JUDY WOODRUFF: And to the analysis of Brooks and Marcus. That's New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, filling in for Mark Shields.

It's good to you have both with us.

RUTH MARCUS: Thanks.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And what is more exciting to talk about than the Congressional Budget Office?

So, this week , there was a sobering report from the Congressional Budget Office, David, in which they warned the country could land in another recession if Congress does a couple of things, lets these -- doesn't let these Bush era tax cuts expire, and if there are serious cuts made in government spending.

And there are members of Congress who want both of these things to happen. So what do people think is really going to happen there?

DAVID BROOKS: Chaos, decline, apocalypse.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: You know, it's all going to happen. . .

RUTH MARCUS: Have a nice weekend.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. Right.

No, the weekend will be fine. It is only going to happen in December. It will be after the election. And all these things come due, tax cuts, spending. All these automatic things start happening. And we hand this incredibly knotty problem on to a Congress which is unable to do the easy problems.

So dealing with a tough problem is going to be tremendously difficult. And so, is there any reason to be other than despairing?

I think there is a couple. And, again, this is silver lining land. One is, I think the Republicans have decided that what happened last summer wasn't good for them. They have taken the country to the brink. They are a little more chastened. They're a little more flexible on the idea that tax revenue, not tax rates, but tax revenues, should be allowed to rise, so long as the money can be thrown into the debt.

And so that is some flexibility there. But if you had to bet long-term will we do what we need to do, all these different things to get sort of a fiscal balance over the next year, I certainly wouldn't bet on that.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Congress going to come to its senses?

(LAUGHTER)

RUTH MARCUS: Well, I don't think anybody should ever bet on that.

But David said that Republicans seem chastened. You certainly couldn't tell it from the comments of Speaker Boehner, who seems more than willing to do a replay of the disastrous, from my point of view, economically, and also disastrous politically for Republicans, replay of the debt ceiling showdown last time around , a year ago.

And what's going to happen is, all of this Taxmageddon, as we are calling it, is going -- because of the timing of it, we will probably kick the can down the road from the lame-duck, for maybe six months into the next Congress. And guess what? That is going to coincide with, collide with hitting the debt ceiling yet again.

So the CBO -- I just -- quick thing on the CBO report. CBO used the R-word, which is very, very scary, recession. If all of these things come to pass, they said, the economy would be in recession in the beginning of 2013.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Which is what got everybody's attention.

RUTH MARCUS: Which got everybody's attention, but in some ways, that wasn't really the message that CBO wanted to send, because, yes, that would be a very bad outcome.

But the second thing they said is that the alternative, if you filled that entire fiscal cliff and cushioned it, and you just dug the debt deeper, the debt hole that much deeper, that would also be a terrible outcome, just later.

And so they have been begging in their very quiet-sounding CBO language, please, members of Congress, you need to both avert the fiscal cliff now and come up with a plan that markets can understand that you really have to fill the debt hole later on.

Whether Congress can manage that. . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: So -- but, David, Congress this year is watching the election. Not a lot is going on over the summer. So does a warning -- does something like this that is said in the late spring, does it really have an effect?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I think they are taking it seriously. I know the Republicans are. They take the debt extremely seriously.

And how much they want to move is a matter of internal debate. So, publicly, Ruth is absolutely right, John Boehner is lining down these stark markers. Underneath, I really don't think those stark markers exist. I think there is some room for flexibility. There is some feeling, we need more revenue.

Now, the question is, you have got to disguise the revenue increases in a comprehensive tax reform. And the Republicans really want to do a comprehensive tax reform. They think it would allow them to secretly raise a lot of revenue, but also it would be good for the economy, it would create growth, more jobs, more tax revenues.

Democrats are -- and especially the Obama administration -- a lot less persuaded that tax reform would be a great thing. They don't think it would produce a lot of growth. They think, politically, it would be extremely tough to get rid of some of these big deductions.

And so it's very interesting to me to talk to people in the Obama administration and hear them being very tepid on the whole idea of comprehensive tax reform.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, meanwhile, Ruth, you have got in Europe this week, became clearer that there really are serious disagreements on what they going to do to get out of their own debt crisis.

What -- is there a consensus on what effect that could have here?

RUTH MARCUS: Yes. The consensus is bad.

(LAUGHTER)

RUTH MARCUS: And the only question is how bad.

And that really, in a sense, though CBO didn't talk about it in their report, that just adds to the scariness and the height of the cliff, because what happens in Europe doesn't stay in Europe. We know that Europe seems -- the European problem just seems to be like a chronic disease now that we have been living with, and Europe doesn't seem to be getting well.

And as it's not getting well, and you see questions about economic growth in China, all of that has an impact on growth here, or lack of growth.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Is there a clear effect of all this, David, on the presidential campaign, or is it just wait and see?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, potentially catastrophic.

What's happened in the last couple of weeks in Europe is that a lot of Europeans have secretly decided, OK, Greece is gone. They are going to leave the eurozone. And the question is, do they have a soft landing, where Greece goes and Greece has to deal with some problems and the rest of Europe will suffer, but not cataclysmically, or does the Greek exit precipitate a whole series of other problems, which lead to a complete collapse of the euro, which would, according to one study, produce a 9 percent drop in European GDP, which would be cataclysmic, not only for them, but for us.

It would send us back into a pretty deep recession. And so I don't know if that is going to happen. Nobody knows how they are going to handle that prospect, but it could have a really negative, really, really negative. . .

RUTH MARCUS: And not that anybody is thinking about this in political terms, but it would have a very negative effect, obviously, on President Obama's reelection chances. And that's -- they are watching it very, very closely.

DAVID BROOKS: Their interest is in having Europe continue to kick the can down the road, so Greece, they will leave, but it will be maybe in 2013. The problem with that is you really -- you have popular unrest. You have got to reverse all sorts of agreements.

It's more likely that Greece will go. And then that's really a problem for Obama politically.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, meantime, the debate continued. It's separate, but it's connected in a way, this debate over whether Romney's experience running his private equity firm, Bain Capital, which sometimes did big leveraged buyouts of companies that cost jobs.

The debate continued this week, David, over whether that is a good qualification for Mitt Romney to be president or whether it says something kind of ugly about what goes on in capitalism.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes.

Yes, I sort of think this debate hurts both candidates. I think Bain is not popular. It is not well-known. Most Americans don't know what Bain is, but it is not popular, the idea that he was in some sort of weird consulting group. It's not popular.

And so I do think they are exploiting it for a reason. Nonetheless, I do think hurts Obama, because it makes him look like a very conventional politician. I don't think, if you are a liberal Democrat, you want to be seen attacking business. People may not love business. They like it a lot better than government. And they don't want to see an anti-business Democrat.

And, finally, I just think the Obama administration -- or the campaign has demeaned itself with a series of falsehoods. They released this ad which had a whole series of falsehoods. The one was that this steel company, GST, was a healthy company until Bain took it over, which the ad suggests. Completely untrue.

Second, that Romney was part of throwing people out on the street when they finally did have to close this failing company. He was long gone from Bain. And then, finally, that these private equity companies load debt onto businesses. There is a study, though, reported in my newspaper. There is no more debt, no more default in these companies than in other comparable companies.

So it's this whole series of things which were untrue, which make Obama seem much more like a conventional politician.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So Romney is not hurt by this line of attack?

RUTH MARCUS: Well, in a sense, David is right. They are both hurt.

I think one of the reasons we're talking about Bain for a second week in a row is that we had the experience on Sunday of the Obama surrogate New York Mayor Cory Booker, who said he found it nauseating that these attacks were coming up.

If I were the candidates, I would get together very quietly -- and this is my modest proposal to them -- just have a pact that whatever -- that your surrogate is going to say something really dumb and damaging to you. My surrogate is going to say really dumb and damaging to me. Let's pretend they don't exist.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Because it's happened on both sides.

RUTH MARCUS: Because it's happened on both sides. And here comes Donald Trump about to -- with his birtherism, about to have a big fund-raiser with Mitt Romney.

But the reality is that there's two Obamas when it comes to Bain. There is the Obama who gave a very nuanced, a very elegant answer when he was asked about it in a press conference this week.

JUDY WOODRUFF: In a statement. He was up there at the NATO meeting, right.

RUTH MARCUS: And then -- so there is nuanced Obama, and then there is jugular Obama, who talked about -- even if the ad were 100 percent true, who talked about Bain as a vampire.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But isn't the way campaigns always operate, where the candidate can be sort of above the fray and the ads can be much rougher?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes.

But, to me, one of the major questions of the Obama campaign is -- he campaigned in 2008 as an untraditional candidate. Now, he did plenty of negative ads and all that. Nonetheless, he was something very different. People were disgusted by politics could really be inspired by Obama, because it was a very different campaign.

And, privately, they would say, we're not going run a Clinton-type campaign. We're not going to be conventional politicians.

And so they really got a lot of independents excited. Now they are running a completely traditional campaign, literally regurgitating the exact same ad that Ted Kennedy ran against Mitt Romney. And so have they decided , we have just got to win this way? Or are they losing something?

I think they're losing something by being so conventional.

RUTH MARCUS: I -- we saw this coming a ways out. And here is why they are doing it and here's why it is a problem for Mitt Romney as well, is, if you look at, for example, the Washington Post-ABC poll that came out this week, it had Governor Romney leading the president 58-40 among whites without college degrees in terms of who would do the most -- which candidate would do better to advance their family's economic interest.

This is a group that President Obama is never going to win, but he has to be able to narrow that gap. He's never done well with that demographic. And this goes right at the core of the message. This man doesn't understand your needs, is the Obama campaign message about Romney. And that is a message that could stick.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Very, very quickly, Romney did give a speech this week on education.

David, did we learn something new from that?

DAVID BROOKS: It was -- I thought it was disappointing. In some ways, it was pretty normal Republican education positions, which was increase voucher, increase choice, increase charter schools.

And I think they are all fine. I think it was a step back from President Bush, who wanted to use the federal government to really leverage and create a lot more reform. And, secondly, it was just rearranging the bureaucratic boxes. We have learned a lot about education even in the last four years, about the importance of quality teachers.

What did Obama -- what Romney have to say about that? Precious little. So I thought it was stale, a little.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well. . .

RUTH MARCUS: Worse than. . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: In two words.

(LAUGHTER)

RUTH MARCUS: Worse than stale, guts No Child Left Behind, ends accountability for schools as a condition of federal aid. You should be much more disappointed.

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF: Ruth Marcus, David Brooks, have a good Memorial Day weekend.

RUTH MARCUS: You too, Judy. Thanks.

In this week's Doubleheader, syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks discuss the end of two campaigns.

For our sport of politics section, we talked about Texas Rep. Ron Paul's strategic shift -- relaying from presidential primaries to amassing delegates. Will he get a speaking slot at the convention? Mark and David aren't so sure.

Also up for debate: the Americans Elect effort calling it quits.

In our politics of sport section, David showed us his iPhone shot of commencement ceremonies at Yankee Stadium, but confessed he stayed true to form and wore his Mets cap.

We also took turns predicting the outcome of this weekend's Preakness Stakes race in Baltimore. The Doubleheader is on hiatus next week, but tune in June 1 so we can see if Mark and I were right to bet on Daddy Nose Best.

Katelyn Polantz shot and edited this video.

Please subscribe to the Morning Line and follow Christina on Twitter.

JEFFREY BROWN: And now to the analysis of Shields and Brooks, syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Welcome back.

A few things bubbling under the surface of the campaign this week. I want to start with one, which was the focus on Mitt Romney and his experience at Bain Capital. Ads come out, competing narratives of that experience.

Mark, why the focus on that?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, you're Barack Obama, and the economy is the dominant issue, economy and jobs, and Mitt Romney has better scores on the economy than you do.

So you have to try and discredit or disqualify him on his economy credentials. And the irony is you have got two candidates in this race, both of whom are running away that from their signal legislative achievements of their career, health care.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: So, what you have got is Romney wants to talk about he's a turnaround specialist. And what -- the Obama campaign is saying, well, wait a minute, this isn't all about creating jobs. It's about creating profit. Sometimes creating profit means losing jobs.

JEFFREY BROWN: So they focused on this Kansas City steel company.

MARK SHIELDS: They want to establish that this wasn't just an economic -- without some pain and without some price.

JEFFREY BROWN: What do you see in the focus on Bain Capital?

DAVID BROOKS: It was pretty similar to the ads Ted Kennedy ran against Romney where they got the unemployed people and said this guy's a vampire, he destroyed our company.

I personally think the ads are 80 percent unfair. This was a company. . .

JEFFREY BROWN: The Obama ad.

DAVID BROOKS: The Obama ad against the Bain activity and this steel company are mostly unfair.

This was a company that was on the way down. They had no other buyer. Bain comes in, buys the money -- buys the company, puts in $100 million. They hang to it for eight years, so it is not like they are just dumping it, and then the thing ends up folding anyway.

And so I think it was a legitimate business transition, an attempt to make a success. The 20 percent that's accurate is that they did load it with a bunch of debt. And Bain -- even though the company went down, Bain did okay. And so that part, they are right about. But it gets into a larger argument about creative destruction, that we have had this. . .

JEFFREY BROWN: And what capitalism is, right?

DAVID BROOKS: Really a ruthless pruning on the part -- especially pats of the economy that are globally competitive, manufacturing, high-tech.

And it's involved tremendous productivity gains, but also tremendous layoffs. And so it's perfectly legitimate for to us have a debate about that, in part, I think because Mitt Romney and a lot of Republicans see that churning as the model for the whole economy. And so that's a legitimate thing to talk about.

JEFFREY BROWN: That a big debate about what capitalism is, right, but how does it work politically?

MARK SHIELDS: But it is one that Mitt Romney has chosen not to make. Mitt Romney has sold us about Staples, a success. He helped this company. And Sports Authority and the jobs, 100,000 jobs.

If you are going to say I have created 100,000 jobs, I mean, the people who got hurt were the workers. I mean, the officers didn't. The officers of the company didn't. And Bain didn't. So, I mean, this reflects a value. I mean, is it going to be decisive? No.

But if you are the president of the United States and the economy is the top issue, and you are running behind, you better make sure that the guy on the other side doesn't appear as a just totally faultless tribune of this position.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now, speaking of the nature of capitalism, another thing we learned this week is JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank, loses at least $2 billion and now it's probably more like $5 billion, right? Brings up all the focus on did the banks not learn a thing from the financial crisis and did regulation do anything and is more needed?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I don't think regulation is more needed. I think parts of regulation are more needed, but not to regulate failure.

Companies are allowed to fail. People are allowed to be stupid. And they lost $2 billion or $5 billion. That's being stupid. They pay the price, the head of the investment strategy out. And that's the way capitalism is supposed to work. That's how you chase in companies.

Where we have a public interest -- the idea of getting regulators involved and telling them, no, you can't make that hedge, you can't make that bet, you can't make that investment, that seems to me a recipe for disaster. Where we do have a public interest is making sure when people are stupid, they don't bring down the whole system.

And so making sure the capital requirements are high enough, that seems to me perfectly legitimate. But regulating within companies, and what bets they can do and hedges and upping the regulation in that sense seems to me completely wrong.

JEFFREY BROWN: What do you see, Mark?

MARK SHIELDS: I disagree.

I mean once you've got these banks that are insured by the public, as they are, and the Volcker rule, which is very straightforward, endorsed by five secretaries of the treasury, which says with these deposits, you can't get into speculative enterprises, and expect that you are going to be bailed out.

And I think there's an overwhelming public interest here. You know, I think Barney Frank had some legitimacy today by saying they're complaining about the cost of applying and complying with the Dodd-Frank law, the banks are, saying it's $400 million or $600 million, and they're talking about losing 10 times as much.

And so I think there is a public interest. I stand in awe of the fact that none of these guys has walked into the bar of justice and what happened to this country, what they did to this country?

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, you say there is a public interest. Is there public interest in this? Does it play as a political matter when something like this happens?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think it's part of the big debate we're in the middle of.

And Joe Biden, the vice president, gave a speech where he talked about finance capitalism. He emphasized we have got to get back to making things. And so it was the good capitalism where the guy is out with a hammer, and the bad capitalism, these cowboys running around with credit default swaps.

JEFFREY BROWN: I was with Secretary Geithner yesterday in a Baltimore factory, and that was the emphasis, making things.

MARK SHIELDS: Manufacturing.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: And so I guess we're going to have this debate.

I think it is a completely bogus distinction.

JEFFREY BROWN: Why?

DAVID BROOKS: How do factories get capital? They get them through the capital markets.

Now, I'm not crazy with al the derivatives and credit default swaps. I'm certainly not crazy about the way people are compensated on Wall Street. But having the best capital market in the world is why we have a successful manufacturing sector. And the idea of separating the two seems to me economically illiterate. I understand politically why you want to do it, the wholesome guy with the hammer vs. those rich Wall Street guys.

But it seems to me economically illiterate. Nonetheless, it's part of the big debate we're having about modern capitalism, which is a service sector. We have a service economy. This is the other problem with the Obama strategy. They talk about manufacturing. We have a strong manufacturing sector. It happens to be 10 percent of employment. We are a service economy, and we have to have a strategy for a service economy.

MARK SHIELDS: I come back to the belief that we have to make something in this country. And are finally starting to make something. And I think that is important.

In answer to your question, Jeffrey, about is it -- does it have political saliency, there is no question that President Obama's message about fairness, about playing by the same rules, about everybody having a fair shot plays far better as a message in these times and situations like this than does Mitt Romney's, which is sort of a back to the future, we need less regulation, less government, smaller involvement. And I think, in that sense, the advantage goes to Obama and the Democrats.

JEFFREY BROWN: Okay, another event this week is the beginning bubbling up, dare I say it, of the debt ceiling debate again, the debate that got kicked down the road, right, last year.

Was this, David, posturing or is there a real possibility of debating it during the campaign?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, it was posturing. This is Boehner saying he was drawing a line in the sand, saying, no new tax, we're going to demand real spending cuts.

But I think was really more mobilizing the base. What happens, as everybody probably knows, is after the election in December, they have what we call Taxmageddon, where all these tax cuts, that all ends, a lot of spending sequestration starts. We really have a bunch of things all happening at once. And it is a potential for a complete catastrophe because the whole system goes kablooey.

And we are going to have to fix these things, deal with all these incredibly complicated issues at once. And the Republicans are saying, we are going to do fundamental tax reform. I happen to think they are right. Last time, it took two or three years. How are we going to do it in a couple of weeks?

JEFFREY BROWN: Right.

DAVID BROOKS: And so I think what they are going to end up doing is kicking the can down the road.

JEFFREY BROWN: Again.

DAVID BROOKS: Again. And then we will see how the election turns out. But right now, everybody is posturing to say this is what we stand for. We stand are for spending cuts, or, in the Democrats' case, we stand for keeping the middle-class tax cuts, but not the rich.

JEFFREY BROWN: What do you think this was all about this week, raising it. . .

MARK SHIELDS: I think it was all about Republican politics and I think it was incredibly stupid.

John Boehner is a savvy politician, an able politician. I think Republicans are looking at election results. They see a Lugar go down in Indiana to Mourdock. They see Orrin Hatch, who has recreated himself as a new conservative in the contemporary mold, barely holding on.

Deb Fischer upsets the Republicans and the conservative establishment in the Nebraska primary with Sarah Palin's endorsement. So they're looking over their shoulder. This is what got the Republicans in the problem they're in. Last August, and that deal, they've never recovered from it, as a negative.

Interesting. David had a piece which you pointed out that in the contraception argument with health care, that the Democrats' support for President Obama had fallen by eight points. The bishops, Catholic bishops have become the Republicans' new best friend.

So by raising this issue, the Paul Ryan budget, which cuts aid to the disabled, which cuts aid to immigrants' children, which cuts aid to the elderly, and to the -- those victims of abuse, the Catholic bishops came out and said, this violates the moral code. This is a violation of our belief in common ground and common good.

And so they are alienating the Catholic bishops. I mean, it makes no sense, other than politically within the Republican Party.

DAVID BROOKS: I do agree with that.

The message plays within the Republican Party, 28 percent of the country. It doesn't play outside. And in places like California, where -- I mean Pennsylvania, where you have a lot of Catholics, they are really enjeoparding whatever little chance they had.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, just a couple minutes here, and I want to get to the last story. It's sort of a non-story story, right? This is the group of Republican political operatives. And they propose an ad, an ad campaign, right, that would tie President Obama to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as almost happened four years ago.

And then it quickly gets disavowed, right, by Mitt Romney and others. What was that about? Does it tell us anything about the campaign?

MARK SHIELDS: It tells us first of all about greed. I mean, this was a greedy proposal. It has no political saliency to it. The issue of Rev. Wright was litigated in 2008.

President Obama gave the most popular and perhaps the most persuasive speech of his career in rebuttal to it. And in the past four years, people have seen him go to St. John's Church and other places and so forth. So in that sense, it is playing only to the conspiracy nuts and those who are convinced that he is either from Mars or Venus or Kenya.

So it really made no sense. It particularly made no sense when Mr. Ricketts, the owner of the Chicago Cubs, who was going to spend $10 million against President Obama while he is asking the people of Chicago to refinance the refurbishing the Wrigley Field, the home of the Cubs. This is a guy who just slit his own throat by doing this.

DAVID BROOKS: And the campaigns are losing control of their message with all these different facts.

MARK SHIELDS: Absolutely.

DAVID BROOKS: And Romney, you can see how strongly he reacted. And Mark hinted at what is driving this.

The consultants get paid by the amount of ads that are taken out by these rich guys. And so they have an incentive to try to pump it up in ridiculous ways, and this was an example of that.

JEFFREY BROWN: Do you think we are going to see a lot more of that?

DAVID BROOKS: I think it's going to be one of the stories of the campaign.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right.

Mark Shields, David Brooks, thanks, as always.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you.

Watch Video

The Doubleheader is ready for your weekend viewing pleasure. Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks discuss the surprise results in the Senate race in Indiana this week and the consequences.

In our lighter politics of sports portion, we also talk about how the NHL playoffs are defeating the NBA playoffs in ticket sales.

Beware of big words used by one David Brooks: Today he we went from Waffle House to asymmetric polarization. We also apologize if you chose to place bets on the Kentucky Derby based on last week's picks, which were based on absolutely nothing.

Have a great weekend.

Terence Burlij shot this video. You can subscribe to Hari on Facebook, Google Plus and on Twitter:

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JUDY WOODRUFF: And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Gentlemen, it's good to see you both.

So, Mark, the president came out and said he's in favor of gay marriage. How big a deal is that?

MARK SHIELDS: He did. He did do that, Judy.

It -- first of all, it was not orchestrated. That seems to be the suspicion of all the conspiracy buffs in Washington that, oh, boy, wasn't this clever? It really wasn't clever. Joe Biden came -- as you pointed out in the piece, came bluntly out, and then Arne Duncan. They were going go one by one through the Cabinet until they got to the president.

And the president had an untenable position, which was his position was evolving. No leader on a controversial issue can say, my position is evolving. You expect a leader to say, I have thought about this. I have come to this conclusion. This is what I have decided.

And the president did decide. And it is a deal. How big a deal it's going to be, I would say this. For the Democrats, the Democrats are trailing Republicans in enthusiasm about this election, quite the opposite of 2008, where all the enthusiasm and intensity was on the Democratic side. This may generate some enthusiasm among those younger voters who were so energized in 2008 and are far less so in 2012.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What about the import of the president's doing this? How is history going to look back?

