgage interest and certain forms of investment, which is something Romney has talked about. This type of change would most likely hit the rich hardest, and so would mitigate the distributional affects of his income-tax proposals.

But since Romney hasn't released any details of which tax shelters he would target, and where the burden would fall, analysts such as those at the Tax Policy Center are unable to include them in their analyses. As a result, the plan looks like more of a giveaway to the rich than it would most probably amount to in practice. Conceivably, the plan could even end up being fairly neutral on a distribution basis. For that to happen, though, a Romney Administration would really have to take the axe to tax shelters favored by the rich. In the words of the Tax Policy Center, "These estimates provide a guide as to how much the base broadening would need to raise taxes in different income groups to achieve the plan's targets."

Until Romney details exactly how he intends to mitigate the highly regressive aspects of his plan, he can expect to see more headlines about it being another huge sop to the rich.

Which is just another one of Mitt's woes…