Blogs: National Interest

Holiday hiatus

newsworks@whyy.org (Dick Polman) — Fri, 25 May 2012 12:28:12 GMT

Memorial Day weekend begins early on my domestic front. So, no prose today. But I verbalized for an hour on "Radio Times" earlier today, along with National Review reporter Robert Costa. You can click here and listen.

My normal routine resumes on Tuesday. Have a great holiday - remember the troops! - and I'll see you on the flip side.

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Here's a podcast of my onstage interview yesterday with Colin Powell. It runs for an hour. The man is an affable raconteur. I played the affable host.

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"Pseudo facts"

newsworks@whyy.org (Dick Polman) — Thu, 24 May 2012 13:35:54 GMT

A new major survey has found that regular viewers of Fox News are the most ill-informed Americans of all. But I doubt that you are shocked to learn this.

The infauxtainment channel has been fomenting stupidity for a long time - other surveys have unearthed such evidence - and it's tempting to just treat Fox News as an annoying natural occurrence, like a flood or a blizzard. But no. This new study, by Fairleigh Dickinson University, is actually a fresh opportunity to examine the damage that is done to the body politic when credulous people ingest junk factoids that have no basis in factual reality.

The shorthand conclusion of the survey is that, on average, regular Fox viewers are dumber than Americans who watch or hear no news at all. That's even harsher than the finding announced in 2010 by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, where researchers merely concluded that self-identified Fox loyalists are less cognizant of factual reality than Americans who regularly get their news from all other outlets.

The Fairleigh Dickinson folks asked 1,185 respondents nationwide what news sources they consumed in the past week, and followed up by asking for the correct answers to five questions about domestic affairs. Few of the respondents appeared to be particularly well-informed; regular NPR listeners scored highest, on average, with 1.51 correct answers, and consumers of Jon Stewart's Daily Show finished second, at 1.42. The survey team determined that, on average, Americans who don't watch or hear any news posted a correct score of 1.22.

The Fox viewers finished dead last, at 1.04.

That sounds about right. That's consistent with previous surveys. Indeed, using different measurements in 2010, the University of Maryland people also determined that Fox devotees were the most clueless - for instance, 60 percent of Fox regulars mistakenly believed that climate change is not occurring and that scientists are evenly divided, whereas, among those those who never watch Fox, only 30 percent believed those lies; and whereas 63 percent of Fox regulars believed it was unclear whether Barack Obama is American-born or believed for sure that he is not, only 30 percent of non-Fox viewers bought those lies.

At the risk of my stating the obvious: The problem with Fox is not its conservative ideology; rather, it's the concocting of fake information to support the ideology. There have been some beauts recently, like when host Steve Doocy made up a quote and stuck it in Obama's mouth, falsely reporting that Obama had prided himself on not being born with a silver spoon in his mouth "unlike some people" - a Doocy-invented reference to Mitt Romney. Naturally, this Foxfactoid ricocheted around the conservative bubble, as evidence by all the emails I received from Foxfans, who dutifully quoted Doocy faux-quoting Obama and who then raged at the president's supposed impertinence. (Doocy finally was compelled to admit that he had "seemed to misquote" Obama.)

Last November, I also got emails raging at Obama for supposedly imposing a tax on Christmas trees - fresh evidence, I was told, of the (alleged) socialist's (alleged) war on Christianity. Naturally, these emails came within days of a Fox report about "a new Christmas tree tax." It later turned out, of course, that the Foxfactoid, and especially the innuendo attached to it, was a fraud. The issue at hand was actually a 15-cent fee per tree that had been proposed not by Obama, but by a trade group, the National Christmas Tree Association, which wanted to use the money for a marketing campaign to promote domestic trees and thus compete more effectively with the artificial trees imported from China. The idea had been kicking around for 20 years. The U.S. Agriculture Department considered the fee, as a way to help the domestic Christmas tree industry - and ultimately rejected it, thanks to the right-wing heat.