DAVID BROOKS: I think it will be a significant step.

Listen, this is remarkable issue which -- rare that you see public opinion shift so fast on one issue. It has been led by young people, people under 40. But people over 60 are moving, Republicans are moving, Democrats are moving. And so there has been just this incredible shift in public opinion.

It's in contrast to, say, the abortion issue, which is pretty much stagnant for decade over decade. This, you see this whole shift. And so the president has not led the shift. But he's moved along with it will. And so, in 1996, he filled out a questionnaire where he said he was for gay marriage. Then he sort of backed off that for a long time. And, you know, you understand why. You don't expect our politicians to commit political suicide, do something tremendously unpopular.

And he didn't. And then, eventually, he decided that he was going to follow along. . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: Right.

DAVID BROOKS: . . . and get with the program, so to speak. And so he hasn't been out front. Nonetheless, I think he has done the right thing.

I think it will be remembered as a very important step for a civil rights victory. And I think it was a brave step. It is something that I think will hurt him.

DAVID BROOKS: It will -- and it arguable both ways. Mark points out it will build up intensity. But I think on state-by-state, there are crucial states, like North Carolina, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania maybe, where you have got pretty significant majorities who oppose gay marriage.

And so I think, in some of those states, to the extent that this issue matters at all in the election, it will have an effect.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So trump the economy as an issue for voters?

MARK SHIELDS: No, I don't think it will.

David is absolutely right. In 1996, Judy, when Bill Clinton was president of the United States, 27 percent favored it, according to the Gallup Poll, 68 percent against it. The same Gallup poll now shows a majority of Americans supporting it. That is a dramatic change in 15 years.

And credit has to go to people like David Brooks, who is a conservative thinker, who made the case that if you cared about stability, and you cared about institutions, that you had to be for gay marriage, and especially if you wanted permanence in relationships as far as the nurturing of children.

I read that 27 percent of gay couples now have children. And more and more people have seen this. And more and more people have gay friends. I agree with David. In 2004, I believe George Bush carried the state of Ohio against John Kerry because there was a same-sex marriage amendment on the ballot.

And I don't say that Ohio has become Berkeley overnight. But I think the economy does trump this. I think African-American voters, when tested, who voted in large numbers against same-sex in 2004 in Ohio, will, in fact, support the only African-American ever elected to the White House and overcome their -- and I think there has been a change. I really do.

I don't know what the result is going to be. But it's -- I think it is a step and it certainly put the lie to the canard that same-sex marriage threatens traditional marriage.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You mentioned gay adoption.

It was interesting, David, that Mitt Romney said he believes that marriage should be between a man and woman, but he said he thinks it's all right for gay couples to adopt children. How do you square that?

DAVID BROOKS: Right.

Yeah. No, he has been sort of -- well, when running for governor in Massachusetts, he was much friendlier, at least in intonation. So there's been subtle gradations. And I'm pretty sure this is how the Republican Party is going to handle it. They're not comfortable with their position.

They're certainly not comfortable with the socially conservative traditional position that it is just an abomination and wrong. And so you will not -- you hear in Washington this week a lot of very anxious Republican pollsters saying, you do not want to go there, you do not want to pick a fight on this issue.

And so it will be unlike 2004, where they were eager to pick a fight. As I say, I don't think it will help Obama in some of these states, very particular states. I do not see Republicans leaping on this, because they can see which way the winds are blowing.

MARK SHIELDS: And, Judy, pointing out, Mitt Romney's position on it makes President Obama's look crystal-clear and totally born of principle.

He is for, you are right, gays being able to adopt. But he's for unwed parents for children. In other words, he doesn't want the stability, the security of a family legally and so forth.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Doesn't want them to be married.

MARK SHIELDS: And he's for a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage.

So you have Obama, who says he's for same-sex marriage, but he wants to do it on a state-by-state basis, not the traditional Democratic approach to most problems. And the Republican is saying he doesn't want to do it by states' right. He wants to do it with a federal mandate. So both sides are a little bit contradictory in there.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Which is kind of the opposite of what one normally thinks of Democrats and Republicans.

DAVID BROOKS: Right. And for Obama, of course, it is a little bit of an out to say it's a state issue. It means he doesn't have to get on the affirmative and talk about. . .

MARK SHIELDS: That's right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Just quickly to both of you, a word about this Washington Post story about what happened when Romney was in high school.

He was a senior about to graduate and there was this incident where he and some of his friends held down a classmate, and then cut -- and Romney and others cut his hair. Romney says he doesn't remember it. Five of the classmates say they do. Does this go anywhere?

DAVID BROOKS: I don't think so. It was an ugly episode, but there is no record of him behaving like this as an adult. Quite the contrary.

When you interview him people about his career at Bain, as governor of Massachusetts, in the campaign, they talk about him being extremely kind and compassionate. You can attack Romney for being a flip-flopper and stuff like that. You cannot attack him for being a cruel bully. It is just not in his adult record.

So, to me, this was a piece of his life that happened when he was young, wildly out of context with his adult record, and blown out of proportion.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Mark, he says he doesn't remember it, but he says, if he did something wrong, then he's sorry for it.

MARK SHIELDS: If I offend anybody by holding them down and cutting his hair off and bullying him -- of course, if it did happen, as his classmates testify that it did, he does remember it, I mean, because it is an unhappy chapter.

He would prefer not to remember it. But I do not think it has any legs as a political issue. And this is a man who has run twice for president, who has had opposition research done by Republican candidates and opponents of him who don't like him, who would use just about anything they could. And there is no pattern of his abusive behavior that I have ever heard of, save this one incident, which is ugly and offensive, and one that he would like to disremember.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Completely different subject, a couple of countries in Europe, David, voted this week, Greece and France.

And the voters lashing out against austerity. We have talked about this a little bit here, but what does this say. And is it going to have repercussions in this country?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: First, what it says -- and let's first define what the austerity is that we are talking about in Europe.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Right.

DAVID BROOKS: Some countries in Europe, like Greece and some of the smaller Central European countries, have actually cut spending. None of the other big countries have. In France, in Britain, in Italy, in Spain, spending is still going up.

They have -- some of them have promised future spending cuts and a lot of them have raised taxes. So, a lot of the austerity is not spending cuts. It's tax increases primarily. And so the austerity, it's not -- it doesn't have a clear relationship to what we are arguing about here, about whether we should cut spending.

Nonetheless, it is true that economies around the world are in terrible shape. And incumbents are losing. Gordon Brown lost in Britain, Sarkozy now. People are getting thrown out by angry electorates. And so it is a perilous time to be an incumbent.

MARK SHIELDS: Unemployment was at a 13-year high in France. Austerity, I think, define it what you will, hasn't worked, and certainly hasn't worked in Great Britain, which is the closest to us, a country with its own economy and most comparable.

And I just could not believe that the Republicans in the House of Representatives doubled down in austerity just -- I mean, you could say it was an act of great high principles.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The vote on the Defense cuts.

MARK SHIELDS: To vote to preserve every penny of defense spending, even though the Pentagon said they don't need it, and cutting literally billions from social programs like for -- for the long-term unemployed and single mothers.

It is just a remarkable decision. They lost 16 Republicans in the House in doing so. And I think you are starting to see cracks in the Republican approach. And Romney now is going to be tied to this because he has endorsed the Republican House budget.

JUDY WOODRUFF: This is not a vote that is going to stand necessarily, though, is it, David? This is the House.

DAVID BROOKS: It's a symbolic vote.

And, as I say, what the Republicans are trying to head off is where Europe is, where they -- some of those countries, namely Greece, they have to stabilize their debt. They have no choice. They have a different currency situation, but they have no choice.

And the Republican point is, we need to prevent us from getting there. Nonetheless, I sort of agree with Mark. It's just a politically unsustainable position to be cutting food stamps and all this other stuff and not touching the defense budget. I understand the need to have a strong defense and to preserve our ability to project power.

And it's fine to lay down a marker for your base. It's just not a sustainable position. I think the Republicans are making a big mistake.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And it's cutting, what, Meals on Wheels and child care assistance.

MARK SHIELDS: Meals on -- yes, child care, exactly.

And, Judy, just to add one thing to the point that David makes, Ronald Reagan doubled the defense budget in 1980, but -- in 1981. But Ronald Reagan also signed the largest tax increase in the history of the United States in 1982 to pay for it.

I mean, what the House Republicans' position is now they will not raise a penny of revenue from any source. They voted actually to support farm subsidies for farmers, while cutting food stamps, and to preserve them, rather than to pay for the food stamps. And I just think that is going to be a politically difficult position for the Republicans to maintain in the campaign.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Right.

Two speed answers. The loss of Dick Lugar in Indiana this week, running for reelection.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. I think he lost primarily because he was getting older, paid a lot of attention to foreign policy. People want this change and he was the personification of the establishment. Nonetheless, it sends a message: Don't compromise.

And other Republicans and other Democrats will learn that lesson.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, Mark, in West Virginia, the president running in the Democratic presidential primary, 60 percent of the vote against a convicted felon, who got 40 percent.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes, I think it's a terrible warning to the White House that, in a closed Democratic primary, Democratic voters participating, that the president's opponent, who was a convicted felon serving 230 months in jail, got over 40 percent of the vote, carried 10 counties without spending a dime or without any kind of a campaign.

And, Judy, to me, it just says something that -- when the Democratic United States senator will not say whether he voted for the president in the primary against the felon, nor will the Democratic government, that's a warning that are you in trouble.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It may be a warning.

DAVID BROOKS: I'm for voting for felons. It saves time.

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF: Mark Shields, David Brooks, thank you both.

And if you want even more of Mark and David -- and of course you do -- they talk sports and politics with Hari later this evening in what we call the Doubleheader.

Watch Video

The Doubleheader is back with syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks. Since someone turned on the humidity in the D.C. area this past week, I figured it might be time to get their opinions on a couple of books on presidents that you might want to check out this summer.

None other than President Bill Clinton wrote a review of Robert Caro's fourth volume on LBJ: "The Passage of Power." David Maraniss also has a new book on the way about President Obama: "Barack Obama, The Story," which includes access to parts of the president's ex-girlfriend's diaries and correspondence. Vanity Fair has published excerpts. Shields and Brooks weigh in on whether it should be written about.

In our section on the politics of sport, you don't have to know much about baseball to appreciate how dominant pitcher Mariano Rivera of the Yankees has been. Unfortunately, he has been sidelined with a knee injury. We also make our picks for which horse will win the Kentucky Derby based on ... not much.

Have a great weekend.

Katelyn Polantz shot this video. You can subscribe to Hari on Facebook, Google Plus and on Twitter:

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JUDY WOODRUFF: And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Gentlemen, welcome.

So we have just been hearing the bin Laden story, the interview with Peter Bergen that Margaret did. This was the anniversary this week of his killing. The White House, the president observed it by going to Afghanistan.

And then his campaign, David, ran an ad pointing to the president's decision to go take out bin Laden. What do you make of the White House handling and the campaign handling of this?

DAVID BROOKS: I thought they went a little far, and then they did Brian Williams/NBC interview in the Situation Room.

I think he deserves credit. First of all, it was a serious accomplishment. And as Peter Bergen gives you the impression, the intelligence community was ambivalent. And it strikes me that it was actually -- the intelligence community was a lot more confident there were WMDs in Iraq than about this.

And so the president has to operate in this zone of incredible uncertainty. And he made the right call. And I thought it was perfectly fine to brag about that. I think it's perfectly fine to jump around in the end zone and say hey, I did it. You are running for president. Maybe they go a little over the top sometimes.

What I didn't think was good was when the campaign ran this ad where they had Bill Clinton very effectively talking about the decision he took, but then they jam in this negative ad using a quote from Mitt Romney from five years ago taken out of context, which he has amplified many times to explain what he was thinking. They take it out of context in an attempt to get a jab.

And that's just the normal gangland campaign thinking, taking what is a good moment and then cheapening it with a stupid and cynical political jab. So that, I would fault them on.

JUDY WOODRUFF: How do you size up the way they handled it, the White House and the campaign?

MARK SHIELDS: I thought the president was totally appropriate. I thought it was a substantive agreement that had with President Karzai, obviously that President Karzai wanted, that the United States wanted. The war is unpopular, remains unpopular.

But I thought the president handled it well. It was a substantive trip. I didn't see any end zone dance. I didn't see any spiking the football, whatever jargon they wanted to use. I thought it was totally appropriate. I mean, are we totally amnesiac in this city? Is it only eight years ago that Top Gun landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln, George W. Bush came out, at perfect sunlight, you will recall, as the White House referred to it, magic light, at that magic moment with a mission accomplished sign, some 6,000 deaths earlier -- before Iraq and Afghanistan took that many American lives?

And that was the sort of a magic moment. I thought that was spiking the football. Silliest statement of the week was Mitt Romney's statement that anybody would have done it. We learned -- heard from Peter Bergen in his interview with Margaret. David has corroborated it. Anybody who has even reported on this remotely knows that there was a great division inside.

When Bob Gates, who served for six presidents, said, this was one of the gutsiest decisions I've ever even seen a president make, you know that it was a tough call. And for Mitt Romney said Jimmy Carter would have done it, Jimmy Carter made as tough a call as any president's ever made with his attempt, failed tragically, the deaths of eight American brave warriors, to rescue U.S. hostages in the -- held by the Iranians in the U.S. Embassy.

I would add, I do think it was -- the ad was a cheap shot on Romney.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The spot that the campaign. . .

MARK SHIELDS: Yes, it was.

I mean, you have got a positive -- that is the kind of thing you bring up in a debate. I mean, if Romney then, in the course of a debate says, you know, anybody would have done it, this and that, then you turn and you say, then why did you say this, and let him explain it.

But it took -- this was an affirmative, positive achievement of Barack Obama. Why make it petty and smaller by taking a cheap shot at Romney?

JUDY WOODRUFF: What about the "anybody would have done it" piece of this?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I agree with that.

I think it's impossible to know until you are there. You know, you can prepare -- and I don't care what you have done in business or what you have done previously in life. As I say, government is operating under uncertainty. There is -- not to get pretentious about this, there is a great Tolstoy scene where one of the generals sends his men into the fog of a valley. He has no idea where he is sending them.

You have got to make these calls all the time in government. And so the president, when you had all the uncertainty surrounding him, he made the call. And it was an aggressive call. And so he deserves credit for that. And it's just impossible to know how he would have done it, when he was campaigning, how Mitt Romney would have done it. He doesn't -- Mitt Romney doesn't how he would make that call.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, the other big international story this week of course is China, the dissident Chen Guangcheng. Now, it looks, Mark, as if he is going to be allowed to leave China. But there's been a lot of discussion back and forth.

Mitt Romney a couple of days ago said -- criticized the Obama administration for what it was doing with regard to human rights. How do you size up how it's been handled by the White House? You have got Secretary Clinton over there, Secretary Geithner.

MARK SHIELDS: Right.

Judy, unlike Mitt Romney, I will say I don't know completely. From what I do know, Mitt Romney spoke saying, from reports, which was his sort of his disclaimer, and then took a cheap political shot. It was -- he would have been far better served, I think his candidacy would have been far better served if he said that this stops at water's edge. We're rotting for this. We want a resolution. We want the safe removal and the safety of his family.

But he didn't do that. I would say right now it looks like a fairly mature, sensible, rational resolution of what had been for the Chinese an obviously humiliating experience, the division, the fault lines between the security people, their foreign service people, between the federal and central authorities and the local authorities. And the real tensions there were exposed.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Chinese.

MARK SHIELDS: Chinese -- were raw.

And I do -- I think credit has to go to Gary Locke, to the people at the embassy. . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: Ambassador, U.S. ambassador.

MARK SHIELDS: . . . U.S. ambassador, China, to Secretary Clinton, and to the Chinese people involved, the Chinese folks involved, if, in fact, this is the answer that it looks to be right now.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But at the time, David -- or not but -- at the time that Mr. Chen was released from the embassy, there was some question about whether that was the right thing to do.

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah. There was clearly -- there was certainly a fumble in the middle there, letting him out and maybe not being able to get him back.

And so that was clearly a fumble. But I do think it's in the context of really six or seven years from the Bush administration and the Obama administration of pretty good policy toward China which made this moment -- apparent moment -- possible, because while we have been tough with China, I think one of Obama's greatest foreign policy achievements is stationing troops in Australia, making sure that we're going to be in the Pacific to counterbalance China.

That's pretty tough, and tough all along the line, at the same time, being subtle and mature about various things so that the liberals in the Chinese regime who want to have friendly relationships are not put in a corner. They have some power. They can exercise their influence. And they can apparently do the thing which will help American-Chinese relations.

And so it's been a pretty complicated set of policies I think over the past eight years which make this sort of deal possible, even in pretty difficult circumstances.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But in terms of how they have handled this incident?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I think reasonably well. It's a characteristic of our policy that we have two tracks. We have what you might call the Geithner track, which is economic, which is pretty friendly, and then the Clinton track, which is diplomatic and military, which is a lot less friendly.

But -- so we're managing both those tracks and we haven't had them crash into each other.

MARK SHIELDS: We have major interests in common. We want their help on Iran. We want we want their help on Syria. We want their help on North Korea.

I mean, there are major economic -- there is an old line, Judy, that says a banker can write a dozen bad poems and nobody says anything about it, but one poet writes a single bad check and he's in trouble.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: I mean, they are our banker. I mean, don't forget that. They keep the lights on, the Chinese do. So it's not a totally equal relationship when you approach it from Secretary Geithner's point of view.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, speaking -- you bring me around to the economy. I am going to ask you the question I ask you every month at the beginning of the month, and that is when the unemployment numbers come out.

David, more jobs were created in April, but not as many as everybody wanted. What does this say about the economy?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What is the effect on the campaign?

DAVID BROOKS: Let me get out what I have been saying for the last four years, which is, first of all. . .

MARK SHIELDS: Financial. . .

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: Financial crisis, it takes a long time to recover. I say it every month. It's the truth.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Gee, have you said that before?

DAVID BROOKS: I say it on a monthly basis. I just should say answer A., and there it is.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: And so the bad news is that the percentage of Americans employed is at a 30-year low.

But the second thing to be said is that this suggests that it's not just the cyclical stuff. There really are structural problems, a lot of people , for demographic and other reasons, leaving the work force, a lot of unskilled jobs. I talked to somebody in the trucker business this week. Can't find truckers to work. And that's true across a lot of manufacturing.

Can't find people, even $50,000-a-year jobs. Take the skilled blue-collar jobs, there just aren't people with those skills. We have got those structural problems. We have got overhanging uncertainty impinging a lot of aggressive investment. And we have uncertainty about health care. We have got a rotten tax code.

And so to me what frustrates me, we were having big debates over what spending would help short term, but over the last four years, knowing we are in for a long problem, why hasn't there been and why in this campaign isn't there huge debates over tax reform, over entitlement reform, over middle-class stagnation?

In this debate, we have seen it go into student loans and other worthy stuff, but pretty small-bore compared to this size economic problem.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But Romney criticized -- you know, the numbers were out. And Gov. Romney was critical of the president. We're going to see that as long as the numbers aren't well.

But what about David's point? Why aren't we having this bigger debate about. . .

MARK SHIELDS: I think -- I hope it will be forthcoming. I think it is going to be inevitable at some point.

I would just point out that these are disappointing and really bad numbers politically for the president and the Democrats, make no mistake about it. I can recall, Judy, in the great recession of 1982, when President Reagan was in office, and he was campaigning in Texas for Jim Collins, Republican nominee for the United States Senate against Lloyd Bentsen.

And the Dow Jones had been way down. And he cheered the fact that the Dow Jones was up some 30 percent and had broken 1000 that day. And unemployment was at 10.4 percent. And the Republicans got wiped out, including Jim Collins, that November.

It isn't the economy, stupid. It's jobs. It is jobs, jobs, jobs. That's what it is. I mean, don't talk about, as some Democrats are, oh, Dow Jones at a five-year high, and manufacturing hiring is the highest it's been since 1997. Corporate profits are up.

No, when Americans look at the economy, it's the seminal experience of the Great Depression. It is unemployment and jobs that they look at.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, Gov. Romney said today we need to -- the country needs to have 500,000 jobs being created every month in order to keep up and be. . .

MARK SHIELDS: I would point out to Gov. Romney that in the entire history of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there have been five months in history where 500,000 jobs were created.

I mean, now, maybe he's got a secret, and I look forward to hearing about it.

DAVID BROOKS: But, to be fair, if this were a non-financial crisis recovery and we were in a normal curve, we would be producing 400,000, and growth would be 4 or 5 percent. It would feel much different if this were a non-financial recovery.

But the point is, the productivity of the American economy is doing pretty well. Companies are doing a good job of producing stuff. They are just not using people to do it. And so that is -- that is the structural problem. And so who has an answer for that? Well, I wish I knew. I don't know. But that is a tough one.

MARK SHIELDS: It's a terrible quandary. We are producing the same amount of goods and services we did with five million fewer workers. That is a real challenge.

JUDY WOODRUFF: We're always going to need the two of you to talk about the news at the end of every week.

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF: We can't do it with anything other than the two of you.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: Machinery. Try machinery.

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF: And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Gentlemen, welcome.

So let's go back to something we were talking about on the show a few minutes ago. And that is the U.S. economy slowing down, but, Mark, not as bad off as Europe's economy. Is there a lesson there for what we see here in the United States?

MARK SHIELDS: I guess there's a less on, Judy.

I mean, you could make the case, certainly, Great Britain, that austerity as an economic prescription, which has been the hallmark of the Cameron regime, is not only unpopular, but hasn't worked.

But I think that the "external shocks" -- quotes, unquote -- of whether it's China slowing down or Europe in a recession, are the wild card in the American political campaign. I mean, regardless of what is happening, I mean, we are part of and vulnerable to what is going on.

The American optimism appears, confidence appears to have survived this initial shock, setback, which is encouraging, but it's been the hallmark of Americans.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And many of these countries in Europe, David, as we were hearing, are countries that cut, cut government spending a lot, and now there are protests that it was too much.

DAVID BROOKS: Right. Well, in some cases, that's true.

First of all, I don't think you can clearly say government spending determines how much growth you have. It's an influence. But monetary policy is probably a much bigger influence, and the state of your labor market is probably a much bigger influence. The Germans, to their credit, did labor market reform under Gerhard Schroeder, and they are in decent shape because they did the reform.

So there are all sorts of influences. Nonetheless, it is certainly true that austerity dampens growth in the short term. Now, some of these countries have to do it because, unlike us, they don't have a reserve currency. They are really vulnerable to the markets in the way we're not.

So I think Britain probably has to do it. The problem is, you have got some countries in Europe who shouldn't be doing it. Spain was mentioned earlier in the show. Their debt situation is not incredibly bad. It's not particularly bad. And, meanwhile, they're recovering from this housing bust. And so they probably do need something much more stimulative, but they are stuck in this monetary union.

They're stuck in this European system, which has to have one uniform policy. And so, to me, one of the different problems Europe has from us is that there are 12 different or now many different economies with different situations, stuck in a common monetary system. And that is a real problem for them.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But you are saying because it's so different from the United States, it is apples and oranges?

