Mitt Romney has a curious habit of being one of the most prolific op-ed writers in the country. He doesn't much care for interviews or press conferences, but the Republican loves to engage the media in a way in which he doesn't have to answer any direct questions.

Lately, this means op-eds that chase President Obama around the country -- the president schedules an event in a city, so Romney writes an op-ed in that city's major daily paper. Yesterday, the tactic led the former governor to write a piece for the Chicago Tribune, condemning Obama in advance of Chicago's NATO meeting.

Most of the condemnation is pretty boilerplate -- neither Romney nor his ghost writers are good at faking expertise in foreign affairs -- and almost appears intended to embarrass the United States in advance of a meeting of world leaders.

But one claim, in particular, seemed rather remarkable to me.

Instead of working to strengthen NATO, the Obama administration has taken actions that will only undermine the alliance.

Last year, President Obama signed into law a budget scheme that threatens to saddle the U.S. military with nearly $1 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years. President Obama's own defense secretary, Leon Panetta, has called cuts of this magnitude "devastating" to our national security. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has plainly said that such a reduction means "we would not any longer be a global power." Despite these warnings, the Obama administration has pledged to veto an attempt to replace these cuts with savings in other areas.

This is reckless.... With the United States on a path to a hollow military, we are hardly in a position to exercise leadership in persuading our allies to spend more on security.

Romney may have trouble keeping up current events -- I imagine he's rather busy -- but he should at least try to brush up on the basics before publishing nonsense in major media outlets.

In reality, most of the defense cuts Romney's referring to were proposed by Republicans. He may not realize this, but he's accusing his own allies of trying to gut the American military.

When Mitt Romney ran for the Senate 18 years ago, he was fairing quite well against Ted Kennedy, right up until voters started hearing from some of Romney's victims.

Many of the folks laid off by Bain Capital drove to Massachusetts to protest the Republican's campaign, and Democrats put together a half-dozen ads featuring laid-off workers who said they suffered while Romney lined his pockets at their expense.

Perhaps none of the companies played as a big role as American Pad & Paper, or Ampad. It's the subject of a new video from the Obama campaign.

It's a rather brutal story. Romney took over Ampad, drove it into bankruptcy, and Bain turned its $5 million investment into $100 million. The workers at the plant in Marion, Indiana, lost their jobs, wages, health care, and pensions.

The Romney campaign claims the candidate was on a leave of absence from his firm at the time of Ampad's demise, but "according to a 2002 interview with former managing director of Bain Capital Marc Wolpow, Romney was directly responsible for Ampad's layoffs."

To characterize this as a literal replay of Kennedy's 1994 strategy is not an exaggeration. As Michael Yarbrough reported this morning, the Obama ad features many of the exact same Romney victims that spoke out 18 years ago.

This isn't surprising. There's no need to reinvent the wheel -- these are sympathetic people who were crushed by Romney's business practices. The result worked for Kennedy, and Obama's team clearly hopes it'll work for them, too.

For a hundred years now, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, has celebrated Elkfest. Mike Maurer writes that the town Boy Scouts head into the National Elk Refuge, collect antlers that the elks have shed, and sell them in town at the festival. The proceeds help pay for feeding the elk.

More recently, Elkfest has become a target for the kind of anti-abortion protesters who show up with huge, gruesome signs and hand out frightening flyers. Last year, the people of Jackson Hole responded angrily to the protesters, in a way that left them hoping for a better response if the protesters showed up for this year's Elkfest.

A couple weeks back, they formed Jackson Hole United, a self-proclaimed group of "pro-life and pro-choice citizens of Jackson Hole standing for civility, compassion and love, united to protect our community and our children." They held a meeting in which they urged their neighbors to remain peaceful, and to get involved in a campaign of diverting attention from the visitors. "Each of you can be the face of this community," said Cliff Kirkpatrick, a co-organizer of the Boy Scout Antler Auction, pictured above. "You have the opportunity to present this community the way we know it really is."

This time around, instead of fighting with the protesters, the people of Jackson Hole decided they would help their neighbors avoid them.

It was bad enough when House Republicans voted to politicize the National Science Foundation, effectively telling the NSF what is and isn't acceptable science to fund. As Ezra Klein recently explained, "That's not how scientific decisions are supposed to work. And the effect could be chilling."

But it's just as bad that House Republicans have targeted the American Community Survey. As Catherine Rampell reported, it's arguably "the most important government function you've never heard of, and it's in trouble."

This survey of American households has been around in some form since 1850, either as a longer version of or a richer supplement to the basic decennial census. It tells Americans how poor we are, how rich we are, who is suffering, who is thriving, where people work, what kind of training people need to get jobs, what languages people speak, who uses food stamps, who has access to health care, and so on.

