President Obama seems to be on the verge of turning the only positive accomplishment of his presidency into a campaign liability.

I don’t know what he and his campaign staff were thinking when they started saying and implying that Romney might not have given the go-ahead for the take-down of Osama bin Laden.   Do they really think Obama or any Democrat is going to win votes by claiming to be more hawkish than a Republican opponent?

The Veterans for a Strong America ad embedded above is just devastating.  The parallels with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004 are obvious — but James Taranto makes an important distinction (second item):

It sounds a bit like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who helped sink John Kerry. We’re not the first to make that connection. On Wednesday Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson wrote a defensive piece titled “Why Obama Can’t Be Swift-Boated”:

Kerry may have been Swift-Boated, but Obama is not going to be SEALed. Republicans are used to calling Democrats cowards and worse. Not this time. Republicans have the squishy, soft, cosseted, consensus-building candidate, while Democrats have the fighter. Finally.

Liberal pundits always make us laugh when they cheer on Democratic macho posturing like this. That said, it seems to us Carlson is probably right to think the SEALs won’t be able to hurt Obama nearly as much as the Swift Boat veterans hurt Kerry. After all, Kerry wasn’t really a war hero, whereas killing bin Laden is a real accomplishment for Obama, one that even his braggadocio cannot completely erase.

Allahpundit thinks the “spiking the football” dustup could actually end up helping Obama (hat tip: Contentions):

He’d much rather have an argument with conservatives over the OBL raid than the economy since every minute spent talking about Bin Laden is (a) a reminder that O did in fact give the order to liquidate the bastard, however shoddy his behavior might have been afterward, and (b) a minute not spent talking about the thoroughgoing crappiness of, oh, pretty much every other part of his record.

It’s not just conservatives going after Obama for celebrating in the end zone.  In the video, Arianna Huffington called the President’s politicizing of the matter “despicable.”  I actually think that overstates it — I just think it’s stupid and counter-productive. But I’m delighted by Huffington’s reaction — it provides a lot of protective cover for conservative criticism on the topic.

Goldberg (from Wikipedia)

(Welcome, National Review readers!)

Jonah Goldberg is the writer I want to be if I grow up. (Since I’m a decade older than Goldberg, I guess I should have started earlier.)

Literally tens of people read this blog every day.  Goldberg, OTOH, has tens of bazillions of readers at National Review Online and elsewhere, and his first book, Liberal Fascism, was a No. 1 bestseller.  How did my first book do?  I’ll get back to you on that.  (Note to self: write a book.)

I bought Liberal Fascism despite the tendentious title, expecting humorous insights.  I found it more dry and scholarly than I expected.  (If you’d like to buy a copy based on that ringing endorsement, please do so through my Amazon widget in the column at right.)

Goldberg’s next book, due out in a few days, seems likely to be more fun, although the slightly less provocative title might keep a damper on sales. The book is Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, and if you’d like to purchase a copy, I recommend using my widget.  (Hey, did you know that if you go to Amazon via my widget, I’ll supposedly get a sliver of revenue from whatever you purchase in that browser session?)

Goldberg’s blog for the book offers a link to the introduction, where this passage caught my fancy:

There’s a kind of argument-that-isn’t-an-argument that vexes me. I first started to notice it on university campuses. I’ve spoken to a lot of college audiences. Often, I will encounter an earnest student, much more serious looking than the typical hippie with open-toed shoes and a closed mind. During the Q&A session after my speech he will say something like “Mr. Goldberg, I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Then he will sit down, and the audience will applaud. Faculty will nod proudly at this wiser-than-his-years hatchling under their wings. What a glorious moment for everybody. Blessed are the bridge builders.

My response? Who gives a rat’s ass?

First of all, my right to speak never was in doubt. Indeed, I’m usually paid to speak. Besides, I’ve given my speech already and we’re in Q&A time: Shouldn’t you have told me this beforehand? Second, the kid is almost surely lying. He’ll take a bullet for me? Really?

Clichés like these are a way to earn bravery on the cheap, defending principles you haven’t thought through or perhaps only vaguely support. Or, heck, maybe he really would leap on a grenade so I could finish talking about how stupid high-speed rail is. But it still doesn’t matter, because mouthing these sorts of clichés is a way to avoid arguments, not make them.