DAVID BROOKS: Right. Well, I think there is a transatlantic debate over austerity. And I think it's certainly true that if you spend, if you go into debt and spend, you do boost growth. How much? Well, that, you get -- economists are all over the map.

It's also true, if you go into debt now, some time down the road, when you have to pay that off, you diminish growth. How much? Economists are all over the map. So there is some effect. The size of it, I really don't think we have a clear answer.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Something for us to pay a lot of attention to?

MARK SHIELDS: No, I think the world is a lot smaller place. And I don't think anybody can escape that. We are not immune from what goes on in Europe, by any means.

And if Europe is in a recession, it is not good for the United States. It's not good for Europe, first of all, and Europeans, but it's not good for outside. And it certainly isn't good -- you can see, Judy, what has happened politically. I mean, if you are sitting in Barack Obama's campaign headquarters right now, the news from France, the news from Holland, the Netherlands, the news from Romania is not good for incumbent governments.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, speaking of spending, the other story we -- in fact, we led the show with is -- and that is this vote in the House of Representatives, Mark, on how to pay for keeping the interest rates low on student loans.

We heard the president's -- the president's argument is, the Democrats' argument is, you shouldn't be taking this money from health care reform, from a fund that was part of the health care reform law. Is one side clearly right in that argument, or is this just, you know, a spring storm?

MARK SHIELDS: One side's playing offense and the other side is playing defense.

The Democrats are very much playing offense on this and the president is playing offense. The Republicans had not provided the funds for the student loan differential in the Ryan budget, which they voted for very proudly and trumpeted. And then they found themselves on what they thought was the losing side politically, the president with a big edge in the youth vote, which shows little enthusiasm or little interest in voting, certainly not comparable towards turnout in 2008.

And so this is a great way -- you go to Iowa City, Iowa, swing state, you go to Boulder, Colorado, University of Colorado, swing state, and you go to Chapel Hill, N.C., swing state, all of a sudden the Republicans, Mitt Romney says, first of all, yes, I am for a differential, cut in interest rates on student loans.

And then John Boehner follows, and the House Republicans have to come up with some sort of a fig leaf, which they did in the form of financing it by taking it out of health care.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And John Boehner really, David, went after the president on this, this week, purely playing politics. He talked about the emperor has no clothes.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I guess I think they are both playing politics.

First, they're pandering. Who can give college students the most? So that is one pander. That is probably a less serious pander because it is probably a pretty good program. The second pander is how are we going pay for it, and of course they pick the political vulnerability of the other side. The Republicans want to go after Obamacare. So they do that.

The Democrats want to go after oil and gas. And so they want to pay for it through there. So, they are picking on each other's vulnerabilities. It's typical election-year legislation. And I would say a little small. To me, you know, how to pay for education is actually a phenomenally difficult issue.

And reducing the interest rates on the loans, believe me, is not a solution at a time when academic inflation is going up, up, up. And we happen to be in a moment when I happen to think we are on the cusp of a tremendous change in how higher ed is delivered through online learning and stuff.

And this is symptomatic of the campaign. It would be nice to see a candidate say, I have got a big view of what is about to happen to higher ed and the federal government's role in it. And that would be a big plan, how it could use online learning. But they're not doing that. They're doing the mutual pandering.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But the charge of politics -- I mean, I was struck by how tough John Boehner was, Speaker Boehner was, in going after the president, saying: I have never seen the White House be so small.

MARK SHIELDS: I was surprised, because that is not John Boehner's style. He's not a bombastic guy by nature or by practice.

You know, I think the White House would have been better served if they had visited maybe the University of Vermont and the University of Kansas. I mean, to go to three swing states and to universities there certainly opens it up to the accusation that this is a political, rather than a substantive visit.

But, I mean, this is vintage -- quadrennial vintage politics, that the president wherever he goes is still the president, even though he's the party leader and the nominee of his party. And it was true of George W. Bush when he ran for reelection. It was true of Bill Clinton and it was certainly true of Ronald W. Reagan when he ran for reelection.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The Supreme Court, David, took up the Arizona immigration law this week. You listened to some of the arguments, a lot of speculation about whether they will uphold it or not.

But whatever they do, does that affect the campaign, the presidential?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I think immigration will play a lesser role this time than many of the past times.

First, I suspect it is going to be struck down. I sort of hope it is struck down, not because of particular substance of the Arizona law. I just don't think each individual state should have their own immigration policy. And so I just think it's unworkable.

But as -- immigration as an issue, well, it's not clear that there is net migration from Mexico, because the jobs aren't here and the Mexican economy is doing better. And so the underlying problem which fired a lot of people up is of diminishing salience.

And so I'm not sure immigration will be a huge issue this year, just simply because there isn't that much immigration, or at least illegal immigration.

MARK SHIELDS: David's presentation is, as always, thoughtful and reflective.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: Unfortunately, it's divorced from political reality.

We just went through a Republican primary, Judy, where Mitt Romney proved himself not to be a true-blue conservative, to be a red-hot conservative by -- what did he do? He went after Gov. Rick Perry of Texas on what grounds? That Rick Perry had signed legislation as governor of Texas that enabled the child of an undocumented immigrant who went through the Texas public schools and had a good record to go to school in state tuition.

He went after Newt Gingrich for saying that a family who had been here for 25 years, belonged to a church, paid taxes, obeyed the law, raised a family, should be deported tomorrow. He has got to scramble back.

John McCain carried white voters by 12 points in 2008. George W. Bush carried white voters by 12 points in 2000, the exact same number. The difference is the electorate changed. There are more Latinos voting and that is why Barack Obama could win a bigger landslide in 2008 than any Democrat except Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt.

And that's the reality that Mitt Romney has got to deal with and the Republicans have to deal with. No Republican since George W. Bush has been able to talk to Latinos at the national level.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. I do agree with that. Romney got himself into a terrible position on immigration.

And the party as a whole has gotten itself into a terrible issue in immigration.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You mean the Republicans?

DAVID BROOKS: The Republican Party.

The question is whether the issue has salience. There are always going to be a range of issues out there, Iran, the economy, XYZ. And if there -- if people especially in the border states perceive a flood of illegal immigrants putting a burden on their health care system and on their schools, well, it's going to have high salience.

If that flood goes away, it seems to me it is going to have lower salience.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You don't think it is going to affect how many Hispanic voters turn out and whether they are upset enough about it?

DAVID BROOKS: Right.

MARK SHIELDS: I think the Middle East has salience to Jewish voters. And I think that immigration or anti-immigration has great salience to Latino varieties.

They see one party that has really been overtly hostile, and its nominee really clambered to the nomination by that route.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Less than a minute left.

Newt Gingrich announced that he is going to drop out of the race...

MARK SHIELDS: No.

JUDY WOODRUFF: ... early next week.

His legacy, you want to weigh in on that?

DAVID BROOKS: Disappointing. We wanted some more -- a little more entertainment from the guy.

I got to see him cry in Iowa one day. But I thought he had to come out with big ideas. Some of them would be wacky, some of them would be smart, but they would be like big heaving ideas. And you would follow him around, he was talking about some bridge in the Port of Charleston. He had little, little ideas.

And so I can't even associate him with an idea this time. So I was a little disappointed.

 MARK SHIELDS: He did have a big idea, $2.50 gasoline and colonizing the moon. He didn't have the 25 cent draft beer or the 10 cent candy bar, but I think that was going to be if he stayed in the race.

He comes out of the race a smaller person than when he went into it. Rick Santorum came out of the race a bigger person than he went into it. And there were -- there really were no big ideas. It was more of a soap opera than it was a campaign, Judy.

He began with great flourish, then went to the Greek Isles for a cruise. His entire staff quit on him, went with Rick Perry. He clambered back. How did he get back? By attacking the press. And it is one of the great true, trusted routes. And he did it as well as anybody I have ever heard do it in those debates.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The two of you do it even better than anybody else every Friday.

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF: Mark Shields, David Brooks, thank you.

Watch Video

In this week's Doubleheader, syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks tackled whether the Los Angeles Times ought to have published the two-year-old photos of soldiers in Afghanistan posing with the bodies of a suicide bomber and another insurgent. Here is the LA Times' defense of its decision to share the images with the world.

We also have an extended boys of summer discussion on baseball. Two stories specifically caught our attention -- both historical moments: the Colorado Rockies' Jamie Moyer became the oldest pitcher in history to win a major league game. David Brooks referenced this interview by our friends at NPR. Six players on his team were not even born when Moyer started playing pro ball. Pretty amazing. Also amazing is the fact that famed Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, turned 100 years old on Friday. Both Mark and David shared some Fenway memories. You might even notice a 4/20 reference of sorts by David.

Have a great weekend.

Justin Scuiletti shot and edited this video. You can subscribe to Hari on Facebook, Google Plus and on Twitter:

Follow @hari

Watch Video

Would syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks dare do the Doubleheader on Friday the 13th? But of course. No black cats or broken mirrors could keep them from it.

In the sport of politics portion of our latest unscripted segment, we hear from both on the significance of the NRA in today's Republican politics.

In our politics of sport segment, we discuss the plight of Miami Marlins Manager Ozzie Guillen, who as Shields says, discovered the limits of free speech this week when he apologized for making positive comments about Fidel Castro. Guillen was suspended for five games by his team.

Finally, we get to Newark Mayor Cory Booker's heroic actions when he saved a neighbor from a burning building. Listen to what David Brooks had to say about Booker's future. If you're on Twitter, check out the hashtag #CoryBookerStories.

Thanks for watching, and have a great weekend.

For the latest endorsements and your fix of politics every morning, subscribe to our Morning Line emails written by Politics Editor Christina Bellantoni and Terence Burlij.

Justin Scuiletti shot and edited this video. You can subscribe to Hari on Facebook, Google Plus and on TwitterFollow @hari .

JEFFREY BROWN: And that brings to us the analysis of Shields and Brooks, syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Welcome.

MARK SHIELDS: Welcome. Thank you.

JEFFREY BROWN: Mark, Richard Lugar, what do you make of that? Is that another sign of the diminishing or missing middle?

MARK SHIELDS: It is.

The strength of Richard Lugar is that he is somebody who has worked, forged consensus and coalition and compromise. And that is reported pretty vividly. That has become in many quarters the kiss of death, that we don't want somebody who can get down and work across different factions. We want somebody who just meets our checklist, whether it's on abortion or same-sex marriage or invading Iran or tax cuts or whatever.

We just want this robot who is just going to go down there. And if he or she doesn't, then get rid of them and put somebody else in. It's an entirely different view of what government is. You have a representative go down who you agree with on most things who can work across and forge a consensus and a compromise, and compromise is not a dirty word.

JEFFREY BROWN: It's interesting to hear people talk about how he has changed.

Has he changed, or has our definitions changed?

DAVID BROOKS: I think it's our definition. I don't think he has changed.

I mean, here he is seen as the quintessential Hoosier. So it is hard for me to believe he's not quintessentially Indiana enough. He's always been a pretty conservative guy. And he still is a pretty conservative guy. He is an institutionalist.

I often ask senators just in small chat, who have you met up here, who you really admire, you like the way they do business, and Lugar's name is the number-one most often name in my experience. They mention Lugar as somebody who is a senator the way they want to be a senator.

He has a couple of things which have historically hurt people, first having long service, but second, especially, foreign policy. Being a foreign policy specialist is not necessarily the easiest ticket to reelection. There are a lot of heads of committees and things like that who have just lost.

JEFFREY BROWN: Especially a year like this.

DAVID BROOKS: Right, and especially when people hate Washington. My friends in Indiana say he is facing an extremely tough race, but he is a supreme Senate institutionalist.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now, speaking of the middle, speaking of how politicians play to it, this was the week when Mitt Romney closed the deal, so to speak, right?

MARK SHIELDS: Mm-hmm.

JEFFREY BROWN: Does he now move to the middle? What does he do?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, he doesn't move to the middle, announce I'm moving to the middle.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: But the middle does matter in American politics, Jeff, as long as independents and those who are undecided and ticket-splitters make the decision who becomes the next president. So it does matter.

And there is no question that Mitt Romney was pushed to the right by the campaign and probably beyond his natural comfort zone. But to win, he had to move over there. And I think that what he is facing right now is the problem that the charge against him leveled most vehemently by his principal challenger, Rick Santorum, was that he was the world's biggest flip-flopper.

So he can't be seen as moving overtly or abandoning positions that he took in this primary fight.

JEFFREY BROWN: So how does he do that? We heard of course the famous Etch-a-Sketch analogy a few weeks back.

DAVID BROOKS: Right.

JEFFREY BROWN: How does he appeal without losing his. . .

DAVID BROOKS: Right.

Well, the first thing he has got to do is be himself. And who is he? He is a data diver. He's a problem solver. He is not a particularly ideological person. I think if you talk to people who have been working with him and have tried to advise him, when you give him some grand ideological philosophy, it just like goes straight through.

It's just not the way he thinks. So he is a problem solver, wants to get the evidence and make a decision. And so I think going back to that, without renouncing anything he stood for, will be fine.

The second thing is look at who he has to deal with and who he has to win over. He has had a really bad several weeks in the polls, as a lot of men and women have fled from him. And the people in particular who have fled and who are the ones who are winnable are especially downscale voters.

There are a lot of college-educated women who are really very strongly on the Democratic side. He is probably not going to get those people. But where he has really seen slippage is among high school-educated women. And so he has got to provide an agenda based on security and social mobility for those people. So far, he shows no sign of doing that.

So far, even at the NRA today, he is still doing the quintessential Republican line, it's all about freedom, let's cut government. He has got to do more than that. George W. Bush did more than that, H.W. Even John McCain had service. It wasn't just, we hate government. It was something to help people out. And he's got to give a "help you out" agenda.

JEFFREY BROWN: What of Rick Santorum? You mentioned him. What of his followers? What of the people who voted for him?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, I think, first of all, Rick Santorum did something that very few people do. Most people who run for president have been successful before they do. They have been governors, senators, or success in business. And most of them lose. And most of them leave as diminished figures.

Rick Santorum came in as a marginal dark horse and leaves as a much enhanced figure, having won 11 contests. Ronald Reagan in 1976 won 12, and he is the ostensible leader of that conservative cultural social wing of the Republican Party.

JEFFREY BROWN: I was thinking back earlier. We barely talked about him in the beginning.

MARK SHIELDS: No. It's just amazing. It is remarkable.

And it's also to me a validation of the value of having two states like Iowa and New Hampshire early, where an underdog, underfinanced candidate who is written off by all the wise guys and all the pollsters, by sheer effort, energy, discipline, determination, and effective message, his campaigning in 99 counties in Iowa, enabled him to spring the upset and to do it against money.

I mean, it was really was quite an achievement. Now, he then blew it with one of the truly -- two of the most devastating self-inflicted wounds in my political experience, when he said John Kennedy's Houston minister speech made him throw up, and Barack Obama was a snob basically by wanting kids to go to college.

And he lost Michigan that closely. But, that said, like all people who have challenged, whether Jesse Jackson in '84 or in '88, or John McCain in 2000, or whoever else, Gary Hart in '84, Pat Buchanan in '92, what they want is the validation at the convention. They want that moment where they can make a speech, where their supporters can cheer and make noise-makers and so forth.

And I think that it is in Mitt Romney's interest to accommodate them.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, does he have more than that, a role more than that?

DAVID BROOKS: I think so, as a spokesman.

Listen, we are going to have a guy from Harvard Law School running against a guy from Harvard Law School. And so we can move the capital to Cambridge, save time.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: And so Rick Santorum represents and spoke for a group that's not like that.

JEFFREY BROWN: Not even Harvard-Yale, right?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. Right. No, it used to be we would have Harvard-Yale. That was at least -- that was diversity in the old days.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: So -- but now we have a guy from Western Pennsylvania whose grandfather, famously, coal miner -- and who won over a lot of downscale voters specifically by talking about how I'm going help you and especially by talking about how social values interacted with economic values, how divorce and family breakdown really hurt the country's economic prospects.

He didn't do it as aggressively enough, but he did it. And so keeping those items on the agenda, both for Democrats and Republicans, very valuable thing to do.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, let's look at, I guess we could call this the flap of the week, which was Hilary Rosen referring to Ann Romney as, what, hasn't worked a day in her life, and, therefore, her husband shouldn't look to her as, right, a source on the plight of woman.

What do you make of that?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah.

Well, I think Hilary Rosen was graceless from start to finish, frankly, throughout all this. I personally think -- and a lot of people have said this -- it's like -- I think John Dickerson called it the umbrage wars, where somebody says something stupid and everybody pretends to be really upset, and then people pretend to be really upset. And this is what passes for media and Twitter politics these days.

I think there was a time when a lot of people said, oh, people, women who stay at home and raise their kids are somehow not doing enough with their lives. I really think that's an extremely small minority these days. Maybe some people still believe that. But I think most people know how hard it is to stay home and raise kids.

So I don't think it's a real issue, in that I don't think people really -- there are not that many people who agree with the idea that stay-at-home moms are working any less hard than anybody else.

JEFFREY BROWN: Go ahead.

MARK SHIELDS: I disagree.

When was the last time in the space of 16 hours the president of the United States, the vice president of the United States, the first lady of the United States and the president's campaign manager all distanced themselves and repudiated a statement made by a supporter?

So, I think it did -- they were terrified of it, being tarnished. The Obama campaign was terrified.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, it also comes amidst this war on women, right, this idea. . .

MARK SHIELDS: The alleged war. . .

JEFFREY BROWN: The alleged, yes.

MARK SHIELDS: The alleged war on women.

But, no, I think what you have with Romney is you have an awkward, emotionally detached, sort of personally inept candidate who has not been able to connect with voters.

What the Romney campaign wanted most of all was to have the face of the campaign become Mrs. Romney, who is authentically natural, appealing, just inviting and welcoming. She is just -- and a great witness for him, okay?

How do they get her out? And what the Obama campaign does, through Hilary Rosen, who is not with the Obama campaign, but certainly is a strong supporter of the president, is to make her not simply the centerpiece, but to make her a sympathetic and appealing figure. And it just put -- and it put the Obama campaign very much on the defensive, because women are the key. And if in any way you energize stay-at-home moms who have been indifferent, who are basically Santorum or other conservative candidates, and not for Romney, and they all of a sudden say, gee, we can bond with the Romneys, then you have energized a constituency that has been dormant and almost indifferent to Mitt Romney.

JEFFREY BROWN: And Ann Romney no longer a secret weapon.

DAVID BROOKS: No.

And I agree with Mark about her quality as a candidate. If you look at all the campaigns, all the -- president, vice presidents and all their spouses, she's the best. She just trusts -- audience. . .

JEFFREY BROWN: She's the best. . .

DAVID BROOKS: As a campaigner. I think they should flip the ticket or whatever the spouse relationship is.

MARK SHIELDS: She is just awfully good.

DAVID BROOKS: She just -- it is a natural. She goes out in front of a crowd and she just has a natural instinctive trust. Whereas Mitt Romney wants to meet people, he works hard, he's a good guy, he doesn't have that instinctive trust. Like sort of a spiritual stage dive where you will catch me, she has that.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right.

Just a short amount of time left, I want to talk about the tax issue. The president raised the so-called Buffett rule this week. Is it good economic policy? Is it good politics?

MARK SHIELDS: Is it good policy? I don't think you can separate the two.

Is the answer to the nation's problems? No. Is it a step to make available to voters a choice with a tax system that we have right now and to change it? It's not going to solve the deficit. It's not going to bring down the nation's debt. But I do think it's an important principle that taxes be based on the ability to pay.

And they are not right now. And if the idea that people making millions of dollars paying less than 15 percent, I think it is a legitimate issue for the president to raise. It is a political issue. Is it going to embarrass Mitt Romney, who paid -- who made $21 million and paid at 15 percent? Yes. Is it intended to do so? Yes.

But that does in no way -- the longest trip of 1,000 miles begins with a single step. This is a step towards tax reform.

DAVID BROOKS: It's a step backwards.

JEFFREY BROWN: A step backwards.

DAVID BROOKS: It's a subterfuge and a deception.

First of all, it only raises $5 billion, $7 billion a year. In a trillion-dollar deficit, that's peanuts. Second, if you want the rich to pay more, which I do, cut the damn loopholes. Don't put a Band-Aid on top of a diseased tax code. And the president is not willing to have a real tax reform.

But if you want to do that, do have a real tax reform. And don't pretend to tell people you can have the government you want and somebody else is going to pay. There aren't enough rich people to pay. So I think this is a -- it's a political gesture that is not going at the core issue.

JEFFREY BROWN: Very quickly.

MARK SHIELDS: Just because you can't do everything doesn't mean you don't do something. It is not the panacea. And I agree with David. And a tax isn't going be to be done by the top 2 percent paying the whole freight. That is impossible. But it is a step. And Republicans are wrong to oppose it.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, we'll no doubt keep talking about tax policies over the next months.

David Brooks, Mark Shields, thanks very much.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you, Jeff.

And if you want even more of Mark and David, and who wouldn't, right, then you can catch them later on with Hari on our website for what we call The Doubleheader.

Listen to the Audio

JUDY WOODRUFF: And to the analysis of Shields and Ponnuru. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru, who is sitting in for David Brooks this week.

And it's good to you have with us.

RAMESH PONNURU, senior editor, The National Review: Thanks.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Both of you.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So let's start out talking about the jobs report, 120-some-thousand -- 120,000 jobs created this past month, Mark, but fewer than what economists were expecting. The Republicans have already jumped all over it. We heard Mitt Romney saying earlier another example of the president's failed policy.

Does this affect the presidential race?

MARK SHIELDS: Not the one month.

I mean, there have been 25 months of private sector job growth, and an increase of 4.1 million jobs in that period of time. And, you know, it's been good. The problem is one of expectations. They were not met. This is disappointing news.

And as far as politically is concerned, Judy, basically you need a quarter, that is three consecutive months, before economic attitudes begin to change. That's what happened to George Herbert Walker Bush, the first President Bush, when he was seeking reelection in 1992. The economy had improved. And it was better.

But the perception had not changed, because there hadn't been three months pass. And I think that is where it is right now. There still is a sense that it's fragile, but it's moving in the right direction. What he can't really use is a couple more months of news of this nature.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, still early, Ramesh, to make a difference?

RAMESH PONNURU: I think that's right.

You know, and I think that part of what is going on with the public is there have been so many sort of false dawns in this economy that people I think are going to take a little bit longer to trust that there is a real economic recovery that they can feel.

If there are some more months like this, where you have disappointing jobs numbers, I think that is very bad news for President Obama. If it picks up, on the other hand, then this is just going to be a memory.

JUDY WOODRUFF: We also saw the president and Gov. Romney get into a sparring contest, if you will, when the president took on the Republican budget plan in the House, Mark, used some very strong language, called it a "Trojan horse." He said it is so far right, it makes the Contract With America look like the New Deal.

Smart for the president to be doing this, and smart for Gov. Romney to be so closely allied with this budget?

MARK SHIELDS: I would say it's tactically smart for the president.

Mitt Romney comes through this on the cusp of the nomination now by consensus more damaged than any presidential nominee in the history of modern polling. His unfavorable numbers are higher than anybody who has ever been nominated -- about to be nominated.

Only less popular than Romney is the Republican Party. And only less popular than the Republican Party are Republicans in Congress. So what the move by President Obama was to make Romney the candidate of the Republican Party, the candidate of the Republicans in Congress.

