Michael Graham ends his column with a line that should get marked down and re-used, a lot:

“Barack Obama is the Nixon the left always wanted.”

You can sub a hyphen for the “is” in the bumper-sticker version.

Whoever employs this guy:

In exchange for anonymity, an official for another GOP prospect provided contact information for the ex-wife of the man Cheri Daniels married, in the years between her divorce and remarriage to Daniels.

I’ll give you three guesses.

One Obama-affirmative action flare is random. Two is coincidence . . .

Trump paraphrases the complaint, but it’s close enough. As I said before, if this becomes part of the underlying populist critique of Obama, I suspect it’s very bad for him.

If Obama wanted to close off this avenue right away, he could just release his SAT and LSAT scores. As it is, the evidence of his claim to academic brilliance rests almost entirely on having graduated magna from Harvard, which may be slightly less impressive than it sounds.

Hey–Mitt Romney is gonna run for president! Who knew? I never thought the American public would be able to haul this great servant back to stand for office again.

No matter what happens in 2012, the best part of the campaign is going to be watching the Romney hard-cases from 2008 try to wiggle out of having to go the barricades for him again. Especially if Rick Santorum gets into the race.

But the second best part of the campaign will be items like this one:

“Trump jumped from 10 percent in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted last month, with Romney dropping from 18 percent to 11 percent.”

The poll’s real significance is in that last bit. I don’t know what’s scarier for Mitt — the idea that his support is so soft that it’ll melt from two weeks of the guy from “The Apprentice” talking about Obama’s birth certificate, or the possibility that his decline isn’t Trump-related at all and is apt to persist even when Donaldmania cools. CNN’s pollster notes that Romney’s support actually drops without Trump in the race, which points directly at the second theory, but I dunno. They are an awful lot alike in some ways…

Yowza.

A little housekeeping on unrelated items.

* Remember our question about betting on WrestleMania? Deadspin has the answers in a piece so thorough and well-reported that you’d be surprised to find it even in the sports section of a big-city daily. It’s WSJ levels of good.

* Michael Kinsley has a retroactive quasi-defense of Microsoft. He opens with Microsoft’s history of DC lobbying, painting them as charmingly naive because Bill Gates didn’t think he needed to lobby the government. He writes:

For many years before the lawsuit, Microsoft had virtually no Washington “presence.” It had a large office in the suburbs, mainly concerned with selling software to the government. Bill Gates resisted the notion that a software company needed to hire a lot of lobbyists and lawyers. He didn’t want anything special from the government, except the freedom to build and sell software. If the government would leave him alone, he would leave the government alone.

At first this was regarded (at least in Washington) as naive. Grown-up companies hire lobbyists. What’s this guy’s problem? Then it was regarded as foolish. This was not a game. There were big issues at stake. Next it came to be seen as arrogant: Who the hell does Microsoft think it is? Does it think it’s too good to do what every other company of its size in the world is doing?

Ultimately, there even was a feeling that, in refusing to play the Washington game, Microsoft was being downright unpatriotic. Look, buddy, there is an American way of doing things, and that American way includes hiring lobbyists, paying lawyers vast sums by the hour, throwing lavish parties for politicians, aides, journalists, and so on. So get with the program.

So that’s what Microsoft did. It moved its government affairs office out of distant Chevy Chase, Md., and into the downtown K Street corridor.

Who is it exactly who “had this feeling” that Microsoft was being “unpatriotic” by not playing the lobbying game? Kinsley was closer to the situation than most of us onlookers, but I don’t ever recall hearing anything even remotely like that complaint made, even once–let alone often enough to claim that it represented some form of the conventional wisdom. And Chevy Chase is “distant” from K Street? It might be six miles. It’s not like MSOFT was headquartered in Columbia, MD. Makes you wonder what angle Kinsley is playing this time–is he trying to hit a bank-shot knock against a past employer, or sucking up to a potential new one?

* David “Spengler” Goldman has an interesting piece about the GOP 2012 field. He opens with the following:

Never before in American politics have so few offered so little to so many. I refer to the prospective Republican candidates for next year’s presidential elections, not a single one of whom elicits a response that might be mistaken for enthusiasm from the voters, the pundits, or the party’s elder statesmen.

There are a couple of generic governor types like Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota or Mitch Daniels of Indiana, and a long list of has-beens and never was’s. But the Republicans despair of finding the man or woman who can define an alternative to a weak and waffling President Barack Obama.

I’m not sure this is quite right, either. The problem for Republicans–to the extent that it is a “problem,” which I kind of doubt–is that the candidates excite different parts of the base. Have you seen the reaction parts of the base have for Sarah Palin? There’s a segment of the Tea Party that goes nuts for Newt. It would not surprise me if Mike Huckabee was really blowing the skirts up on Christian cultural conservatives. And while Goldman dismisses Mitch Daniels as a “generic governor type,” among DC elites, people are swooning over him like he’s the second-coming of Scoop Jackson.