As I have in the past, I experienced a little frisson of kinship with Goldberg.  I’ve always been annoyed by the phony sincerity of the “defend to the death” line.  Here’s my take on it from three years ago:

There’s an old platitude, “I may not agree with what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it.”  That rings slightly false — although I would verbally defend your right to disagree with me, if there’s a realistic prospect of death, you’re probably on your own. But surely all of us would be better off if more people treated opposing ideas with some level of respect.

No, I don’t think Goldberg got the idea from me, I just think it’s kind of cool that by being a blogger, I can go back and look up stuff I wrote in the past, and brag about having an idea first.

VP-Maker Myers

With the Republican nomination apparently sewn up, Mitt Romney now turns his attention to the most dangerous and dysfunctional ritual in all of American politics:  The choice of a running mate.  Today Romney named Beth Myers, a long-time senior advisor, to head his vice presidential search committee.

Romney will be the nominee because he is the last candidate standing after a grueling multi-year marathon of fundraising, organization-building and campaigning, leading up to a labyrinth of primaries and caucuses in which his qualifications were scrutinized in detail and weighed against those of other contenders.  He was essentially the runner-up for the nomination in 2008, which means he’s been running for president for more than half a decade.  If he wins, he may or may not become a good president, but at least he will have been thoroughly examined.

So how will the Republican VP nominee be selected?  Sometime in the next four months, Romney will make that decision unilaterally, after a secrecy-shrouded process of his own choosing.  Nobody else gets a vote.

Oh, the Republican Convention in late August could theoretically decline to nominate Romney’s pick, but that’s not going to happen.  Conventions are designed to be coronations, and if there’s no contest for the top of the ticket, there’ll be no contest for the bottom.

Forty-seven men have served as vice president of the United States, and 14 of them have gone on to become president — just under 30%. Disregard the five VPs who were elected in their own right, and you’ve got nine VPs who ascended because of the death or resignation of the president — about 19% of the total.

The primary duty of a vice president is to be ready — and qualified — to assume the presidency on a moment’s notice. Here are some of the people the two major parties have nominated, during my lifetime, for this somber and auspicious role:  Spiro Agnew, Sargeant Shriver, Geraldine Ferraro, Dan Quayle, John Edwards.  Four years ago, of course, John McCain tried to hit a five-run homer by choosing Sarah Palin, and succeeded only in creating a target-rich environment for Tina Fey.

I don’t have any bright ideas for a better system — I just know this one makes no sense.  And I hope I won’t end up reprising my 2008 election eve post: “Vote for McCain… and pray for his continued good health.”

The only vote that matters

At first glance, the answer seems obvious.  If the Supreme Court overturns Obama’s signature legislative “achievement,” surely that hurts Obama and helps his opponent.

But what about the fact that most Americans — 56% to 39% in a recent poll — want the legislation to go away?

James Carville today bravely argued that an overturn “will be the best thing that ever happen to the Democratic party because health care costs are gonna escalate unbelievably… and then the Republican Party will own the health care system for the foreseeable future.”  He also said, twice, “I honestly believe this, this is not spin,” leading Alana Goodman to headline her Commentary blog post, “Dems Spinning Possible Health Care Loss.” Ross Douthat has a rather unlikely theory about how an overturn could help Obama: “setting a clear limit on liberalism’s ability to micromanage Americans’ private decisions might make voters feel more comfortable voting to re-elect their micromanager-in-chief.”  Not Douthat’s best effort.

Goodman also points to a potential silver lining for Republicans the verdict goes the other way:  “if ObamaCare is upheld, the only way for Americans to get rid of the unpopular law may be to vote Republican – but it’s a stretch to say that would be the best possible scenario for the GOP.”

We’ll never know, because it seems clear that the law will be overturned.  The only vote that has ever been in doubt is that of Justice Anthony Kennedy, and I think we can discern his opinion from his remarks from the bench: “But the reason, the reason this is concerning, is because it requires the individual to do an affirmative act… and that is different from what we have in previous cases and that changes the relationship of the Federal Government to the individual in the very fundamental way.”  Why yes… yes it does!

In addition to all this, I think an overturn will help Romney by neutralizing his biggest handicap as the nominee:  the fact that he signed a healthcare bill in Massachusetts that also included an individual mandate.  If the Supreme Court lets the law stand, Romney is going to have to spend a lot of time making fairly subtle distinctions between Obamacare and Romneycare.  There’s the federalism argument: it’s one thing for a state to mandate something, quite another for the federal government to do so.  But anybody who cares about federalism is already a Republican anyway.