That was the smart part tactically. What the president convincing or persuasive? No. "Social Darwinism" is not a term that goes easily on a bumper sticker.

JUDY WOODRUFF: This is one of. . .

MARK SHIELDS: One of the lines that he uses.

Let's go to the ramparts, take on these social Darwinists.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You don't think that's. . .

MARK SHIELDS: I don't think it rings very evocatively.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But, Ramesh, Gov. Romney had used the word marvelous, which the president mocked in his speech to the newspaper editors. Is it smart for him to be so closely allying himself with the Ryan budget?

RAMESH PONNURU: You know, I'm in the really sure that Gov. Romney has a choice.

If he had been away from -- tried to keep his distance from the Ryan budget, I think it would have created a very damaging rift between the congressional and the presidential wings of the party, and you just can't go into a big election that way.

You know what? I think in a way what President Obama has done is immensely clarifying. This is a serious disagreement between the parties. It a very important set of issues and we need a political debate on these questions. I think the problem with Obama's strategy right now is he's got the negative part, the critique of the Republicans' plan.

What he doesn't have is his own administration's plan for dealing with our long-term debt problem. Tim Geithner, treasury secretary, said so on Capitol Hill. And until he fills that in, I think that there is a hole in his strategy.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You see it that way?

MARK SHIELDS: Yes, I think that the president wants this to be about -- he would love to it be about budgets and deficits and tax cuts. What you don't want is the economy with bad economic news to be the centerpiece.

I think Gov. Romney is paying a price for the bitterness of the fight to win this nomination. He has taken positions, for example, on immigration. He got to the right of both Rick Perry, who was a formidable threat, and Newt Gingrich, who emerged as a threat, by taking a more right-leaning position, more stridently anti-immigrant. Romney promised to veto the DREAM Act.

He did the same thing with Rick Santorum on the Planned Parenthood. He got to the right of him on contraception. He embraced the Ryan plan, you will recall, a year ago. Why? Because Newt Gingrich branded it right-wing social engineering. So it was a tactical move. And now he's married to that move.

I don't think being closely aligned with Republicans in Congress or President Obama being aligned with Democrats in Congress is particularly helpful going into a campaign.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, Ramesh, we should point out, full disclosure, you have endorsed Gov. Romney.

RAMESH PONNURU: That's correct. I made the case that he was the strongest of the Republican candidates.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And so do you see it as Mark does, that this is a risky strategy?

RAMESH PONNURU: Well, absolutely. Taking on entitlement reform is risky. Everybody knows that.

I think, though, that it's sort of fundamentally something that a lot of Republicans, and I think Gov. Romney is one of them, view as a responsibility. If the Republican Party actually wants to keep taxes down over the long run, there is no way to do that without a kind of Medicare and Social Security reform.

And in the case of Medicare reform, I think he has come up with a pretty intelligent one that has Democratic advocates, like Sen. Ron Wyden.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, one story that did come out today about Gov. Romney was about how he -- Mark, how he has decided to keep, I guess, from disclosing a large chunk of his wealth. I mean, a lot of it is in many different investments. And there is -- it's legal. He's apparently using a law that is available.

But it means that he will not have to disclose a good bit of it. Is that. . .

MARK SHIELDS: He's got to get it out.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Is that going to -- can he hang on that. . .

MARK SHIELDS: They've been through this.

I mean, it's painful if you are in the campaign, because the candidate obviously doesn't want his privacy violated for all kinds of reasons. But Mitt Romney's problem is that he's not seen as connecting with ordinary people. He's got to get all discussion of estates and taxes and everything else, get that out, I mean, just get it all out now, and don't let it drip, because it's going drip out.

And it's opening up. There's a hundred journalists working on it right now to find out what exactly Bain's money was and how many jobs overseas it created.

RAMESH PONNURU: Now, you can see this playing out the way the debate over whether Romney would release his tax returns played out, which is the candidate resists disclosure, there is a steady drumbeat from reporters and from Democrats and from Republican ravels that he has to disclose.

Eventually, some Republican backers of him will say, you know, look, this is not going to be sustainable, and he will cave in. But having resisted that long will just make it a bigger story.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Okay.

Meanwhile, we have been talking about Mitt Romney. Meanwhile, Rick Santorum still is in the race. He says he's going to compete for his home state, Mark, of Pennsylvania. He says -- he is talking about Texas in the month of May. What is his path?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, Judy, the toughest thing is not even deciding to run. The toughest thing is withdrawing from a race, and especially after he has tasted some glorious moments.

I mean, Rick Santorum looks at a state like Louisiana, where neither candidate, neither nor Mitt Romney, spent any real money. And he won 2-1. Every place else he has lost, he has been outspent 4-1 or 5-1. So he is saying, if I could just hang in there.

I thought Richard Land, the Southern Baptist leader who has been a supporter and admirer, urged him to withdraw before Pennsylvania, that he had had a remarkable run, that he had altered the debate, that he improved his own standing in the party, but he can't leave having lost his own state, especially after the defeat at Bobby Casey's hands.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But, Ramesh. Excuse me, Mark.

Is there any sign that he would drop out before Pennsylvania?

RAMESH PONNURU: Well, he keeps saying that he is absolutely committed to the race and he's not going to drop out. But, of course, that is something that politicians will say until the minute that they decide to say, well, actually I'm dropping out.

And I think that Mark is right, that if he were to lose Pennsylvania, that would erase all of the gains he's made. He's made a real comeback since his humiliating defeat in 2006. And that would all be wiped away.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, one other thing we see when you compare Rick Santorum's approval rating compared to the president, there is a big gap among women. There's also a gap, not as large, with Gov. Romney, but it's still significant.

Mark, there was a poll out this week that showed an 18 point so-called gender gap in support for the president ahead of Gov. Romney. Is this a problem? I mean, Republicans traditionally have done a little worse among women, but is it worse this year, Mark?

MARK SHIELDS: Republicans have traditionally done better among men and worse among women. . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: That's right.

MARK SHIELDS: ... particularly women who are employed outside the home and especially true among women who are either sole supporter of their household or on their own, whether in fact there is a -- they want a government that's activist and interventionist, some sense of social and economic justice.

But there is no question that there has been an inclination there. This is bad. These numbers are unsustainable for Romney. He has to turn Ann Romney loose. She is his best ambassador and a far better salesman than he is of Mitt Romney.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Is that the way he helps himself with women voters?

RAMESH PONNURU: You know, I'm sure that the Romney strategists are very worried about this.

It's certainly -- I mean, I think most Republicans understand you can lose the women's vote and still win an election. George W. Bush did it in 2004. Women went narrowly for John Kerry. But the kinds of numbers that we've seen in this week's polls, that can't sustained if you are going to win a national election.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, as Mark said -- we want to point this out, that Gov. Romney is doing better among men in some polls. It's. . .

MARK SHIELDS: No, right, the -- the women -- and obviously the White House, quite by coincidence, had a conference today on American. . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: By complete coincidence.

MARK SHIELDS: Absolutely, totally divorced from the campaign.

JUDY WOODRUFF: One last thing, and that is what the president had to say in two different speeches or sets of remarks this week about the Supreme Court, in effect challenging the members of the court not to overturn the Affordable Care Act, health care reform.

Is this -- how smart is this on the part of the president to be going there?

RAMESH PONNURU: Well, I think that the president's initial comments were sort of surprisingly clumsy for a former lecturer in constitutional law. And then he kind of had to walk them back, because he seemed, as you know, to be suggesting that there was something wrong with the idea of a court striking down a law that had been passed by what he called a strong majority of Congress, which, of course, wasn't even the case with Obamacare.

But he walked it back. He's made his argument. And I don't think the Supreme Court is going to pay much more attention to what he is saying than to what the solicitor general said and to their own views about the Constitution.

MARK SHIELDS: I thought it was unhelpful for the president, especially the phrase, unsolicitious phrase, calling them "unelected" justices.

That's sort of the rhetorical territory of traditional anti-court people coming from the right spectrum attacking the court for expanding the civil liberties or individual rights. And I thought he walked back the next day. But I don't think it's where he wants this campaign to be going into the fall.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And at one point referring to health care reform getting a big majority.

MARK SHIELDS: Well, big majority.

There were 75 Democratic seats in the House when we voted on health care. And it passed by nine. And it passed by one vote on a reconciliation procedure in the Senate. It wasn't -- when Social Security passed, four out of five House Republicans voted for it. Three out of four Senate Republicans voted for it.

Now, you could say the Republicans weren't available, but it was not a substantial majority.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, we are delighted to have the two of you with us.

Ramesh Ponnuru, thank you. Mark Shields. . .

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you very much, Judy.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Thank you both.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you.

RAMESH PONNURU: Thank you.

Admit it, you're in an office pool. You're trying to win a kajillion dollars just like everyone else playing the Mega Millions lottery. The Doubleheader team -- syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks -- are letting you in on our winning numbers. In a totally transparent process, you can watch us get rich quick. Heck, you can even make us less rich, by sharing in our wealth and picking the following numbers: 2, 4, 12, 13, 40; Mega Ball: 24

Even though you know the chances of hitting the jackpot are so miniscule and that it's almost a sure bet that you will lose a dollar, we play anyway. Read Paul Solman's post on whether to play if you're still on the fence.

In the more serious portion of our weekly discussion, we asked whether endorsements really mattered in the presidential race. For the latest endorsements and your fix of politics every morning, subscribe to our Morning Line emails written by Politics Editor Christina Bellantoni and Terence Burlij, our man behind the lens.

Terence Burlij shot the video. Paula Rogo and Samina Uddin edited it. You can subscribe to Hari on Facebook, Google Plus and on TwitterFollow @hari .

JUDY WOODRUFF: And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Welcome, gentlemen, on this Friday.

So, this week, three days of hearings before the Supreme Court on the president's health care reform law.

David, what did you make of it all?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, it's -- I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but it certainly sent shockwaves through Washington.

People have been overconfident. I think the views of the conservatives have been under-reported for months and months, and their views slighted. And it turns out there are serious concerns. And I don't pretend to pass judgment, but it strikes me as a perfectly valid constitutional issue.

Basically, what the individual mandate does, it asks -- it compels people to enter into a contract with an insurance company, which is not really in their best interest, in order to subsidize other people who are forced to enter into that contract.

That strikes me as a very -- as a step forward in executive or governmental power. So it strikes me as a perfectly legitimate thing to do. I can see why, morally, we are all responsible for each other's health. We're not going to let somebody die on the street.

But, constitutionally, why the government should be compelling people to do this, that strikes me as a completely valid concern, and the justices honed right in on that one.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, what did you hear, Mark?

MARK SHIELDS: What I heard, Judy, was a political discussion, a reminder that a judge is a lawyer who is appointed to that office by a politician, and that it struck me as rather remarkable to hear judges -- justices of the United States Supreme Court reciting lines that were -- actually questions that were written by the Tea Party opposition to the law.

David's point is a legitimate one. It's a question -- I don't know it's not to my advantage. I think it is to my advantage to have people, everybody in society covered by health insurance, that it is now. If someone is forced to go to an emergency room, we do cover all the expenses, and at a cost to everybody. And that's the right thing to do, to cover it.

But I think most of all, it hit me that -- the change in two years. I mean, there's no question the political sea change with. . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: You mean since the law went into effect.

MARK SHIELDS: Since the law was passed. There was a confidence on the part of the administration and the White House that once people became aware of this, there would be a change.

And people like Ken Cuccinelli, who is the attorney general of Virginia, and other conservatives saying, no, they're going to challenge this in the Supreme Court, they were dismissed, they were treated with some disdain. And you could see this grow to the point where it's not only possible, it may be plausible that this law will be overturned, if not in entirety, in part.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, did you hear the justices reciting Tea Party lines. . .

DAVID BROOKS: Sometimes, yes.

I mean, I ran into some judges this week who said, it went on too long. There was no reason for it to go on three full days -- or not full days, but three days. And so within -- on the fringes, it's true there were some political statements made. There were some comments, inaccurate comments, in summary of the bill.

But -- and so that was there, no question. But at the core, there was this core issue, does the government -- we all know that if you enter into a relationship, the government has the power to regulate it. Does the government have the power to compel you to enter into a relationship?

And that strikes me as a purely constitutional matter, a role of government matter. And there are many ways to get people to have universal coverage. And it's worth remembering, when Barack Obama was running for president, he was against the individual mandate because he thought it would be ineffective, you could not enforce it.

You could tax people and pay them. You could give people strong economic incentives to get universal coverage. But compelling that mandate, which was the most politically convenient, is far from the only way to get there.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So you're saying that that was the right argument to have, over the mandate, over the validity of the mandate? Mark, I mean. . .

MARK SHIELDS: Yeah, I think the argument, they went to the point that is the vulnerability, and it was a point that Democrats didn't -- they came to out of a sense of necessity, political necessity.

The mandate had its origins, the individual mandate, some 20 years ago when Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the president and first lady, a Democratic administration, came up with their health care plan, and this was the Republican rebuttal. It was hatched at the Heritage Foundation, a Republican conservative -- conservative think tank here in town.

It was backed by Republicans. And this -- David's absolutely right in his recitation of history, that candidate Obama opposed it. Most Democrats opposed it. Most Democrats wanted a single-payer, at least the Democrats who were engaged and involved in this. They couldn't pass it. They didn't have the votes to pass it. And this was the compromise plan.

DAVID BROOKS: And I would say, first, I'm for it as a matter of policy. I think the mandate is something you need if you're going to have a good system.

As a matter of constitutional law, that's sort of different. And so we do have to respect the Constitution. One other thing I did want to say, and I have heard this from a lot of people, is we got to see the justices in a more high-tension setting than we normally do.

And I can't tell you how many conservatives have told me this week, we were opposed to Sotomayor, but she's really good. And they were really impressed with her. I thought Roberts was very good. I think Scalia is always flamboyant, but also super-smart. But Sotomayor and Kagan I think really showed on that public, or the newest justices, how smart they are.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What was your take on the justices?

MARK SHIELDS: I think -- I can't make an assessment of the judges. I just -- I didn't listen in its entirety. I dropped in and out and listened to our summaries.

But I do want to say this one thing about the court. And that is, at a time when American institutions are under siege -- Gallup poll last year had the favorable or unfavorable evaluation of these falling institutions -- the court had been up pretty high, had been 61 percent favorable.

And after the Citizens United decision, when they opened up corporate contributions, unlimited corporate contributions, for the first time in 100 years in American politics by a 5-4 vote, the court has dropped, and a decision that 80 percent of Americans when polled opposed.

The court's favorability has dropped to 46 percent. And I think the court is in danger of becoming very much a political institution. The reality has been in the past. . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: Political institution.

MARK SHIELDS: A political institution that's become politicized as part of the political campaign.

Fifty years ago, Judy, it was not uncommon to see cars with bumper stickers on them, "Impeach Earl Warren," who was the chief justice, at a time when the court expanded civil liberties and civil rights and upset established order.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So are you saying you expect a political decision?

MARK SHIELDS: I expect a political reaction to the decision, if in fact -- I think the losing side in this kind of a decision, high-profile, high-intensity decision, is where the political energy lies. I think the initial reaction, if the mandate is overturned, if the law itself is overturned, there'll be a celebratory victory lap by the part of the conservatives who prevailed, and disdain for the president, the constitutional professor who didn't understand the Constitution.

I think after that settles in, I think what you will see is political energy on the Democratic side to -- because once these rights and these -- those changes have been repealed.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But just to make sure I hear you right, Mark. . .

MARK SHIELDS: Sure.

JUDY WOODRUFF: . . . you're not saying the court is making -- is injecting politics into this? You're saying. . .

MARK SHIELDS: Oh, I think that it will be seen very much as a political decision, I mean, based upon the questioning.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Okay.

MARK SHIELDS: You got Charles Fried, who was Ronald Reagan's solicitor, I mean, a very conservative Harvard professor, you know, say he just couldn't believe some of the questions, that they sounded like they'd been written by the Tea Party.

I think it does become part of the political -- you would then have the Citizens United decision, the Bush v. Gore decision, and this decision in the space of, what, 11 years, 12 years, that are serious political decisions that have all come down on one side.

JUDY WOODRUFF: How do see you the politics?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, and then that happened the opposite -- Roe v. Wade, both sides were pretty energized after that one.

I don't see this having that kind of scope, a Roe v. Wade, which has gone on forever. What I frankly think what's going to happen, a lot of people on the left, the champions of the bill, will be furious, no question, if it's struck down. We should emphasize we don't know what is going to happen.

But as for the country at large, it's worth remembering the bill -- the law is unpopular. And the latest study, and I think the best study, suggested that 25 Democrats in the House lost their seats because of this law, aside from the economy in 2010. So I think what is going to happen for most of the country is, they will say, fine.

I'm not saying this majority -- minority. And I think, on the electoral effect, it will actually help the Democrats, because the Republicans are losing the economy as an issue as it improves. They are settling on health care as their number one issue. And if that's taken away from them, it's tougher to run the sort of campaign they want to run.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So you're saying there wouldn't be the backlash or the reaction from. . .

DAVID BROOKS: I think among real champions of the bill -- of the law, it will be there.

MARK SHIELDS: I think -- I disagree with David on Roe v. Wade.

I think the energy on Roe v. Wade was on the losing side. That's been kept alive by -- that led to an entire political movement.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Anti-abortion, pro-life.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes, the pro-life/anti-abortion movement, and in part because it was seen that the court interrupted what had been the legislative and political process, and that this would be a case of the court for the first time in, what, 70 years, overturning a legislative act of this nature.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Just one other thing I want to ask you about. We're on the edge of our seats on this, and that is the budget.

The House, Mark, overwhelmingly rejected the president's budget proposal.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And then they turned around and passed, along party lines, David, the Paul Ryan budget.

What -- what is -- it's not a shock that this happened. But what's the next step here? What happens?

DAVID BROOKS: We have an election.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Does it matter? It's March.

DAVID BROOKS: We have an election. We wait until December, which is the cataclysm month, when all sort of things, bad fiscal things happen all at once.

But I give Ryan credit. I don't agree with all parts of it, but he's taken a step forward. One of the saddest things that has happened this week is Jim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee, and others put together a Simpson-Bowles bill, sort of an outline, and had them vote on that. I think it got like 38 votes in the House.

And so we're going to end up there eventually. I don't know when, before or after a fiscal crisis. We'll end up with something like Simpson-Bowles. But you see the two parties not wanting to get there yet.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Including tax increases.

DAVID BROOKS: Right. Exactly.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But the Republicans aren't ready.

DAVID BROOKS: Right. And neither are the Democrats, apparently. Almost nobody voted for this thing.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Mark.

MARK SHIELDS: The rejection of the Simpson-Bowles approach is proof that bipartisanship is no longer on life support. It's dead in this city.

I think the Ryan budget, which I think is indefensible in a social sense, in a social justice sense, with a $394,000 tax cut for the average millionaire, I think -- I think what it is, is the blueprint that House Republicans are laying down right now for the lame-duck session that follows the election.

They have staked out their position, so that this is their negotiating position. Let the White House and the Democrats try and come up with theirs. But I think that's what they're doing. And, plus, what they have done is they have stopped any cuts in the military that were agreed to last summer in the grand budget agreement last year, 2011.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And just quickly, real consequences of this. Do people just say, oh, there goes Washington again?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, we see what they -- the parties believe in. We don't see what they're going to do.

So, if you're looking for the practical consequences, zero.

MARK SHIELDS: I think there could be political consequences in the election.

I think some of the cuts that the Republicans have voted for could become issues in certain House races.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, we are always thrilled, our hearts race when you're here.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: Oh, my goodness, Judy.

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF: Mark Shields, David Brooks, thank you both.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Welcome, gentlemen. Good to have you here.

Trayvon Martin, Mark, of course, the Florida teenager shot to death by a neighborhood watch volunteer, allegedly, President Obama weighed in today, said, if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin.

Are you surprised at how personal his comment was?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, the president's not somebody given to personal remarks about himself or his family, and biographical, and it seemed appropriate in this case.

Rick Santorum also made a personal commentary, comment as well. There are two kinds of issues in American politics, Judy. There are position issues, should the defense budget be cut, should taxes be increased? You're on one side. I'm on the other.

And there are valence issues. And this is a valence issue, where nobody is on the other side of Trayvon Martin. This is a terrible thing. The question is how convincing and sincere one is seen by the position that candidate or that politician, a public figure, takes.

And I think as of this point, everybody has been plausible, and I thought the president was quite convincing.

JUDY WOODRUFF: How careful do politicians have to be, David, about what they say at a time like this?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, the president has to be careful because he is in charge of the Justice Department, which is involved. And you saw him in a statement today talk about how he couldn't really state a case.

And so he had to show some aggression, aggressiveness about confronting the events, while still not prejudicing anything. And I thought he did quite well by being personal. And this is a guy who has been accused sometimes of not being -- of wanting to stay aloof from racial issues.

And so I thought it was particularly important in this case to show some personal connection. I thought he did that well. Santorum does not have the bounds of heading the Justice Department so he could be a little more aggressive, and I thought he did quite a job of highlighting the crucial point, which is, why was the local police so unaggressive in this case?

JUDY WOODRUFF: Does it become a political issue? Or does it stay in the -- Justice?

DAVID BROOKS: I have trouble seeing it becoming a political -- it may have to do with some of the laws on the books, especially in Florida, the self-defense laws, but that -- right now, that's all ahead of what we know.

We don't know who was pursuing, who wasn't pursuing. So a lot of the talk about stand your ground and all the other rules, we will see if he was standing his ground. It's quite possible, as some of the tapes suggest, he was at least at some point pursuing, in which case self-defense really wouldn't apply.

MARK SHIELDS: No, the police dispatcher, 911, instructed him not to chase, not to pursue the shooter. We do at least know that.

But, no, it won't become a political issue unless and until it becomes a question of the police were on one side of this law when it passed the Florida legislature. They were opposed to it because they believe it is important that a professional, somebody who is trained in the use of force, in the use of firearms only be responsible for this.

And obviously, those who were in favor of the law -- and supported by the National Rifle Association, I would point out -- wanted a larger citizen involvement, even if that did run the risk of somebody packing heat.

DAVID BROOKS: That sort of is the crucial issue. Does the state have a monopoly on force?

Community watch, they're wonderful organizations. They're supposed to be eyes and ears and not trigger fingers. And they're supposed to call in others, because when you have a gun -- I read a study today, when you have a gun, you're more likely to think somebody else has a gun. And so you're more likely -- whatever your racial or other attitudes are.

It's a dangerous position. You want somebody with a lot training to have that responsibility and not some guy just sitting out there.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The presidential campaign, Mark, Illinois last Tuesday, Louisiana tomorrow, Wisconsin next week. Where does it stand on the Republican side?

MARK SHIELDS: The Republican Party is split. It's what I would call the natural-born and the naturalized.

The natural-born Republicans, those who grew up in Republican households and went to good schools and have had successful careers, are probably more likely to support Mitt Romney. Those who probably grew up in -- might have been Democratic households in many cases and have ideologically moved to the Republican Party, especially on social values and cultural values and religious values, and don't have that same level of income are more likely to vote for Rick Santorum.