Now, none of these candidates has wide appeal, yet. But they each have appeal which seems pretty deep, considering that most of them haven’t even declared yet. What’s more, the eventual Republican nominee doesn’t have to worry about exciting the base, because Barack Hussein Obama will do that more effectively than any GOP candidate possibly could.

Finally, the extent to which a Republican will need to make a clear case in 2012 seems unclear. There are a handful of candidates who probably can’t unseat Obama no matter what. But assuming one of them doesn’t take the nomination, how much difference would it make for Candidate X to be running as opposed to Candidate Y if unemployment is 9 percent, gas costs $3.50, the housing sector is still dead, and America is still floundering abroad?

* Last, Galley Friend A.W. sends a link to this epic Susannah Breslin piece on the porn industry. How good is it? So good that you might walk away rethinking the welfare state:

Here, I just give, give, give! And this is a fact!” he shouts, wild-eyed. “We are helping these girls! Anybody that comes into this business, for the most part, is a broken toy.” He leans towards me, earnestly attempting to make himself understood. “We’re giving them a place where they can make money, and get by, so they’re not standing on line in a welfare department. Thank God for people like me!” He bangs the desk.

That’s the great Jim Treacher’s headline, and it seems pretty spot-on. I hardly know what to say, except:

1) Evidently the repeal of DADT wasn’t enough to keep Sullivan bought; the ante to stay in the hand was “gay marriage”;

2) I wonder if Sullivan is headed for Huffington circa 2000 “pox on both their houses” moment. Or if the looming specter of the most dangerous, extremist, right-wing ideologue in the history of America as the Republican nominee will scare him reluctantly back into the fold.*

My guess is that this break-up won’t take and that Sullivan will be back for more. But it’s nice to know we can add him to the list of writers having second thoughts after blithely assuring America that Obama was a super-serious guy and that anyone who thought otherwise was a racist bigot.

* Of course it doesn’t matter who the nominee is. If 2008 taught us anything, it’s that much of the left will render any Republican nominee not simply as a less desirable president than their preferred choice, but as an actual monster.

Joe Scarborough takes after Sarah Palin this morning for her demeaning former Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.

He then mounts extended defenses of Reagan and H.W. Bush.

I’ve got a piece at the Standard about some different cross-trends concerning Obama’s reelection. In it, I mention that there’s a possibility Obama could face a primary challenge, but it would come most probably from his left. Galley Friend P.G., however, makes the following observation:

Go check out last week’s NYT op-ed pages. Guess who has a really good op-ed: Evan Bayh. Guess what else he has: a $10M war chest that he refused to donate to dem candidates even as he was retiring from the Senate. $10M isn’t much in terms of presidential runs, but it’s enough to build an organization for Iowa.

I think it’s wrong to hypothesize about a primary challenge solely from the left. You can’t run on Obama’s left on domestic policy, and if you try to run to his left on the wars, he’ll just say that he tried to end the wars but was blocked by Republicans and the military (and he wouldn’t be lying). However, you can run against the war to Obama’s right, based on the cost of the war and its impact on the deficit.

Maybe there isn’t a difference in saying “We need to end the wars because our soldiers are dying, we’re occupying a foreign country, blah, blah, blah” and “we need to reduce the deficit, as part of my plan I’d like to end the wars because they cost too damn much”. I, however, think there is a huge difference in these two positions. I think one comes across as post-VietNam pacifist nonsense while the other seems fairly reasonable. And I suspect there is a huge portion of middle-class white Dems who would agree.

Wanna know what I secretly think: Evan Bayh, with a Republican Congress and split Senate, would make a helluva Prez. He’s like Clinton without all the Clinton baggage and Clinton attack machine. Kinda like a 2000 McCain, only a little more pro-union and a little less pro-life.

Galley Friend K.A. sees broader openings:

The conventional wisdom is that a primary challenger to Obama couldn’t get traction because of the black vote. But I seem to remember Hillary polling pretty respectably against Obama among blacks. That all disappeared once it was time to get to voting, of course. But primary challengers might be able to believe that they could peel off some significant black support. The point is that Russ Feingold, or Hillary, or a prevailed-upon Howard Dean would only have to think they could beat Obama in order to really shake up the 2012 race. And a wounded Obama will look vulnerable, causing ambitious Democrats to see an opportunity. A primary challenge isn’t unthinkable, and even talk of a primary challenge is itself enormously damaging. Especially if the economy is continuing to doing poorly.

And about that: Americans’ feelings about the economy tend to lag around six to twelve months behind the actual data about how well or badly the economy is doing. People were still feeling pretty happy when the recession first started; they will still feel like they’re hurting long after unemployment has gone back down to 5 or 6 percent. That means that if the economy doesn’t really get moving immediately, people are still going to be really unhappy with the president by the late summer of 2011 — when potential 2012 candidates will be making their am-I-serious-or-not decisions. Prime conditions for a primary challenge!

