It is pretty much understood by now that one person who may hold veto power over Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels' potential presidential run is his wife, Cheri Daniels. There are numerous articles out there describing her reticence. She is sometimes said to be "very cool" and "uneasy" about a run, or not "sold on the idea," or she "has publicly expressed her discomfort over the possibility," even as her "public schedule" features an uptick in public appearances.

Now, some of what Cheri Daniels feared about her husband making a run for the White House is playing out in the press in advance of any decision, as the media starts to chew on the marital strife that the Daniels have been through (and, by the way, has by all appearances overcome). During the '90s, Cheri and Mitch split, and for a time, she was married to another man. Ben Smith terms this the "Cheri problem." Dan Amira at Daily Intel describes this as "Mitch Daniels' Weird Marriage."

And in the Washington Post's Style section today, the whole Cheri-as-the-deciding-factor gets a full treatment, and the couple's "complicated personal history" is at the heart of the piece. But the most interesting part of the article is this sentence: "In exchange for anonymity, an official for another GOP prospect provided contact information for the ex-wife of the man Cheri Daniels married, in the years between her divorce and remarriage to Daniels."

It just goes to show that Cheri Daniels is smart to be hesitant. She's clearly pretty wise to the game. The 2012 campaign may be slow to start, but its dark artists never take a holiday. And what does Mitch have to say about this?

For his part, Gov. Daniels opted to shut his eyes to the less noble aspects of presidential politics.

“I talked to the governor briefly,” said Jane Jankowski, a spokeswoman for Daniels, when asked for a response to the preemptive attack. “And Governor Daniels chooses to believe that no candidate would employ such tactics, and if someone working for a candidate did such a thing, it must not have been authorized.”

Oh, Mitch. You're really new to this, aren't you?

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If you want to get a feel for how difficult it's going to be for former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to thread the needle he needs to thread in his "major speech on health care today," Jon Ward's piece on these pages from yesterday is a great place to start. Yes, Romney will, in all likelihood, make it clear that as President, his Day One task will be scuttling the Affordable Care Act, but the internecine opposition he's drawing on his own health care record is going to be difficult to surmount. When Grover Norquist is telling you that your singular legislative achievement is a "boat anchor" around your neck, and Karl Rove is opining that your based-in-Federalism argument is insufficient to the task of defending your actions as governor, your problems are legion.

Jon's piece came ahead of an absolutely brutal editorial in The Wall Street Journal, which will only make matters worse. The sting comes right in the sub-hed: "Mitt Romney's ObamaCare Problem." And it contains paragraphs like this one:

As everyone knows, the health reform Mr. Romney passed in 2006 as Massachusetts Governor was the prototype for President Obama's version and gave national health care a huge political boost. Mr. Romney now claims ObamaCare should be repealed, but his failure to explain his own role or admit any errors suggests serious flaws both in his candidacy and as a potential President.

And this one:

There's a lot to learn from the failure of the ObamaCare model that began in Massachusetts, which is now moving to impose price controls on all hospitals, doctors and other providers. Not that anyone would know listening to Mr. Romney. In the paperback edition of his campaign book "No Apology," he calls the plan a "success," and he has defended it in numerous media appearances as he plans his White House run.

The big takeaway here is that the whole notion that "RomneyCare begat ObamaCare" is no longer just some talking point. Rather, it's an idea that has now reached such widespread penetration that whether you support the health care reform package that President Barack Obama signed into law or oppose it with equal fervor, you recognize that its very existence depends entirely on Mitt Romney.

The unremarked-upon irony of this situation is that it's fair to say that Mitt Romney's existence -- as a credible candidate for President -- depends entirely upon his Massachusetts health care reform. Flashback to 2008, and you'll probably recall that CommonwealthCare is the innovation that brought Romney to the heights of a national campaign in the first place. (A tertiary accomplishment was his management of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.) Four years ago, the conventional wisdom was that Romney had deftly co-opted universal health care coverage as an issue, and demonstrated -- as only a governor could, goes the narrative -- the ability to actually stop talking about the problem and craft a solution.

Over at Politico, they've got a "What Romney Needs To Do" post up. The four-step process basically boils down to: 1) restate the same arguments about how RomneyCare is different from ObamaCare that no longer wash with anyone, 2) offer a sort-of apology, like Tim Pawlenty did on cap-and-trade at the South Carolina debate (Pawlenty was rewarded with poll numbers that put him behind Donald Trump and Michele Bachmann, proving once again that there's nothing better in politics than an almost-apology, right?), 3) then, don't apologize for it, by sticking up for the individual mandate that the GOP base hates, and 4) try to dazzle the viewers with a PowerPoint presentation, because PowerPoint is the vehicle through which managerial deftness flows.

Naturally, I feel compelled to warn Romney that following Politico's advice is a trap! If things run true to form, then tomorrow, Politico will criticize Romney for doing the things they suggested.

Of course, if he wanted to, Romney could make the bold choice and say, "You know what, I did this in Massachusetts and I'm right." And, as he can no longer defeat the argument that the Affordable Care Act didn't not flow naturally from his actions as the governor of Massachusetts, he could begin to advance the argument that the implementation of his idea requires the management skills of the man who invented it.

That wouldn't satisfy the conservative critics that want to see some kind of renunciation. But what choice does Mitt have? What would be left of the man? Any renunciation of his health care reform achievement is essentially a renunciation of the entire idea that Mitt Romney should be running for President in the first place.