For that reason, Rick Santorum has to be the favorite in Louisiana. Romney would be the favorite in Delaware and Connecticut and New York going forward. Santorum would -- I would bet on wonderful Virginia and Kentucky and Missouri. I mean, that -- but it's almost -- that's the cleavage within the two parties -- the two groups within the party right now.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But, having said that, is it Mitt Romney's to lose, or is it?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. I have always said it's Mitt Romney's to lose, and the margin that he's not going to get it becomes smaller and smaller.

Illinois was a good win for him. There is this cleavage, and it will probably last. But there was this cleavage on the Democratic side four years ago. There was an upscale candidate, who was Barack Obama, and a downscale candidate, who was Hillary Clinton. It didn't really hurt the party. They came together at the end.

I suspect that will happen. What is different is that Obama and Clinton over the course of the primary season, their approvals stayed the same or even went up a little. And Romney's are like that. So that is the big difference.

MARK SHIELDS: His negative has doubled since he entered the race.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Romney's.

MARK SHIELDS: Romney's. And his favorable has stayed the same, at 28 percent in the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, and his negative has doubled.

That's exactly -- David is absolutely right. Four years ago at this time, when -- a donnybrook between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Barack Obama was 49-34 favorable.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And then you had this week a comment, David, of Romney's aide, Eric Fehrnstrom, one of his top advisers, talking about Etch A Sketch.

There's a lot of conversation about that, but is he right that Mitt Romney at the end of the primaries, once he -- if he does cinch the nomination, can just shake it up and start all over again?

DAVID BROOKS: I hope so.

DAVID BROOKS: That's what most candidates do.

It's one of those gaffes where you tell the truth. I hope -- he certainly needs to reset the campaign. And so I was very heartened to hear him say that, because it suggests they really will restart the campaign, reset it, get some new theme in -- which is what they need to do.

The downside, obviously, is it plays into the key doubt people have about Romney, does he believe in anything? And there are certain images that get locked in people's mind. For John Kerry, it was windsurfing. Once you give people what the literary critics call an objective correlative, an image, an actual image to symbolize doubts like the windsurfing or Michael Dukakis in the tank, if, for Mitt Romney, it's Etch A Sketch, something that is easily erased, well, then gives people something concrete to hang their doubts on, and then it becomes sort of serious.

MARK SHIELDS: George Herbert Walker Bush, the president of the United States, in 1992 running for reelection, at a supermarket checkout counter asking what is the electronic scanner, confirming to a lot of people the sense that he didn't understand what was going on in their lives at the time, which became a problem.

I agree with David. I think where I disagree is I don't think Mitt Romney can change. You can't flip-flop and then flip. I mean, he's already flipped on issues as important. . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: You don't think he can reposition himself?

MARK SHIELDS: He can't reposition, because then you have really got a character problem. He can calibrate, but he cannot in any way -- this is a man who has already switched on abortion. He's already switched on gay rights. You know, he's -- what's the third one?

I sound like Rick Perry.

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF: Oops.

MARK SHIELDS: Whoops.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes, that's right, SPA.

And gun control. I mean, those are three on which he has already repositioned. So he can't flip-flop and flip. I agree with David. The natural move is to go to the middle, and I just think he is where he is. He shouldn't be talking about this stuff. He should be talking about the economy, that I'm a guy who can turn around businesses, I can turn around the country, I can turn around the economy. But he can't go and revisit these.

JUDY WOODRUFF: David, you're saying he has to.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. Well, he's not going to turn back on gay marriage or anything, but he can switch to what is his authentic self, which is management. He's a manager. He's not a particularly ideological person. He's sort of been pretending to be hyper-ideological.

But he can say, okay, I'm a manager, I'm a turnaround artist, go back to that. And that's not portraying anything he stands for. That's actually getting back to the authentic Romney.

JUDY WOODRUFF: One other thing I want to bring up from the Congress, and that is the budget plan proposed, Mark, this week by Chairman Paul Ryan. Where does that leave the budget fight? What do you make of what he put out there?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, the president introduced a budget that's going nowhere. And it's been accused of being unrealistic.

Paul Ryan has been introduced a budget which has been praised by those on the right as bold and decisive and clairvoyant and all sorts of other things. It's science fiction. It's going nowhere. But the problem of the Paul Ryan budget is, politically, it is an undertow for Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney is now seen as somebody who favors the rich over the middle class by 65 percent to 28 percent in the CBS-New York Times poll.

He's seen as somebody who is out of touch with ordinary people. Here is a proposal that cuts the top rate for the wealthiest by 28.5 percent. Think of what kind of a tax cut it would be for Mitt Romney. I mean, just -- he's going to be answering that. This is -- talk about the cuts, and my goodness, and they're terrific.

All the cuts are visited about basically people who are means-tested, people of lower and ordinary and even less than ordinary income. And all the advantages go, in terms of the tax side of it, to the best-off. And I just think, politically, as a document, it is a disaster for Republicans, and particularly for Mitt Romney, given his biographical problems.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Is it that bad? Do you see. . .

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I have my doubts about it, but not in that way.

I think one of the things it does -- and the argument behind it, and I have debated Paul Ryan about this -- is he thinks we're headed -- and I think he's right about this -- toward a fiscal catastrophe some time in the next few years, and you might not like the cuts that go in the Ryan budget, but it gets us toward fiscal survivability.

It doesn't balance the budget. It increases spending 3 percent a year. It doesn't shrink government. Government goes up by over $1 trillion in 10 years, but it gets us to avoid a fiscal catastrophe. And Ryan's argument is, you may not like all this, but at least I'm getting us to fiscal survivability. The Democrats are not willing to propose a budget that gets us there. And, therefore, you have got to take us seriously.

And the political argument is we're going to treat the American people like adults. And I'm not sure it's going to work politically, but that's their argument.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And you're saying it's politically smart or not smart?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think it's politically very risky. People don't like the idea of risks. They'd rather run huge deficits.

MARK SHIELDS: I think David is wrong.

There are focus groups that have been done on it in the last few nights. And people can't believe that this is a semi-serious proposal by a serious political thinker. I mean, you're talking about knocking two million kids out of Head Start in the next 10 years. You're talking about knocking a million students out of Pell Grants that are needed for college tuition.

I mean these are major cuts. What Simpson-Bowles did was, it said it can in no way increase the poverty level in the country or the economic inequality in the country. That has to be -- and it has to be both tax increase, as well as spending cuts. This is all spending cuts, and somehow we're going to close tax loopholes, unspecified, unmentioned.

DAVID BROOKS: But, listen, if you want to reduce deficits -- and I agree with Mark about that. If I was writing a budget, I wouldn't have that stuff in there.

But you have to be serious. You have to make -- either you're going to have to raise taxes, and not just on the 2 percent. You got to raise taxes up and down.

MARK SHIELDS: I agree with. . .

DAVID BROOKS: And if nobody is going to talk about that, at least Ryan is getting us a step toward some sort of talk, giving people a sense of what kind of responses, whether it's tax increases or spending cuts, we're going to have to take.

I would spread it around differently, as Mark says, but at least he's getting us a step forward.

MARK SHIELDS: What does Paul Ryan's budget plan mean for Mitt Romney's taxes in 2013?

JUDY WOODRUFF: We heard it here.

Gentlemen, we thank you both, Mark Shields, David Brooks.

Watch Video

Tonight we tackle a topic that has been bandied about for weeks as citizens across the U.S. face sticker shock at one gas pump after another. Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks weigh in on how much the president can really help lower gas prices.

We also jump into the March Madness. My bracket is here. David Brooks' bracket is here. Mark Shields chickened out this year, but did mention a different type of bracket that weighs your ability to pick long shots more than the overall winner, and you learn about his favorite college mascot.

Have a great weekend.

This video was shot and edited by Justin Scuiletti. Subscribe to Hari on Facebook. Circle him on Google Plus

Follow @hari Tweet #doubleheader

JUDY WOODRUFF: A short time ago, a U.S. government official identified the U.S. soldier accused of killing Afghan civilians as Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales.

And on that, we turn the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Welcome, gentlemen.

This is the first time we have the name. We knew 38-year-old staff sergeant. He is being blown tonight from Kuwait to Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

David, this terrible incident, the killing of all these civilians by -- and he is the suspect alleged to have done this -- how does it change what the U.S. is trying to do in Afghanistan?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I'm not sure it will have a long-term effect.

There have been tragedies before. There have been drone killings. There have been a lot of civilian killings over the years. And, as Ryan Crocker said, generally, we have been through them.

I think what is different now is the circumstances surrounding this and the Quran burnings, which is that we're much closer to the exits. We're certainly leaving by 2014. A lot of people now think we should leave by 2013. And so that idea that the exits are so close creates this momentum where people think, let's get out of here.

And what you have is a lot of Afghan capital is leaving the country, waiting for what is going to happen next. You have got an Afghan -- the educated class leaving the country and applying for asylum abroad, citizenship abroad. You get the Taliban knowing we don't have much longer to wait. So they are much more suspicious about negotiations.

So what happens is, when you begin the withdrawal process, you get this spiral. And so managing the withdrawal -- we're all agreeing we're going to withdrawal -- becomes much, much more difficult for the U.S.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, Mark, is it all about just managing the withdrawal and getting out faster?

MARK SHIELDS: No, I think it's more than that, Judy.

I think, first of all, there's an iron rule of history here. And that is that armies of occupation throughout human history are unpopular. Just think of the French, who were indispensable to the American Revolution, had stuck around for six months. Americans would have been stoning them in the streets. That's just -- that's human nature.

I think that is the first reality. Now this war is 10 years old. Secondly, nobody can define what the mission is now. Managing the exit, I mean, is this for the more expenditure of blood and treasure and Americans risking death, and worse?

And I guess that -- I think that is where it is. And I think that is the reality. It's got a political implication now. This week, we saw Newt Gingrich say it wasn't -- Afghans -- was not doable, Afghanistan was not doable, Rick Santorum saying that we ought to double the resources -- I'm not sure what resources mean -- or begin to pull out or accelerate the pullout.

And it really appears to be more of a political problem than a strategic international problem.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But. . .

DAVID BROOKS: I have to say, I disagree with that. I think we know what the mission is.

The military is very clear about this and the president has been very clear about this, is that we are trying to create an Afghan army that can defend the country, so it doesn't descend back into civil war, so it doesn't descend back into a pre-9/11 circumstance.

And the people in the military, who are not particularly political, think that is quite doable. And they are little disturbed by the talk of the early withdrawal, because they think they can do that and we can get out. The Afghan army has -- is the one sole institution in that country which sort of functions. It's not perfect by any means. A lot of the troops are illiterate, among other things.

But it does sort of function and there are a lot of them. And so there is some expectation that you will be able to create an army so you won't have a long civil war, as you had after the Soviet pullout, after -- in previous pullouts.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So you don't see that as. . .

MARK SHIELDS: No, I stand second to nobody in my admiration of the military, but there is a pattern of American generals. they are always reluctant to go into a war and they are always to leave it. That is the pattern. And that is what we're seeing now, because this is a failed mission.

Let's be very blunt about it. We are not going to leave Afghanistan as a functioning, operating society. Karzai is a disaster. If you can remember -- those who remember South Vietnam, this is the parallel, this is the bookend to that. We are propping up a corrupt regime that doesn't have the respect and commitment of its own people and it has no commitment and respect of its people. That is the reality. He is the mayor of Kabul at best. And that. . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: So when the ambassador, Ryan Crocker, tells Jeff, as he did a few minutes ago in that interview, that considering the circumstances, Hamid Karzai is doing what he has to do. . .

MARK SHIELDS: He is, what, playing to the gallery by insulting Leon Panetta and condemning the United States and chastising us and telling us what our strategy ought to be there? I just -- I don't see that he is a particularly either admirable or reliable ally.

DAVID BROOKS: I agree with that. I don't have much -- Ryan Crocker has to say he has a lot of room for Hamid Karzai.

I don't think too many people -- certainly, the U.S. military doesn't. They see him as corrupt, or at least his brother as corrupt. They see a lot of corruption rife through Afghanistan. There's no question about that.

But what we want is just stability so we won't have the Taliban coming in kicking girls out of school. You won't have just a long civil war, which will be a breeding round for Taliban, which will then bleed over into Pakistan. That's what we want.

And so can we get some basic level of stability? Well, I think the generals, maybe they're too yahoo about this, but I do think they think it's possible. And we have handed over large parts of Afghanistan to Afghan control. They're running it without really U.S. troops. We're busy in the south and other regions. So there is some just basic stability. That is all we want.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Mark, you mentioned the political -- the implications in the election this year. Do you see any? Do you see this having an effect one way or another?

DAVID BROOKS: Newt Gingrich said what he said for a reason. People are exhausted by this.

And if you ask them, should we stay in Afghanistan, no, we should spend our money here. That's what people will tell you. On the other hand, I'm not sure it will be a huge campaign issue, because the fiercest opposition to being there is in the Democratic Party. And they're not going to go against the president.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Ron Paul.

DAVID BROOKS: And Ron Paul.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And Ron Paul.

DAVID BROOKS: And Ron Paul, exactly.

MARK SHIELDS: I think it's beyond partisanship now, I think, the American fatigue with Afghanistan and the lack of enthusiasm for the United States continuing to fight and die there.

Stability is a -- that is not exactly unconditional surrender. We want to leave stability in our wake. That just doesn't -- I don't think it's a rallying cry. I don't think it's a defining mission that Americans are going to support at this point.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Okay.

The campaign, David, where does it stand? Mitt Romney, we thought he had a shot in Mississippi and Alabama. Rick Santorum won. Newt Gingrich is still in the race. Where is it? Where are we?

DAVID BROOKS: From one quagmire to another.

The good news is we are nearly halfway done the campaign, not quite. It will go on. And it's just -- I don't think Romney is not going to get the nomination. I think he will get the nomination, because if you look at the delegate math, A., he is way ahead, B., he is likely to stay way ahead.

Will he get enough delegates to clearly give him the nomination? That, I'm not sure of, but I think he will be close. And I say that because what has happened in campaign after campaign or in state after state is purely the battle of demographics, upscale voters, middle-class voters going for Romney, especially urban voters, downscale and rural voters going for Santorum.

Henry Olsen of the American Enterprise Institute points out that in every place where there is a Major League baseball park, Romney carries that place. In every place where there is a AA minor league team, Santorum carries that place.

It's been purely demographic. And if you count the demographics going forward to all these other states, the Californias and even Illinois, there are just more Romney people. So you would expect him to finally get the nomination, after an incredibly brutal and terrible slog.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So is it inevitable?

MARK SHIELDS: I don't think inevitable.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Or almost.

MARK SHIELDS: A week is a lifetime in politics, and five months an eternity.

I still would bet on Mitt Romney. We are moving -- now, David is right -- we are moving into territory now, Delaware, Maryland, New York, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Illinois, that are better Romney states than they are Santorum states.

What Santorum has achieved is rather remarkable, outspent, outgunned, without any establishment endorsement, written off, just ignored in all those early debates. And contrary to all of the prevailing conventional wisdom about American politics in 2012, he got 49 percent of white working women who work outside of the home voting for him. It's just -- it's an achievement.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Despite all the controversy.

MARK SHIELDS: And he has got the passion. Romney has got the deep pockets. Romney has got the organization. He has got the enthusiasm. That's really. . .

DAVID BROOKS: I must say, I think Romney has a much, much, much better chance in the fall.

It's hard not to be impressed by what Santorum is doing. He's being outspent 15-1 in some places.

MARK SHIELDS: That's right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, what reward does he get then? He just keeps fighting and. . .

MARK SHIELDS: Well, if he could get Gingrich out of the race, he could finally get Romney one-on-one. But Gingrich -- what are the chances of getting Gingrich out?

A man who says -- and on the record -- that "I define my job as saving Western civilization" is not somebody who probably is going to be talked out a race.

JUDY WOODRUFF: I hate to remind you of this, but on this program last week, you said, if Newt Gingrich doesn't win Alabama and Mississippi, he's going to have to get out.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes, he is going to have to get out.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It's now a week later, Mark.

MARK SHIELDS: That just shows you how limited logic is.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: No. But, I mean, it just -- he really -- now he is saying, "I want to go to Tampa and be a player."

There is a hell of a reason to make phone calls and go door-to-door.

DAVID BROOKS: Right. He thinks he can deny Romney the delegates. And it's possible he can.

MARK SHIELDS: Yeah.

DAVID BROOKS: One of the interesting parlor games, I guess, if Gingrich doesn't get out is, what would happen if he did get out?

Some of the polls show the Gingrich voters are kind of split between Romney and Santorum. It's not necessarily they will all go to Santorum. I think most of the polling suggests the majority would go to Santorum.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But, for now, you see this thing going on?

MARK SHIELDS: It would have been the difference in Ohio and Michigan.

DAVID BROOKS: That's right. It could -- literally, we're not halfway through.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The last thing I want to ask you about is this column, op-ed piece in The New York Times by this former -- now former trader at Goldman Sachs, just blistering, about the culture of Goldman Sachs, saying it's all about the money.

We knew it was about the money, but he's saying putting the company ahead of the customer.

MARK SHIELDS: Well, Judy. . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: Is this a surprise? What does it tell us?

MARK SHIELDS: This wasn't a column written about the Salvation Army that takes care of homeless and poor people or a column written about the Little Sisters of the Poor who take care of the indigent and dying.

This was a column written about Goldman Sachs. And people are ready to believe about Goldman Sachs. Understand this in American polling. When you ask favorable of institutions, big corporations rate higher, big pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies, the Congress of the United States rates higher in favorability than does Wall Street and financial institutions.

And this is a group conspicuous for its arrogance and for total self-absolution of its own responsibility in any way for the financial crisis in this country and the suffering that followed in its wake. And to be very blunt about it, this is a company that created a financial instrument and sold it to its customers solely because a hedge fund customer, larger customer, wanted to bet against it. And they made millions on that.

So are people ready to believe it? Yes, they are ready to believe it.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, stating the obvious, in 20 seconds. . .

DAVID BROOKS: Well, yeah.

I mean, I thought the guy who wrote it was a bit narcissistic, talking about what a great guy he was. It was three-quarters about him. Nonetheless, the decline in manners and ethos, where people at firms like that talk about their own clients as if they're to be their cows to be milked, I do think that is true. And that is what needs to be addressed.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, we thank you both, David Brooks, Mark Shields.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Welcome, gentlemen.

MARK SHIELDS: Good to see you.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, today's jobs report, 227,000 jobs created in the month of February, the White House says this is an encouraging sign.

Mark, what do you make of it, and what effect on the presidential campaign?

MARK SHIELDS: The White House is right.

It is encouraging news. It's sustained encouraging news, Judy, to the fact, as Diane mentioned to Ray in that earlier segment, 61,000 additional jobs for the previous two months. So it's been a good record. It is not breaking the back of unemployment. It's not Bill Clinton's 22 million jobs in eight years, but it is certainly a significant improvement, the best since 2006.

And for the Republicans expecting to run on the economy, it is just sand in their gears.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Does it make it harder for the Republicans to run on the economy?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. My colleague Andy Lowry has a rule, which is, if the job number is 200,000 jobs a month more, that is good for the Democrat, more like 100,000, that's good for the Republicans, and then 150,000 sort of in the middle there.

So that's good, because, at 200,000, you are beginning to reduce the unemployment rate over time. And so this is clearly good. Also interesting, the psychological effect even beyond the job creation numbers, the fact that people are reentering the labor force, the fact that people are starting to quit jobs, assuming and being somewhat confident they can get another job, that's a sign of a broader psychological effect.

So, without question, good news. The only lingering question, is the wages are kind of flat, as we heard. And then, will this be sustained? Usually, when you have job creation rates at this amount, you have really strong growth, 3 or 4 percent. But our growth, the projections are like 1.8 or 2 percent.

And so if the GDP growth is that slow, it's hard to see us sustaining this level of job growth. Those projections could be wrong and we could have it, but a lot of economists think we may have hit a little lull there.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, Mark, there are still gas prices going up, which have to factor in to people's ability to pay their bills every month.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes.

Politically, I think the best note was struck by Alan Krueger, who's the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. He said this is an economy on the mend. There was nothing triumphalist or nothing self-congratulatory about it.

It is very much, as I think David put it, an economy on the mend. The gas prices are real, Judy. And it's been cushioned somewhat by the sustaining of the payroll tax cut and by low energy costs in this very mild winter. So people have probably a couple of extra bucks. But it's going to start feeling -- and it looks that gas praises are going to continue to go up.

And that is a problem. It became a problem politically yesterday when the president -- the Keystone pipeline. He had to scramble to get -- stop the number of Democrats defecting to support the Republican position, which is basically a jobs and gas prices vote, to limit it to 11.

So I think that was a direct reflection of gas prices.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And then you have the debate, David, where the president -- on one side, the argument is there is only so much the president can do about gas prices. And of course the Republicans will argue there is a whole lot more the president should be doing.

DAVID BROOKS: Right. And he's more or less right, though he -- I do agree with the Republicans -- the decision not to build the Keystone pipeline was an insane decision.

It didn't do anything for the environment and it did hurt jobs. And so would that have had an effect on gas prices before the election? Absolutely not. There is really little the president can do short-term.

The final thing to be said on gas prices is that, as you talk to people, talk about the Iran situation, what happens if there is an Iran contretemps? I heard the quotes from very well-informed people that gas prices would lead to $8 a gallon. And that might not be long-term, but that would just send a tremendous shock through the economy and through the psyche of the American people.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, let's talk about the Republican primary, the Republican contest, Mark.

Super Tuesday's behind us. We're now into March. What does it look like? Mitt Romney had a good showing on Tuesday, but he hasn't put away the competition.

MARK SHIELDS: I had an epiphany about Mitt Romney.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: Okay? I think Mitt Romney had won six out of 10 races. If you were giving him his report card, you would say he is A-minus arithmetic. The math is very much on his side. He's D in chemistry, because he just is not connecting, all right?

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: I think it's time for Mitt Romney, Judy, just to say the following.

Look, I don't make your heart beat. I don't put a step -- sort of a life in your steps. And I'm not going to be the heartthrob that you have always wanted to give you an emotional lift or anything of the sort. What I am is, I am an incredibly dependable and competent person. I will be a great steward of this nation's economy. I have no vices. I am a good family man. And this is who I am. I'm not going to be touchy-feely.

And he shouldn't try to be. Today, in Mississippi, he stood up and said, "Hello, y'all." That supposedly. . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: And talked about eating cheese grits.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes. And it just is not -- it's synthetic and counterfeit and it doesn't work.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Is that what he needs to do?

DAVID BROOKS: I think it would be a start.

You reminded me, as you were speaking, of a speech Mark Helprin, the great novelist, wrote for Bob Dole when he started his campaign, which was: I'm not the flashiest guy in the world, but I'm regular and dependable.

And it would be authentic, because he is not a heartthrob. The other thing I would say he needs to do he is, he needs to get on offense to actually control the debate, to actually issue some -- get some arguments started. The coverage today of his campaign was about saying, howdy, y'all, or whatever he said, and then he stomped on a cockroach.

And so that was the coverage. And that's partly because we're trivial and we, like, cover trivial things, but partly because he wasn't actually offering anything to talk about. And that's been a perennial theme of his campaign, doing the same things over and over again, not controlling the discussion with something you are actually offering.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What should he be talking about?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I mean, I think he should be talking about things like entitlement reform. He could come up with a job program of the day. He could pick a fight about anything, have some policies on education, on families.

