Here is your New Hampshire GOP Primary Debate, which HuffPost's Hunter Stuart has heroically condensed into a four minute helping, in case you were unable or unwilling to watch it last night.

Key takeaways include the fact that the GOP candidates have had a lot of children, and some of them may have been among the four thousand delivered by Ron Paul. Maybe you were delivered by Ron Paul, who knows? You should probably go check your long-form birth certificate and find out.

Also, the candidates have a tenuous relationship with CNN moderator John King. Yes, they will reluctantly submit to his idiotic "this or that" questions. Leno or Conan? iPhone or Blackberry? Thin crust or deep dish? Snap, Crackle or Pop? 'The ending of "Inception" was real or the ending of "Inception" was a dream or I did not see "Inception" because it was made by godless Hollywood homosexuals, you must decide right now, for the amusement of jobless America. But while the candidates would suffer this foolishness gladly, they would not, under any circumstance, heed King's urgings to stop talking and let the debate continue. (Which is only fair, considering CNN promised a "no rules" debate only to try to start imposing them once it began.)

Let's see: Herman Cain does not trust the Muslims that are apparently trying to kill him to run the Department of Health and Human Services. Michele Bachmann gives President Barack Obama a failing grade. Also, everyone hates abortion!

Oh, and Mitt Romney said, "It's time for us to bring our troops home." Really? Oh, thank God for that! You really don't know how great it is to hear -- oh, wait, you're not done talking? And you actually want to add a lot of equivocations? Okay, Mittens, go ahead, "As soon as we possibly can, consistent with the, uh ... the word that comes from our generals that we can hand the country over to the Taliban military in a way that they are able to defend themselves ... excuse me, it should be the Afghan military to defend themselves from the Taliban." Today, everyone will be making fun of Romney for saying "Taliban" when he meant to say "Afghan," but really, the bigger mistake was that he said, "It's time to bring the troops home," when he clearly meant to say, "It's not time to bring the troops home, at all, sorry, parent of a troop or some troops."

As CNN is well known for being the most trusted name in holograms of Jessica Yellin and, for reasons never explained, Will.I.Am, you might be expecting tonight's GOP primary debate to be swaddled in so much high-tech, pyromaniac nonsense that viewers will risk spontaneous retinal detachment if they fail to watch the debate through a pinhole camera. Well, according to the Atlantic's Joshua Green, who toured the debate set, "CNN's format has so many tech and social-media bells and whistles that it seems more like a video game than a staid political debate."

Let's see, there's a poll-based algorithm in play to determine who gets to stand where on the stage, a "Red Zone" from which undecided Republican voters shall hurl questions, three other groups of Republican voters standing by, ready to beam their questions in as well, and then you get to the real overkill:

Oh, but they're not all that's going to be looming over the state on giant 27-foot screens. You know why? Because there are TWO giant 27-foot screens, and the other one will be devoted to a Twitter and Facebook stream curated by CNN's own Bryan Monroe. (The hashtag will be #CNNDebate, by the way.) So you, too--or anybody!--can ask questions of the candidates. Or just embarrass them for ducking, if that's what they do. Monroe made clear that he'll be including all sorts of comments--so you if you want to shame Romney for some weak dodge on health care, you can do so IN GIANT LETTERS ON A BIG SCREEN RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIS FACE. And your comments and questions won't be limited to the audience in attendance. Because CNN will also be broadcasting them on that scrolling thingy at the bottom of your TV screen when you watch CNN. So the candidates will not be able to escape your judgment.

Also, there will apparently be no rules! Candidates can blather on and on for as long as they like, and, if the spirit moves him, John King might ask for more blather! Plus, there will probably be Dance Dance Revolution, and laser tag and a segment in which each candidate have to "AutoTune Their Medicare Plan."

I will, of course, be rooting for CNN's machines to rise up and destroy humanity.

Go read the whole thing.