The list of Fox falsehoods is way too long to tabulate here, although I was fascinated earlier this month to watch Sean Hannity reiterate a Koch brothers lie about how Obama supposedly spent "$39 million to build traffic lights in China" - whereas, in reality, American cities used that stimulus money to install new energy-efficient street and traffic lights that included some components from China.

Suffice it to say that David Frum, the former George W. Bush speechwriter and longtime conservative author-commentator, got it right not long ago when he skewered Fox News for inventing "an alternative knowledge system," for immersing its audience "in a total environment of pseudo facts and pretend information." He hardly needed the results of yet another survey to state what he sees with his own eyes; as he remarked on CNN last December about the Christmas tree tax scare, the pseudo story reinforced Fox-generated fears of "this Muslim-y kind of president trying to destroy a Christian holiday."

"The question is," he said, "what is the impact on the viewer?" Indeed, what is the impact on our political discourse? But we already know the answer.

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Obama's anemic wins

newsworks@whyy.org (Dick Polman) — Wed, 23 May 2012 15:02:32 GMT

In the journalism business, a "dog bites man" story has little news value, because, after all, it's not unusual for a dog to bite a man. Which is why it's so tempting to dismiss last night's Democratic presidential primary results, in Kentucky and Arkansas, as a non-story with scant news value, as just another manifestation of dog bites man.

Indeed, it's tempting to dismiss Barack Obama's anemic wins (58 percent in both contests) as a non-story, given the states' longstanding antipathy toward Obama, antipathy that dates back to the '08 Democratic primary season. But the Kentucky and Arkansas results are not entirely insignificant. There's one electoral factor that Obama partisans would be well advised to view as worrisome.

Granted, the case for dismissal is strong. That region of the south - which is heavily populated by culturally conservative, downscale rural whites - didn't warm to Obama even when he was the hottest commodity in presidential politics. Kentucky and Arkansas Democrats thrashed him in the '08 primaries, choosing Hillary Clinton in landslides. And in November, those states went heavily for John McCain, even as Obama was winning the largest nationwide percentage of votes since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. In fact, Obama did worse in Arkansas than '04 Democratic loser John Kerry.

Given that history, one might ask whether it's such a big deal that incumbent Obama coughed up roughly 42 percent of the Arkansas primary vote to some little-known lawyer named John Wolfe; that he lost the same share of votes in Kentucky to a non-existent challenger known as "Uncommitted"; and that both sets of results virtually mirror the May 8 tally in West Virginia, where a federal inmate who got on the Democratic ballot managed to draw 41.6 percent of the vote. Yes, Obama is weak in the Ozarks, but so what? He was never going to win those three states in November, anyway. All three have been generally trending away from the national Democratic party for a long time.

That dog-bites-man interpretation is true - as far as it goes. But here's what the Obama team should be concerned about:

There are millions of culturally conservative, downscale rural whites, harboring similar sentiments, in the states Obama needs to win.

The hostility to the president may be more virulent down in Appalachia (exit polls in 2008 identified a clear racial factor), but some of the southerners' concerns are shared by the same voter cohort elsewhere: most notably, the belief that Obama epitomizes the highly-educated upscale elite that has allowed liberals, gays, minorities and secularists to run rampant (his '08 remark about people clinging to "guns and religion" has never been forgotten). If strongly motivated to vote, these culturally conservative folks - who are populous in southeastern Ohio, central-southwestern Pennsylvania, and rural North Carolina - could leave Obama with little margin for error in those key states.

All told, the 58 percent primary tallies in Arkansas, Kentucky, and West Virginia, while ostensibly mere incidents of dog-bites-man, nevertheless could be a portent of trouble for Obama in swing states where he can ill afford any softness in support.