Howard Dean is the other guy I’ve been thinking could challenge Obama, and he’s even better poised than Feingold. A former DNC chair who led the party during its recent successes times, he’s well liked for being a straight talker; his primary-night howl has now long been forgotten, or at least forgiven; and he’s been very smart about putting a bit of distance between himself and President Obama on healthcare and a few other issues. But I now see that, just in the last few hours, Dean has reportedly said, through a spokesman, “He is absolutely, categorically not running in 2012.” Ah well. Always time to change your mind, Howie!

The other wild card in all of this is Bloomberg, who needs neither the time to build an organization nor any rational evidence that he could win a presidential election.

Since yesterday I’ve been thinking a little more about what the reaction to the election results will be next Wednesday. As a rough guide, I suspect the story will be played somewhere along these lines:

35 – 40 seats – Threat Level Green: All is well for Obama and the Dems, full speed ahead.

40 – 50 seats – Threat Level Blue: Spun as Obama overperforming expectations, waved off as “just like 1994,” no big, etc.

51 – 58 seats – Threat Level Yellow: The country threw a temper-tantrum, people are ungrateful, if only Obama had been more aggressive/more progressive/less bi-partisan, things might have been different.

59 – 68 seats – Threat Level Orange: Republicans are dangerous, America is a scary place, man the barricades because the GOPacalypse is nigh. If we don’t reelect Obama in 2012, brownshirts will roam the countryside murdering and pillaging and disbanding the Department of Education.

69+ seats – Threat Level Red: Can Obama save his presidency? Is it possible for a Democrat to mount a serious primary challenge?

The pages of history will show that anti-anti-Palinism was a powerful force in American politics during the late 2000’s. So powerful, in fact, that it spread to encompass politicians who weren’t even Sarah Palin.

In case you missed it, yesterday Gawker published a story (you’ll get no link from me) about a guy who claimed to have hooked up with O’Donnell a few years back on Halloween night. It was an anonymous, first-person account in which the fellow lewdly and uncharitably revealed all sorts of (purported) particulars and O’Donnell and attempted to make her look like a slut/weirdo/harpy/etc. The piece had neither news value, nor entertainment value. It was mean-spirited and ugly in the extreme. Gawker paid for it. (I mean this literally–they gave the cretin “low four figures” to tell this tale; about what they paid for the iPhone 4.)

The story makes this mild Ben McGrath hit piece on Nick Denton look not mean enough by a factor of 1,000.

In the intervening 24 hours, the Village Voice and the Smoking Gun combined to identify the anonymous party, whose name is Dustin Dominiak. May his name live forever in Google so that any woman who ever considers dating him can easily find out exactly what sort of man he is.

Anyway, the entire episode is deeply unpleasant, except for this one graph, from the Village Voice’s account of how they tracked Dustin Dominiak down:

Finally, we got ahold of Ms. Jackson, Christine O’Donnell’s very nice and pleasant-to-talk-to aunt. She had never heard of “the Gawker,” but did have very nice things to say about her niece, and noted what an ugly campaign it was and would tell us on the record that all the nasty things said about her niece were “false.” She also confirmed that Brad and Brent were indeed once tenants, and that she had yet to read the story, but not much else to say. We left our contact information with her and await any further details from her in the event she ends up reading another nasty thing about her niece.

As Allahpundit notes, this story has united much of the lefty blogosphere behind O’Donnell. Which tells you how strong a force anti-anti-Palinism can be. As of today, the RCP average had O’Donnell -18 in her race. I’ll be curious to see if she finishes closer than that.

New York Magazine has a long John Heilemann piece on how Sarah Palin’s 2012 run might play out in conjuncture with a Bloomberg third-party run. It’s worth reading.

At this point, the only scenario regarding 2012 which is more likely to happen than not is that President Obama will be the Democratic nominee. Everything else has a less-than-even chance of happening. That said, people should not discount even the less-likely possibilities because the environment is so unpredictable. After Obamacare passed, I wrote the following:

As a political matter this was a destabilizing act. Passing a gargantuan piece of legislation with permanent  consequences for the country using only the support of one party (and against bipartisan opposition) against significant popular unhappiness with the legislation will have large political consequences, both immediate and long-term.

Seats that were safe will not be. Candidates who are not ready for prime-time will find themselves winning the political lottery. ObamaCare will destabilize the political environment in the same way the Iraq war did, upsetting coalitions, elevating new figures, and dooming once solid-seeming politicians on all sides.

I think we’ve seen that come to pass with people like Christine O’Donnell and Joe Miller rising, guys like Bob Bennett and Mike Castle put out to pasture, and warhorses like Barney Frank and Barbara Boxer suddenly running scared. Obamacare will still be looming on the horizon in 18 months–like Iraq, it’s an issue that won’t go away. And coupled with the unemployment numbers, I suspect it will create an environment where lots of outcomes are possible.

People tend to conflate Palin’s chances of political success with their opinions of her. As I’ve said before, I think that’s a mistake.