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Five men competed in last week's Republican debate in South Carolina, but only one of them could credibly package the entire experience in a video highlight reel, frame it as a victory lap, and toss it up on the web for fans to gobble up and spread around. That guy is Herman Cain. (Though I'd love to see Tim Pawlenty's vaunted videographer try to turn his cringing apology for supporting cap and trade into the stuff of action movie heroism.)

The enthusiasm for Cain that manifested itself among the members of Frank Luntz's post-game focus group is the essential ingredient that allows Cain to present the debate as a pillar-to-post drubbing.

One moment lingers in particular: the young focus group member who tells Luntz that after previously campaigning for Romney, he's going to kick Mitt to the curb and go all-in for Cain. Romney, of course, didn't make the trip to South Carolina (he may take a pass on the state entirely), but that moment allowed Cain to get in some shots at the presumed front-runner.

__________________________________

"It's basically self-parody here at POLITICO to write about the 2016 presidential campaign," but it's Ben Smith, so stick with it as he games out the way the issue of same-sex marriage could play out down the road. (How will it play in 2012? I'm pretty sure that only libertarians Ron Paul and Gary Johnson support marriage equality, though Barack Obama's opinion may "evolve" just in time to pander to LGBT voters, you never know!) [Ben Smith]

Steve Kornacki tells us that there are "two types of 'flawed' Republican presidential candidates," which is bad news for those of us who naturally assumed that there were many, many more. [War Room @ Salon]

Representative Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.) -- of whom there was a mini-spike in presidential speculation yesterday -- has written a book, and I'll let Taegan Goddard finish the joke: "So he must be running for president." [Taegan Goddard's Political Wire]

Your Virginia Senatorial race is a tight one and remains "about as evenly matched as it could possibly be with two well-known and highly polarizing candidates duking it out. Tim Kaine leads George Allen 46-44 this time around." [Public Policy Polling]

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Yesterday, Public Policy Polling had some bad news for people who like the idea of Donald Trump running for president (by which I mean, "Donald Trump and his occasionally sycophantic celebrity apprentices"). His support had essentially hit the skids.

And in the wake of Trump's going all-in on Birtherism in order to get some attention for his pretend campaign, one might wonder: "What is Donald Trump going to talk about in order to manufacture some publicity?" Well, he could always fall back on menswear!

That's how Eric Hedegaard's begins his interview with Trump in Rolling Stone. The story, which is a wee bit dated in light of yesterday's polling, opens with Trump full of heady bluster about his brand and how well it performs in the marketplace:

Like you, we've always wondered what's inside Donald Trump's wallet. So, on a recent visit to his office at the top of Trump Tower in Manhattan, the epicenter of his vast real estate empire and putative presidential ambitions, we ask him if we can take a look. He pulls it out, dips it down and hides it behind his huge desk, peers inside, saying, "Let me just see if there's anything ... ," and then holds it out, fanning through it, revealing his Winged Foot Golf Club membership card and his very own gun permit, neither of which he apparently ever leaves home without.

"It's a Donald J. Trump wallet," he says, happily. He's still a fairly big, fairly imposing guy at age 64, has hair that's the patriotic shade of amber waves of grain, dresses like men of the world used to dress, in a dark suit, with a crisp, white shirt and a tie that's the subtlest pink ever. "We sell them at Macy's. They sell great. Hey -- I have the number-one-selling tie in the country. What color tie do you like? Your tie looks like shit. Do you want a tie? It's not a bribe. They're nothing. I sell shirts, PVH, Phillips-Van Heusen. Cuff links." He waves his arms around, shoots his cuffs to show off glittering cuff links. "Trump cuff links!" he shouts. "They're magnificent! Everybody's buying them! If I said I got them at Harry Winston, for $100,000, you'd believe it! Forty-nine dollars at Macy's! Macy's doesn't even want to carry other brands! We blow them out!"

For the record, Macy's does stock other brands of cufflinks, including some tasteful and reasonably priced items from Kenneth Cole, which would be the one's I'd gravitate to, given the choice. (They also stock some truly ghastly things from Nautica.)

Trump goes on and on, about his business savvy, and his morning constitutional: "OK, what I do is, wash it with Head and Shoulders. I don't dry it, though. I let it dry by itself. It takes about an hour. Then I read papers and things."

Also, whatever vices he has, chemical dependencies don't appear to be among them: "I've never smoked a cigarette in my life," he adds. "I've never had a drink, never had a joint, never had any drugs, never even had a cup of coffee. So, those are some good things about me." That's so close to "straight edge" that I'm a little disappointed that Hedegaard didn't try to reach Fugazi lead singer Ian MacKaye for a reaction.

But, as you probably already know, Trump does have the tendency to drone on about how awesome he is. That's when the interview took a turn for the weird:

And then he goes on about the ratings of Celebrity Apprentice and the ratings of himself in presidential polls, both of which are "very, very" high. This is all well and good, but it's incredibly boring, and eventually you are forced to cut him off, with, like, is there one orgasm in his life that he would consider the most memorable?

He leans back in his chair, tilts his head up, takes a long time to think this over, his cherubic cheeks reddening either with the effort of recollection or the maintenance of a boiler about to explode. At last, very smoothly, he says, "Well, always the children. And this building. Trump Tower." A duller answer one cannot imagine.

