- Occupy Wall Street loses popularity.
- Why Elizabeth Warren never fit in with the Obama Administration.
- Democrats’ latest supercommittee offer: $876 billion in spending cuts, with $225 billion from Medicare and $50 billion from Medicaid, and $400 billion in new revenue.
- Republican voters trust Newt with the nuclear football.
- Jonathan Gruber, the intellectual architect of Obama’s and Romney’s health care reforms, on why the latter shouldn’t draw a distinction between the two: ”Because they’re the same f***ing bill.” (He’s unhappy the federal law’s fate rests with the court.)
- Perry says Obama is a poor leader because of his “privileged” upbringing(?).
- UT college Republicans not ready for prime time.
- And Herman Cain learns about “wet foot, dry foot” policy and how to “say ‘delicious’ in Cuban.”
Morning Must Reads: Privileged
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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.
