By the time the interview had finished, Chris Matthews had done his best black mamba impersonation and Newt Gingrich had, in the course of explaining his support for the Republican nominee, called Mitt Romney a liar. There was a debate over the legacy of Eisenhower, a discussion of George Washington's wealth, and a sincere heart-to-heart about reptiles. It was, without a doubt, the most compelling political television in recent memory, though that is a notably low bar. Take this exchange:

MATTHEWS, pivoting from a veepstakes discussion of Sen. John Thune: OK, last question, animals. Because you and I -- in a different way, maybe -- share a tremendous interest in animals .... What's you and animals about?

GINGRICH: I love the natural world. I love animals, whether they're out in the wild, I love animals in zoos, I love paleontology --

MATTHEWS, interrupting: OK, we're going to make news now. Best zoo in the country?

GINGRICH, without hesitation, looking deadly serious: Oh, San Diego.

MATTHEWS: For big animals, all kinds of animals?

GINGRICH: If you take the wild animal park and the -- it's just huge.

MATTHEWS: OK, best animal, favorite animal to go watch?

GINGRICH, looking sincerely conflicted: Favorite animal to watch? Uh, hard to say. Maybe elephants.

MATTHEWS, avidly: Me too, me too. I'm with elephants.

GINGRICH: They're just remarkable.

MATTHEWS: Listen, you like the reptile house? Why do you like the reptile house? Most people are afraid of them.

GINGRICH: They're astonishingly successful. They do it in a totally different way than we do. And they've been successful for a very long time.

MATTHEWS, impatiently: OK, favorite snake.

GINGRICH: Uh, probably a python.

MATTHEWS: Why? It's a constrictor, right?

GINGRICH: It's big and passive. It sits there.

The whole interview was like that: two battle-weary political veterans, grown men of indiscriminate, childish enthusiasm and boundless ego, enjoying themselves -- and the spectacle of themselves -- immensely. In Matthews' instinctive, emotional, hectoring style, Gingrich -- the man who never met an idea too grandiose -- seemed finally to have met his match.

As a tryout for Gingrich in his new role as Romney supporter, the interview was somewhat rocky. Gingrich said he respected Romney for having beat him: "You have somebody who's tough enough to look you in the eye and run over you," he said.

"Did he tell the truth about you?" Matthews asked.

"No," Gingrich replied. "But he did what he had to do."

As a recommendation of Romney, it was far from ringing -- but refreshingly honest. Later, Gingrich described himself as "a team player," with a big, can't-touch-this grin.

"HAH!" barked Matthews, emitting his signature one-note guffaw. "You know, when you smile, I know what you are." Gingrich just grinned even wider.

Even in a golden age for absurd ads, Jeff Barth has managed to shine.

Barth is running for the Democratic nomination to run against Tea Party star Rep. Kristi Noem in South Dakota. Remember the fantastic video promoting Dale Peterson's run for Alabama agriculture commissioner? Now, imagine a parody ad that's four times as long, has lower quality video and higher quality props, and features an Kerouaquian, On the Road-style narrative: stream of consciousness, chronological, possibly fueled by an altered mental state.

Here are a few of the best lines from Barth's ad, which is just begging for a rap remix:

• "I lived in Gemany before they built the Berlin Wall, I lived in Germany when they built the Berlin Wall."
• "I learned chess in Iceland."
• "I bicycled a thousand miles through Great Britain with my church youth group."
• "I've ridden an ostrich, I've done a lot of stuff."
• "Our daughters ... both have straight teeth, college degees, husbands..."
• "I was state chess champion in 1993."

H/t Taegan Goddard.