Which brings me to the current situation in Florida - another crucial battleground. The new Quinnipiac poll, released today, says that Mitt Romney has opened up a six-point lead; back on March 28, Obama was up by seven. The race there is clearly volatile, and it's likely to be close in November. But Obama's prospects for winning may hinge on whether cultural conservatives in the northern Panhandle opt to stay home or cast ballots for Romney en masse, evincing some of the hostility seen last night in Kentucky and Arkansas. Obama partisans may be tempted to shrug off Obama's 58 percent primary tally against "Uncommitted," but presumably the perilous state of play in critical Florida will rightly strike them as cause for concern.

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The third-party pipe dream

newsworks@whyy.org (Dick Polman) — Tue, 22 May 2012 15:41:04 GMT

To paraphrase Shakespeare, I have come to bury Americans Elect, not to praise it.

If you hadn't heard about Americans Elect, don't sweat it. The non-profit organization, which spent a whopping $35 million in a futile bid to find and promote an independent presidential candidate, declared itself dead last Thursday. Yet again, the pipe dream of a viable alternative to the Democrats and the Republicans has gone up in smoke.

Supposedly, many people yearn for a potent independent candidate (or "third party," the terms are often used interchangeably). But we rarely get one. (Remember Unity08 four years ago? No? Never mind.) Americans Elect was probably the most ambitious attempt to free us from our semi-dysfunctional duopoly, until it failed on a grand scale. It wrote the book on screwing up.

Created by wealthy investor-philanthropist Peter Ackerman, Americans Elect was a high-tech venture, a unique concept that didn't translate to the real world. Citizens would sign up as "delegates" for an online nominating convention. The group would get itself on the ballot in all 50 states. Popular independent-minded politicians would vie for the nomination. The nominee would be the candidate who garnered at least 10,000 online clicks (1000 clicks from each of 10 states) by the middle of May.

Well, last week, the nomination deadline came and went. Nobody got 10,000 clicks. No popular independents came forward to vie for the honor. The top-vote getter, at 6000 clicks, was a former Louisiana governor, Buddy Roemer.

So Americans Elect, rightly concluding that Buddy Roemer wouldn't throw a scare into Barack Obama or Mitt Rommney since he couldn't even dazzle the 420,000 online delegates, decided to pull the plug. The group had managed to get on the ballot in 29 states - yet it wound up without a candidate. This had to be the worst 2012 launch since the Disney film studio lost its shirt with John Carter.

Seven reasons why Americans Elect didn't work:

1. It was strictly a top-down concept, whereas successful insurgencies tend to be bottom-up. It had a fancy Washington office, but nothing at the grass roots.

2. It got things backward. "Third parties" tend to start with a charismatic candidate who then builds a vehicle for his ambitions - as was the case with Ross Perot in 1992, George Wallace in 1968, and Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Americans Elect built the vehicle first and then went in search of a driver.

3. It operated on the assumption that Americans would coalesce behind a "centrist" independent. But what the heck is a "centrist," anyway? Somebody who would curb Social Security and Medicare entitlements in order to balance the books long term? (Good luck winning senior voters with that one.) Somebody who would tell the voters what they don't want to hear, about the need to raise taxes in order to balance the books? (Voters can't handle the truth.)

4. It mistakenly believed that middle-of-the-roaders were just as impassioned as the Democratic and Republican partisans. By definition, it's the partisans who pay serious attention to politics early in the campaign year. The folks in the middle don't tend to pay serious attention until autumn. In other words, centrist activism is a contradiction in terms.

5. It offered potential candidates a snazzy vehicle for a presidential bid - with one huge caveat: it didn't intend to help raise any money for the autumn independent campaign. The lucky nominee would've needed to troll for dollars on his own. Which means that whoever succeeded in getting those 10,000 clicks by mid-May would've had only four months to raise the necessary money to be competitive with Obama and Romney. Minimum amount? Probably half a billion bucks. No wonder all the big names passed.

6. It overlooked the retribution factor. Potential candidates with ties to the two major parties feared that if they ran and lost, they would be treated forevermore as dead people by the political establishment. On the risk and reward scale, the former outweighed the latter.