Romney’s stronger argument is the fact that Obamacare was foisted on an unwilling public without a single Republican vote, whereas Romneycare had bipartisan support.  This argument actually gets bolstered by an overturn.  “Remember how they passed this legislation? Votes in the middle of the night on a 2,700-page bill that wasn’t even fully collated yet? Remember deem-and-pass?  Americans knew that was wrong, and they promptly swept a lot of Democrats out of office.  Now the Supreme Court has thrown it out, and all that remains is to give a new president an opportunity to reach across the aisle and find healthcare solutions that Americans can support.”

Advantage: Romney.

One of Iran's nuclear facilities, near Qom

Three assumptions are implicit in the headline, and I feel pretty confident about all three.

Let’s start with the easy assumption: Romney will be the Republican nominee. I declared Romney the inevitable victor way back in January, and I see no reason to change my mind just because the underlying reality is having trouble keeping up with my insight.

Second assumption: Israel will attack Iran.  Here I’ve actually changed my mind since I wrote “Pace Bolton, I’m Betting Against an Israeli Air Strike on Iran’s Nuke Facilities” in July 2009.   Way back then, in the wake of Obama’s inexplicable tardiness in condemning the theocracy’s crackdown of what didn’t quite become the Second Iranian Revolution, America’s greatest former UN Ambassador said:

Iran’s nuclear threat was never in doubt during its presidential campaign, but the post-election resistance raised the possibility of some sort of regime change. That prospect seems lost for the near future or for at least as long as it will take Iran to finalize a deliverable nuclear weapons capability.

Accordingly, with no other timely option, the already compelling logic for an Israeli strike is nearly inexorable. Israel is undoubtedly ratcheting forward its decision-making process. President Obama is almost certainly not.

That inexorability, which I didn’t buy back then, has had nearly three years to continue inexorabilizing.  Back then, Obama’s emerging lack of support for the Jewish state seemed to me to be the main non-logistical barrier to an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.  Obama still is not the world’s biggest fan of Israel, but his attitude toward Iran certainly has hardened.  In a long and thoughtful overview this week of the recent rhetoric, one of Meryl Yourish’s co-bloggers wrote:

Obama stated quite forcefully that he is not going to abide a situation where US will have to deal with containment of nuclear Iran. On the face of it, this is as clear-cut declaration of intentions as anyone would hope to get from a leader of the superpower.

Obama may not want an Israeli attack, he may still be trying to dissuade the Israelis from attacking, but it would be hard for him to take any action against Israel if it attacks.  And if you have any doubt that Israel has the guts to attack eventually, I commend to you Jeffrey Goldberg’s column this week, “Israelis Grow Confident Strike on Iran’s Nukes Can Work.”

The third headline assumption is a bit more subtle.  I’m assuming not just that the attack will happen, but also that it will happen before November 2012.  Once upon a time I might have thought that Israel would delay until 2013 in the hope of acting under a more supportive U.S. administration.  But there’s obviously no guarantee of a Republican victory, and a re-elected Obama who never has to campaign again might become even less sympathetic to Israel.

So what’s the answer to the headline query — will an Israeli attack on Iran help Obama or Romney?  Hell, I don’t know.

Tempting though it is to end the post there, I may as well share the few ideas I have on the matter.  Obviously, who it helps will be affected by what happens after the Israelis attack.  Iran’s Supreme Theocrat Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said yesterday:

“We do not have atomic weapons and we will not build one. But against an attack by enemies — to defend ourselves either against the U.S. or Zionist regime — we will attack them on the same level that they attack us.”

In Iran-speak, Israel is the Little Satan and America is the Big Satan. It would be suicidal for the Iranians to overtly attack American forces while launching a retaliation against Israel — but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.  Keep in mind that we’re dealing with a culture that glorifies martyrdom.

In wartime, Americans tend to rally around the president, at least initially.  More than two-thirds of Americans supported the beginning of George Bush’s war in Iraq. So unless Obama utterly abandons Israel in its time of greatest need, I tend to think an Israeli attack will favor Obama’s re-election.  Sure would take a lot of attention away from the economy and Obamacare.