Byron Tau at Politico posted an interesting piece yesterday about how President Obama's views on gay rights evolved after "meeting people like Judy Shepard," mother of Matthew Shepard, the young gay man who was brutally murdered in Laramie, Wyoming, in October 1998 in a case that drew international attention. Looking to buttress his recent announcement supporting same-sex marriage, the president mentioned Shepard in a campaign video. The president said:

Meeting people like Judy Shepard, and not only hearing the heartbreaking tragedy of Matthew but also the strength and determination she brought to make sure that never happens to young people anywhere in the country again ... those stories made me passionate about the issue.

The president and the remarkable woman met in 2009, just as the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was becoming law. That federal statute came about largely because Shepard and her husband, Dennis, relentlessly promoted its passage, year after year, often in the face of scornful Republican opposition. The legislation was first introduced in 2001. It died in the 107th, 108th, 109th, and 110th Congresses before finally passing through a Democrat-controlled House and Senate.

What President George W. Bush had consistently refused to do on gay rights Obama quickly did. So it's natural and unsurprising that the president today would specifically mention Judy Shepard. She has been a tireless tribune for tolerance -- a worthy symbol of what America has done well since 1998 to combat anti-gay prejudice and violence. Her story, that of a grieving parent trying to bring some good to something so bad, is a universal one; heartbreaking and ennobling at the same time.

But I was just as interested in the impact the president's remarks had upon Judy Shepard as I was in the impact Shepard has had upon the president. What does it feel like when a president declares publicly that he's been moved by your story? What goes through your mind when you realize that your family's tragedy has helped change American law and policy? On Wednesday, I asked those questions of Shepard, who founded and still runs the important Matthew Shepard Foundation. She replied via email:

I am humbled and grateful that something good has come from losing Matt. But it wasn't this one incident or just our story that changed things. It was many people and other unfortunate incidents. If it was Matt's story that resonated, I'm gratified something came from it. In my thoughts and prayers, I thank President Obama everyday for his compassion and empathy for all Americans.

She explained:

I think the basic notion of 'telling your story' to educate the public at large helped the president come to his understanding of what 'love' is. Hearing the stories of LBGT friends and colleagues in regard to the inequities facing them in their everyday lives has had an impact on the president's views. The more anyone knows about the situations facing the LBGT community the more they understand about the inequality and legal discrimination and the more they want to help set things right. Matthew's story opened the eyes of folks in both the gay and straight world in regard to the violence and hatred facing members of the LGBT community.

I also asked her what she believes has changed (and what has not) since her son was savagely attacked, tied to a fence, and left to die on a cold, windswept prairie. She responded: "The changes are both subtle and obvious. The polls show a much broader acceptance of the gay community, but I see it every day as I travel around the country. The way we talk about the issues facing the LGBT community is much kinder and more understanding of perception and language..."

Judy and Dennis Shepard told Matthew's tragic story. Over and over again. To anyone and to everyone who would listen. Until someone, until the president, did. This is how social change occurs. This is how hearts and minds are changed. This is how the law "evolves." And this is why the gay and lesbian community, and everyone else who supports it and opposes hatred and ignorance and prejudice of the sort that murdered Matthew, has cause to believe that the worst is over. The proof is right there on the campaign video for all the world to see: From bad things good things one day come.

Corruption is hot these days. A verdict in the John Edwards case is expected imminently. A top aide to D.C Mayor Vince Gray faces jail time for obstructing justice, while a former Washington City Council member was just sentenced to three years in prison for stealing from youth programs. Ohio Senate candidate Josh Mandel has returned $150,000 in donations after reports that they may have come from questionable practices. And in a boon to crooks across the Land of Lincoln, Patrick Fitzgerald, U.S. attorney in Illinois and scourge of the corrupt, announced on Wednesday he's stepping down.

Of course, it's not as if corruption ever went out of style. This infographic from Good and Column Five does a great job of visualizing the worst states for corruption since 1976. There aren't many surprises: commensurate with the examples above, D.C. tops the list, and Illinois and Ohio make appearances too. What's amazing is just how much more corrupt the nation's capital is than any other jurisdiction -- even famously, laughably crooked Louisiana -- when measured per capita. To be sure, it's not a totally fair metric: There's simply more government per capita in Washington than anywhere else.