There are a million things to talk about in the country. But he's got to have something new each day, something that begins to have an argument.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, meanwhile, Mark, he has Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich nipping at his heels. Now, the Romney camp says it's just about mathematically impossible -- you mentioned arithmetic a moment ago -- for them to catch up.

MARK SHIELDS: Arithmetic.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Is that right, that it's just about impossible?

MARK SHIELDS: Yes, I mean, the argument is there that it becomes very, very tough for them. I think it becomes almost impossible for Gingrich.

His own campaign has said he has to win both Alabama and Mississippi on Tuesday if he's even going to be a regional candidate, which would then give himself Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.

But Gingrich does make one point about Romney that I think is valid and deserves Romney's attention. And that is, Romney has beaten Rick Santorum in both Michigan and Ohio by outspending him at a minimum of 4-1. And Gingrich points out you're not going to have that kind of luxury advantage against Barack Obama in the fall, that this is a weakness of Gov. Romney's campaign. He just can't go in and outspend and just dominate the airwaves that way.

So I think that Santorum is pushing hard, and understandably, to win one of those two states. And if he does. . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: Mississippi or Alabama next Monday -- Tuesday.

MARK SHIELDS: Mississippi or Alabama Tuesday. And if he does, I think it makes tough for Gingrich to go forward.

He is in a position one-on-one with Romney to be at least competitive. And I think most measures I've seen, he would get at least a majority of Gingrich's vote and that Romney wouldn't.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But it doesn't look like either one of them is going to get out any time soon.

DAVID BROOKS: Well, there are a lot of conservatives right now who are holding fire on Gingrich, who are backing -- who are going, okay, he deserves next Tuesday.

But if he loses one of those two states, then I think will you see a wave of people, not even just Republican, but really quite conservative people, saying, Newt, you had your chance. We have got to have a one-on-one.

And I was thinking, with the good economic news, a lot of Republican voters might say, we may not win anyway, let's go with a guy we really believe in, and Santorum could have an advantage.

Now, the Romney people are right. It is very hard to see how Santorum gets the delegates. But a guy named Sean Trende at RealClearPolitics did a very good analysis saying it's possible to see how Mitt Romney doesn't get the delegates. It doesn't mean Romney -- that Santorum gets them, but Romney could do about as well as he's been doing in state after state and still fall 75 delegates short by the time of the convention.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Meaning you get to the convention and nobody has. . .

DAVID BROOKS: Right. And, presumably, the party would sort of heave him over the top. It's hard to see somebody else getting. But it would certainly not be a sign of strength.

MARK SHIELDS: Judy, one point that I think bears mentioning here, and that is Newt Gingrich in Oklahoma, Tennessee, and -- Oklahoma, Tennessee, and, what was the third Southern -- Georgia. . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: Georgia.

MARK SHIELDS: . . . last Tuesday, his campaign was outspent by his super PAC 70-1, 70-1.

The super PAC has become the substitute for the campaign, for the party and everything. As long as you have got one angel, one angel with deep pockets and wants to be a kingmaker or believes devoutly in you, it can keep you going.

Historically, when votes dried up, your money dried up. But that's one of the problems the Republicans are going through right now. It's totally disconnected to any electoral reality. And so that makes it tougher for Romney as well, that these guys can hang around, even though -- Santorum has done pretty well and won a number of primaries. But Gingrich, by historical standards, should long be gone from the race.

DAVID BROOKS: And that will be a permanent feature of politics from now on as long as Citizens United is there.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Only a minute or two left, but, David, a lot of talk this week about the women's vote and whether the Republicans have done some long-lasting damage to themselves with all this talk about birth control, contraception, turning many women off.

How do you see that?

DAVID BROOKS: I really don't think so.

You know, I think women are as divided as men on a lot of these social issues. There are a lot of pro-life women, a lot of pro-choice women. There has been historically generally a bit of a gender gap, though, in some elections, it's disappeared. And so I assume that will be there. But I don't think there is a women's position on a lot of these issues.

And so I expect the gender gap will be about what we have seen in past elections.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Which is, unmarried women tend to favor Democrats, married women tend to favor Republicans, although more women were with the Republicans in 2010 in the. . .

DAVID BROOKS: Right.

MARK SHIELDS: But President Obama carried women by 13 points in 2008. I mean, they were key to his election.

And the difference is, it's between unmarried women and married women. John McCain carried married women in 2008.

JUDY WOODRUFF: How do you see this, though? Do you see Republicans doing. . .

MARK SHIELDS: I think Republicans, I think they were ill-served by the hearings on Capitol Hill.

Darrell Issa's committee lined up six males to comment and to be witnesses on the subject of contraception. Once it switched, Judy, from a debate about religious freedom to a question of contraception, I think the Republicans were in terrible shape. I think that Rush Limbaugh hurt the Republicans, quite honestly, when he equated anybody seeking contraceptive aid as being a slut or a prostitute.

There's very few people in the country who don't have a close relative who is on contraceptive medication.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Do you see this dying out as an issue?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think the contraception, it is tough to see anybody raising a -- fighting a campaign on contraception.

And just quickly on Rush Limbaugh, I'm not sure people really see him as a Republican. I don't think there has ever been historical evidence that he has swung a lot of votes. People see him as a conservative movement/entertainer guy. I'm not sure he -- people see him as the center of the Republican Party.

MARK SHIELDS: I think Republicans have treated him with a respect and a deference.

A lot of Republicans seek his approbation. It is almost, I don't want to say like a papal audience, but, I mean, they are thrilled to be mentioned by -- he did go after John McCain. It didn't deprive McCain of the nomination.

JUDY WOODRUFF: We're thrilled to have the two of you.

Mark Shields, David Brooks, thank you.

Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks weigh in on radio host Rush Limbaugh's comments about Georgetown student Sandra Fluke over her testimony to Congress last week urging that insurers be required to cover contraceptives. They point to how the comments are no fluke. That qualifies as our sport of politics section tonight.

In our politics of sports section, we mark the 50th anniversary of Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game. A Facebook commenter created an opportunity for Mark to demonstrate his gift for remembering the minutiae of baseball facts about players like Mel Ott.

We also unwrap, and display for the world to see, the results of our Oscar picks from last week. (Let's just say the three of us are keeping our day jobs).

Also from my Facebook page, we were also able to surprise Mark with a blast from the past. Thanks for watching and have a great weekend.

Justin Scuiletti shot and edited this video.

Subscribe to Hari on Facebook, Follow him on Twitter, Circle him on Google Plus.

RAY SUAREZ: And now to the Republican presidential campaign, with just a few days before voters across the country weigh in.

Kwame Holman has our report.

KWAME HOLMAN: The candidates largely were focused on the 10 states that vote on Super Tuesday. But Mitt Romney took time to swing through Bellevue, Wash., hoping to secure a win in tomorrow's caucuses there.

MITT ROMNEY (R): There going to be a bunch of states that are going to make their mind up in the next couple of days, but you guys are first. And so your voice is going to be heard.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

MITT ROMNEY: It will just make a big difference, so please make sure and go to the caucus site.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

MITT ROMNEY: Get your friends to do the same thing.

KWAME HOLMAN: Ron Paul also was in Washington, speaking in Spokane.

REP. RON PAUL, R-Texas: You know, things have been going very well, but we keep coming back to Washington because we expect to do real well here.

(LAUGHTER)

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

KWAME HOLMAN: From the Pacific Northwest, Romney headed to Ohio, a critical Super Tuesday prize, where Rick Santorum held a small lead in a new poll.

Santorum appealed for support today in Chillicothe.

RICK SANTORUM (R): We have a chance to make a statement that we want someone who is a conservative in their heart, in their soul, in their mind, someone who's not afraid to stand up and talk about all of the issues.

KWAME HOLMAN: In a press release, but not on the stump, Santorum also criticized Romney for a 2002 video. It showed him campaigning for governor of Massachusetts and boasting about getting federal funds, something he's slammed Santorum for in the past.

MITT ROMNEY: The money is in Washington. And I have learned from my Olympic experience that, if you have people that really understand how Washington works and have personal associations there, you can get money to help build economic development opportunities.

KWAME HOLMAN: Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich campaigned again in Georgia, the state he once represented in Congress. He went after both Romney and Santorum.

NEWT GINGRICH (R): Unlike Gov. Romney, I'm not going to go to Washington to manage the decay. And unlike Sen, Santorum, I'm not going to Washington to join the team. I want to create a new team called the American people who force dramatic bold, dramatic change on Washington.

KWAME HOLMAN: Georgia shaped up as a must-win for Gingrich in his bid to stay alive in the Republican race.

JEFFREY BROWN: And that brings us finally tonight to the analysis of Shields and Brooks, syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Welcome, fellows.

MARK SHIELDS: Jeffrey.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now, last week, when you sat here, it was Mitt Romney must win Michigan. He did.

How important was it, David?

DAVID BROOKS: It was important. And it makes him the presumptive nominee, I think, again. And so I think it was partly his victory, but mostly Santorum's defeat.

JEFFREY BROWN: In what sense?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think Santorum had a head of steam going, but then he went down into social conservative territory in that final week.

And so you see the wall building around his campaign. He had the social conservatives, but he sort of lost some outreach to people outside that ideological vanguard. And that sort of hemmed him in. And so if you look especially among women, Republican women went more for Romney.

And so we have a classic confrontation which we have seen in races before, where Santorum has the more downscale voters, Romney the more upscale. And overall there are just more Romney type of voters than there are Santorum voters. That doesn't mean it will be the case in Ohio. Ohio is a little like Michigan, but a little more downscale. So Santorum may be able to pull something off in that state.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, before you get to Ohio, what is your read on Michigan? How important. . .

MARK SHIELDS: Rick Santorum blew his chance. He will look back on Michigan as the missed opportunity of his public career - David's right -- by his dwelling on issues, abandoning the very narrative that had brought him to where he was, the grandson of the miner, the blue-collar Republican who was concerned with manufacturing, with those who weren't part of the country club set.

And he did that. This isn't a man who doesn't have a chip on his shoulder. He has a two-by-four on his shoulder. And he goes after the president on -- accused him of snobbery for wanting people to go to college and people wanting their children to go to college. And many of the people he's trumpeting as heroes, those who spend long days in difficult physical labor, want -- most want their children to go to college.

And then doing the unthinkable, attacking the icon of John Kennedy before the Houston ministers when, at a time of anti-Catholicism in the country, when there was a lot of it, he, the first Catholic ever elected, had to go into foreign, alien territory and make the case that the pope wasn't packing up to move to the White House, and accomplished it without losing his integrity, saying that made him throw up, that sort of stuff was just -- it's not kind of thing you expect in a bad lieutenant governor's race, let alone a good presidential race.

JEFFREY BROWN: So now we look forward to Super Tuesday and Ohio. And you saw Kwame say Rick Santorum seems to have a slight lead there.

DAVID BROOKS: Right.

JEFFREY BROWN: So what are the stakes there now for him?

DAVID BROOKS: Slight, though diminishing. So, Santorum had a much bigger lead. It's sort of narrowed since the Michigan win.

I fundamentally think right now Romney can afford to lose Ohio. He's going to lose a bunch of states, probably, some of the Southern states. And so I think he can afford to do that, because he's basically established two things, first, as I say, a sort of identity with the upscale Republican voters, of whom there are a lot just in state after state.

And, second, he tends to be acceptable to different -- almost all parts of the party. Among pretty conservative voters, he does okay, among mainstream voters, among moderate voters. There's a -- very conservative, he doesn't do okay. But among the center of the party, he does okay.

So, he's in the enviable position of being able to survive some defeats. The downside for where he is right now is that he has lost what he had a month ago, which was a clear narrative of who he was that was appealing to independents. He has now become much more conservative, has a tax plan that is much more filled with debt, because it really doesn't pay for the tax cuts. And so he has made himself a weaker candidate for the general election.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now, what of Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, and Santorum himself? You said. . .

MARK SHIELDS: Sure.

JEFFREY BROWN: . . . Romney can afford to lose.

Can they afford to lose?

MARK SHIELDS: Yeah, I'm not sure he can afford to lose, because I think it saps enthusiasm.

That little video that Kwame showed in the setup piece of Mitt Romney in 2002 talking about raiding the public treasury, looking like Don Draper out of Mad Men, didn't he? I mean, really, a striking similarity.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: But that undermines his narrative against Santorum and Gingrich.

JEFFREY BROWN: Who is the insider?

MARK SHIELDS: They're the insider. They're the ones who are corrupted by all those years on the banks of the Potomac and staying inside the cloistered Beltway, and he was the outsider, the white knight. It was a little bit tarnished.

Ron Paul has to win somewhere. People ask, what's his motive? Does he want a convention speech? I don't know what his motive is. I think he wants to influence policy. I think he wants some vindication. He is the only candidate in the field, Jeff, who has not had to revisit his positions, has not had to rewrite his record, has not had to try to repudiate past statements. He's been consistent.

But he's got to win. And Washington State, where he finally is going after Romney, as well as both Gingrich and Santorum, it may be his best chance. Idaho, he's -- they're spending some resources on. Newt Gingrich has to win Georgia. He probably -- it looks like a three-way race. Santorum is giving him a real tussle there.

But he needs -- he really needs a victory in Georgia, and an impressive victory, too.

JEFFREY BROWN: You see the same stakes for. . .

DAVID BROOKS: I guess I do.

I'm not sure Ron Paul has to win as much. I think if he can rack up delegates -- and he's paying a lot of attention to delegates -- if he can just get a lot of delegates, he'll emerge at the convention. There will be a lot of people on the floor with Ron Paul signs. And I think that's more or less what he wants in terms of future, influencing the party.

Gingrich, he has said he has to win Georgia. But he still has this money sitting out there. And the oddity of the thing is, because of Citizens United and all these super PACs, candidates who lose, as long as they have a couple rich billionaires, or maybe even only one, they can keep going.

And so the perversity of Citizens United is, it prolongs primary campaigns. It makes them tougher and uglier for the party. And the real perversity is in the short term. I don't know how it will be election after election. Right now, it's all helping Barack Obama by making the Republicans mutually unattractive.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, let's turn to him. He was out in the country this week, a big speech to the UAW. And part of the narrative for him seems to be, look, things are getting better.

MARK SHIELDS: It did.

I think the president would like to keep the Ohio and Michigan primaries going in perpetuity. . .

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: . . . because, you know, as one leading Republican in Ohio told me who was out there this week, he said the auto thing is working for him here. It helps the president.

JEFFREY BROWN: He was able to say, we went in and we did something.

MARK SHIELDS: Yeah. There's not a lot of mention about other, necessarily, initiatives, but this is one that Americans celebrate, each day, the further good news from the auto industry.

And the president, I would -- don't think it's morning in America. It's no longer midnight in America, and maybe there's a hint of dawn, but I think so that there's a little bit of getting ahead of the story. But I think things are improving, and that's good. I think identifying with optimism is always good for any leader, and picking up on the sound that Clint Eastwood articulated so well at the halftime of the Super Bowl, I think building on that, with the reality of what's working in both Michigan and in the Midwest in general, and Ohio in particular.

JEFFREY BROWN: Does the president have to be careful with this message because of potential dangers ahead?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, yes, obviously. He lauded the Chevy Volt, and Chevy just announced the Volt is suspending production for I think five weeks because of slow sales. So you do have to worry about getting out in front.

And I would say the political mood has gotten a little out in front. There's a mood now that Obama is cruising to victory, the Republicans are sunk.

JEFFREY BROWN: Really? I mean, you sense that?

DAVID BROOKS: Certainly, a lot of Republicans feel that, and even a lot of Democrats are beginning to feel, oh, yes, we're going to win this thing.

And that's too far out front. If you still look at fundamentals, is the country headed in the right direction, they're still very negative. If you look at things like the economy may slip back, there's still some expectation of slow growth for the remainder of the year.

So, the mood has shifted a little too far. I had a very smart friend who's a Democratic consultant said, Romney is going to look dead six times between now and November, but he will keep drifting back, because fundamentally the country really does want change, and Obama's central policies, health care, stimulus, are still fundamentally unpopular. And so things will look bad for Republicans, but it's too soon to say. . .

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, is it your sense that the Obama folks in the campaign know this, that they can't get too far ahead of themselves?

MARK SHIELDS: I think there is.

But they've been down so long, that, now that they're up, they're feeling pretty good, I think. I agree with David. But sort of the conventional wisdom, Jeff, just a matter of four months ago was that Obama was gone. Republicans were quite bullish. In private, they would talk about they couldn't wait to get him.

Now those same Republicans are pretty glum. I mean, they've found that Romney has not caught on. After two campaigns, he still stumbles as he did over the question about the Roy Blunt amendment in the Senate this week. He's did that -- he's done it time and again. This was on the -- in the aftermath of his great victories in Arizona and Michigan.

He comes into Ohio and stumbles on that. So there's a certain loss of confidence there. But I don't think there's any question David's right that, between $5-a-gallon gasoline, and Democrats will not be nearly as bullish.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, just a couple of minutes left, but just to pick up on that, because while we're talking about domestic events, in the meantime, the world is too much with us, as Wordsworth put it, right?

Syria, we just talked about at the beginning of the program, Afghanistan, Iran, a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu for the president coming up, how do all these things bubble up into the world that we're talking about of politics and. . .

DAVID BROOKS: Well, first, thanks for bringing Wordsworth into it. You've elevated our tone here.

JEFFREY BROWN: I'm doing the best I can.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. It's tough.

Well, to me, the most important thing globally that Barack Obama did this week was give an interview to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic where he talked about Iran. And what was striking about the interview was, he said, it's unacceptable, in terms I think bolder than he's ever used before, for Iran to get a nuclear weapon. It will not happen.

And he really sent the message to Israel, we have got your back and we're not bluffing.

JEFFREY BROWN: Strong words.

DAVID BROOKS: And so part of that was to hold the Israelis off from doing anything rash.

But part of it really was laying down red lines, as they say. And it was quite a bold, quite a sophisticated interview. It's worth reading online, but quite a bold statement by the president, saying, it's not going to happen. It's just not going to happen.

JEFFREY BROWN: This is ahead of a meeting, the AIPAC meeting. . .

JEFFREY BROWN: The AIPAC meeting and a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday.

JEFFREY BROWN: Right. Right.

MARK SHIELDS: I agree.

I thought the interview is well worth reading. But the president, I thought, was just sending a message to both sides that we're serious about this, both Iran and Israel. Israel, don't act. And, Iran, you better be very careful.

At the same time, we're looking at our third potential war -- at least, that's being rumored -- in 11 years. And is it too much to ask that we have a public debate on this, that it not be conducted in interviews with distinguished journalists or just on speculation?

I mean, is it too much too ask that the president make a case for sending Americans into harm's way, and that the Congress of the United States, especially with this fever about the Constitution and return to the Constitution, that maybe declaring war or debating whether we go to war is timely?

It's just -- this is -- you know, we seem to be just sort of elliptically heading into a confrontation, and a serious one.

JEFFREY BROWN: But your sense is that now is the time to have that?

MARK SHIELDS: Now is the time to have it. I really do believe that.

JEFFREY BROWN: Is it. . .

DAVID BROOKS: You know, I agree with that. I don't think short-term sanctions are going to work to deter Iran.

I'm very dubious about bombing Iran. I don't think anything's going to work, to be honest. So, I assumed, well, we just learn to live with a nuclear program. But, apparently, that's not going to happen.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, David Brooks, Mark Shields, as always, thanks a lot.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

David, remind us why these primaries tonight, especially Michigan, are so important.

DAVID BROOKS: Well, Michigan is nominally Mitt Romney's home state, or at least one of his 20 home states. And so that's crucial.

And it's the first time they've really gone toe to toe, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney. It's the first time since Iowa we don't know who is going to win. The polls have been very accurate this year. And this, they have as a dead heat.

And, finally, if Mitt Romney loses in Michigan, a wave of anxiety will sweep through the Republican Party such as you have not seen. It's been building week after week after week. But if he loses, then it will be, oh, he's got to shake up his campaign. We've got to go to get Chris Christie out of wherever he is.

It will have a psychic effect. And then people will look to Super Tuesday as an even more cataclysmic risk for him.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, Mark, he was -- Romney was already anticipating that today, taking responsibility for any mistakes that have happened.

Mark, no chance that we are overstating the importance of Michigan?

MARK SHIELDS: I think, psychologically, for Republicans, Judy, Michigan is enormously important.

It's important by itself. It's the first major industrial state where the voters have gone to the polls. I mean, think about it. We've had small states, Iowa, New Hampshire, a Deep South state in South Carolina and sort of a Sun Belt mega-state in Florida.

But now we're into the industrial belt of the country. And I agree with David that, obviously, it's because it is Mitt Romney's hometown and home state, state of birth, where his father was governor, an enormously popular figure, that it does -- it becomes more important.

A loss here is seen as a blow, and especially after Santorum had seemed to slip and slipped in the national polls, and Romney had moved. And so there will be questions and self-doubt about what did happen if it does happen.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, David, when we hear Romney today take -- again taking some responsibility saying, well, if I were willing to make incendiary comments, he said, if I were to light my hair on fire, I might be doing better, what about that?

DAVID BROOKS: That's another mistake. You don't say, oh, these Republican voters are so crazy, if I would light my hair on fire, they would be impressed.

You don't -- A., politicians should never use the word "the base," because it's your voters. They're not the base. And, second, it denigrates the voters. It's a sign of his awkwardness. There's been awkwardness, I know -- I have a lot of great friends who are NASCAR owners.

There's just been a constant stream of the mini-gaffes. I personally don't think that's it, though. I think Romney is a decent candidate. He has these gaffes. I don't think it's fundamentally a problem with him. I think it's partly a problem the electorate. The Republican electorate just wants somebody true-blue. And they're not looking at someone who is a -- they think of as another Dole.

I personally think that's a mistake, but that's what they're looking for, even if Romney was really good. And, second, as Mark indicates, in these states, the Michigans, the Ohios, they're looking for a working-class social conservative. And Rick Santorum is sort of tailor-made.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, Mark, what about this tactic on the part of the Santorum campaign, running these so-called robocalls, urging Democrats to come out and vote against Romney? We heard Bill Ballenger say that it's hypocritical. Is it a dirty trick, like Romney says?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, it's not a dirty trick because he's doing it out in the open. I mean, everybody can see it. Dirty tricks are usually done furtively at 3:00 in the morning.

I think it's not kosher or however you want to put it, Judy. As Democrats, I would simply ask, do you want Republicans picking your presidential nominee? And I think the answer is no. I mean, you don't like the other party meddling. They're not coming in because -- it could be said in 2000 that some Democratic voters really were attracted and found John McCain enormously appealing, and that's why they did vote in the Michigan primary.

But the only reason to vote for Rick Santorum if you're a Democrat is because you think that Rick Santorum is a weaker candidate against Barack Obama than is Mitt Romney. And so I think, in that sense, his doing it sort of corrupts the process, dilutes the impact of Republican voters, at a time when, if anything, he's on the rise with Republican voters.

The most interesting thing that Bill Ballenger said, that they're finding -- he said many interesting things, but the one that stuck with me was that over half the voters today were identifying as -- or half were identifying as Tea Party members.

Here in Ohio, where I am right now, fewer than one-quarter of Republicans voters identify themselves as Tea Party supporters. So Romney -- and Santorum is running up the score with them right now in all surveys here.