It is, more or less, the country's primary check for determining how well the government is doing — and in fact what the government will be doing. The survey's findings help determine how over $400 billion in government funds is distributed each year.

Last week, House Republicans voted to eliminate the American Community Survey altogether.

Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) took the lead in trying to kill the survey, arguing that the research "intrudes on people's lives, just like the Environmental Protection Agency or the bank regulators."

Webster added that the American Community Survey "is not a scientific survey. It's a random survey."

I'm not sure which of those words -- "scientific" or "random" -- confuses the Republican congressman more, but Webster clearly has no idea what he's talking about.

Last week, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (R) took on President Obama's record, arguing, "President Obama hasn't run anything before he was elected President of the United States. Never ran a state, never a business, never ran a lemonade stand."

The focus groups must have loved this, because Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus argued yesterday:

"[N]o matter what David Axelrod may say, President Obama's private business experience hasn't seen the inside of a lemonade stand."

This is a pretty standard criticism for any presidential candidate whose background is legislative work. Recent major-party nominees like John McCain, John Kerry, and Bob Dole -- none of whom served as a governor or business leader -- faced similar critiques.

But as we've talked about before, these criticisms of Obama's record were made four years ago. Since early 2009, he's been president of the United States during a time of foreign and domestic crises. Obama may not have led a state or a business before getting elected, but he led a nation after getting elected.

The larger arc to all of this is that Republicans are eager to fight the last war -- redoing the 2008 campaign as if it never occurred. It's why we still hear so much talk from the right about Jeremiah Wright, birth certificates, and Obama's pre-2008 experiences.

If you missed it, there was a good segment on this on Friday night.

There's a spirited debate underway on the relevance of Mitt Romney's controversial private-sector background -- even the party lines have been blurred -- but I continue to think the Republican's record while in office is arguably the greater vulnerability.

On "Fox News Sunday" yesterday, host Chris Wallace asked a series of pointed questions to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Austan Goolsbee, the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Obama, but there was one question in particular that stood out for me.

Wallace asked Ryan:

"You know, it's not just a question of vision, it's also a question record because of these men have served in office and have records in office. So, let's take a look at that.

"Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts for four years, Congressman Ryan. And during that time, Massachusetts ranked 47th of the 50 states in job creation. The only reason the unemployment rate went down [was] because so many people left the work force -- more than any other state in the country except Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. Is that a record to be proud of?"

The question only took 15 seconds to say, but it's easy to imagine it showing up in an Obama campaign ad.

When Ryan pushed back and said the unemployment rate in Massachusetts went down during Romney's one term, Wallace again reminded him, "If I may, sir, again over the four years, 47th in job creation and unemployment rate went down because so many people were leaving the state."

Ryan didn't have much of a response, so he changed the subject to the "contrast in visions" and Romney's support for an "opportunity society." (There's that phrase again.)

The larger point, of course, is that we're looking at a campaign dynamic without a modern precedent, especially for a governor running for the White House. In 2000, George W. Bush said, "Look at what I did in Texas." In 1992, Bill Clinton said, "Look at what I did in Arkansas." In 1980, Ronald Reagan said, "Look at what I did in California."

And in 2012, Mitt Romney is saying, "Look at what I did at Bain Capital."

Today's installment of campaign-related news items that won't necessarily generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers:

* Ron Paul supporters have apparently taken over the Minnesota Republican Party, throwing a wrench into the GOP's plans for the race against Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D).

* In the latest fundraising reports, the Democratic National Committee had a much better April than the Republican National Committee, while the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee narrowly outraised the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

* On NBC's "Meet The Press," Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) refused to say whether he's being vetted by Mitt Romney's presidential campaign for a possible spot on the ticket. "Look, I'm not going to get into the internal process of another campaign," he said.

* On CNN yesterday, Obama adviser David Axelrod said attacks on Romney's Mormon faith are "not fair game."

* The Obama campaign is, however, apparently eager to talk about Romney saying, "I stand by what I said, whatever it was."

* Even at this late date, the Republican field in Florida's U.S. Senate race is growing, with former Rep. Dave Weldon (R) jumping in on Friday.

* The Republican primary in Texas' U.S. Senate race is getting increasingly competitive, with the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll showing a close contest pitting Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and former Solicitor General Ted Cruz.

* And it seems hard to fathom, but the latest Vanderbilt University poll shows Romney leading Obama by only one point among likely voters in the Volunteer State, 42% to 41%. I wouldn't take this too seriously -- Obama lost Tennessee in 2008 by 15 points.

About a year ago, with his campaign already in full swing, Mitt Romney condemned President Obama for "one of the biggest peacetime spending binges in American history." It was an odd thing for a presidential candidate to say -- there's been no spending binge and this isn't "peacetime."

I thought of this when Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) made a very similar comment to MSNBC's Chuck Todd (via Jed Lewison).