Check out a larger version of this infographic, with some additional info, over at Good.

]]>http://Theatlantic.feedsportal.com/c/34375/f/625835/s/1fade14d/l/0L0Stheatlantic0N0Cpolitics0Carchive0C20A120C0A50Cchart0Eof0Ethe0Eday0Ewhere0Edoes0Ecorruption0Elive0Ein0Eamerica0C2576490C/story01.htmhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AtlanticPoliticsChannel/~3/FS3q2fhNy8U/story01.htmVia Dave Weigel, some welcome news out of Maryland:57% of Maryland voters say they're likely to…<img width='1' height='1' src='http://Theatlantic.feedsportal.com/c/34375/f/625835/s/1fad3745/mf.gif' border='0'/><br/><br/><a href="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/134204900459/u/49/f/625835/c/34375/s/1fad3745/a2.htm"><img src="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/134204900459/u/49/f/625835/c/34375/s/1fad3745/a2.img" border="0"/></a><img width="1" height="1" src="http://pi.feedsportal.com/r/134204900459/u/49/f/625835/c/34375/s/1fad3745/a2t.img" border="0"/>Thu, 24 May 2012 17:31:35 GMTtag:theatlantic.com,2012-05-24:mt-257646PoliticsTa-Nehisi CoatesDave Weigel, some welcome news out of Maryland:

57% of Maryland voters say they're likely to vote for the new marriage law this fall, compared to only 37% who are opposed. That 20 point margin of passage represents a 12 point shift from an identical PPP survey in early March, which found it ahead by a closer 52/44 margin. 

The movement over the last two months can be explained almost entirely by a major shift in opinion about same-sex marriage among black voters. Previously 56% said they would vote against the new law with only 39% planning to uphold it. Those numbers have now almost completely flipped, with 55% of African Americans planning to vote for the law and only 36% now opposed. 

The big shift in attitudes toward same-sex marriage among black voters in Maryland is reflective of what's happening nationally right now. A new ABC/Washington Post poll finds 59% of African Americans across the country supportive of same-sex marriage. A PPP poll in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania last weekend found a shift of 19 points in favor of same-sex marriage among black voters.

[Reverend Emmett C]. Burns enjoyed the first spasms of repeal campaign coverage. He went on CNN and promised not to vote for Obama -- he was just so angry about the gay marriage "evolution." Less than a week later, he told National Review that he'd evolved. He'd back Obama anyway. It's not that easy to stake a position against the president and try to hold on to the black vote.

There are two other states where similar things could take place. Washington will likely be voting on whether to uphold that state's legislation granting marriage equality, and voters in Maine look like they'll be enacting marriage equality.

Mitt Romney, it turns out, has a core after all.

You may remember that for months -- dating back to October -- President Obama's most persistent criticism of Romney has been that he has no core. Chief strategist David Axelrod said it first, followed by senior White House adviser and 2008 Obama campaign manager David Plouffe.

"You look at issue after issue after issue, he's moved all over the place," Plouffe said of Romney on NBC's Meet the Press. "You need to have a true compass. And you've got to be willing to make tough calls."

The "no core" line of attack worked about as well as the "right-wing ideologue" criticism that cropped up earlier this year, which is to say not at all. Since it became clear that Romney would be the GOP standard-bearer, he has rallied the support of 90 percent (Gallup) or 91 percent (CBS News/New York Times) of Republican voters. In the first month that he was able to raise money for the general-election campaign and the Republican National Committee, Romney took in $40.1 million, just under Obama and the DNC's $43.6 million April haul. Romney has tightened up the yawning poll deficits he was facing among independents and women. The race is now a dead heat.

That has led the Obama campaign to discover a new Romney they somehow missed -- a rapacious capitalist. Romney's Bain Capital, according to Team Obama, is a prism through which to view the decisions Romney would make as president.

