That was fast. Here’s Richard Cohen today:

That leaves Mitt Romney. He is like one of those odd animals left behind by an ice age or shrinking oceans. Nature adapted him to a different political climate. He is his father’s son, a pragmatic Republican. He is moderate on social issues and actually knows how to make money and create jobs. But his very moderation, not to mention his exotic Mormonism, makes him suspect in the tea partyish Republican Party.

Ah yes, Who could ever harbor a reasonable doubt that Mitt Romney is anything but wisely moderate. And oh, how he created jobs at Bain Capital! If only the GOP weren’t in thrall to the likes of Rick Perry . . .

If you want another example of how foolish Team Obama is by trying to hobble Mitt Romney, John McCormack has a breakdown of how two Republican politicians handle the idea of corporate taxation while talking to voters. In the first, we get Romney telling a voter “Corporations are people, my friend.” (“My friend” is the cherry on top.) Then McCormack shows how Ryan handled an almost identical question.

You tell me: Does Romney look like a stud politician?

If you were setting the Vegas line on the date Rick Perry takes over the lead from Mitt Romney in the RealClear Politics poll average, where would you put the over/under?

I’d probably stick it at September 14.

Exit Question: If you were establishing the line on the date Hugh Hewitt jumps ship from Romney to Perry, where would you set that?

Galley Friend X sends in the following observation about Mitt Romney’s ability to make the jobs case against Obama:

Romney is making a big push on jobs.  In his new ad, he takes Obama’s line that economy faces some “bumps in the road,” and he runs with it: a bunch of weary-looking Americans get up off a road and say, “I’m an American, not a bump in the road.”

But this ad has a ready-made response: Where are all the people whose employers were acquired by Romney’s private equity fund, Bain Capital, and who were subsequently laid off by Bain to make the acquired company more profitable?

So Romney’s opponents can go out and show the video from the 2008 speech in which Romney said, “By the way, you know, layoffs happen. … Of course you have layoffs sometimes to try to keep the company alive.”  And they can keep pointing to the Boston Globe’s big 2008 article on how Romney got rich while Bain gutted companies.

I’m not saying that Romney’s wrong to highlight Obama’s dumb “bump in the road” line.  But Romney’s probably the last guy the Republicans want making this argument.  Just like the Obamacare fight: Romney is probably the least-well-positioned Republican in this fight.

I don’t mean to make too much of Steve Kornacki’s Salon piece about how close John Edwards came to the presidency–I understand what he’s getting at and his macro point is valid. (When you look back through modern political history, it’s amazing/terrifying how many people get close to power and then later turn out to be crazy.)

But I think Kornacki has it slightly backward: The closest Edwards got the presidency was when he made it onto the Democratic ticket as John Kerry’s vp. I followed Edwards pretty closely during the two cycles in which he ran for president and it was awfully clear that he was a two-faced candidate. Sometimes he was very, very good with voters. Sometimes he was dreadful. If you believe that raw political skill matters in these things, then it’s hard to believe that Edwards was ever destined to win anything. (On his own, that is.)

I hate to keep harping on this, but if you want to measure the skill-set of a politician, it’s not that hard. A politician’s primary job is to get more votes than the other guy. So just look at their record in campaigns. Good politicians win more–many more–races than they lose. Bill Clinton, Harry Reid, Al D’Amato, and John McCain all have one thing in common: They won a lot of races.

John Edwards, on the other hand, was [not] good at winning elections. Not very good at all. Sure, he had the ability to self-fund, but over the course of his entire political career, he won two races: In 1998 he beat a 70-year-old first-term incumbent to win his Senate seat. And in 2004 he won the South Carolina primary. That’s it. Lifetime, that’s something like 2-45.

My point is, politicians who lose election after election after election do not tend to suddenly start winning elections and go on a tear. Despite what journalists and political professionals thought of John Edwards, the candidate, voters never liked him.

As pointless as Twitter is for private use, it’s commercial uses are pretty interesting. For instance, if you’re a coffee shop you can push out alerts that you’re having a sale on baked treats at 2:00 pm. Twitter is basically an advertising pipeline that (1) you don’t have to pay for, and (2) your customers ask to be included in. Win-win!

Since presidential campaigns are essentially really big, abstract sales operations, it makes sense that they use Twitter, too. Again, you can see lots of interesting uses: fundraising, alerts on candidate appearances, rapid response.

But it strikes me that having a candidate use Twitter to attack his opponent is–at least at the presidential level–a really, really bad idea.

There’s a story out this morning about Mitt Romney trying to elevate himself (surprise!) by having pizza sent to Obama’s campaign HQ. Yes, Mitt, we get it–you’re such a front-runner that it’s like you’re already going mano-a-mano in the general election and all the other Republican are just minor side-shows. But buried in the story is a nugget that reflects even worse on Tim Pawlenty:

Presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty also took a swipe at Obama today with this tweet:  “@barackobama sorry to interrupt the European pub crawl, but what was your Medicare plan?”

Ugh. Presidents–even today in the internet/Facebook/Twitter age–act presidential. You know what presidents don’t do? They don’t attack their rivals with the kind of drive-by snark you see on gossip sites and blogs. I’m all for Tim Pawlenty (or anyone else–even Mitt Romney!) savaging Obama at every opportunity by pointing out the administration’s incoherent foreign policy, the continuing housing disaster, rising inflation, awful unemployment numbers, and total disconnect from America. Pawlenty could have simply Twit-picked these two pictures from Tuesday and asked if the president would come back to look after the people of Joplin:

But the low-rent Twitter flame should be beneath anyone who aspires to the White House.

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.