7. It embarrassed itself with some bad PR. This supposedly high-road reform group was financed by secret donors. One does not need a PhD to see the fundamental contradiction. A new reform venture really can't afford to take hits in the press for cloaking its contributors in secrecy, but that's what happened. Peter Ackerman donated $8 million, but we couldn't find out who put up the other $27 million because American Elect took advantage of a tax-code loophole that allows "social welfare" groups to keep their donors confidential. One of Karl Rove's outfits, Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, is working that very same loophole. A reform group can't credibly claim the high road when it shares the low road with Karl Rove.

But if you still crave a third candidate, don't despair. We're just three years away from the next scheduled boomlet for Michael Bloomberg.

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Battling black homophobia

newsworks@whyy.org (Dick Polman) — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:49:20 GMT

To paraphrase Martin Luther King, the long arc of history bent a bit further toward social justice on Saturday, when the nation's most prominent black civil rights organization struck a powerful blow against black homophobia.

In a virtually unanimous vote by its 64-member board, the NAACP decided to follow President Obama's (belated) lead and endorse "marriage equality":

"The NAACP Constitution affirmatively states our objective to ensure the 'political, education, social and economic equality' of all people. Therefore, the NAACP has opposed and will continue to oppose any national, state, local policy or legislative initiative that seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the constitutional rights of (gay) citizens. We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Further, we strongly affirm the religious freedoms of all people as protected by the First Amendment."

In cultural terms, the resolution is a significant milestone; it has the potential to change hearts and minds in the black community. And in electoral terms, the NAACP - a venerable, middle-of-the-road organization - gives Obama significant political cover among black church-goers, many of whom have long clung to a bigoted view of gay people (thanks to some passages in the Bible), and many of whom, as a result, might arguably have been less enthused about supporting Obama in November.

You'll note, of course, that the resolution concludes with an expression of respect for religion. The NAACP rightly framed its endorsement of gay marriage as a constitutional issue; it certainly didn't want to contest the black church's traditional reading of the Bible.

So let me do the honors on that one. Better yet, I'll simply quote from a sermon that was delivered a week ago Sunday at an evangelical Lutheran Church in Wisconsin. The pastor's remarks speak for themselves: "Yes, it's true that the Bible says some nasty things about homosexuality. It's also true that the Bible has passages that prohibit men from cutting their hair, and that forbid anyone from wearing mixed fiber clothing, or planting two different kinds of seed in their fields, or eating shellfish. The Bible also commands slaves to obey their masters, parents to stone unruly children, and upholds as heroes of the faith men with multiple wives and concubines."

The Bible also commands slaves to obey their masters...Well, there you go. Black parishioners, many of whom cite the Biblical passages about homosexuality as the basis for their opposition to gay marriage, seem to have no trouble rejecting the Biblical passages that endorse slavery. The NAACP's key point is that, politically speaking, one cannot cherry-pick the people who deserve equal protection.

Granted, the socially conservative black pastors who helped fuel a rejection vote on the May 8 gay marriage referendum in North Carolina, and who flexed political muscle when gay marriage lost the big California referendum back in 2008, will still retain great influence among their congregants. But other key voices are coming to the fore.

Obama's gay marriage marriage endorsement has already prompted various black leaders - most notably, Jesse Jackson and South Carolina Democratic congressman James Clyburn - to follow suit. Even the polls have started to shift since Obama spoke; the latest ABC News-Washington Post survey says that 54 percent of African-Americans support Obama's stance, the first time that a black majority has said yes.

Back in November '08, when the California gay marriage lost by a few percentage points thanks to a 70 percent thumbs-down vote in the black community, I wrote this sentence: "Some gay marriage supporters believe that Barack Obama can perhaps accelerate the black community education process" by coming out for gay marriage. That's precisely what appears to be happening now.