For those who can't watch clips online, Daniels argued:

"Well, you know, he's been the president of this nation for the three years in which we have drifted ever closer to the biggest peacetime crisis we may have ever faced. There's no doubt it. It's a mathematical certainty.... To me the central question of this election is why such an administration deserves a second chance."

The "crisis" Daniels is referring to is the national debt. It's quite a conversion for the Republican -- as the budget director for the Bush/Cheney administration, Mitch Daniels had no concerns whatsoever about adding the cost of massive tax breaks to the national debt, as well as the cost of two wars. Indeed, whether Daniels understands this or not, the national debt keeps "drifting" to new depths because of the policies he endorsed at Bush's OMB.

Watching his interview is a bit like getting a lecture on fire safety from an arsonist.

But there's also that reference to "peacetime" that rankles. Republicans may occasionally forget that we're a nation at war -- I have a terrific book recommendation for Mitch Daniels -- but this isn't "peacetime."

@LegalEagle tweets this flyer from the National Rifle Association, sent in support of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker:

"Governor Scott Walker believes your life is worth protecting and Tom Barrett does not."

The ad specifically mentions Walker's signing the state's "Castle Law" last year, expanding homeowners' right to shoot when they feel threatened on their own property.

Facing a recall election on June 5, Governor Walker has been leading steadily in the polls. Still, the race is close enough that an outdoor shop decided to ask the NRA to find somewhere else for its recall meetings. The shop passed a new rule saying they wouldn't host political events. Nearly a third of Wisconsinites in one survey say they've stopped talking politics with someone because of disagreements over Walker.

Political scientists Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein -- celebrated and respected figures of the Washington establishment -- recently argued in an impressive op-ed, "Let's just say it: The Republicans are the problem." It seemed like the kind of piece that would spur some debate within the political establishment. That hasn't quite happened.

For Mann and Ornstein, blaming "both sides" for what ails Washington is no longer accurate, and only exacerbates the problems posed by the radicalization of today's Republican Party. "When one party moves this far from the mainstream," they argued, "it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country's challenges."

Mann and Ornstein added, "The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

It's a rarely-seen thesis, which seemed likely to generate widespread discussion. But Media Matters prepared a fascinating report on the ways in which the Mann/Ornstein argument "has been largely ignored, with the top five national newspapers writing a total of zero news articles on their thesis." The report included this chart:

Media Matters

Remember, Mann and Ornstein aren't just two random political scientists with a provocative op-ed. Mann and Ornstein enjoy almost unparalleled credibility with the Beltway establishment, and are generally accepted as centrist observers, not ideologues or partisan bomb-throwers. For years, these two have been quoted constantly as objective experts.

This context matters. When Paul Krugman or Eugene Robinson says the radicalization of the Republican Party drives the dysfunction of our politics in the 21st century, they're correct, but the impact of perspective is limited. When Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, present the same argument, it carries added weight because of their reputation as non-partisan, apolitical observers.

Or at least, it's supposed to.

With fundraising totals reaching extraordinary heights, there's no doubt that both President Obama, Mitt Romney, and their assorted allies will have plenty of resources between now and Election Day.

Boston Globe

But it's worth noting that while neither side will suffer from empty coffers, there's a clear qualitative difference in the kind of donors that separate one campaign from the other. The Boston Globe had an interesting report on this the other day.

When the head of JPMorgan Chase met with shareholders to answer for a trading loss of more than $2 billion Tuesday, it was against an evolving political backdrop: Donors from big banks are betting on Mitt Romney to defeat President Obama and repeal new restraints on risky, large-scale investments.

"There's no doubt that there's been a big diminution of support for the president,'' said William M. Daley, Obama's former chief of staff and a former top JPMorgan Chase executive. "People in the financial services sector are saying, 'The president has been too tough on us, both in policy and on rhetoric.' ''

The top five donor groups in Romney's campaign are individuals and political action committees associated with large financial institutions, led by Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, according to information compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group that tracks campaign donations.

While in 2008, financial institutions were far more inclined to back the Democrat, those contributions have seen a sharp decline. The most generous contributors to Obama's re-election campaign include exactly zero Wall Street backers: the top donor groups include individuals and PACs affiliated tech giants (Google and Microsoft), law firms, and academia.

Why does this matter? For one thing, for voters who care about such things, Romney's overwhelming support from Wall Street could prove to be politically problematic -- just four years ago, these financial institutions' recklessness and mismanagement nearly destroyed the global economy. Wall Street is not at all popular with the American mainstream, so being known as Wall Street's candidate isn't exactly a selling point.

For another, these generous contributions do not occur in a vacuum -- if Romney's elected, he'll pursue a policy agenda intended to make these Wall Street donors very happy.