This is not where Obama thought he would find himself: making a general-election argument in late May. But he also knows he has no choice.

With Europe's financial system on the brink and the U.S. economy still fragile, attacking Romney on the central premise of his campaign -- that he can use his business experience to turn around the U.S. economy -- is a tactic with some appeal. In an election that will be defined by economics, Romney's perceived strength is Obama's biggest weakness. That means Obama has no time to waste. He can't wait for October; he must drive down confidence in Romney's ability to handle the economy now.

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MORE FROM NATIONAL JOURNAL

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That's why Obama's campaign began waging war on Romney's role at Bain last week. It's also why Obama, against the background of the NATO summit, took the unusual step of talking politics amid serious discussions about the war in Afghanistan and the fate of the euro. "This is not a distraction," Obama said of his critique of Romney's Bain years and Romney's claim that his business success makes him a good manager of the economy.

Romney's team has told surrogates that they are ready for this debate. But where and under whose guidance? Romney's? The campaign delights in leaping upon the briefly discordant voices of Democrats Cory Booker, Harold Ford Jr., and Steven Rattner. But that betrays a central Romney weakness on Bain: He still appears uncomfortable with the topic. He was in 1994, when the late Sen. Edward Kennedy raised it and crushed him by 18 points in what otherwise was a very good Republican year. Romney was similarly awkward earlier this year when Republican primary challengers Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry raised the issue. Romney won, but the awkwardness remained.

If anything, Romney had to rely on surrogates -- some already on the team and some who jumped into the fray for philosophical reasons -- to see him through. Surrogates won't save Romney this time. And counting on Democrats who clash with Obama won't work either (they will recant, anyway, as Booker did over and over again this week).

Since the Bain attacks have started, Romney's personal response can't even charitably be described as ghostly. He hasn't addressed this issue at all, unable to discuss a central element of his biography. A growing number of Republicans fear that he doesn't have the stomach for this fight -- at a philosophical or political level.

That might be selling Romney short, but the fact is he can't wait much longer to offer a fulsome, emotional explanation of the Bain years. There is peril and possibility aplenty. If Obama whittles away at his Bain tenure, he buys time and forces Romney to win back that which he's lost -- while Obama continues to knit together party constituencies. That's the peril. The promise for Romney is an argument -- if he has one -- that explains who and what he was at Bain, why it matters in understanding a 21st-century global economy, and how it will guide his policies as president.

The October surprise is that the general-election campaign is here -- now. Obama announced to the world that Romney is unfit to lead on the economy. Time to find out what lies at Romney's core.

What other than willfully hiding Obama's patriotic garb could explain the media's failure to republish a photograph appearing in a venue as prominent as the Hyde Park Herald circa 1997?

The media's failure is all the more glaring, given that the forgotten photograph has been in plain view for fifteen years. It appeared on the front page of Chicago's Hyde Park Herald on July 9th, 1997, and was taken by legendary photographer Nancy Campbell Hays.

"When will we talk about Mormonism?" asks Politico's Dylan Byers. Judging by the Romney campaign's communication strategy to date, the answer would appear to be "never." The candidate has studiously avoided discussing his religion in all but the most general terms, no doubt out of fear of backlash against his unusual and sometimes controversial faith. But a growing chorus of commentators on both sides of the political aisle has begun questioning this exercise in avoidance.

For some, Mitt Romney needs to tackle the topic in order to connect with religious voters; for others, it's a question of the candidate's honesty and ability to demonstrate core convictions rather than simply strike opportunistic poses. But all agree that for Romney to succeed, he'll have to substantively address his Mormonism.

"He needs to come out of the closet on his religion," argues liberal MSNBC contributor Jimmy Williams. "Why would you not embrace your own religion?" Conservative columnist Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times that "Romney would stand to gain if he spoke more directly and in more detail about a worldview ... that provides one of the most authentic and deeply felt influences on his often inauthentic-seeming personality. In one form or another, there will be plenty of attempts to define Romney's religion for him, and he might be better off doing his own defining first."

