An excellent piece by Galley Friend Jody Bottum on religious mysteries. Don’t miss it.

Also, BusinessWeek has a great, long piece about the reinsurance industry. It’s kind of great.

Former Galley Slave, stud writer and editor, and all around great guy Victorino Matus has finally hung up his own shingle. I urge you to visit VicMatus.com, often.

Watching the various comments tick in on the big Romney post, I’m struck by one thing: The Romney boosters seem to be of two camps–people who believe Romney is a real-deal conservative and people who believe that Romney is the only sane person in a Republican party dominated by crazy, real-deal conservatives. Essentially, Romney-supporting commenters represent the two divergent views of David Frum  and Hugh Hewitt concerning Romney.

I wonder if the presence of the other side under the Romney banner gives either one pause, since Frum and Hewitt see each other as representing everything wrong with the GOP/conservatism. After all, they can’t both be right about Romney, can they? Either he is a Frum Republican or a Hewitt Republican.

Not that anyone cares about comic books in the B-school world, but the DC universe reboot has New Coke written all over it. For anyone collecting string on what looks to be one of the biggest mistakes in the history of corporate management, there’s this amazing tidbit tucked inside a New York Times story:

DC, which is owned by Time Warner, has long lagged behind its rival Marvel Comics, the Disney-owned publisher of Spider-Man and Captain America, in market share if not audience enthusiasm. Its latest company-wide overhaul has been almost a year in the making, devised in October at an editorial retreat where staff members were trying to create a love triangle for Superman, who wed Lois Lane in 1996.

Yeah, so the geniuses spent all of 11 months contemplating the pluses and minuses of deconstructing its entire fucking product line. Actually, it must have been much less than that, since the 11 months includes the time taken to plan and launch the new line.

You’d like to think that if, say, the executives at Ford were toying with the idea of killing off every vehicle they manufactured and instead rolling out tractors, motorcycles, and mining equipment, they would spend more than a few months kicking it around and doing some research before they pressed the self-destruct button.

And it’s not like DC is some indie publishing company that can do whatever it wants–they’re own by Time-Warner, a real, honest-to-blog big-boy multinational corporation. Were there no grownups anywhere to say, “Hey, this is an interesting idea and all, but let’s think it over for a while . . .”

I suspect the Romney-Perry showdown will get increasingly unfriendly for all sorts of reasons, but one of them, I suspect, is that Perry–like most of the self-made politicians Romney has bumped elbows with–probably disdains Romney’s view that people without independent wealth have no business running for elective office. I’ve always marveled at how this line from Sridhar Pappu’s excellent 2005 profile of Romney hasn’t come back to haunt him:

As governor of Massachusetts he draws no salary at all. A lesson he says his father taught him is that one shouldn’t get involved in public life until it is a question of service rather than employment.

Maybe there’s wisdom in that maxim, though it does, at least on its face, seem to run counter to the American democratic experience. I’d like to hear him unpack it a bit.

Scott Johnson runs an item with the headline “Affirmative Action Baby.” But the real damage is in a letter the Harvard Law Record published from young Barack Obama. Forget the substance. Here’s the first line:

Since the merits of the Law Review’s selection policy has been the subject of commentary for the last three issues, I’d like to take the time to clarify exactly how our selection process works.

The grammar problems continue from there.

Whenever I see people talk about Obama’s native intelligence I’m reminded of a gobsmacking comment Michelle Obama made about her husband during the 2007 primary season. She told a crowd in Nevada, “Barack is one of the smartest men we will see in our lifetime.”

Reeves Wiedeman has a great Grantland profile on Ryan Harrison. (He’s this year’s Donald “Future of American Tennis” Young.) It’s full of all the usual tennis ridiculousness. Here, for instance, is Ryan’s dad, a minor professional player who acts as his kid’s coach:

Harrison was spending 30 hours a week on the court, often waking at 6 a.m. to hit 5,000 tennis balls a day. He was homeschooled — Susie, his mom, was a high school teacher — while Pat, who had a brief professional career, handled the coaching duties. “I actually still am his main coach,” Pat told me recently. “I’m still the guy he calls when there’s six rain delays at Wimbledon. Ryan knows there’s nobody in the world that knows the game better than I do.”

Nobody? In the whole world? Not one single guy out there, anywhere, who knows the game of tennis better than Pat Harrison?

Now I don’t know Pat Harrison, so maybe he really is the smartest tennis mind on the planet.

But probably not.

Ross Douthat seems in danger of jumping on the Romney meat-wagon. He writes that despite Rick Perry’s position, Romney should not panic because “Romney doesn’t have to worry about any of the rival candidates making a play for his core supporters.”