I first became aware of VDH in the weeks and months after September 11.  Like many people, I was hungry not just for information, but for perspective.  I was less interested in the fluctuating body count than in what the future would hold.  While milling about in Citigroup’s corporate offices in midtown that awful Tuesday afternoon, wondering how to get home with the subways and trains locked down, I fell into conversation with a much-younger co-worker, who said something along the lines of, “maybe things will all get back to normal soon.”  I shook my head.  “The world changed today,” I said.

That was about the extent of my insight on Day One.  For what it’s worth, I think it’s held up pretty well.

Here’s a sample of VDH’s insight on Day One:

[O]n December 7, 1941, we declared war against the Japanese Empire after twenty-four hundred American sailors were surprised and killed on a Sunday morning at Pearl Harbor….

Today, September 11, the United States was similarly attacked, in acts every bit as cowardly and without warning.  The only difference between Pearl Harbor and the firing on the Pentagon and destruction of the towers of the World Trade Center is one of magnitude.  Ours now is the far greater loss.  No enemy in our past, neither Nazi Germany nor imperial Japan, has killed so many American civilians and brought such deadly carnage to our shores as these suicidal hijackers who crashed the very citadels of American cultural, economic, and military power in our nation’s two greatest cities. … Surely, by any fair measure of history, we should be at war now.

But are we and shall we be? This generation of Americans is at a crossroads in our nation’s history.  We must decide whether we shall continue to be the adolescent nation that fretted the last six months over the risque details of Congressman Condit’s private life while our enemies were plotting death on the scale of a Guadalcanal or Tet under our very noses.  Or are we still the children of our fathers, who accepted the old, sad truth that “the essence of war is violence, and moderation in war is imbecility.”

As you read those words now, they may seem unremarkable — nothing that you haven’t read dozens of times.  But those sentiments, part of a carefully fleshed-out essay of 1,000 words, spun forth from Hanson’s computer on September 11.

Between then and the end of 2001, VDH wrote 38 (!!) similarly thoughtful essays, published at National Review Online and elsewhere.  The essays are collected in An Autumn of War, a book available through the Amazon widget in the right column of my homepage.  More than a decade later, the essays are still worth reading, and if you order the book through my Amazon widget, supposedly I’ll get a tiny little piece of the action.  I really wish someone would do this someday so I can see if I really get a commission.  Just a thought.

Where was I?  Ah, I was making the point that VDH has a talent for producing insightful analysis in real time.  His output at National Review Online and what used to be called Pajamas Media is prodigious.  I don’t always agree with him — his criticisms of Obama sometimes seem fueled by an intense dislike that I do not share.

But he’s always worth reading, and today he’s done the best job I’ve ever seen of describing how much is at stake in Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.  (That’s right, the 600 words above are all for the purpose of setting up a blog post of the “here’s something interesting I read today” variety.  Maybe someday I’ll figure out how blogs are supposed to work.)

Onward! There are so many insights in today’s essay that it’s hard to decide what to excerpt.  But that’s the kind of choice that I as a professional blogger have to make every day.  Or once or twice a week in my case.

Otherwise insignificant nations and failed states gain credibility by shorting their own people to divert billions of dollars to acquiring a bomb. Take away that fact from Pakistan, and the United States would probably have reduced aid to such a de facto belligerent long ago. …

[I]f a head of state can feign insanity, or, better yet, convincingly announce a wish for the apocalypse, then he can, in theory, circumvent some traditional rules of deterrence. An Iranian theocrat’s supposed willingness to use his sole nuclear weapon to wipe out tiny Israel — at the cost of losing 30 million Iranians from retaliation — yields a cheap way to obtain not just parity with Israel, but potentially a nuclear advantage. …

To this day, we do not know whether North Korea has successfully detonated a nuclear bomb that is easily deliverable. But it does not matter; we need to know only that it has achieved some sort of nuclear reaction that suggests the ability to repeat it a few times. That fact prevents any sort of preemptive attack on a North Korean reactor, giving North Korea the sort of exemption that Iraq, Libya, and Syria never quite achieved. …

The reason why Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are not nuclear is not a matter of technology or finance; indeed, all four could this year alone create nukes as they do BMWs or Hondas. It is not just an American nuclear umbrella but rather a large American nuclear umbrella that assures such countries that they can rest secure without their own deterrent stockpiles. …

The danger is not the bomb per se, but rather who has it. Most of us do not worry about a democratic Britain, France, India, or Israel possessing nuclear weapons. The fright instead is over a Communist authoritarian China, an unhinged North Korea, an Islamist Pakistan, or an unstable Russia having nuclear weapons. Transparent democracies, in other words, are mostly reliable nuclear guardians; non-transparent autocracies are less so.