It's only dull if you decide to put the images of "always the children" in the proximity of Trump Tower out of your mind. Which, by the way, you should do immediately.

[Hat Tip: Americablog]

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[Jason Cherkis contributed reporting to this piece.]

If all goes according to plan, in just a few hours, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich will end a decade-and-a-half of testing the waters and finally announce his candidacy for President of the United States. This seemed all but assured last week, when Gingrich campaign spokesman Rick Tyler told reporters, "by the time Newt speaks to the Georgia convention," which is scheduled for Friday, May 13, "he'll be a candidate." As always, it's worth taking a wait-see-position, since so many of us have been burned before by Gingrich. At various points in the past, a couple of folks have been burned by both Newt Gingrich and the women who served as his mistresses These Americans are, obviously, the luckiest of all.

If Gingrich gets into the race, rest assured that it will only be a matter of hours before his allied political touts begin referring to him as the GOP's Man of Great Ideas. (Gregory Schmidt, in this column, may have jumped the gun, but many will follow.) Whether or not Gingrich has managed to remain an "ideas guy" in his post-Congressional career has always been a matter of subject of intense debate. Sometimes, Gingrich's "ideas" are warmed-over policy proposals from his Speakership heyday. Sometimes, his "ideas" are things that other people have already proposed. On rare occasions, his "ideas" involve laser beams. Regardless, Gingrich's reputation as some sort of walking reliquary of policy innovations precedes him.

But if there's been anything that's helped protect and preserve that reputation, it's been Gingrich's ability to remain a ubiquitous presence in the conservative movement. In Washington, activity is often confused for achievement, and the savvy Gingrich has found a maddeningly eclectic way of producing tons of busy work over the last 15 years.

He's never far from cable news or the bookshelves (where he's always seen wearing the same tie). He's a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution. He's produced an astounding array of video projects. It's almost impossible to imagine the annual CPAC conference happening without him.

And when it's suited him, he's found ways to be politically ecumenical: recall the commercial he cut with Nancy Pelosi on behalf of Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection, or, more recently, his team-up with Al Sharpton and Education Secretary Arne Duncan to support President Barack Obama's school reform initiatives (which Gingrich has somehow reconciled with his overall view that Obama is a dangerous "secular-socialist.")

All in all his organizational entanglements are extensive and byzantine. It's obviously a lot to absorb, but if you're in the mood to dive in, check out Jason Cherkis' piece on the matter, where he reports that Gingrich's generosity to his political organizations far outpaces his treatment of his charities.

If you're looking for a way to get the bottom of what a Newt Gingrich presidency might look like, your best route is to head on over to the home of Renewing American Leadership, which Gingrich helped found in 2009. If you want to fully experience Gingrich's brand of conservative politics, Renewing American Leadership is your source for the pure and uncut stuff.

The organization -- whose mission is to "preserve America's Judeo-Christian heritage by defending and promoting the four pillars of American civilization: faith, family, freedom, and free enterprise" -- takes square aim at secularism, dressing up its cant in quasi-academic garb. There's American history presented in a way that Sean Hannity might love -- American Exceptionalism consecrated on the same altar as the Trinity. The organizations' work is tailor made for the modern Christian conservative, but this isn't the angry religiosity of a Rick Santorum. In the world of Renewing American Leadership, God is seen as a divine brand manager, with America as his purest product.

The organization is currently headed by Dr. Jim Garlow, the senior pastor of San Diego's Skyline Wesleyan Church. Garlow is the author of numerous books, a body of work that's allowed him to keep one foot in heaven (2009's Heaven and the Afterlife: What Happens When You Die?) and another on earth (The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership Tested by Time). (He's also written "exposes" on The DaVinci Code and The Secret, which seem like pretty worthy endeavors to me.) Garlow is joined in these endeavors by Wallbuilder's David Barton, whose teachings are so valuable, according to Mike Huckabee, that people should be "forced to listen" to them at "gunpoint."

Gingrich occupies a special place in Renewing American Leadership's firmament. As the honorary chairman, Gingrich's face is the one that appears in the organization's welcome video. The site maintains a stuffed gallery of Gingrich's video projects and television appearances. They also track his every move: Here's Gingrich at CPAC's past and present. Here's Gingrich at the Value Voters Summit. Here he is speaking at Liberty University and his address to the RGA. You'll find Gingrich sounding off on matters both memorable -- the Cordoba House, Elena Kagan's nomination -- and obscure, like the Mojave Memorial Cross.

The organization also features the prominent involvement of the aforementioned Rick Tyler, who serves as the chairman of ReAL Action, Renewing American Leadership's "citizen activist arm." Under Tyler, ReAl Action has published regular "ReAL News And Views" newsletters, and it's in these periodic missives that you find the purest distillation of Gingrichiana.

The Tyler newsletters fairly comprehensively establish the foundations of Gingrich's politics and policies. The chief tenets involve worshipful nationalism, a love of free markets and small government and a wholesale rejection of secular humanism. How wholesale? Well, consider the organization's take on the concept of "American Exceptionalism." In the November 23, 2010 newsletter, Tyler maintained that it exists "not because of our DNA - America is home to peoples from all across the earth - but because Americans began with the correct ordering of man's relationship to God."