________________________

Encouraging the Republicans to nominate General David Petraeus, former senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole said, "We need another Eisenhower." Presumably, this new David Eisenhower would differ from the old David Eisenhower, in that the old David Eisenhower would probably note that most of the foreign excursions David Petraeus has been on were extraordinarily foolhardy. [Taegan Goddard's Political Wire]

Jack Welch is reconsidering his support for Tim Pawlenty, very slightly. [Politico]

People watch the candidate's campaign videos on YouTube, some more than others, go ahead and make a thing out of it if you like. [Ben Smith]

Herman Cain promises to only send the United States armed forces into places that are safe, because that's what a lifetime of running (and apparently micromanaging) a pizza delivery chain has taught him about foreign policy. [Salon]

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During last week's interview between long-shot GOP candidate Fred Karger and David Frost, Karger intimated that he was going to be "filing some papers" in Massachusetts over former Gov. Mitt Romney's residency status. Karger said the GOP primary frontrunner had "fudged a lot in his political career and I'm going to be calling him out on that." Well, courtesy of Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones, here's what Karger was talking about:

In his complaint, Karger lays out a chronology of Romney's real estate moves since his failed presidential bid in 2008. According to Karger's timetable, Romney and his wife, Ann, bought a $12.5 million home in La Jolla, California, in May 2008. ("I wanted to be where I could hear the waves," Romney told the AP of his move to the West Coast.) Thereafter, Romney became a regular at California political events, even campaigning for Meg Whitman during her gubernatorial bid. A year later, in April 2009, the Romneys sold their home in Belmont, Massachusetts, for $3.5 million, and registered to vote from an address in the basement of an 8,000 square-foot Belmont manse owned by their son Tagg. But where the Romneys really lived these past couple of years seems to be a bit of a mystery. While Romney was appearing at so many California political events people were speculating he was going to run for office there, the National Journal reported in May 2009 that the Romneys had made their primary residence a $10 million estate in New Hampshire.

The discrepancies in the news coverage prompted Karger to take a closer look, in part because he found it dubious that a guy worth $500 million would really be living in his son's basement.

What brings the allegation of voter fraud into this? Well, in the January 2010 special election for the Massachusetts Senate seat, Romney cast a mail-in ballot for Scott Brown. Of course, the fact that Romney was using his son's house at the time didn't escape notice: Here's a Jan. 8, 2010 item from Christina Bellantoni at Talking Points Memo, reporting the matter. At the time, Romney's spokesperson said that he "never gave up his Massachusetts residency." There seems to be no evidence that he cast ballots in any other state during this time.

Though Karger has made it his mission to do so, I'm not convinced that there's much here to derail Romney's run. That won't prevent all the various "Stop Mitt" forces from having themselves a look at the allegations. Go read the whole thing.

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Longtime readers are probably aware that I despair over the fact that the only time the media bothers to cover the nation's massive unemployment crisis is when they can report that it's a potential problem for the reelection prospects of politicians.

It's a much bigger problem for the people who are unemployed, obviously! But there's going to be no respite from this jobless phenomenon from here until November 2012, so I suppose I'll have to lie back and try to be appreciative of articles such as this one by the Wall Street Journal's Sara Murray, titled "Job Picture Set to Test Obama in Key States."

The nation's high joblessness, already a problem for President Barack Obama as he seeks re-election next year, is shaping up to be a particular burden in a handful of key swing states where the unemployment rate is above the national average.

In four states that may prove key to the Obama re-election strategy -- Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and Michigan -- the jobless picture is bleak. In three of the four, the rate tops 10%.

Congratulations to Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and Michigan! You are in the throes of a terrible downturn, but the good news is that you are part of the battleground. So, you have that going for you. Someone will be coming to tell you that they care, and might you consider voting for them?

Of course, if the unemployment rate were, say, 6 percent in those states, they would still be part of the battleground, because these states are always considered battleground states. And, of course, there's rampant unemployment in places that aren't considered the "battleground." So, yes, there's a certain senselessness to this, but that's campaign coverage for you!

As Murray reports, President Barack Obama is scheduled to make appearances in Florida and North Carolina. Which is nice, I guess? Of course, for the moment, he has other business attend to:

Last month, Mr. Obama's campaign manager, Jim Messina, traveled to New York for back-to-back meetings with Wall Street donors, ending at the home of Marc Lasry, a prominent hedge fund manager, to court donors close to Mr. Obama's onetime rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton. And Mr. Obama will return to New York this month to dine with bankers, hedge fund executives and private equity investors at the Upper East Side restaurant Daniel.

"The first goal was to get recognition that the administration has led the economy from an unimaginably difficult place to where we are today," said Blair W. Effron, an investment banker closely involved in Mr. Obama's fund-raising efforts. "Now the second goal is to turn that into support."

Yes, unemployed people, the President is coming to your states but first he has to make sure the people of Wall Street get personal assurances for that time he ... um ... made them extremely profitable and ensured the passage of only some very light regulation? Oh, well, according to Nicholas Confessore, Obama once referred to these people who nearly destroyed the economy as "fat cats," so apologies must be made, I guess.