Associated Press

Last summer, just a few days after the debt-ceiling crisis had been resolved, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said of the debt limit, "What we did learn is this: it's a hostage that's worth ransoming."

I thought of this yesterday when McConnell told CBS's Bob Schieffer, referencing House Speaker John Boehner, "The Speaker and I have been the adults in the room."

Ah yes, thank goodness for the adults. McConnell and Boehner (1) backed the Bush/Cheney agenda that added $5 trillion to the debt; (2) decided they no longer liked raising the debt ceiling; (3) held the nation hostage, threatening to hurt the country on purpose unless they got their way; and (4) rejected a White House offer to reduce the debt by $4 trillion.

Nothing says "grown-up behavior" like the antics of an elementary schoolyard bully.

The larger significance of McConnell's quote, though, is the way in which in reinforces an odd truth: Republican leaders simply don't see a problem with their dangerous and unprecedented debt-ceiling strategy. Boehner said last week that he may be threatening to trash the full faith and credit of the United States for the first time in history, but we shouldn't consider this a "threat."

As Dana Milbank put it over the weekend:

John Boehner thinks it's kind of funny. "It struck me as somewhat comical," he told reporters Thursday morning, "that, you know, people are looking to me like I'm the guy carrying a sword around town, I'm going to bludgeon someone."

Well, Mr. Speaker, maybe that's because your rapier keeps setting off the metal detectors.

GOP leaders aren't just comfortable deliberately holding the country hostage, they're lacking in self-awareness, seeing themselves as responsible "adults" who aren't doing anything wrong.

This somehow makes the problem worse. It's one thing for a villain to hold a gun to the head of a hostage; it's something else when he feels a degree self-righteousness while he's doing it.

Pew Research Center

When President Obama endorsed marriage equality two weeks ago, there was some talk about his position possibly alienating some African-American voters. After all, as the chart on the right shows, support for same-sex marriage in the African-American community has grown in recent years, but opponents clearly still outnumber supporters.

But since Obama's announcement, the larger shift has been towards the president's position, not away from it. Over the weekend, the board of the NAACP, in a near-unanimous vote, followed Obama's lead and endorsed same-sex marriage. Jonathan Capehart's take on this rings true.

When leaders lead, especially on difficult social issues that demand the end of an injustice or the expansion of liberty, people will follow. The announcement Saturday that the NAACP passed a resolution supporting marriage equality is the most important sign yet that President Obama's public support of it had the power to change hearts and minds. [...]

According to the New York Times, [former NAACP chairman Julian Bond] said that Obama's May 9 announcement "was 'a tipping point' for many of the board members." Turns out it was a tipping point for many African Americans, as well.

Rev. Jesse Jackson touted his newfound support for same-sex marriage to culture writer Toure'. House Assistant Democratic Leader Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) did the same with NBC's Chuck Todd. A Post-ABC News poll released last week showed that 54 percent of blacks supported the president's position on same-sex marriage.

After Obama's comments on May 9, there was a fair amount of analysis that said the president's position had symbolic value, but little more. After all, LGBT Americans were no better off on May 10 than they were on May 8.

But with the NAACP speaking with one voice in support of marriage equality, it's a reminder than the president's words -- any president's words -- can have a larger impact on society.

Leadership, in other words, counts.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker, widely considered a rising star in Democratic politics, raised quite a few eyebrows yesterday when he denounced criticism of Mitt Romney's work at Bain Capital.

On NBC's "Meet the Press," Booker said, "[F]rom a very personal level, I'm not about to sit here and indict private equity," adding he's "very uncomfortable with" the recent talk about Bain. Drawing a parallel between attacks on Jeremiah Wright and criticism of Romney's private-sector work, the mayor said, "[T]his kind of stuff is nauseating to me on both sides."

It was an unexpected, and rather confusing, argument. For one thing, I've seen no evidence of Democrats attacking private equity in general, but rather, criticizing Romney's specific tactics: orchestrating leveraged buyouts, loading up companies with large debts, flipping them quickly for large profits, and treating thousands of laid off workers as collateral damage. For another, Obama isn't running around saying, "Vote for me because I was a member of Wright's church," so comparing Bain criticism to The Ricketts Plan is misplaced.

As reports of Booker's comments spread -- Republicans were promoting them heavily -- the mayor felt the need to clarify matters in a YouTube clip.

It's hard to see this as anything but a reversal. Whereas on "Meet the Press," Booker said in no uncertain terms, "Stop attacking private equity," the mayor said in his clip, "Let me be clear: Mitt Romney has made his business record a centerpiece of his campaign. He's talked about himself as a job creator. And therefore it is reasonable -- and in fact I encourage it -- for the Obama campaign to examine that record and discuss it. I have no problem with that."

Apparently, upon further reflection, the scrutiny of Bain is less "nauseating" after all.