Tyler continues:

Either our rights come from man, which was the dominant model throughout history, or they come from God. One answer leads to freedom and prosperity and one leads to tyranny and poverty. The Founders answered "the grand sez who?" question unequivocally, with "God says."

[...]

A society that does not recognize that rights come from God inevitably morphs into a society that believes rights come from the state -- and it happens fast. In old Europe, the state could torture a man until he admitted he was guilty of a crime, then he could be punished for his admission. By contrast, our Fifth Amendment bars the state from compelling us to incriminate ourselves. In practical terms, ours was the first government in the history of the world that saw the evil of putting a screw into a man's thumb until he told the authorities what they wanted to hear. Camus wrote in The Plague, "But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death."

When the government believes that a man has rights that come from God, it cannot simply torture or arbitrarily kill its citizens. That may seem like an extreme example, but you can also see the damage of this type of thinking in the genocide perpetrated by secular-socialist regimes such as the Soviet Union, or even in the 40 million aborted babies lost since Roe v. Wade. When governments forget that the basic rights of the citizenry come from God, horrible violations of basic human rights will invariably follow.

Obviously, there's no quarter given here: If human rights have a source, it's either Yahweh or the highway. (Gingrich has, in the past, condemned the use of torture, but his position is awkward, given his prior unwillingness to state whether he felt waterboarding qualified.)

The November 30 newsletter outlines how to "Renew Economic Leadership" in America. There, the organization advocates eliminating the capital gains tax, lowering the corporate tax rate, eliminating regulation and oversight, repealing Obamacare, and digging every natural resource out of the ground as quickly as possible. I's wager that it's the essential preview of Gingrich on the stump in 2012.

I especially enjoy the February 9, 2011 newsletter, which grapples with events abroad in a piece titled "What Egypt Tells Us About America," by answering the important question: "Why Don't We Have Unrest Like This?":

We have said this before: America is not unique because of our military might, baseball, mom, or apple pie. We as Americans are not blessed simply because we were born in the United States. America is exceptional because she is the first country in human history founded with a genuine free market economy that isn't dominated by cronyism and a ruling class. We are also the first nation to clearly establish that our rights come from our Creator and not from the State, and not from some government-established cleric who tells us what God requires that we support the state.

Emphasis mine, because wow. It's like things like lobbying and the Citizens United Supreme Court decision just don't exist. Like the special dispensation that Wall Street received in the wake of their 2008 cock-up collapse of the economy, and which they continue to receive to this day, just didn't happen.

In short, there's a lot to be divined about what Gingrich's presidential platform will potentially be. But that shouldn't detract from the ways in which this Gingrich group has exercised its will on the political landscape. It was through Renewing American Leadership that Gingrich funneled $150,000 to "help defeat Iowa justices who threw out a ban on same-sex marriage." And if after reading about the organization you're left with the funny feeling that they have a particular fellowship in common with the right-wing activists who were bent on revising Texas' school textbooks, give yourself a gold star: David Barton "served on the Texas State Board of Education's "panel of experts" that edited history textbooks to be more friendly to Republican perspectives."

The bottom line is that while there's always a reason to be uncertain about Newt Gingrich's presidential ambitions, how those ambitions would manifest themselves as a govering philosophy couldn't be more clear.

ALSO on the HUFFINGTON POST:
Newt Gingrich's Charities Wither While His Political Organizations Thrive

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The news today is that it's looking like the Donald Trump boomlet is all but done, with a new round of numbers from Public Policy Polling finding that whatever support he once enjoyed among Republican primary voters has all but "collapsed." But when you look at these numbers, it sure looks to me like the reality teevee host is still stealing focus from even more dire polling news:

Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney are at the top of the GOP race with 19% and 18% respectively. Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin are further back at 13% and 12%, followed by Trump and Paul at 8%, Michele Bachmann at 7%, and Tim Pawlenty at 5%.

Yes, let's note that Ron Paul fans are probably feeling some satisfaction today, as it was their guy that Trump dubbed a "loser" during his Conservative Political Action Conference speech earlier this year. With a minimum of effort, Paul's now level with Trump, and likely to be trending in the opposite direction.

But, wow: Tim Pawlenty is at 5 percent? That's bad news for TPaw, who has worked harder than anyone at this "running for president" game, with next to nothing to show for it. Pawlenty likely hoped that making an appearance at that South Carolina debate would establish him as an electable conservative, but he's best remembered for being made to grovel over his previous support for cap and trade. With Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul and Gary Johnson standing onstage giving a loud voice to stances from which they've never wavered, it was a bad look for TPaw.

The best thing Pawlenty could have achieved by now is to have put down his marker as the "next-best Mitt Romney." As it stands, he's not even competing well as an alternative to fellow Minnesotan Michele Bachmann. This means that the people Pawlenty would most like to court are going to continue to cross their fingers for Mitch Daniels.

There's obviously still time to make up ground, but at the moment, Pawlenty is looking like this cycle's Jim Gilmore. At least Donald Trump can lay claim to being more than an afterthought.