We’re going to hear this argument a lot in the coming months from Romney partisans as they try to argue that something they would like to happen is, in fact, likely to happen. It’s worth taking this pundit fallacy apart now because it gets to the nub of why I’ve been insisting for four years that Romney is a non-starter as a political commodity—it’s precisely because he has no core supporters. Which is why he is not very good at winning elections.

Let’s revisit Romney’s campaigns:

1994: MA Senate Republican primary: Romney 82%, John Lakian 18%

1994: MA Senate general election: Ted Kennedy 58%, Romney 41%

2002: MA Gubernatorial Republican primary: Romney runs unopposed

2002: MA Gubernatorial general election: Romney 50%, Shannon O’Brien 45%

2006: MA Gubernatorial primary: trailing in polls for the general election to Deval Patrick—a guy who’d never run for anything before—Romney declines to seek reelection. I’ll count this as a loss; you might be more charitable.

2007: Presidential primaries: I won’t go state-by-state, but here’s the breakdown: Romney won only three states where the vote was a straight-up primary. Each of these wins was in a place where he had enormous legacy advantages: Michigan, where his father had been governor; Massachusetts, where he had been governor; and Utah, which is overwhelmingly Mormon. (He also won 8 caucus states, though the organizing rules there are much less indicative of electoral strength.)

On other side of the ledger, Romney lost primaries in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, California, Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, and Maryland. (He also lost a bunch of caucus states, but we won’t count those against him since we’re discounting his caucus wins.)

Which means that in the 2008 cycle he went 3-16.

Combine that with the rest of his runs and you get a 17-year career record of 5-18. I don’t think you could find any other figure in politics who has run this far below the Mendoza line and still managed to get taken seriously as a presidential candidate. In fact, the only reason Romney gets taken seriously is his money. Strip away the $500M treasure room and the willingness to blow large chunks of his kids’ inheritance, and he’s Ron Paul without the ideological moorings and grassroots support.

But I’d argue that his electoral prospects are even worse than they look from his won-loss record. Here’s why:

(1) Romney made his political career out of his “close” 17-point loss to Ted Kennedy. But keep in mind that to only lose by 17, he spent $7M of his own money. But more importantly, this was the 1994 midterm election—so he got blown out during the biggest Republican wave in half a century.

(2) The high-point of his electoral career was the 2002 MA governor’s race, where he took 49.77%. Even in the biggest win of his life, he couldn’t capture more than 50% of the vote.

(3) It’s funny that Romney’s line of attack on Perry seems to be that Perry is a “career politician” because he’s been in elective office since 1984. Well, Mitt Romney would have been a career politician too, if only voters would have let him. He’s been running since 1994. His real gripe about Perry is actually, “Hey, that guy wins all the time! No fair!”

(4) Each of Romney’s previous electoral “successes” came with him occupying a different political space:

Romney 1.0 (MA senate) was Different Kind of Republican^TM.

Romney 2.0 (MA governor) was a competent technocrat, ready to fix Massachusetts.

Romney 3.0 (the 2008 presidential cycle) was a rock-ribbed conservative you couldn’t get to the right of.

Romney 4.0 is a sane, moderate, establishment Republican. (Romney 4.1 seems to have installed an Emotion Engine mod which allows him to show anger. Who knows what updates the engineers will push out if Romney falls into third place.)

Because of all these opposing political personas, I suspect that the Venn diagram of Romney voters over the years would probably show four distinct, small circles. And very little overlap.

Douthat says that “The greatest danger to Romney’s candidacy — the thing that could destroy him long before the voting even started — has always been that a more appealing establishment candidate would enter the race.” But that’s not right at all. The greatest danger to Romney’s candidacy is that he has no constituency because he’s not very good at campaigning and, as the electoral results of the last 17 years have shown, voters don’t like him very much. The danger to the Romney candidacy is the candidate.

At the end of the day, the only committed Romney voters out there are his co-religionists (see the 2007 Utah primary where he took 89% of the vote) and people who have written books about him.

On this last score, I’d remind readers of what Hugh Hewitt wrote on September 13, 2007:

“The third quarter fundraising is coming to an end, and so has Fred Thompson’s honeymoon, leaving one of three people as George Bush’s successor–Senator Clinton, Mayor Giuliani, or Governor Romney.”

Just something to keep in mind.

Post script: I don’t hate Romney, by the way. I bet he’s a great guy. Would love to have him as a neighbor or to share a decaf iced tea with him. For all I know, he might even make a very good president. My point is that he’s a terrible campaigner and that, over and over again, voters have been unwilling to pull the lever for him. And that’s what ultimately matters for politicians.