So if that's the case, I mean, it's a problem for the Republicans going into the fall, if they're going to have their decision made by an electorate where half of them identify as Tea Party members.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Just quickly -- and this is a hypothetical, David, but if Santorum is able to pull this out tonight and it is partly due to Democratic votes, does that somehow diminish the meaning?

DAVID BROOKS: I don't think so.

I'm a little dubious that robocalls work for anything at this stage. People are robocalled out. I'm really dubious that people are going to go to the other primary, to drive over, stand in line and vote unless they have some ideological connection with a candidate. I doubt it's having an effect, whether you think it's kosher or not.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Okay, last quick question to you both, President Obama telling the UAW today that the Republicans are -- in essence, he's saying the Republicans were wrong to blame the union members for what happened to the auto industry.

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah. Well, he's got a good case, I think.

You know, if you go back and look over his first term and the way he talks about it, the stimulus package is sort of down here, health care is down here, but the auto bailout is up here. He's very proud of that. And it's popular now. So -- and he's right.

And what's striking is that the president is saying, never on defense. I'm going to run all year. I'm not waiting for these guys to shut up. I'm just going to run, run, run.

And that's what he's doing.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, Mark, in a few words, what about the president's tactic today?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, the president obviously wants to talk -- he'd like the Michigan primary to go on, on the Republican side for another three weeks, because this is a rare and undiminished success, undiluted success of the Obama economic program, is the auto rescue. And it's seen that way increasingly by voters. And he likes the fact that Republicans candidates are all on the other side and trumpet the fact that they're on the other side. So I think it's -- he'd like to keep that in the public consciousness just as prominently and long as he can.

JUDY WOODRUFF: On this big primary day, thank you both, Mark Shields, David Brooks.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you, Judy.

Watch Video

When we have the chance to have an informal chat with Mark Shields and David Brooks, we take it. The sport of politics portion of our conversation includes their views on super PACs. This week Bill Maher, Jeffrey Katzenberg and the SEIU pledged millions to help re-elect President Obama as billionaire Peter Thiel continues to write sizable checks to support Ron Paul, or as he says build a libertarian base for 2016. What do you think of that plan? Tell us in the comments.

As we turn to the politics of sport, our topic is Ryan Braun, the baseball player who became the first to challenge the drug-testing procedure of Major League Baseball and win.

We also seal our Oscar ballots (just the top four categories) for unveiling at a later date. The porch in Nebraska reference is an homage to Carnac the magnificent.

Finally, we mention that Mark and David received an award for their civility in public life and their work on the NewsHour from Allegheny College. Coincidence that it came to them after they began appearing on The Doubleheader? I think not.

Have a great weekend.

This video was shot by Mike Fritz, and edited by Larisa Epatko. Subscribe to Hari on Facebook, circle him on Google Plus, follow him on Twitter

JUDY WOODRUFF: And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Welcome, gentlemen.

MARK SHIELDS: Judy.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So let's start with Syria. We did have a discussion a few minutes ago, Jeff, with three people.

And, you know, more than 100 people, David, killed today again in Homs, 60 countries meeting to talk about what to do. Where do you see this headed in terms of the role of the United States?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think there are two things that give a sign of where it's headed. The first was the reaction of Hillary Clinton, which we saw and which you talked about.

The reaction was something I think we should be proud of, clearly a lot of passion, a lot of directness. I think that's the way our secretaries of state should behave. And, second, you get a sense -- and it's sort of striking. We've been through Afghanistan. We have been through Iraq. It's a country fatigued, feeling underdeveloped at home.

And yet, in the case of Libya, and I think also now in the case of Syria, there's a sense of responsibility, the sense that you just can't sit by. And this is part of the U.S., I think, eternal national character, but part of the global national character, as these countries do gather to figure out what to do.

There is a much greater sense that we have a feeling of responsibility for the internal atrocities committed in countries. So -- and I think we're going to be headed in that direction in some form or another.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Mark, is this a tough, tough, tough one for the United States?

MARK SHIELDS: Oh, I think it is.

And I just want to echo what David said about Secretary Clinton. What we saw was unrehearsed. It was impassioned. It was eloquent. It was really, I thought, quite moving. There was a -- we search for authenticity all the time in our politics and public life. And I thought we saw it there.

And I'm not one that lionizes or idolizes or idealizes fellow journalists, but -- but for the courageous efforts of so many there, as well as the technology, the citizens and what they have been able to accomplish. They've singed the world's conscience. They have made it totally uncomfortable not to do something.

But I think there is a sense of fatigue, that we demand and insist that he stop, that -- but at the same time, what is the action statement that we're willing to do? And I think that's the real dilemma. I mean, what - Gen. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he doesn't know where the opposition is, who the opposition is within.

So it's not simply doing something, but what to do and how to do it.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It's a sense -- it's a real sense of frustration.

DAVID BROOKS: Go ahead.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, we've got a lot of politics to talk about, too.

MARK SHIELDS: Okay.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So I am going to take the liberty of moving on.

There was a debate after four weeks in the Republican contest, David. Where does that leave everything?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, it was our 20th. And, believe me, there will never be another campaign with 20 debates. I think there is a consensus with both parties it has been a bad thing for the Republican Party to have this many debates.

This final debate, judging from the polls, it wasn't a complete game-changer, but there is no question Rick Santorum had a very bad week. He was on the defensive for various votes, various positions, various endorsements, Arlen Specter, moderate Republican-turned-Democrat.

And so he has been hurt. And I have to say I have a lot of sympathy for him on this score, because he's a politician. He's doing the craft of politics. And that involves sometimes voting for bills that you don't particularly like, but your party needs you. It means endorsing people you don't particularly like, but your party needs you. It means sometimes bringing home the bacon with some earmarks and things like that.

And so he did what I think of as normal things that, not only politicians, but people in the arena do. They make compromises. And so he's being hit for it at the debate. And I think it is unfair. I think we ought to have some realistic expectations of what our people in public life are going to do.

And you can be a pundit and say you should be pure, but we shouldn't expect that. And so I guess I have some sympathy, but it's, no question, been a bad week for him.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But the crowd was pretty negative when he gave that sort of explanation about taking one for the team, Santorum.

MARK SHIELDS: No, you are right.

And I think that Romney did not do as well as the crowd in the room -- the best job Romney did all night was stacking the room. It was totally partisan to Gov. Romney. He basically cleared his throat, and they applauded.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: So -- I agree with David. The Republicans ought to think about debates in these terms.

There wasn't a single candidate in that stage the other night who was more impressive, more compelling, more commanding or more thoughtful than he was when this thing began. I mean, collectively, there was no progress.

You could watch both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in 2008 become better and more intelligent and more informed public figures and public leaders. And I just thought all of them really were sort of diminished, have been diminished by this process.

Rick Santorum -- every politician who runs for president yearns for that one moment, Judy, when the microphone and the spotlight comes to him. And you want to be ready for it when it does. And, for Rick Santorum, it came after his three victories in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri.

And that was the moment for him to talk about his own story, his grandfather, the mines, his own commitment to blue-collar America. And he blew it. He went into a series of unforced errors. . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: You think it was that bad?

MARK SHIELDS: . . . series of unforced errors, talking about phony theology, talking about peripheral social issues, not say, this is who I am, this is what I believe, but getting into discussions of contraception.

I mean, abortion is a divisive issue in this country. Contraception is not. And that isn't where he needed to be. So I just thought, in addition to that, he fell into Washington-speak, with, We didn't have a quorum in the subcommittee. Therefore, the motion to table took precedence over the motion to recommit.

And you watch eyes glaze over when somebody does that.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You agree that Santorum is having a really bad run right now?

DAVID BROOKS: Right. And I do, and I guess for those reasons. He's always been a little didactic on the stump.

But he believes that. He believes -- he thinks theologically. There are some odd things about Santorum. A., he thinks theologically. And very few Americans, even regular churchgoing. . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: And he got in trouble the other day for using that word.

DAVID BROOKS: Right, think theologically.

The second thing -- and this always interests me about it -- most of us when something bad happens, we sort of skirt by it and want to think about some positive thing. Santorum, through the whole course of his career, has always looked at the tragedy in the face and dwelt upon it.

And that is sort of an unusual personality trope, but I think it is a personality trope. It was most serious and most tragic for the death of his son Gabriel. But, also, in the campaigns, he dwells on the criticism, dwells on the negative, sometimes even international affairs, dwelling on the threats.

And so there is sort of a tragic sense about it. And sometimes that's not great political sense for people who want uplift. And so he didn't do uplift so well.

But the final thing I will say and just about the tenor of the debates, as Mark said, they are not better than they were. And I think that's because it has become an identity marker. Are you with the team? And you have to stake out certain pure positions to show that you're with the Republican team. And so it's defeated thought and encouraged just, I'm totally pure.

And we saw that with the immigration issue, where they have to be purer than pure now, which I'm not sure any of them actually believe that position. But they think they have to be there just to show, I'm one of you.

JUDY WOODRUFF: A question about Romney, Mark. He rolled out his tax -- business -- corporate tax plan, reform plan, this week. Does that change the debate in any way? Is that something that voters are going to be looking seriously at?

MARK SHIELDS: Maybe some voters will be, Judy. I think we've seen this movie before.

The rollout is always about, we're going to lower the rates and eliminate expenditures, broaden the base. We never get quite to that second part. It seems to be the functional equivalent to what waste, fraud and abuse used to be in balancing the budget. We don't get into specifics.

And when the president did say we're going to put a cap on charitable contributions for wealthy people, heaven and earth fell upon him for saying that. But, at the same time, that's the only way we're ever going to come to a debate about real tax reform, just the little initiatives and the crowd-pleasers. I think David is right.

I did want to say one thing in defense of Rick Santorum. And that was he admitted a mistake that he felt he made and all that.

And. . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: In No Child Left Behind.

MARK SHIELDS: No Child Left Behind. He said it was a mistake for him to cast that vote.

And it was an honest thing for him to say. And he paid an enormous price, not only in the room, but he was attacked for it. And we have gone through a campaign now where nobody else on the stage has acknowledged a single mistake, as we stare, stare in the face of the incredible success of the bailout of the United States auto companies.

And Mitt Romney has to prove that he's not a flip-flopper, so he consistently clings to that position. It's just -- it's kind of bizarre.

JUDY WOODRUFF: I guess Romney has not had an apology during this campaign.

DAVID BROOKS: No.

In fact, it's deteriorated. First, I don't think it was a mistake voting for No Child Left Behind. It is not a perfect piece of legislation, but I think it's moved us forward. Second, the Romney thing -- and this goes back to what I was saying earlier about the deterioration of positions.

He wrote an op-ed for my newspaper in 2008, I think, on how to deal with Detroit. And it was quite a smart op-ed. It was about changing management, restructure some of the union things. And a lot of things -- not everything, but a lot of the things were done by the Obama administration.

And so it was sort of a nuanced thing. He was sort of against it, but with some helpful suggestions.

JUDY WOODRUFF: That was the headline that he got a lot of attention for.

DAVID BROOKS: Right. The headline -- well, it's my colleagues, but the headline wasn't quite fair to the piece maybe. But. . .

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: Detroit, drop dead.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, or must go bankrupt.

But he made the distinction between bankruptcy and managed bankruptcy and liquidation. And whatever you think of the position, it was a nuanced position.

In the campaign, instead of saying, I had a nuanced position, he now has to say, I'm purely against it to please the pure position. And so he's -- his strength, which is a subtle appreciation of how to run an economy, has been evaporated because he's got to be pure and simple and crude. And that is sort of the deterioration of the whole race.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, yet, that auto bailout, you know, will have an effect on how people vote in Michigan.

MARK SHIELDS: It's -- Americans are pragmatic people. We are interested in results.

And Americans have concluded -- the Pew Research did a survey on -- they have gone from 3-2 thinking that the auto bailout was -- the loans were a mistake and were unhealthy for the nation's economy, now to 3-2 thinking they are. Twice as many Republicans think today that it's worked as it didn't.

And his -- the one flaw in Mitt Romney's argument in 2008 was, he wanted private funds to be available. To the best of my knowledge, we were dipping deeply into taxpayers' pockets. . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: Already.

MARK SHIELDS: . . . in 2008 to fund -- to provide the private funds those banks didn't have.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So he -- but in terms of the corporate tax, David, you didn't get a chance to weigh in on that.

DAVID BROOKS: I'm sorry.

Yes, well, I actually think we're moving in the right direction. So both -- President Obama has a corporate tax plan that he announced this week -- or Timothy Geithner did -- which is similar. Lower the rates from 35 to 28 and close the loopholes.

And then the Romney plan, which does a similar -- they are not complete plans, but we're going to have to do tax reform probably in the early next year. And they set us up for that.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, now, finally, before we go, point of personal privilege, we just want to take a moment to say that some congratulations are in order.

Mark and David were awarded the first ever Prize for Civility in Public Life from Allegheny College in Western Pennsylvania. As the college president, James Mullen, said in giving you the award -- quote -- "It is the hope of today that through this award and our college's focus on civility, we might empower young people across the nation, that we might help them, help all of us find the faith and the courage to engage in the public arena with civility and respect."

So, to both of you, Mark, congratulations, David, congratulations.

MARK SHIELDS: Well, thank you, Judy.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What does this mean to you?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, it's lovely. It means most of all we're grateful to -- I think I speak for David -- to Allegheny College and President Mullen for their attempts to bring civility and to lower the toxicity level in American public life and dialogue.

But we are the beneficiaries of the standards laid down by Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer. I mean, we literally stand on the shoulders of giants. It was they who demanded and insisted upon a standard of civility in dialogue which permeates this whole show and has been the gold standard, in my judgment.

So I'm grateful, but I'm appreciative. We stand as proxies for them.

JUDY WOODRUFF: We stand on their shoulders as well. And they're watching now, and we hope they're hearing this.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: Yes.

I want to apologize for punching Mark at the end of the. . .

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: Unfortunately, I lost my temper and I. . .

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: No, I agree with Mark.

When you come on this show, there are certain expectations. And you -- it is easy to fall into the expectations of civility and intelligence. And so it's just a pleasure to be part of the show.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And maybe you will never come to blows on the NewsHour. Is that right?

MARK SHIELDS: I don't know.

JUDY WOODRUFF: I mean, can we count on that not happening?

DAVID BROOKS: Keep that in the corridor.

MARK SHIELDS: If he pushes that corporate tax thing. . .

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF: Mark Shields, David Brooks, thank you both.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you, Judy.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And to the analysis of Shields and Gerson. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson. David Brooks is off tonight.

Gentlemen, it's very good to have you with us.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you, Judy.

MICHAEL GERSON: Good to be with you.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, a word about the economy, Mark.

Good news seems to be coming in bits and pieces, the Dow industrials almost at 13,000, which would be, I guess, a record in four years, if it hits there some time soon. How does all this affect the presidential campaign going on out there?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, if in fact the pattern continues, Judy, four consecutive months of declining unemployment, and the lowest number of unemployment applications for unemployment insurance in four years, and the good news in the market that you described, and building consumer confidence, then it really hits the basic premise of Mitt Romney's campaign, the Republican campaign, which has been that Barack Obama has been a failed steward of the economy, that the economy has foundered under his leadership, or lack thereof, and that voters were understandably discouraged and pessimistic and sometimes hopeless about the future.

If all of that changes, then Romney's basic message that "I can improve the economy" loses saliency and traction, along with his argument about his electability, which has taken a body blow as well. So the Republicans almost have to redraw their campaign.

When the economy is bad, voters blame the party in power. When the economy is good, voters make their decisions on other issues of their choosing or what candidates offer.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, Michael, an unmixed blessing for the president and his campaign?

MICHAEL GERSON: Well, I think the direction of the economy, particularly on Election Day, the perception of that matters greatly.

Now, we don't know what that direction is going to be on Election Day.

MARK SHIELDS: That's right.

MICHAEL GERSON: If you remember, the administration had the summer of recovery in 2011. They declared that this was going to happen, and it didn't really work out the way they wanted. So that's a problem.

And we also do know, however, that this recovering economy remains a weak economy. We have now had three years above 8 percent unemployment. That is the first time that's happened since the Great Depression. We still have a housing market that's at depression-level reductions in values.

These things are something that, you know, even if the economy is improving, we still have serious economic problems that I think that the Republicans will be able to point to.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, separately, you had, Michael, on the Hill this week this rare show of bipartisanship.

The two parties were able to come together, pass this payroll tax cut extension, unemployment benefits. On the surface, it looks like the Republicans caved, the Democrats won. Is that what happened?

MICHAEL GERSON: Oh, I think the surface is pretty accurate there.

(LAUGHTER)

MICHAEL GERSON: I think John McCain said -- well, you know, Republicans lost this debate in December on middle-class tax cuts. They didn't want to repeat it again.

And John McCain, with typical bluntness, said today that, we're dumb, but we're not stupid. And, you know, I don't think this is a fight that Republicans wanted. But Republicans are happy to vote for tax cuts. Democrats are happy to vote for the extension of unemployment insurance.

The people that shouldn't be happy are people that are concerned about the deficit. This is really not offset. It doesn't deal with fundamental problems about the deficit. You know, we have with had four years of unprecedented deficits in this country, and the Congress still can't, you know, take that seriously.

And so I think that it's both, you know, a good sign that the people can agree on this, but I think it's a little bit in denial about our economic circumstance.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, it's a reversal on the part of the Republicans.

MARK SHIELDS: It was. The Republicans took a big hit in December.

It's awfully tough to argue that we favor tax cuts for Goldman Sachs, but we oppose them for nurses and firefighters and teachers, which they would have been in that position. And the Republican sort of late mantra about they have to be paid for was a little hollow after the 2001, 2003 tax cuts, which remain unpaid for and still a drain and contributing to the deficit.

So, I think that Republicans really wanted to get it behind them. John Boehner understood that. There was greater resistance in the Senate. What it really means, more than anything else, Judy, legislatively this year is that -- I liken this to a narrow canyon in a Western movie, where the stagecoach goes through and it's most vulnerable to the attack of the bag guys, that they're going to be held hostage, that this is the last place where the administration has to go through that narrow canyon in this legislative year.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So you're saying the administration are the good guys and the . . .

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: Well, they're in the stagecoach, whether they're the good guys or not.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: But it's the place where you want to stop the stagecoach and hold them hostage, as you could on the debt ceiling in the summer of 2011.

There's no more of those. On Dec. 31, 2012, the world ends. The world ends. That's when the Bush tax cuts expire. It's when the debt ceiling has to be raised, everything. But that's after the election. So, in other words, there are no more confrontations scheduled between now and then legislatively, that -- where the administration can be held hostage, as the Republicans did hold them hostage last summer, and the administration looked weak in the process.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So what does that mean for the rest of this year in the Congress?

MICHAEL GERSON: Well, I have asked that question up in Congress whether they're going to do anything the rest of this year.

I think you're correct that, now the last confrontation has ended, I'm not sure -- I think the leadership, the Democratic leadership is going to be fairly partisan the way they perceive issues. They're going to try to find vulnerabilities that highlight Romney's weaknesses.

The Republican Policy Committee, I was up there talking with some of those people. They're doing the same. They're trying to find, on the pipeline or the other things -- so we have entered, I think, a kind of strategic chess game in the Congress about what comes next.

No one thinks that we're going to resolve these issues, but everyone thinks that immediately after the election, in that lame-duck period, it's going to be very large issues taken on at that point.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Over that period of a month-and-a-half.

Michael mentioned Romney's weaknesses, and, Mark, which brings up what's going on right now with the primary. The next primary is coming up in about 10 days, Michigan, Arizona. Romney seems to be struggling right now since the three states Rick Santorum won, a week-and-a-half or so ago.

He's campaigning in a state, Michigan, I guess everybody thought was going to be a cakewalk for him, his former home state?

MARK SHIELDS: Yeah.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But he's struggling there. What's happened?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, I mean, the passage of time. His dad was governor there close to half-a-century ago, so the Romney name is not what it was.

But I think it's deeper than that, Judy, as far as Michigan is concerned, and as far as Mitt Romney is concerned. What's happened to Mitt Romney, in my humble judgment, from watching him, is that Rick Santorum has emerged. There's always been -- and Michael has addressed this -- there's always been a market for the non-Romney.

The other non-Romneys have been flawed models. Rick Perry was a flawed debater, failed debater, an inadequate platform performer. Rick Santorum is a good debater, good platform performer. Newt Gingrich had more baggage than Southwest Airlines carries.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: And Rick Santorum doesn't have personal baggage.

Herman Cain appeared from nowhere and had no legislative or really governmental experience. Rick Santorum does. So he fits better. But the problem with Mitt Romney, timing is everything in politics. He's gone into Michigan, all right, at the time of General Motors having a 130-year record profit.

It's now three -- it's three shifts, three shifts. It's around-the-clock, General Motors. Workers are getting a $7,000 bonus. It's the number-one auto-maker in the world. Americans are not ideologues. We're pragmatists. The ideologue has an ideology and looks at it and says, what is right works. The pragmatist looks at it and says, what works is right.

And whatever Americans think, this auto bailout worked, okay? Whether they think the government should have been there or not, it worked. And Mitt Romney's re-litigating it all week and saying the banks should have done it. At that point, we were bailing out the banks. The banks weren't making any loans.

So he just looks silly and he looks sort of off-key and really rooting against Michigan's success and against Clint Eastwood, of all people.

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF: Remembering the Super Bowl.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Michael, you did write about this today. I mean, how does Romney work his way through this?

MICHAEL GERSON: Well, it's a long-term problem.

He has a chronic condition. He has a political anemia. He has a hard time exciting people. He doesn't know how to touch the buttons for conservatives. And when he tries too hard, he looks inauthentic.

Santorum is not an ideal candidate in some ways either.

MARK SHIELDS: Not at all.

MICHAEL GERSON: He has an acute condition, I think, which is kind of a culture war fever.

He seems to enjoy those debates, culture war debates, a little too much. It scares people. People don't like aggressors in the culture war. It's hard, though, for Romney to exploit that. It's hard to come in and criticize his social conservative can views in the Republican primary.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You mean during this period.

MICHAEL GERSON: During this period, right.

He can do it through proxies. He can raise direct -- and questions about his electability in general. But, of course, Barack Obama won't have any problems attacking these views on contraception or women's rights issues or gay rights issues.

And so it creates a dynamic where I think, if I were Barack Obama, I would want to face Santorum. But it's hard for Romney to make those attacks about electability in . . .

MARK SHIELDS: One of the things about Santorum that has kind of gone unnoticed, Judy, is, this is a man who was 14 -- or 16 years in the Congress. He served during that -- his four terms -- four years in the House with 227 House Republicans. He served with 89 different Republican United States senators.

Up until today, not one of them had ever endorsed him for president. Now, that's a comment of sorts. I mean, it really is. I mean . . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: It was Mike DeWine, the former . . .

MARK SHIELDS: Mike DeWine did switch today, the former senator from Ohio.

But that does reflect a sense of, is he really the presidential candidate they want him to be? The other thing he's done is, he spent this week criticizing President Bush's policies. And I think that's an attempt to sort of explain his 18-point landslide defeat at the hands of Bob Casey in Pennsylvania in 2006.

JUDY WOODRUFF: That gets a little convoluted.

MARK SHIELDS: Blaming the Bush policies -- no, that the Bush policies caused him to lose.

How do you explain losing by 18 points in your third race for statewide office . . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, Mitt Romney has pointed that out several times. We have heard . . .