The National Review's Stanley Kurtz really, really wants to help Pawlenty out, though: "Yes, Tim Pawlenty can beat Barack Obama in a head-to-head battle for the presidency of the United States. Wake up, Republicans! The answer to your prayers is already running. And if all the pundits would just stop fantasizing for a minute about everyone who’s not running, maybe they’d pay more attention to who actually is." [The Corner]

Speaking of Michele Bachmann, Polk County GOP co-chair Dave Funk is pretty sure she's going to make a run, with an upcoming appearance at a Polk County GOP fundraiser on May 26 as a potential announcement date. [Daily Caller]

If you do want to make Chris Christie smile on the inside, keep telling him he ought to run for President. He really likes that! [Taegan Goddard's Political Wire]

Jon Stewart did Rick Santorum no favors by bringing up his legendary Google problem last night. This news appears to have also scarred Keira Knightley rather badly [The Note]

WATCH:

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As Salon's Steve Kornacki pointed out yesterday, there's still a strong desire among GOP elites for some yet-to-be-named candidate to jump into the race for the 2012 Republican nomination and save it from the current primary field. Kornacki says there's still time for a "white knight" to burst onto the scene, and, to his reckoning, the person who best fits the bill is Gov. Chris Christie (N.J.). But what about Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.)? Huh? Did you ever consider him?

That got your attention, right? Well, it's actually a thing that appears to be happening, at least according to the Washington Times' Kerry Picket:

Conservative Republican donors and grassroots activists, who have raised concerns that there is not yet a true Reagan conservative in the GOP presidential primary are privately encouraging Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, Michigan Republican, to look at a potential entry.

McCotter, who led the Republican fight against the Bush/Obama TARP bank bailout and stimulus and is acknowledged as one of the party's foreign policy leaders,

And that's how this brief item ends: on a comma, which only heightens the exquisite tension of speculating that McCotter may enter the race. It's hard to say what McCotter would be like on the campaign trail, though this clip from an interview with conservative news site Human Events suggests that it will be heavy on classic rock guitar noodling. Results may vary! McCotter's take on Libya is pretty lucid, if you ask me. His lamentations over the trouble Silvio Berlusconi has gotten himself into with his alleged underage-prostitute sex crimes, not so much:

So there you have it. If McCotter can't get the nomination, maybe he can pick up a decent rhythm section.

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This week was an important week for American democracy, as the GOP met in South Carolina for a grand debate, in which all most some a handful of longshots and holographic screensaver of Tim Pawlenty, competed to win the GOP nomination make an impression with voters win the approval of Frank Luntz's focus group.

It was a wondrous occasion. The four Fox News moderators operated at a breakneck pace that ran in inverse proportion to the debate's importance, and there was a constantly dinging bell that kept us all wondering if we had finally come to "Final Jeopardy" at the appointed time when Watson the Computer was to be wheeled out on stage to take on all comers in the category of "Potent Potables."

The clear winner turned out to be Godfathers' Pizza magnate Herman Cain! He bowled over the Luntz focus group, and honestly, it was easy to see why. Cain's got one of the best speaking voices in politics -- a room-filling baritone that seems to escape from Cain's throat as if it were as easy as breathing. And his feel for clever ripostes compared well against the typical candidate blather.

Sure: most of his "plans" for America were to sit down and come up with "plans" -- something many critics found absurd, but I think it's definitely possible to overstate the extent to which politicians present "plans" at debates. And as far as Cain not having a fully-realized strategy for Afghanistan, I'm a little lenient in this regard, because it's not like the Joint Chiefs and the CIA are giving security briefings to dudes who own pizza delivery companies. (Or are they?)

The rest of the field competed for second place, and mostly lost to Rick Santorum. Ron Paul's full-throated supporters hooted and clapped for their man, but it didn't leave much of an impression on the pundits in the post-debate spin room. But so what? While everyone was talking, Paul's supporters were raising insane amounts of campaign cash for their hero. Gary Johnson mostly came off like a libertarian dude who likes to toke up and philosophize.

And the moderators were really adversarial to Tim Pawlenty. At one point they actually played a video clip to embarrass him, and it led to the weird spectacle of Pawlenty giving a cringing apology for what seemed like forever.

That's basically it! Begun these drone wars have! (Also, President Obama whacked some guy over the weekend? Can't remember the details, but everyone was telling me how important it was.) For all the rest of the vital campaign activity of the last seven days, please enter the Speculatron for the week of May 6, 2011.

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Did you miss last night's GOP presidential debate in South Carolina, between four people who have only a slim chance of ever being the party's nominee and a Tim Pawlenty-themed holographic screensaver? I have to imagine that many of you did, since it's May, more than a year from the 2012 elections, and you have "lives."

That's okay, though: Our own Ben Craw has condensed the entire 90-minute affair into a four minute video that hits all the highlights. Thrill to the sight of former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson asking for more questions! Delight in Texas Rep. Ron Paul's hilarious depiction of heroin use. Swoon over ex-Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum's gritted teeth demeanor -- and maybe suggest he get checked out for TMJ.

And listen to the time's up bell, dinging and dinging, forever! I think that the bell was the clear winner of last night's debate. The bell's platform of "you shut up now" really resonated with me. Anyone know if the bell is staffing up in Iowa? Because I loved the tintinnabulation that so musically wells! From the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells! BELL 2012!

WATCH:

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The Speculatron's favorite longshot candidate, Fred Karger, has released a new web video in support of his ongoing efforts in New Hampshire. Titled "Demon Frisbee," it references Carly Fiorina's cinematic masterpiece, "Demon Sheep," with a lot of "Plan 9"-style sci-fi cheese effects. But it's all in good fun! Karger supporters are walking around the Granite State, handing out frisbees and telling people about the Karger campaign's platform of "bringing back the American spirit of optimism and getting along."