The shared implication of these arguments is that Romney cannot run for office while running away from his potentially problematic religious beliefs. But recent history offers a powerful counterexample of a very successful politician who quite transparently soft-pedaled and sidestepped his own religious convictions: former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Like Mitt Romney, who has been profoundly shaped by his faith, Blair is a deeply religious man. According to his press secretary Alastair Campbell, he would often consult the Bible when making major political decisions -- including when he took Britain to war with Iraq. His biographer Anthony Seldon writes "Where some politicians turn to drink, Blair ... turns to prayer and religious reading." Seldon and other observers partly attribute Blair's muscular interventionist foreign policy to his faith-based outlook. (Thus, in celebrated British screenwriter Peter Morgan's script for BBC Films' The Special Relationship, the prime minister lobbies President Bill Clinton to support NATO intervention in Kosovo by deeming it "a battle between good and evil" and "our Christian responsibility.") Since leaving office, Blair has spearheaded the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, devoted to harnessing religion as a force for good in the world, and even debated Christopher Hitchens on the merits of belief.

Yet for all these commitments, Blair never told the whole truth to the electorate about his personal convictions -- for reasons of political expediency.

In the midst of resigning and handing over Labour Party leadership to Gordon Brown in June 2007, after serving 10 years as prime minister, Blair converted to Catholicism. The move surprised no one. It had been an open secret that Blair was Catholic in all but name for decades -- he attended Catholic churches, took communion, had Catholic mentors and spiritual advisers who frequented Downing Street, and raised his children as Catholics with his Catholic wife, Cherie. But Blair never publicly acknowledged his faith while in office, due to the precarious position of Catholicism in Britain. As The Guardian reported upon Blair's official conversion:

[W]hy has it taken so long? Almost certainly because of Mr Blair's sensitivity about the place of Catholicism in British public -- and particularly its constitutional -- life. The only positions specifically barred to Catholics are marriage to the sovereign or heir to the throne, or becoming sovereign themselves, a legacy of the Act of Settlement that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the deposition of the last Catholic monarch, James II; there has never been a Catholic prime minister ....

But the motives of Catholic politicians have traditionally been regarded with suspicion by non-Catholics, both here and in the US, based on the allegation that they take their orders from the Vatican rather than the electorate.

The parallels to Mitt Romney's Mormon problem are evident. Like the Catholic Church in Britain, the LDS Church is viewed with suspicion by sectors of the American electorate -- some, both on the religious right and secular left, view it as a "cult," while others have raised the (spurious) specter of a "Mormon theocracy" dictated not by the Pope, but by the church's Prophet. Gallup polls show that 22 percent of voters -- including 19 percent of independents -- would not vote for a Mormon presidential candidate.

Given the detrimental electoral effects of his Mormon affiliation, it is not surprising that Romney's advisers have taken a page out of the Blair playbook and opted to downplay it. But can they duplicate Blair's success?

The evidence is mixed. On the one hand, Blair's example shows that a campaign can sidestep the religion issue if it persistently refuses to address it. Voters will ultimately base their decision on more immediate and consequential concerns, like the economy. On the other hand, Romney operates in a very different political and media climate than Blair did during his prime ministership, which makes him a hard act to follow.

First, unlike Britain, America has a long tradition of civil religion, with politicians expected to pay homage to its tropes and tenets -- like closing speeches with "God bless America" -- in their rhetoric. It is far more difficult to avoid talking about religion in this sort of atmosphere than it was for Blair in largely secular Britain. Indeed, Romney has made frequent reference to the touchstones of American civil religion in his paeans to American exceptionalism. But with each invocation of this tradition, he opens the door to questions about what he really believes.