(LAUGHTER)

MICHAEL GERSON: But I'm glad to hear you standing up for President Bush.

MARK SHIELDS: Absolutely.

(LAUGHTER)

MICHAEL GERSON: But I do -- I completely agree with your point, which is any president, Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative, when you have a collapsing financial sector and the collapse of the economy in the Upper Midwest, is going to act.

George W. Bush acted on those things. Barack Obama acted. There was a great deal of continuity between the administrations. It seems disconnected from reality and ideological to come in and say, for completely ideological reasons, I would have done nothing.

I think that that -- it doesn't play very well in the general election, certainly.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, what do we -- do we look for some movement in the next few weeks? Do they slog away until these primaries in just a few . . .

MARK SHIELDS: I think that Romney has to win Michigan. If he doesn't win, he has to lose it closely. If he loses Michigan lopsided, I think it's going to be a moment of grave self-doubt for the entire Republican Party establishment, as well as the Romney candidacy.

Maybe he wins -- loses Michigan and wins in Arizona and comes back. I think Ohio will be a real battleground on March 6, on Super Tuesday.

JUDY WOODRUFF: In a few words, do you agree with that? If Romney loses Michigan . . .

MICHAEL GERSON: I do. He can narrowly lose Michigan and win big in Arizona and still survive this near-death experience. Lots of campaigns have them.

If he loses big in Michigan, it reconfigures the race.

JUDY WOODRUFF: All right, we are glad to have you both here to help us reconfigure our analysis.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Michael Gerson, Mark Shields, thank you both.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you, Judy.

JEFFREY BROWN: And now we return to politics with the analysis of Shields and Brooks, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Welcome, gentlemen.

Now, a compromise on the birth control health care mandate. Last week, you both decried the administration's stance on this. We heard from a lot of viewers, by the way, who disagreed with both of you. Put aside the debate, the original debate.

Mark, where are we today? What's happening?

MARK SHIELDS: I think we stepped back from the brink. I don't think there is any question about it.

I think those on both sides of the issue -- and there were a few, but they were not unimportant -- who craved and desired a religious war and an all-out fight, I think have been deprived of that.

JEFFREY BROWN: David?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I think the administration figured out they made a mistake. This is what they should have done a couple weeks ago. I think Mark and I made this point last week, which is there was a perfectly plausible way which is in existence already in a couple of states to cover the contraception and the other things that are covered by this, but still show respect and deference to the religious views of these Catholic institutions.

And that was always sitting out there. And they chose an absolutist view, which was an insult to a lot of people. And then they realized, okay, this was a political mistake. It was probably substantively unnecessary. And so they made this fudge. And it is a fudge. It's sort of a bit of an accounting gimmick.

It shoves the cost for covering the contraception on to the insurance companies, who presumably will pass it on to somebody in some way. Nonetheless, it's messy. It doesn't make a lot of sense logically, but it shows deference, it shows respect to the people who are out there every day in the neighborhoods doing the work of serving the poor and the needy.

JEFFREY BROWN: At the same time, Mark, we heard the president earlier in the program say that he could claim to hold on to the principle, the key principle of full contraceptive care for all.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes. I mean that was, the president made that case today, that he has been consistent.

But there's no question. David is absolutely right. There was a firestorm of protest. And it wasn't just Catholics. It was, I mean, Rick Warren, the pastor at Saddleback Church, bestselling author, who gave the invocation at President Obama's inaugural. I mean, he stood on this issue and said he was 100 percent. And it became one of religious liberty.

As long as you were arguing, Jeffrey, about whether a woman has the right to contraception and that ought to be unfettered, that side carried the issue. But when it became a debate, which it ultimately did, about religious freedom and a rather cramped definition of what a religion can do or should do -- namely, as long as it just took care its own parishioners and did "religious" -- quote -- work, rather than, as David was talking, feeding the poor, sheltering the homeless, and taking care of the lonely, the idea that that wasn't religious, I think, really became a problem.

And where it was reflected was when you've got Tim Kaine -- nobody was more important to Barack Obama.

JEFFREY BROWN: A Virginian.

MARK SHIELDS: Former governor of Virginia, then governor of Virginia, an early supporter, strong supporter, and a close personal friend, and a man of unchallenged character, and he is running in the United States Senate race in Virginia this year.

And he broke and criticized the administration on it and said that this was a violation of religious freedom. Bob Casey, the senator from Pennsylvania, who was an early and strong supporter for Barack Obama against Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, where she was strong, he did the same thing, another important state.

I mean, so it became both philosophical and political.

JEFFREY BROWN: But you said we stepped back from the brink.

JEFFREY BROWN: The question is, does this go forward? Does this kind of an -- this issue or this kind of issue carry forward?

DAVID BROOKS: In some respects.

I think a lot of the religious angle will begin to simmer down. I think there will be some people who fight it, but most people, if you look at some of the statements from the Catholic organizations -- these are some Republican senators -- their statements were much more, okay, it's a small step forward.

Where it doesn't die down -- and this -- again, it's not the religious angle. It is the Obamacare. It's the Obama health care angle. It is why -- this plan gives the government a lot more intrusive role into a lot of institutions. So, even in this solution, in this compromise, they're imposing themselves on insurance companies and saying, you will do this, the government telling a private company what they must do.

And so this turns in -- turns back into really an Obama health care plan, which is the debate we've been having for a couple of years, about how intrusive do we want the government to be in telling people and mandating this and that and this and that.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right. In the meantime, on the campaign trail, Rick Santorum had a very big night a few days ago, right? Three victories, three states. How did he do it? How important was it?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, he did it as he's done it. He's been a consistent candidate. He's been relentless in his positions.

We talk about both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich being good in their debate performance. He's been consistent and he's been good in his debate performances. And, in addition, he was willing to spend the time of retail politicking, that is, going in and personally campaigning in states that have caucuses. And this is not unimportant.

But do not overlook what this -- this firestorm we were just discussing did to him. I mean two, three weeks ago . . .

JEFFREY BROWN: You think there's a connection?

MARK SHIELDS: Three weeks ago, the political dialogue in the country was income inequality, the economy. Obama is on the offensive. Republicans are divided about extension of the middle-class tax cut.

And what happens in the meanwhile? This issue comes front and fore, a question of life, of religious freedom, of the government overreaching and social and cultural issues replaced. Who has been the tribune of the social and cultural and religious issues? Rick Santorum. It changed the debate.

You could say the Obama people were just incredibly clever, because they dealt a serious blow to Mitt Romney by putting the turf or the . . .

JEFFREY BROWN: That's a new spin on it.

MARK SHIELDS: It is a new spin.

DAVID BROOKS: They got Planned Parenthood involved. They got the court on gay marriage.

DAVID BROOKS: We will call it a big conspiracy.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: I just -- I really do think it was quite an achievement.

JEFFREY BROWN: But do you buy that as the reason, one of the big reasons behind Santorum's...

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah. I don't think it was the sole reason, but it had to contribute. It just elevated his issues. It energized a lot of people.

And the second thing is that Mitt Romney is not so great. And it's his weakness, I think, as much as Rick Santorum's strength, that explains what happened, especially in a state lake Colorado, where he did have a history and did compete.

And the core problem to me is not, is he conservative, are his policies conservative enough? It's not a policy problem, because their policies are all essentially similar. But it's a personal problem. People know that, if Rick Santorum, if he -- if he was not running for president, he was in a room and you asked him about his positions, he would say exactly what he is saying. People do not believe that about Mitt Romney.

JEFFREY BROWN: So you are saying this is more of an anti-Romney . . .

DAVID BROOKS: I think it's significantly and maybe -- probably mostly an anti-Romney thing.

DAVID BROOKS: So it's a sign of his weakness that people don't know where he comes from. He doesn't talk about his past. And I think he should break the Mormon taboo and talk about it. Talk about his past. Talk about his family past.

I think he needs to tell the country -- and he sells himself as the turnaround artist. Well, what does that mean to most people? What community is he from. What business -- what industry does he really know? It sounds like he's sort of a free agent floating out there.

So people don't know where this guy comes from. And he really hasn't filled people in because he wants to be reticent about his own personal past. And I think that is a core problem that he has to address.

MARK SHIELDS: We have two core problems.

I mean I think Romney's problem was best captured by Tom Toles, the cartoonist of The Washington Post, in which Mitt Romney is sitting in an elephant's lap, and the elephant is dressed in a Santa Claus suit. And he says to him, "What do you want me to ask for?"

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: I mean, that's really what it is like.

I mean you're dying for Mitt Romney to come in and tell any audience what it doesn't want to hear, I mean, just once. I mean, I don't care who it is. I mean, but just go in and say, no, I am not going to be able to do that for you because I will tell you why. I think there is a larger national interest.

And I think that is a real problem. He went to CPAC today. And . . .

JEFFREY BROWN: There was the audience today, right, a very conservative audience.

MARK SHIELDS: There was no emotional connection.

And it was -- he was -- you know, the words were there, but the music was missing, or whatever, however you want to phrase it. It just isn't convincing. And I don't know if you let Romney be Romney, whatever it is, but they -- he's won, he crushed Newt Gingrich by negative commercials.

Now they're saying, the Romney campaign, we have more money. We've got more offices. We have got more people in our campaign staff and we will go after Rick Santorum.

And it makes you want to reach for the Listerine or the Scope, because it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. He's got to make the case on why he wants to be president, not why his opponents shouldn't be.

JEFFREY BROWN: At that CPAC meeting, of course, all three of them were there, all trying to claim the mantle, right, of most conservative.

DAVID BROOKS: Right. And Santorum at this point is probably the most dear to the heart of people in that room. It is a pretty conservative group.

The odd thing about Romney is they know all the problems. They have got a slogan in the Boston campaign headquarters: You've got to be willing to lose in order to win.

And that's absolutely true of politics. You have to believe in something deeper before people will trust you. And yet that hasn't been manifested. And the thing to look ahead, if we are looking ahead, is the Michigan primary I think in two weeks or so, because that is a state where he has nominal family roots, obviously. And yet Santorum is not so far behind.

And I suspect that is where Santorum is going to contest. And right now, you still have to consider Romney the frontrunner, though it is true that Santorum has won four primaries and he has only won two. But if he doesn't win the Michigan, then I think the party becomes really hysterical.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, what is your sense of the conservative voters? At a meeting like this one, where there are very strong conservatives, they're listening for all three. What are they looking for and what are they waiting for?

DAVID BROOKS: They're looking for conviction.

The idea is, you are going to go to Washington, a place they distrust. There are going to be all these forces against you telling you not do what you promised to do. Do you have the internal mettle to do it anyway? And they trust that about Rick Santorum. I'm not sure they trust it about Romney, which is not to say his positions aren't right. It is a question, do you have the inner steel?

JEFFREY BROWN: You were there today. So what is your sense?

MARK SHIELDS: No, I just sense that there isn't an emotional connection.

It reminds me of a focus group that Peter Hart, the respected Democratic pollster, did of 12 voters about President Obama. And they asked, what is his spine made of? And the first person said steel, metal. Then it was plastic and wood and bamboo. And, you know, I think that is really a question that people ask about their president. It is a question that people are asking after going through this most recent experience with the president.

But I think it's one that -- with Romney, it is just central to his public identity. Who is he? What does he stand for? What is he willing to give up to lose? What is he willing to risk to lose? And that's -- I mean, at some point, addition does develop by subtraction, that you are willing to write off either some constituency just because of conviction.

And I think that is the question about him. Is he a conviction politician in a group, CPAC, particularly, who are conviction political activists?

JEFFREY BROWN: And you -- just briefly, in our 30 seconds here, back to the president in all this, he's trying to hope that the conversation switches back to the economy . . .

DAVID BROOKS: Right. And he's . . .

JEFFREY BROWN: . . . which is funny after all the talk we've had about the bad economy for a long time.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. And he's, by the way, doing quite well in the polls. There is a poll out, which I think is probably an outlier poll, which had him beating Romney by 10 points. That can't possibly be.

But, nonetheless, yes, there is no question he has had a good period. And if he got Rick Santorum to run again against him, he'd be extremely happy.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, David Brooks, Mark Shields, thanks a lot.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you, Jeff.

Watch Video

It might be the first time in the history of the NewsHour that we used that word in a headline, but that's what you may have come to expect from The Doubleheader, where we talk about the sport of politics and the politics of sport.

This week, syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks assess the chances, fate and fortune of Newt Gingrich, and the consequences for Mitt Romney. They also lay down opposing views on who will win the Super Bowl, and we speak briefly about the tragedy of head injuries in the NFL. Please see NewsHour's earlier coverage on the topic.

Video by Justin Scuiletti. Follow Hari on Twitter, like him on Facebook or circle him on Google Plus.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally tonight: the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

So, jobs numbers.

Mark, unemployment rate is down, the best numbers, I guess, that they have seen since this president took office.

MARK SHIELDS: That's right, Judy.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What does it all mean for the presidential campaign?

MARK SHIELDS: It's encouraging. It's good news. It's upbeat for the country, first of all, but certainly for the Obama administration.

I think that you have seen this sort of increasing better-than-expected jobs numbers now the second month in a row. And I think it's reflected in the president's support. You can see his own numbers improving.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What do you say?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. I mean, that's -- yes. People feel better about the country.

There was a sense, I think, a couple months ago things were spiraling down. And that sense has not totally gone away, but feel better about the country, feel better about the way things are going. And one of the good pieces of news is not because we have some massive stimulus going out there to pump things up.

It is the business cycle. And so the business cycle is ticking upwards. And as all the economists say, that doesn't mean it is going to continue. The CBO came out this week, the Congressional Budget Office, with a projection that next year or the rest of the year is going to be down.

And then looming out there always is Europe. When you talk to people who are following the European situation full-time, a lot of anxiety there. So we have had a false dawn before. This could be another one. On the other hand, this could be the slow, gradual climb out of what we have been through.

JUDY WOODRUFF: How much does it matter, Mark, how the Republican nominee candidates still handle this?

I mean, today, they were pretty much universally saying, well, the president should be doing better, should have done more.

MARK SHIELDS: They were. You almost wanted to say, cheer up, fellows. Eventually, things will get worse.

MARK SHIELDS: I mean, they were clearly sort of discouraged or upset that there was good news.

I mean, there are still, Judy, 5.6 million fewer jobs today than there were when the great recession began in December 2007. And so we have got a long way to go. But this is good news. It's encouraging. And it means that the Republicans have to come up with something other than: We're the other guys.

I mean, they have to come up with some vision. And whatever Mitt Romney's strengths have been, vision has not been one of them up until now.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I just completely want to underscore that.

First, on the policy sense, it lessens the need probably for a little more stimulus. It increases the need for long-term unemployment policies, because that issue is still very strong.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Which is something that Congress is dealing with right now.

DAVID BROOKS: Right. And so we still have this huge number of long-term unemployed.

But the idea that Mitt Romney, assuming he is the nominee, can coast to the presidency on bad economy while just uttering banalities about how much he loves America, that's probably not to going happen now. If the economy continues to tick up, he can't just ride the economy. He has to be much more philosophical, much more substantive about how he differs with the president.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So how much of this is the president just simply at the mercy, David, of these numbers that come out the first week of every month, and how much of it is how he talks about it?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, we cover campaigns, and they all say, I created this job, I created that job.

The extent to which a president is responsible for the economy under his watch -- we should emphasize this. It will help him politically, but it's completely bogus. Presidents do not control the economy under their watch. They can have a marginal impact in extraordinary circumstances. But it has to do with a lot more complicated things then they are responsible for.

And that is true with Obama. That's true with Bush. It's true probably with Herbert Hoover, that presidents do not correlate in the short term with economic quarterly-by-quarterly performance.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So he just has to wake up the first Friday of every month and hope that the numbers...

MARK SHIELDS: Well, I think the president did take dramatic, bold, controversial steps. And I think he can make the case that he -- what he did is working, that there were major policy changes that were at the outset of his administration.

Right now, there are very few arrows left in his quiver of what he can do. And so, in that sense -- and I think -- just to underscore what David said about Europe and what we had in the previous discussion with Ray, I mean, Iran...

JUDY WOODRUFF: About Iran.

MARK SHIELDS: Iran is the wild card. I mean, if we're talking about the Strait of Hormuz being closed or something of that sort, that is a game-changer politically.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, let's keep it here at home a few more minutes, David.

And that is the Mitt Romney comments this week, where he said I'm not concerned about the very poor. And he went on to talk about they have got a safety net. At first, he said, this is taken out of context. And then, yesterday, as we heard from Jon Ralston, he said, I misspoke.

What do we know more about Mitt Romney from this episode?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, first, that he is following the strategy that every candidate since maybe Bill Clinton -- or maybe before, with the exception of George W. Bush -- has followed, which is just pay attention to the middle class.

And they all focus on the middle class. And as a result -- with, again, the potential exception of George W. Bush -- we have had no national candidate talk about poverty for a long, long time, maybe decades.

The second thing we learned about...

JUDY WOODRUFF: Including the president?

DAVID BROOKS: Including the current president.

And so the second thing we learned is, I understand what he is trying to say. But to have the words "I do not care about the poor" come out of your mouth say that you are responding to reality in an abstract, dehumanized way, the way a consultant would, not as a human being would.

People who are in touch or see the electorate as human beings, those words would not come out of your mouth. And so to that extent, I do think it touches a genuine problem for Romney, which is he sometimes sees things in a much more distanced, emotionally distanced way. And, as a result, people think, I'm not sure he gets what I am going through.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Does this connect, Mark, to the other comments that have been highlighted, the $10,000 bet, the...

MARK SHIELDS: I'm unemployed, too.

JUDY WOODRUFF: I'm unemployed.

MARK SHIELDS: Right, and I was afraid of a pink slip.

It does, Judy. What you have to be worried about is that a perception, a negative perception can start to set in that becomes a caricature. Take the case, for example, of President Gerald Ford, perhaps the best athlete ever to sit in the White House, a University of Michigan football player, drafted by the NFL.

But he slipped coming down the stairs and he drove a golf ball into a crowd, and, all of a sudden, he was a klutz, and Chevy Chase had a career. And that became the perception.

Mitt Romney is now coming across as a guy who was born in a log cabin in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, with silver earplugs. I mean, he doesn't hear. I mean, it really is setting in. And I think Republicans you talk to are getting nervous that perhaps this guy just doesn't haven't the touch. I mean, it's not a silver spoon. It is silver earplugs.

I mean, he really is tone-deaf.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So -- but he's now saying, I misspoke.

Can he put this behind him and...

MARK SHIELDS: Well, I mean, to be blunt about it, whatever else he says about the safety net, very little of his campaign has been devoted to extending, repairing and strengthening the safety net.

I mean, that has not been a priority of the Republican platform or of Mitt Romney's agenda, I mean, so that was kind of a silly statement to make in passing, even as he tried to -- I mean, the middle class has become the Holy Grail of American politics.

I mean, whatever you do for the middle class of these, you do for me. I think Scripture is going to be rewritten. I mean, it's really -- you know, it becomes shameless on the part of Democrats and Republicans. And that's what he was trying to do, ineptly though he did it.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Do you think we are going to hear more focus on the poor, the very poor?

DAVID BROOKS: I hope. He can have a policy. Maybe this is a -- would be a good antidote -- I don't expect him to do this -- but say, OK, here is my poverty agenda. We believe in equal opportunity, but providing equal opportunity, the government just can't hang back when you have got all these disorganized neighborhoods. You have actually got to do some stuff, and I'm going to help charities, I'm going to do this.

And so he -- it would behoove him to have a policy agenda toward poverty.

MARK SHIELDS: We have a greater number and percentage of people very poor today than we have had in a generation.

There are 20 million Americans living in households less than one-half of the poverty rate established by government. So that would be an income for family of four of about $11,000 a year. So it is a real problem.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, final thing I want to ask you: two developments this week around social -- sensitive social issues. One was the Susan Komen Foundation changing course on money for Planned Parenthood. And the other one had to do with something that came out of the health -- health agency this week.

But let me ask you about the second first. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health for the Obama administration, announced that social service providers have to include contraceptives in their health coverage, whatever a group's religious or ethical views are.

Mark, what is the fallout from this?

MARK SHIELDS: The fallout is cataclysmic for the White House and for the president.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Really?

MARK SHIELDS: Yes, cataclysmic. I'm not talking about -- and I say this as a Catholic. I'm not talking about Catholics who attend mass every Sunday.

Catholics who attend mass here regularly take great pride in the social mission of Catholic Church to provide the -- to feed the hungry, to provide shelter for those who are homeless, to take care of those who are lonely, and the immigrant.

And there is a great sense of pride that this is the mission of Catholic Church. It's part of the definition of the Catholic Church. And what President Obama has done with this policy, and Secretary Sebelius, quite bluntly, is they have taken those Catholics who took a risk to support them, Father John Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame, and Sister Carol Keehan, who is the president of the Catholic Health Association, and Father Larry Snyder, who is president of Catholic Charities, who have taken on orthodox, more conservative groups within their own Catholic Church to support the president, especially his efforts on the poor, and he has left them out to dry.

I mean, he really has, with -- in just a policy that I think is, quite frankly, indefensible.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So what are the implications?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. I agree. I think that it is enormous. I think it was the most under-reported story of many months, because you have Catholics who are upset. You have evangelicals who are really upset.

And whatever problem they had with Mitt Romney, that has now healed. They have now united with Mitt Romney because they are so upset about this story. And a lot of people think we are a diverse country, we have a lot of different values, that government should get involved -- it gives money to a lot of these associations -- but it should give different people with different values the ability to operate in a way they see fit.

When you have the government saying one size fits all, sort of a form of bureaucratic greed, you are going to do it our way, or not, well, then that insults a lot of people. And so I think this is having resonance across the country. It was -- statements were issued in a lot of masses, a lot of pulpits this past Sunday. And, you know, I think it's going to have a significant lingering effect for a long time.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Why did the administration do it, then, Mark?

MARK SHIELDS: I honestly don't know. I think there was a tone-deafness. I think maybe the Mitt Romney thing is contagious.

I mean, there just really was. This was after the president in private conversations and in public speeches at the commencement address at Notre Dame had said, we're going to work out a compromise. We will work this out. We will have a solution that respects the conscience.

The conscience clause is deep in our tradition. It's Quakers at time of war. It's Seventh-day Adventist not being forced to work on the Sabbath. It's Orthodox Jews being given kosher food. You know, it just really, to me -- I don't know. You can make a political calculation, but I honestly don't know why they did it.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Do you have a sense of why?

DAVID BROOKS: No, and it is a great mystery.

I hear conspiracy theories. Who switched the president's mind? Who would have the power to change his mind after he had made these vows? I don't know. I really think they should come out and address it a little more, because not getting some of the front -page covers that I think it deserves. But it is out there.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But you are hearing that they may reverse?

DAVID BROOKS: No, no, no, I don't mean to say that. I mean to say that there is a lot of popular upset about this, and within the administration, by the way, there is some upset about this.

MARK SHIELDS: Judy, I mean, places like Scranton, Penn., Cincinnati, Ohio, the I-4 Corridor, Catholics in those -- I mean, Barack Obama carried Catholics with 54 percent in 2008.

I'm just saying that this appears to be distancing, if not dissing Catholics.

JUDY WOODRUFF: We hear you both.

Mark Shields, David Brooks, thank you.

DAVID BROOKS: Thank you.