Awww.

And, yeah, then there's about 40 seconds of kids running around throwing frisbees to one another. CUTE DOG AT THE END, THOUGH!

- The perfect Trump campaign slogan (with accompanying image). WE SHALL OVERCOMB! [/dev/random]

- "So, to make a point about the debt ceiling at a meeting of gun owners, Huckabee repeated an anecdote about the Holocaust that he'd previously used to make a point about abortion in front of a crowd full of Christian conservatives." [War Room @ Salon]

- How did Ron Paul's pre-debate "money bomb" do? About as well as they always do, which is to say, pretty damn well. [Taegan Goddard's Political Wire]

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The first scheduled debate of the campaign season, jointly sponsored by NBC News and Politico, was supposed to have been held on May 2. But back at the end of March, the debate organizers rather astutely observed that the presumed frontrunners weren't yet running and that the campaign season had not yet really begun. Presciently, they realized that these conditions were not likely to change during the month of April, so they postponed the event until mid-September, when they might be able to present a debate that voters would find credible. That's how tonight's debate, sponsored by Fox News and the South Carolina GOP became the first debate of the 2012 campaign.

It's going to be a complete mess. The candidates that the debate organizers want won't be showing up. A pair of candidates who want to participate won't be allowed in the room. And the Associated Press is in a kerfuffle with Fox News over "restrictions placed on media access." What is the point of this debate, again?

Fox News did a round of polling during April 25-27 where they asked respondents to identify which presumed candidate they would like to see end up the GOP nominee in 2012. In that poll, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney led the field with 19 percent. He was followed by former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee at 17 percent, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin at 9 percent, reality teevee host Donald Trump at 8 percent, and peripatetic perma-candidate Newt Gingrich at 7 percent. None of those people will be appearing onstage at the debate in Greenville, SC.

Instead, the field for the debate will be a bunch of lower-tier and lightly-regarded candidates, including Texas Representative Ron Paul, Godfathers Pizza CEO Herman Cain, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson. In that coterie, I count one candidate with an active and devoted base of support (Paul) and one candidate who could potentially obtain the approval of independent voters and elite conservative pundits (Pawlenty). The long-played out joke of this debate is that plenty of seats are available ... on the stage.

Tim Pawlenty finds himself cast as the guy who stands to gain the most, unless he's actually the guy who stands to lose the most. Pawlenty presents himself as the typical kind of candidate the GOP hopes will be left standing when the primary season runs its course: clean-cut, presentable, reasonably fluent with all the songs in the conservative hymnal and -- above all -- electable. He's worked very hard to be all things to all people: His background is straight up managerial technocrat, but over the past year of testing the waters, he's added enough Tea Party and social conservative schtick to his act to enable him to boomerang through that territory without losing too much luster to voters who crave less bomb-throwing.

Where has that gotten TPaw? Well, maybe the best thing anyone has said about him was said by David Frum, who said, "predicting Pawlenty feels like reaching the wrong answer on a math exam. You do the calculation and you arrive at the answer, Pawlenty. You think: that can’t be right. You check the formulas. Yes, you have written them down correctly. You repeat the calculation. Same answer. And it still does not feel right." And that's about that.

Trying hard at being a presidential candidate is a central part of Pawlenty's strategy. So he signed up for this debate quickly and has never wavered from participating in it. (He's actually gone so far as the criticize the no-shows for no-showing, which at the very least might help prove to Roger Ailes that Pawlenty is a team player.) If Pawlenty has a natural advantage tonight, it's that against the rest of the field, he'll stand out as the most mainstream, electable candidate. And, in turn, that might finally get the elite thinkers talking about his candidacy and its potential. As it stands at the moment, the sort of people who might naturally admire Pawlenty, like David Brooks, are all hoping that Mitch Daniels will soon arrive on the scene to be their bland, managerial savior.

The problem Pawlenty faces tonight is that with only four other candidates standing on that stage, those four other candidates might steal a lot of the focus. When debates are populated by an enormous number of candidates, the debate moderators tend to manifest front-runner bias, pushing the little-regarded candidates to the sidelines and engaging them rarely, if ever, on matters that fall outside their pet packet of issues.

But tonight, Cain and Johnson and Paul and Santorum are going to get to speak. A lot. And they could end up steering the debate off in some unexpected directions. Paul and Johnson, for example, promise a double-dose of libertarianism, and both are dead-set against the war in Afghanistan. That's forty percent of the field on stage tonight. When's the last time a GOP debate featured the possibility of an actual debate on our foreign misadventures? It could happen tonight.

And there are all sorts of landmines for Pawlenty. TPaw's been mildly wooing Christian conservatives, essentially doing just enough to get by. But how can he compete against Rick Santorum -- who more or less would, if he had his druthers, impose the Christian fundamentalist version of sharia law on the United States. Ron Paul is a great debater -- charming and ferociously consistent, he doesn't talk in party-approved talking points, and his followers know how to pack a room and stuff an after-action snap poll. And Herman Cain has so far thrived at events where his field of opponents are few. He's a powerful, brash public speaker, capable of dropping bons mots that echo long after he's left the room.