Obviously, the NAACP doesn't speak for all African-Americans. Nor does Obama. Nor does Rev. Joseph Lowery, a member of Martin Luther King's entourage, who said the other day, "You can't believe in equal rights for some people and yet not believe in equal rights for everybody." But the near-unanimous NAACP resolution, in particular, is a key barometer of incrementally changing black sentiment, and the arrow points only one way.

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Mick Jagger got political on Saturday Night Live, singing a blues song about Mitt Romney. (Jagger is rarely so political.) The lyrics aren't very sophisticated, but the last few lines are true enough. And Jeff Beck's awesome blues licks carry the day.

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Follow me on Twitter, @dickpolman1

Wright and wrong

newsworks@whyy.org (Dick Polman) — Fri, 18 May 2012 11:33:54 GMT

What a shame it is that billionaire Joe Ricketts, the paymaster of an anti-Obama super PAC, has decided to reject a TV ad strategy that would've linked the president to his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It would have been so entertaining to watch that organization waste tens of millions of bucks in a pitiful replay of early 2008 - a demagogic guilt-by-association exercise that would've sucked Mitt Romney right into its muck.

Good sense and cooler heads appear to have prevailed. This political flap exploded and fizzled like a cheap firecracker, galvanizing the political world yesterday for roughly five hours - from the unveiling of the Wright strategy on page one of the New York Times (the pitch to Ricketts: "The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way") to the announcement by a Ricketts aide, in early afternoon, that the strategy idea had been junked.

Brian Baker, who heads Ricketts' super PAC (which is called Ending Spending), essentially said in a statement that Ricketts was distancing himself with all deliberate speed from the uproar triggered by the Times story: "Not only was this (Wright strategy) merely a proposal - one of several submitted to the Ending Spending Action Fund by third-party vendors - but it reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects, and it was never a plan to be accepted but only a suggestion for a direction to take...His efforts are and will continue to be focused entirely on questions of fiscal policy, not attacks that seek to divide us socially or culturally."

That decision must be a huge disappointment for the Obama haters who want to divide us socially and culturally. They've deluded themselves these past four years into believing that a mega-focus on Jeremiah Wright would doom Obama on election day, and they were ticked off at John McCain back in '08 when he refused to detonate that bomb - and now they've lost out again.

But you know what? Ricketts is doing them a favor, because that kind of explosion would've blown up in their faces and wounded Romney as well. Tactically speaking, it would've been brain-dead stupid.

There's no need here to detail the Wright saga (it's so spring of '08) but the gist, lest you may have forgotten, is that Wright occasionally said incendiary stuff in the Christian church where Obama worshiped. Nothing freaks out Fox News and the Republican right like the specter of a scary black man - Wright once said "God damn America," and said that 9/11 was "America's chickens...coming home to roost" - and Obama was clearly well acquainted with this perceived scary black man. (Although Obama was not in church on the key days in question when Wright God-damned America and invoked the chickens.)

Yes, there was some restiveness among voters early on, when Wright's worst verbal moments were being replayed in endless loops on cable TV. But what the haters seem to forget - what they probably willed themselves not to have heard in the first place - is that Obama basically extinguished the Wright issue in April '08 during a speech on race relations in Philadelphia. The issue had dogged him that early spring because he'd allowed it to fester. Then it died, fast. Any conservative foolish enough to try to resurrect the issue in 2012 would've discovered that it was still dead.

I was at that speech, and I still have the transcript. Here's how Obama put Wright to rest: "Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely....(Sometimes Wright) expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam. As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems....(Wright's comments have) denigrated the greatness and goodness of our nation."

How could conservatives successfully gin up Wright as a political issue in 2012 - given the fact that Obama already broke with the guy, at length and on the record, in 2008?