Second, the media environment has changed dramatically since Blair occupied 10 Downing Street. With the advent of Twitter, other social media, and viral videos, a stray incendiary remark about Mormonism can quickly overtake the news cycle when it previously would have languished in obscurity. In this climate, the Romney campaign will be bombarded with far more questions and soundbites about the candidate's religious views than Blair ever was.

Lastly, Romney's personality and positions -- or lack thereof -- make his religion a far more enticing topic for journalists and voters. Unlike Blair, whose New Labour platform and easy charisma lent focus and coherence to his campaign and personal narrative, Romney comes across as lacking definition and core convictions. Nature abhors a vacuum; faced with a blank canvas, reporters and interested onlookers will seek to fill it. From this vantage point, Romney's religion presents a tantalizing target for such investigations -- a window into the soul of a supposedly soulless candidate.

For now, it looks like Team Romney is betting that the electorate is more concerned with the economy than with media-fueled frenzies over their candidate's church, and that the Tony Blair strategy can transplant to America. Whether they are right remains to be seen.

The military-industrial complex is small-c conservative -- and I'm using both those terms in a completely value-neutral, descriptive way. It looks for fights it can win, not fights -- like a land war in Iran, or endless, bank-breaking fuel bills -- that might fatally weaken it. It looks to consolidate.  It is a status quo power seeking to preserve the status quo. And these days, preserving the status quo involves fuel made from seaweed, talks with Iranians, and getting out of the prison business.

Whatever the conservative movement in America is at the moment -- conflicted, in a battle for its soul, looking to get its groove back -- it isn't a status quo power... That just may also have something to do with the percentage of military campaign contributions reported to be going to either President Obama... or Ron Paul.

The Obama campaign today launched its much-anticipated Dashboard platform, described by National Field Director Jeremy Bird in a video as "the organizing network of supporters helping to reelect Barack Obama." Read The Wall Street Journal for a healthily skeptical take. (No, a website does not a president make.) But with that out of the way, we're freed up to consider what's meaningful and potentially powerful about the work they've done.

Log into Dashboard, tell it where you live, and it connects you to your "neighborhood team," the basic building block of the Obama organizing model famously espoused by Harvard's Marshall Ganz. From there, you get your call tools -- empowering you to ring up your neighbors and sing to them the virtues of the Obama health-care bill, your event-planning tools; and inspirational content living under the banner of "Get Fired Up." There's information on your assigned team leader and other team members. And, importantly, there's a section labeled simply "Numbers." For a campaign that eats metrics for breakfast and data for lunch, this is where the action is. It's a means of tracking all that it is a volunteer does for a campaign, from calls made to voters registered to team meetings attended.

On the surface, there's not much about Dashboard that particularly impresses. Indeed, to those who track this sort of thing, Dashboard can seem retrograde -- where's the ability to form groups that MyBarackObama had way back in 2008? But look deeper. Much of the innovation of Dashboard lives under the hood, and won't become apparent until the system fills up with activity. Critically, Dashboard does something that MyBO and other '08 tools never managed to do: understand online and offline volunteering as parts of the same whole. "It's about treating a person as a person no matter what they're doing," says someone knowledgable about the Dashboard project.

For all the innovation it gets credited with, the Obama campaign still pivots around the same drudgery campaigns have long pivoted around.

That might seem easy and obvious to those of us on the outside. In 2012, we're really still drawing a distinction between phonebanking someone does in a poorly lit field office somewhere and phonebanking done from the comfort of his or her home? But it's a quirk of the Ganzian organizing model, centered on the so-called "snowflake," where individuals are collected into small groups that build up to a greater whole: Field organizing the Obama way is still very much structured around geography. All that happens on the Internet is wonderful, sure. But if it doesn't feed into the campaign structure, if it doesn't funnel into the assigned responsibility of some team leader somewhere, it isn't fully captured and put to use. For all the attention that Obama 2008 got for tapping into the Internet, much of the enthusiasm generated there was left to dissipate.