Read the whole thing.

Which doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions about the terms people use.  “Anti-choice” and “anti-life” are argumentative metatags.  “Anti-abortion” seems descriptive and largely not provocative, although I understand the preference for being “pro” something.

Conversely, “pro-abortion” does seem provocative and inappropriate.  For years I told myself, nobody is really pro-abortion, but people like me believe a woman should have the right, at least under some circumstances, to decide whether to have an abortion.

I’ve been pro-choice my entire adult life, but I’ve never been entirely comfortable with it. Bill Clinton had it about right when he said abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.”  Abortion is a deeply personal, sometimes wrenching decision made on the threshold of life and death.  It’s much like the decision, at the other end of the timeline, on whether to remove the feeding tube or refrain from resuscitation. At both ends, I believe the choice should be made by the people who are most directly affected, and the rest of us should move along.

But there is, at the very least, something morally ambiguous about abortion, and it becomes more troubling the closer the fetus comes to viability.  I’m not particularly interested in debating when life begins — it’s enough to know that it does begin.  Barring miscarriage, disease or trauma, the fetus eventually becomes a baby.  If someone says “abortion is murder” I have no trouble ignoring them.  The slogan that clutches at my soul is “abortion stops a beating heart.”*

In recent years, it’s become clear I was mistaken in believing nobody is “pro-abortion.”  I was projecting my own values onto people who did not necessarily share them. I was utterly appalled when a prominent priest in my own Episcopal denomination proclaimed that “abortion is a blessing” — under every circumstance.

Think I may be exaggerating? Here’s the passage in question:

And when a woman becomes pregnant within a loving, supportive, respectful relationship; has every option open to her; decides she does not wish to bear a child; and has access to a safe, affordable abortion — there is not a tragedy in sight — only blessing. The ability to enjoy God’s good gift of sexuality without compromising one’s education, life’s work, or ability to put to use God’s gifts and call is simply blessing.

These are the two things I want you, please, to remember — abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Let me hear you say it: abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done.

Now that same mindset — the idea that reproductive rights are absolute and trump every other consideration — is at play in the current controversy over the Obama administrations mandate that Catholic organizations must cover contraception free of charge in their employee health plans.

Personally I think the Catholic Church’s opposition to all contraception — whether or not abortifacients are involved — is silly and misguided.  Most Catholics outside the hierarchy agree.  The 98% figure floated by the White House seems to be exaggerated, but it’s safe to say the overwhelming majority of sexual active Catholics use contraception if they don’t want to make a baby.

But nobody is talking about denying anyone access to contraception.  Any person with a job that includes healthcare coverage makes enough money to be able to afford some form of reliable birth control, even if the employee has to pay every dollar of the cost.  The debate is whether a Catholic organization should be forced to pay for a product or service that the church believes is immoral.

Despite Justice Douglas’s emanations from penumbras, the Bill of Rights doesn’t actually say anything about reproductive rights.  But it does say something, explicitly and forcefully, about religion.  Liberals and Democrats would be well-advised to be more deferential to religious liberty when one of the three people most likely to win the next presidential election is Rick Santorum.

* This isn’t literally true of very early-term abortions.  But fetal heartbeat begins as early as week six — well within the first-trimester threshold established by Roe v. Wade.

I argued earlier this week that although Christie will veto the marriage equality bill if it reaches his desk, the governor is fighting a losing battle.  The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.  As of this week seven states permit same-sex marriage.  New Jersey will not become the eighth, but I fully expect it to be in the front half of the parade, despite Christie’s efforts.

In Salon, author Steven Kornacki captures the dilemma well:

There are two elections on the horizon that Chris Christie has a particular interest in. The first is in New Jersey next year, when he’ll seek a second term as governor. The second is in 2016, when he’ll make a logical presidential candidate — if he wins reelection in ’13 and if the Republican nomination is open. (For now, at least, let’s leave aside the idea that Christie might serve as his party’s vice presidential candidate this year.)