Is Pawlenty prepared to say something memorable tonight? If not, his debate opponents could steal the spotlight, and make him look foolish for not standing on the sidelines with the actual frontrunners.

Of course, those sidelines are crowded with long-shot hopefuls as well. Two guys who actually wanted to be in the room -- former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer and veteran GOP consultant/LGBT activist Fred Karger -- won't be allowed, because they've failed to hit the extra special benchmark of 1 percent in five national polls prior to the event ... which each man was invited to attend, by the way (for a time, Roemer was actually a confirmed attendee).

This requirement seems bogus to me. It is, at the very least, a cruel Catch-22: Roemer and Karger need polling recognition in order to debate, and they need to get into the debate to earn themselves some polling recognition. The debate organizers would likely say that those rules are in place in order to maintain a magical standard of participant excellence. I'd counter by saying: 1) Well, look who you ended up with and 2) It is May of 2011 -- why are we pretending the stakes are anything but perilously low?

The debate organizers aren't inclined to believe that their event is anything other than a high-stakes political tilt-a-whirl. And they went ahead and completely, unnecessarily injected some raised-stakes yesterday when they informed the Associated Press that they would not be permitted to take photographs of the debate while it was unfolding. As Michael Calderone reported on these pages, the AP did not take this news well, and issued the following statement:

These are restrictions that violate basic demands of newsgathering and differ from other debates where more access was granted. Accordingly, the AP will not staff the event in any format nor will the AP disseminate any pool photos taken by another outlet. This is consistent with longstanding policy exercised in coverage of many events.

Should access conditions change, the AP will reassess this decision and expedite a new coverage advisory if warranted.

Since this debate is supposed to be a public service to help voters decide who they want to be the GOP nominee for President, and not something that you should need the expressed written consent of Major League Baseball to reproduce, it's a puzzlement as to why Fox News and the South Carolina GOP would pointlessly piss off the Associated Press. One imagines they either believe that the product they are going to produce tonight is a precious commodity that they can't afford to share, or (more likely) an implied admission that the debate is likely to provide a moment that will embarrass everyone involved.

Either way, it's a bunk decision. And in the interest of disseminating actual visual evidence that this debate took place, I'm inviting any courtroom sketch artist, iPad doodle aficianado or artistically inclined child with understanding parents and a set of fingerpaints to please feel free to send in your artistic representations of tonight's debate, because I will publish them. (Though I'll totally understand if you want to skip this debate entirely, on the grounds that you have something better to do with the finite time you have on this earth.)

Hey, is it really too late to cancel this thing? It is? Well, that's a real pity.

PREVIOUSLY, on the HUFFINGTON POST:
South Carolina Debate's Small Field Guarantees A Strong Libertarian Flavor

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UPDATE, 4:11pm: Mike Huckabee is disputing reports that suggest Fox News has imposed a decision deadline on him. Per Andy Barr:

Citing GOP operatives, RealClearPolitics reported Thursday that the network has given Huckabee until the end of May to opt against a run or lose his lucrative contract as a cable pundit. Continue Reading

But Huckabee’s top aide told POLITICO that the network has imposed no such deadline.

“The governor has been clear — his timeline for a decision is this summer and that has not changed,” said HuckPAC executive director Hogan Gidley. “Fox is aware of the governor’s timetable and he is aware of his limitations in considering another run."

_____________

If you've been waiting for former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee to finally make up his mind and enter the race, well ... you're probably one of a number of people who imagined that by this point, Huckabee would have an active campaign structure on the ground in the early primary states. Huckabee, so far, has remained aloof -- most days, he seems to be more excited by the fact that he's considered a frontrunner than he is about doing any actual frontrunning.

But here's some good news for people who heart Huckabees! Huckabee's employer, Fox News, has given him until the end of the month to come to a decision. Per Erin McPike, at Real Clear Politics:

For months, the political class has believed that Huckabee would not run in the 2012 election cycle because he wasn't taking any organizational steps. (Activists in New Hampshire, too, said in March that his messaging was off, which suggested to them he would stay out.) That has changed, and a scheduled appearance at the Republican Leadership Conference in Louisiana in June and a fundraiser Wednesday in Washington are part of the latest evidence.

According to a confidant of [Huckabee campaign chairman Ed] Rollins who has been slated for a high-level position in the potential campaign, "Ed has had long and serious discussions with Mike as recently as this past weekend." Rollins would manage the first phase of the Huckabee campaign this time.

[...]

Now, he may have to offer his decision by the end of the month. Republican operatives familiar with the deliberations at Fox News say that the network has told Huckabee he has until the end of the month to make up his mind about the race or he'll be cut off, just as Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum were when the then-contributors were still in the consideration phase.

Just week ago, an announcement that Huckabee was "releasing his political operatives" in South Carolina so that they could "work for other candidates" fueled rumors that Huckabee was done with his presidential flirtations. But as Jon Ward reported, a closer examination of what Huck was up to actually increased the probability that he was going to enter the race. Per Ward: "if it is true that Huckabee is setting potential campaign workers free, [it] may be that he is letting them go in order to instead snatch up operatives who were working for Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour until his decision Monday not to run." Huckabee had previously said that he coveted Barbour's extensive "Rolodex."

And while Huckabee's kept himself at a remove from the hullabaloo of the 2012 campaign cycle, he's been a constant presence where it counts: at the top of the polls. There's significant voter support out there for Huckabee to inherit -- the question is, has he dithered too long to capitalize on it?