And if Ricketts had said yes to Wright-Obama ads, they would've blown back on Romney. He and his people are sensitive about the Mormon factor and any discussion of religion. Linking Obama to a controversial church leader - even if it was conducted by super PAC proxy - would've opened Romney to the charge that he was condoning an attack on Obama's freedom of worship. And if Obama sat in a pew for years while Wright made incendiary statements, would it not have become fair game to ask whether Romney, in all his years as a Mormon leader, had listened to remarks that many Americans today might find objectionable? That's the problem with guilt by association - it's a slippery slope.

No wonder Romney surfaced at midday to say, "I repudiate the effort by that PAC to promote an ad strategy of the nature they’ve described." (The man has a way with words.) And it was surely more than the fear of blowback that prompted his response. He and his people are smart enough to recognize such a dumb political idea. Because only zealots could possibly think that demagogic personal attacks on a well-liked president would somehow bring him down. And any day talking about an oldie from '08 is a day not spent talking about the economy of 2012.

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I did a newspaper column today on the political demise of Dick Lugar, and why it's a metaphor for Washington's ever-worsening dysfunction.

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Obama and girlfriends, continued

newsworks@whyy.org (Dick Polman) — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:29:57 GMT

Enough, already, with Barack Obama's wooing of women. His commencement speech at Barnard, his second presidential sitdown on The View...at this rate, we can only imagine what he'll say on The View next time:

'When human life is on the line'

newsworks@whyy.org (Dick Polman) — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:07:10 GMT

It's heartening to learn that Connecticut has now abolished capital punishment - the fifth state to renounce government-sanctioned death in the past five years, and the 17th state overall - because the incidents of injustice have become too visible to ignore, even in America, which in its devotion to the death penalty is virtually alone in the civilized western world.

Savior or vampire?

newsworks@whyy.org (Dick Polman) — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:03:31 GMT

Right on schedule, the Bain of Mitt Romney's existence is back. We knew it would be.

Taking a page from the Karl Rove playbook, President Obama is taking aim at his opponent's supposed strength (job creator) with a new TV ad that seeks to redefine it as a weakness (vulture capitalist). The Obama campaign strategy is obvious. Roughly one in three Americans has yet to form an opinion of Romney, according to a new national poll, so this is the opportune time for Obama to shape that opinion on his own terms.

Talk it up or shut it down?

newsworks@whyy.org (Dick Polman) — Mon, 14 May 2012 14:45:08 GMT

Republicans can't seem to agree on how to handle the gay marriage issue. The party's religious right wing wants to make it the centerpiece of the '12 campaign, but the party's establishment leaders want to bury it six feet under.

In the five days since President Obama voiced his personal endorsement, the GOP has been awash in mixed messages. Mitt Romney doesn't want to talk about it. John Boehner doesn't want to talk about it. But the moralists who speak for "the base" are insistent on talking about it, and they can't understand why the party bigwigs are so reluctant to frame the election as a major battle in the culture war - as a crucial test, in the words of Pat Buchanan, of "whether we still call the United States of America God's country."

Rick Santrum (of course) said over the weekend, "This (issue) is a very potent weapon, if you will, for Governor Romney if he’s willing to step up and take advantage of a president who is very much out of touch with the values of America....Governor Romney has to talk about his values,” he added. “That’s the most important thing."

Tony Perkins, who runs the evangelical Family Research Council, said yesterday, "I don’t think the way the Republicans on Capital Hill are addressing it is the way to do it, saying it’s a distraction. Defending the family, the cornerstone of civilization, is not a distraction. It should be a priority. And it should be a part of what Mitt Romney talks about."

Gary Bauer, a former presidential candidate who runs a similar group, America Values, wrote today: "Republicans...too often run away from debates over issues related to marriage, life and religion. With President Obama's acknowledgement last week that he supports same-sex marriage, Republicans have been handed a political gift that could keep on giving until Election Day, but only if they take advantage of it. Unfortunately, the Republican response has been muted....To ignore social issues when they arise is pure folly."