This makes the debate over gay marriage in the Garden State, where the Democratic-controlled Senate approved marriage equality legislation yesterday, a problem for him.

On the one hand, support for gay marriage among New Jersey voters is solid…  Christie has to be very careful as he approaches his reelection race. He doesn’t have much margin for error when it comes to alienating swing voters — one of the reasons he was so colorful and adamant in denying interest in the presidential race last year — and swing voters in New Jersey are generally fine with gay marriage.

But Republican voters nationally are not, and it will be a long time before they are (if they ever are). So if he wants to preserve his viability for ’16, Christie cannot be known as the New Jersey governor who enacted same-sex marriage. But he also can’t position himself as a hard-line, stop-at-nothing-to-derail-it opponent of it; to do so would reek of the cultural conservatism that has made most national Republicans unmarketable in New Jersey and endanger Christie’s reelection prospects. And if he gets the boot in ’13, it could sink whatever ’16 ambitions he has.

In the 2009 gubernatorial election, Christie did campaign “as a hard-line, stop-at-nothing-to-derail-it opponent” of marriage equality.  He went beyond merely promising to veto it — he promised to support a state constitutional amendment banning it.  You won’t hear The Great Man repeating that promise.  The legislature may or may not be able to overcome a veto in the current session (which lasts until January 2014), but there is zero chance that a constitutional amendment would pass in New Jersey.

I want to be careful here — I am not criticizing Christie for having moderated his stance on same-sex marriage.  I think it’s a move in the right direction.  I have no doubt that Christie honestly believes that marriage should be reserved for the union of one man and one woman. I disagree with his position, but holding that position does not make him evil.  Don’t forget, that’s precisely the position Barack Obama articulated just days before the 2008 election.  The most important difference between Obama’s pre-election stance and Christie’s is that Obama opposed tinkering with state constitutions.

Christie has every right to modulate his level of aggressiveness in supporting one-man-one-woman.  He’s promised to veto the current bill, and he has to go through with that.  But as Kornacki writes, the best thing that could happen to Christie in terms of his future political ambitions would be for marriage equality to become the law of the land in New Jersey without his fingerprints on it.  If it begins to look possible that the legislature could override a veto, look for only token arm-twisting by Christie.

Senate President Sweeney

(Welcome, NewJerseyNewsroom.com readers! You can find more posts on gay issues here, and more on New Jersey here.)

Timing is everything in politics.  In a race against the clock two years ago, with a lame-duck governor who happily would have signed the bill, the New Jersey Senate fell well short of approving same-sex marriage.  Today, with a governor who will veto the bill, a similar bill passed the Senate easily, and approval also is expected in the Assembly.

Chris Christie, who in most ways I consider an outstanding governor, lost my vote in the 2009 election solely on the basis of his promise to support a constitutional amendment to prohibit marriage equality.  Neither house of the state legislator has the votes now to override the expected veto — but that could change, and the legislature has nearly two years to override.  In the two years between Senate votes, the tally shifted from 20-14 against to 24-16 in favor.

Votes are going to shift only in one direction.  Senate President Stephen Sweeney, a Democrat, abstained in the vote two years ago — effectively voting no, as any bill needs an absolute majority of 21 to pass.  This time he led the fight for the bill.  Whenever a politician changes sides on an issue, he or she has to be prepared to explain the “flip-flop.”  Here’s Sweeney’s explanation, from before today’s vote:

It was a political calculation [the first time] … you know, I didn’t want to be part of a bill that was gonna fail. And it was the wrong position to take. Because this is about civil rights, and you can’t take a pass on civil rights.

… There’s a whole lot that’s taken place since [the last vote]. Which is people like myself recognizing that this isn’t a political issue, it’s a civil rights issue, and when you talk about, well, put it on the ballot — you know, the majority will always deny the minority, in almost every example, of giving what they already have. So no, we’re not doing that. As a legislative body it’s our responsibility to do the right thing.

Here’s a thought experiment: Try to imagine a politician explaining a vote change in the opposite direction. Ain’t gonna happen.

Also today, the governor of Washington signed a bill making that state the seventh to allow same-sex couples to wed.  The Census Bureau says that in 2010 there were more than 130,000 legally married same-sex couples in the U.S., and despite the fantasies of opponents, no legislature is ever going to issue wholesale annulments.  As the number inexorably rises, same-sex marriage will follow the same arc as interracial marriage, moving from scandalous to novel to unremarkable.  There’s no going back.