As Kevin Drum points out, "After all, even weak financial reforms are more annoying than no financial reforms, which is what Republicans are offering -- along with soothing reassurances that Wall Street's masters of the universe had nothing to do with the financial crisis, no matter what that mean Mr. Obama keeps saying." Which makes you wonder what the point of courting Wall Street is at all. It looks to me like accepting any form of regulation in order to prevent another financial crisis is only the sort of thing that you'd do if you loved your country, or something.

Of course, in the background hovers last week's "Maybe everyone would accept Raj Date at the CFPB instead of Elizabeth Warren, because Raj used to work at a bank" trial balloon, which tells me that the Obama administration would rather be well-liked than feared. So maybe places like Michigan are "battlegrounds" because a lot of people lost their jobs, in some kind of battle, that's now over.

I guess this is a pretty bad time to be connecting all of these dots, but then, it's a pretty bad time right now for a lot of people.

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Is it way too soon to start speculating about the 2014 midterm elections? Yes. But in Florida, where glabrous grifter Gov. Rick Scott recently hit a 29 percent approval rating nadir, Democrats are already excitedly talking about turning him out. And while they have a host of prospects to choose from, the most intriguing chatter centers on the possibility that Charlie Crist may want his old job back -- and perhaps mount a run as a Democrat.

Here's St. Petersburg Times political editor Adam Smith:

"Charlie Crist is the wild card in this whole thing," said Democratic consultant Steve Schale, who led Obama's Florida campaign in 2008 and worked for [Democratic gubernatorial candidate Alex] Sink in 2010. "It's hard to say how Democrats would react to Crist switching parties, but if he was thinking about it I think he would find a base of support."

I mean, Crist has been every other kind of candidate. Why not run as a Democrat and call it Yahtzee? Here's how this would look:

Consider one scenario a number of Democratic strategists see as more than plausible: Crist, still popular outside of conservative Republican circles, endorses Obama and helps his campaign in Florida in 2012. He parlays that goodwill into another gubernatorial campaign and Democrats desperate to rid Florida of Rick Scott welcome a moderate statewide figure who looks like a winner.

"That would be enormously exciting. He has the statewide name recognition and he's someone who looks out for the people," said state Rep. Darryl Rouson, D-St. Petersburg. "The Democratic party is the big tent party, and I can't see why they wouldn't embrace Charlie Crist."

Okay, sure. I have to wonder why there isn't already someone in that big tent who's capable of mounting a campaign against someone with a 29 percent approval rating, though. (I also think that we'll be able to more properly gauge how unpopular Scott is if he draws a primary challenger.)

But if you're looking for people who are only too ready to officially anoint Crist as a Democrat, you need look no further than Florida Republicans. Adam Hasner, who currently represents represented Florida's 87th District in the state House up until 2010, is angling to follow Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to Washington, and he's treading the same path Rubio blazed: criticizing incumbent Republican George LeMieux by linking him to Crist, and criticizing Crist by linking him to the Democrats.

So, were Crist to run for governor again, it's certainly plausible he'd run as a Democrat, as the GOP has all but run him out of the Party. What's less plausible, of course, is the notion that he'd run at all. Per Smith:

Now a personal injury lawyer and TV pitchman, Crist tells anyone who asks or urges, and many do, that he's happy in private life.

Obviously, I have lingering doubts about this.

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For the 2012 field of GOP hopefuls, this week was looking like a quiet week of advancing strategies and firing generic shots at the White House over the bad economy, with only some simmering internecine rivalries cropping up here and there to add some spice to the stew. But then, Thursday happened, and with it came news of the Newtiny!

Last week, Newt Gingrich did the smartest thing he's done yet since officially becoming a candidate and went on a vacation cruise to the Greek Isles. This move assured that he would stop saying things that his fellow Republicans would find to be stupid. Unfortunately, upon his return, he came face to face with a campaign staff who wanted Gingrich to take a serious approach to his candidacy. Whatever strategy they felt to be the soundest, Gingrich (and perhaps his wife Callista) disagreed. And so, his entire campaign staff said, "Smell you later," and peaced out to join other campaigns (perhaps a Rick Perry campaign!) or otherwise spend more time with anyone who wasn't Newt Gingrich.

Yes, this mass exodus included trusted campaign spokesman Rick Tyler, the man who penned that epic declamation on sheep-minions who sipped cocktails and lived in clouds of billowing tweets. It included just about everybody. Like Zell Miller, maybe! And definitely every single person who was working on Gingrich's Iowa campaign. Now Gingrich is going to "reboot" himself in California, like he was every single season of "Alias."