But a top Republican pollster, Jan R. van Lohuizen, is saying precisely the opposite, that it would be folly for the GOP to highlight its hostility to gay marriage. Van Lohuizen, who polled for the George W. Bush re-election campaign in 2004, authored a memo last Friday, and circulated it among his party brethren. Basically, he's saying that it would be a bad idea for Republicans, particularly with their presidential nominee, to advertise the fact they are on the wrong side of history. From the memo:

"Support for same-sex marriage has been growing and in the last few years support has grown at an accelerated rate with no sign of slowing down. A review of public polling shows that up to 2009, support for gay marriage increased at a rate of one percent a year. Starting in 2010 the change in the level of support accelerated to 5 percent a year. The most recent public polling shows supporters of gay marriage outnumber opponents by a margin of roughly 10 percent (for instance: NBC/WSJ poll in February/March: support 49 percent, oppose 40 percent). The increase in support is taking place among all partisan groups. While more Democrats support gay marriage than Republicans, support levels among Republicans are increasing over time. The same is true of age: younger people support same sex marriage more often than older people, but the trends show that all age groups are rethinking their position....

"As more people have become aware of friends and family members who are gay, attitudes have begun to shift at an accelerated pace. This is not about a generational shift in attitudes, this is about people changing their thinking as they recognize their friends and family members who are gay or lesbian."

Given those realities, van Lohuizen advised that Republicans position themselves on the right side of history - by arguing that support for gays is actually a conservative position. He even crafted a talking point for GOP candidates: "As people who promote personal responsibility, family values, commitment and stability, and emphasize freedom and limited government we have to recognize that freedom means freedom for everyone. This includes the freedom to decide how you live and to enter into relationships of your choosing, the freedom to live without excessive interference of the regulatory force of government."

It's fairly safe to say that the Phillies will lead the National League in slugging average before the religious right would ever sign on to that memo.

So what we see instead is a party that's struggling to split the difference - as occurred yesterday, on Meet the Press, when national chairman Reince Priebus willingly engaged on the gay marriage issue while clearly wishing he could change the subject.

He quickly got into a pickle. Last week, he said it would be wrong to make gay marriage the law of the land; in his words, "you can't federalize that kind of mandate." But host David Gregory pointed out yesterday that Romney supports a U.S. constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage - a federal mandate.

So isn't it hypocritical for the party of state's rights to support a federal ban that would override the states and enshrine anti-gay bigotry as the law of the land?

Here's Priebus' response, and if you can track his explanation, you are far smarter than I:

"Well, first of all, I agree with the governor. And maybe I - because I - perhaps it was inartful, but here is the point. At the time, we were debating President Obama's incredible evolution of mind on this issue. As if the American people are sitting around as the hourglass is being turned and you can wait for President Obama to evolve over his opinions on this particular issue. My point is as we sit here today, under today's law, we don't have a marriage amendment. But under today's law President Obama's (statement) isn't going to change anything....We don't have an amendment. And states across America are making this decision. And states across America agree with me."

Gregory asked again whether Priebus would like to see a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage nationwide.

Priebus: "Of course....It is part of the platform....Sure I would."

And then a fascinating moment occurred. Priebus, perhaps realizing that a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage is a red-meat fantasy that turns off independent swing voters, and that such an amendment makes the GOP look intolerant, and that it's nuts to talk about a nationwide ban to a national audience, proceeded to engineer a gymnastic pivot worthy of the London summer Olympics. Let's pick up the quote. Watch him run far, far away:

"Sure I would. But here's the point. We're talking about this issue now for an entire eight minutes on an incredible show on Sunday morning across America while millions of people are out of work. Our debt is going in the wrong direction. This president hasn't fulfilled his promises that will put our economy back on track. Those are the issues that people care about. When I go across this country people are filling their tanks half full of gas. They can't afford their groceries..."

Way to go, Reince. Sounds like he got the memo.

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I explored the muted GOP response, and other gay marriage ramifications, in my Sunday newspaper column.

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I did another Live Chat today, mostly about you know what.

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