Separated...

... at birth?

When I was in high school, one of my favorite gag lines was, “I’m a reformed Druid — we worship bushes.”  I thought this was hilarious.  More than that, after saying it enough times, I went through the next quarter century honestly believing I had made it up. (According to the spoilsport Internet, it dates at least back to a M*A*S*H episode in 1973 — a year I remember as “10th grade” — and probably to the whimsical founding of the Reformed Druids of North America in 1963.)

Some time ago I started talking about my concern that Mitt Romney might be the Republican equivalent of John Kerry.  Here’s how I described it in my December 12 endorsement of Romney:

The saying is, “you can’t beat somebody with nobody” — and any sitting president is a somebody.  Romney’s not exactly charismatic or inspirational, and the risk is that he becomes the Republican analog to John Kerry.  Lots of people voted against George Bush in 2004, but hardly anybody voted for Kerry.

I don’t remember hearing that analogy offered previously by anyone else, but I’m wary of claiming authorship.  A search for “Is Mitt Romney the Republican John Kerry?” — including the quotation marks in the search — yields more than 7,500 results.  But the vast majority of them turn out to be other sites referring to a post by that name on Daily Kos.  And the Kos reference is more than a full month later than mine.

The Kos post is by someone who hides behind the screen name Zackpunk, and as you would expect, it is highly tendentious:

Both Romney and Kerry have a political issue that makes them unpopular with their own base. For Kerry it was his vote for the war in Iraq (or the authorization for Bush to wage said war). Hardcore progressives were loathe to forgive him on that. Romney’s scarlet letter is the healthcare mandate he enacted as governor for Massachusetts. Trying to help the sick is an unforgivable offense for today’s GOP.

Really, Zackpunk? Do you really think Republican opposition to Obamacare is driven by animosity toward sick people?

But whatev, let’s turn our attention back to me.  Those 7,500 Google hits collapse down to a mere two screens of results, followed by “we have omitted some entries very similar to the 18 already displayed.” Of those 18, only one appears to predate the Kos reference.  It also predates mine: It’s from a group blog I had not previously encountered called Exchange Coffee House.  In a post titled “Is Mitt Romney the Republican’s John Kerry?“, Roland Hulme offered a much more balanced post than Zackpunk, adhering to the blogosphere’s typical inverse relationship between thoughtfulness and web traffic.

[P]oor old Mitt makes the worst possible candidate precisely because of the reason he’s been chosen – his mediocrity.

The GOP are planning to run a middle-of-the-road Republican based on nothing more substantial than the slogan: “He’s not Barack.” The problem is, Romney has a track record of so-called “statism” that rivals Obama’s own! …

For example, he invented the “Obamacare” health care reform that the Republicans now expect him to criticize and discredit. Romney’s political advisers even met with Obama to help draft the bill!

If Romney ultimately takes the candidacy for 2012, Obama will get his second term in office

The post is dated October 18, 2011, which trumps me by two months.  I think I first started talking about the analogy earlier than that, but I can’t prove it.  (Note to self: get off your fetish about research, just start posting stuff as it pops into your head.)

Hulme certainly has correctly identified Romney’s heaviest baggage.  “Romneycare” (a misnomer) makes it much more complicated to take advantage of the wildly unpopular Obamacare.  Complicated, but not impossible.  While Romney signed legislation with a constitutionally questionable individual mandate, the Massachusetts version was a bipartisan effort — not a single-party cramdown advanced in 1 a.m. votes and “deem and pass” maneuvers in a desperate race to get the bill signed before enough people realized just how bad it was.

The healthcare bill Romney signed is more of a liability in the GOP primary than it will be in the general election. And while Romney may be more of a “big-government Republican” than many conservatives would prefer, most of those conservatives will vote for him anyway, correctly reasoning that he’s well to the right of Obama.

I think Hulme is on shakier ground in saying Mitt’s “mediocrity” is the reason he’s been chosen.  (I’m posting this half an hour before the polls open in Florida, where I expect Romney’s inevitability to re-emerge.)  Romney, who can point to his background as a governor and a successful businessman, is bland, not mediocre.  That distinguishes him from Kerry, who was both.