Over at Politico.com. Jeanne Cummings has an interesting look at the array of big players lining up on both sides of the battle to turn back the law on ethanol subsidies. As consumers are squeezed between paying for their groceries or filling their tanks (the role that biofuels play in that tradeoff was ably explained by our colleague Michael Grunwald in a recent TIME cover story), they are going to find it hard to figure out which side to root for in this one.
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Political Picures of the Week, May 18-25
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The Phony War: Obama and Romney Are Debating Character, Not Policy
More than five months from Election Day, the back-and-forth about Mitt Romney’s record at Bain already feels played out. Unfortunately, there’s good reason to expect the campaign continues in this vein indefinitely. Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney are terribly interested in dwelling on policy platforms. Romney’s plan to slash spending and keep taxes low on the wealthy isn’t especially popular, at least not at any level of detail beyond a blithe promise to shrink the deficit. Meanwhile, Obama’s signature first-term achievements, like health care, the stimulus and Wall Street reform, are all unpopular or tricky to sell. (The Dodd-Frank bill is the most popular of these, but hyping it means offending wealthy donors.) So what we’re getting instead is a superficial duel about character–and, worse, one that’s based on the largely false premise that the better man can better “manage” the economy back to health.
