- Gingrich didn’t lobby for Freddie Mac, but he was paid $1.6 million over eight years, Bloomberg reports, and not for being a crisis-predicting historian.
- Unlike the other beneficiaries of primary boomlets so far, Gingrich polls as well as Romney in a general election.
- The Republican nominating game of musical chairs in one chart.
- The Post Office reports a $5.1 billion loss; it would be twice that without budgeting gimmicks.
- Congress won’t give the CFTC the $100 million it says it needs to, among other things, set up new oversight of derivatives.
- Federal prosecutions of bank fraud are way down.
- The Energy Department played politics with Solyndra.
- Pau Krugman and Larry Summers debate.
- Recall polling in Wisconsin proved a bit dodgy last time, but Governor Walker seems to be at a rough starting point.
- And I apologize for reposting, but I was away. Truly, one for the ages:
Morning Must Reads: Historian
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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.