In any event, Fox laying down the law is a significant development. The fact that the cable news network found it necessary to cut Newt Gingrich loose is one of the few things that points to the idea that Gingrich will end his sixteen-year period of agonizing and actually run for the White House. In related news, the fact that such an ultimatum hasn't been directed at Sarah Palin is strong enough evidence to suggest that a Palin 2012 campaign is not in the cards.

RELATED:
Mike Huckabee's Ready-Made Campaign [Real Clear Politics]

PREVIOUSLY, on THE HUFFINGTON POST:
Mike Huckabee 2012: Reports In South Carolina That He Won't Run End Up Supporting Idea That He Will Run

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Hey, you guys remember Buddy Roemer, right? Former Louisiana Governor? Re-emerged after a quarter-century of being out of politics to announce he was running for President? Last seen procuring a Winnebago? Yeah, that guy. He's been out of the news so long that I started to worry that he had forgotten that he was a Presidential candidate.

But there's good news: over at ThinkProgress, Lee Fang has posted an interview with Roemer from a Tea Party rally in New Hampshire, and he's making some refreshingly honest points about the way our democratic process is unduly influenced by corporate cash. "Right now," Roemer says, "too often the political debate has become about the money and not about the issues."

FANG: You’re running in the Republican primary. And some of the biggest players in the Republican Party are groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the NFIB, these big money, big corporate groups that are the reason the DISCLOSE Act died. They lobbied both Democrats and Republicans to kill the bill in the Senate.

ROEMER: It’s disastrous, it's dysfunctional, to their shame. You might look at the big unions on the Democratic side. The guys with the bucks want unfettered regulation. They want to run America. [...] The reason the tax code is four thousand pages long and paid no taxes last year and made five billion dollars? It’s [campaign] checks. That’s whats wrong with the American system. It’s not free anymore. It’s bought. [...]

FANG: How are you going to directly challenge them? I mean, you’ve placed limits on yourself, but what are you going to do about Karl Rove’s groups?

ROEMER: Well, Karl Rove can contribute to me. One hundred dollars!

FANG: But he’s got these front groups with undisclosed money.

ROEMER: I understand. You know I’ve got to run against the system. It’s corrupt. And the only way I know how to do it -- and if you have a better idea, give it to me Lee -- is by example.

The influence of corporate money and lobbying is, of course, a pernicious problem that routinely interferes with the democratic process and places ordinary citizens at a disadvantage. It really doesn't matter a whit what party you support. Roemer is one of the few people willing to talk about it, but his principled stand comes with a cost: His pledge to keep to $100 contributions has kept his campaign coffers empty. But Roemer's problem is our problem: When principles can't buy you egg rolls, the system is broken.

Good policy ideas should sell themselves, right? And lawmakers who govern at the pleasure of ordinary people should be a commodity unto themselves. So what is all the money in politics actually for? Turd polish, frankly.

I'd like to be able to say, "Give 'em hell at the debate tonight, Buddy," but as you might have expected, Roemer -- after being initially confirmed as an attendee -- failed to qualify for the debate because he didn't hit 1 percent in five national polls.

READ THE WHOLE INTERVIEW: GOP Presidential Candidate Gov. Roemer Slams Lobbyists As ‘What’s Wrong With The American System’ [ThinkProgress]

Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.

As it turns out, sending Osama bin Laden to his watery grave is a great political move.

The most recent New York Times poll sees Obama on the bounce: approval rating up 11 points, from 46 percent to 57 percent, his "highest number since the summer of 2009."

But Dave Weigel dives into the internals, and sitting right there is the economic yang to the Osama bin yin:

The pollster asked whether voters "approve or disapprove of the way Barack Obama is handling the economy." That number has fallen since April, from 38 percent to 34 percent. Disapproval has fallen, too, from 57 percent to 55 percent, as the number of people with no opinion -- possibly dazzled by the OBL news -- has doubled.

For more on the polling from HuffPost's Mark Blumenthal, click here.

Everybody is pretty happy over the news that they won't be sharing their future with Osama bin Laden. But it's hard for most people to actually visualize a future -- let alone plan for one -- without having a steady job and the income it provides. Real talk.

Former President Jimmy Carter says Jon Huntsman is "very attractive to me personally." "Great! Thanks a lot for that," says the Jon Huntsman campaign, in my imagination. [Taegan Goddard's Political Wire]

South Carolina GOP operative Bob McAlister on tomorrow's exciting GOP debate: ""It's like a beauty contest where all the women are ugly. ... It's just mind-boggling that we're this far along in the political silly season and there's no one of major stature that appears to be interested so far." Please note: we're really not that far along in the campaign season, it's just that everyone continues to wrongly insist that it's already begun. [Real Clear Politics]

Sarah Palin is mad at the White House for "pussyfooting" on providing her with the snuff Polaroids of Osama bin Laden that she's craving. Again, that's Sarah Palin, accusing the Obama administration, which arranged for Osama bin Laden to meet his end at the hands of Navy SEALs, of "pussyfooting." [Politico]

People who are sick of Donald Trump -- and they are LEGION -- are trying to keep him from driving the pace car at the Indianapolis 500. Indiana governor Mitch Daniels (R) says, "whatever sells tickets." [Indianapolis Star]

Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.