Dashboard aims to solve that.

Now, if all goes well for the campaign, calls made online and offline get counted to the same end. For the field organizer responsible for hitting voter contact targets, that means that the supporter who never shows their face in a field office is, newly, a valuable commodity. More than that, the work of a supporter who gives $200 at a campaign rally in California, goes doorknocking in New York, and makes some calls through his laptop isn't split across three different databases. Their efforts are aggregated, and get credited to their neighborhood team. The team leader -- very often a volunteer herself -- gets to bundle those efforts and roll them up to the next level of the campaign in meeting her goals. "If you're a neighborhood team leader," says Bird in his video, "your day-to-day tasks are going to get a whole lot easier." If true, it makes the (monetarily) uncompensated hours put in to reelect the president a more sensible transaction. The tasks of field organizing, which often involving interrupting the day of someone you don't know, become slightly less painful for all involved. In sum, less effort is wasted.

Think of Dashboard as virtual insulation, making sure that the enthusiasm folks are willing to pour into the practice of campaigning doesn't leak out of the cracks.

To make the model work, though, the campaign is going to need a near-battalion of super volunteers to stand up and take leadership roles. (Fort Greene for Obama, the geographic group my test account got channeled into based on my address, has an opening at the top.) But here, too, Dashboard makes some tweaks to the old '08 model that could make that process more efficient and sustainable over the long haul. It has to do with permissions, a web-design term that echoes in this case its normal meaning. Where MyBarackObama was largely binary, Dashboard is engineered on a hierarchy that functions on a need-to-know basis. A volunteer sees something different than a team leader does, and so on up the chain. Jeremy Bird gets an omniscient view. Everyone else in the organization, though, is treated to the data, metrics, and contact information that they need to know to fulfill their role, and no more.

For example, one compelling function of Dashboard is a little alert feed letting you know when someone has a message for you. National staffers like Bird can, presumably, message everyone in Dashboard-land at once. A team leader, though, seems restricted to pinging his team. Functionally, that limits the damage that the inevitable bad apple can do to the campaign. At the same time, it manages to blur the distinction between volunteer and paid staffer, an underappreciated change to the status quo that the Obama organization first tinkered with back in the '08 race.

The Obama field organizing model depends on volunteers trusted with a great deal of responsibility. Dashboard builds in checks to make sure that trust doesn't get out of hand.

Spend any real time on Dashboard, and a few things become apparent. One is that the tool is meant to appeal to the Obama campaign volunteer who is willing to put some real time in doing the drudgery that is the stuff of the Democratic campaign experience. (Republican presidential campaigns, in popular conception and in fact, focus far less attention on field organizing and getting-out-the-vote operations.) Another is that the Obama organization, for all the innovation it gets credited with, still indeed pivots around the same drudgery campaigns have long pivoted around: making calls, knocking on doors, holding a neighborhood meeting, maybe asking other folks for money. In this day-one roll out, at least, any of the tech-enabled action that commentators (guilty!) sometimes obsess over are secondary, if they're captured at all -- tweets, for example, are powerful only in that they help drive people to an event you might be throwing on behalf of the campaign. And the last: The sort of self-directed freedom of MyBarackObama that allowed the creation of a group opposing the then-candidate's stance on surveillance legislation, for example, isn't a priority in Dashboard. There's talk on the site of users being able in a future iteration to form their own groups, like an Irish Setter Lovers for Obama cell, for example. But there's every indication that that ability, too, will be tied to work and metrics that the campaign has embraced as the way you go about (re-)electing a president of the United States.

That's one early take on Dashboard. But one nice thing about online politics of this kind is that there's no need to trudge down to a local field office to see the Obama campaign in action. Anyone -- friend, foe, interested observer -- can poke around in their operation without having to leave wherever they might be. So poke around.

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.

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

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."