(Admit it, J.J. Abrams fans: That was pretty damned exhausting.)

The rest of week featured some tensions between rival camps, which could well be exploited in next week's New Hampshire debate. It will be Mitt Romney's first outing alongside his rivals, and this week, the various factions of the Stop Mitt Movement continued to assail Romney for his health care reform in Massachusetts, as well as his stance on global warming. A key thing to note: neither of these matters would have stirred anyone's anger in 2008. Back then, Romney's health care reform was seen as a way of co-opting the universal health care argument from the Democrats, and no one thought that badly of a Republican who thought global warming was real -- McCain, the eventual nominee, was at the time a pretty convincing speaker on the subject and was compellingly urgent in his suggestion that we, as a nation, could do something about it.

And, of course, the Bachmann and Palin camps fell out over comments that Bachmann's newly minted campaign consigliere Ed Rollins made, in which he deemed Bachmann to be a more "serious" candidate than Palin. Of course, she is a more serious candidate! She's the one that actually is a candidate!

Elsewhere, Tim Pawlenty rolled out some awfully gimmicky sounding economic plans; Bachmann discovered that she's not the only candidate who God likes; Rick Santorum burst onto the scene bragging about how he was more hardcore than Paul Ryan; Herman Cain had to decide how much attention span he could devote to signing bills into law; and you will never guess who Fred Karger has managed to out-fundraise. For all of this and more, please feel free to enter the Speculatron for the week of June 10, 2011.

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Sarah Palin's PAC is up today with a three-minute movie promoting Sarah Palin's bus tour, which promoted a longer movie titled "The Undefeated" promoting Sarah Palin and her current activities -- which brings us back to this video. In it Palin walks around historical sites and poses for photographs as talking heads talk about that time she walked around historical sites and posed for photographs. Also, there is a bus.

I think the best thing about this video is that the musical score is just a slowed-down, contemplative version of "I Just Had Sex" by the Lonely Island (featuring Akon), and if you sing along, it can be quite enjoyable.

[H/T: Rumproast]

Gary Johnson says he's "very jaded" after being excluded from next week's GOP debate in New Hampshire. So if you were wondering what could make a guy who likes to climb mountains and run marathons feel jaded, now you know. [Politico]

Newt Gingrich says that his "campaign begins anew in Los Angeles." Just like NBC's "Law And Order" franchise! Commenters on his Facebook page range from supportive people who want to join his team and people who say "YOU'RE OLD NEWS!!!!!!!! GO AWAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" (You have to use that many exclamation points to out-shout Newt supporter Zell Miller.) [Facebook]

Former GE CEO Jack Welch likes Tim Pawlenty, y'all! Welch: "He's not the jazziest guy in town. He's not the most exciting ..." Get to the good part! "But if you look at what he says and his vision for America and that plan he put out in the last 48 hours. Every time I see him on an interview, etc., the guy makes sense." Really? [Ben Smith]

Barack Obama's fake Democratic primary opponent Randall Terry has a commercial in which he starts off by biting Ben Quayle! (He goes on to say that Obama funds Islamic radicals and murders babies, etc.) [Gawker]

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Long-shot Presidential candidate Fred Karger has had to roam far afield to get some media coverage for his campaign, but hey, how does an interview with the Sir David Frost grab you? Could he interest you in a little of that?

Karger and Frost had their tete-a-tete last Friday on Al Jazeera English, as Karger was swinging through Sacramento on a fundraising tour. Karger reiterated his hopes to reach out to younger voters and restore a sense of "optimism" to the Republican party. "The kind of mainstream Republican party, 65-and-up voter has not been quite as enthusiastic about my candidacy," Karger drolly noted. (Mainstream Republican voters will also probably not thrill to statements like, "I was a maxed-out donor to Hillary Clinton [in 2008].")

Karger told Frost that one of the lessons he learned from Ronald Reagan -- on whose campaign Karger served as a consultant -- was what Karger termed his "never say die" attitude: "He came into office when the country was in dire straits ... but he kept that American spirit up."

Karger offered some opinions on the other GOP candidates, who form what Karger says is a "mediocre field." He was quick to hit Mitt Romney, as is his wont, calling him "yesterday's news," adding "I don't think he can cut it." Karger deemed President Barack Obama's efforts at restoring economic optimism to have been a "miserable failure." As for Sarah Palin, Karger took a pretty traditional Republican line: he likes her just fine, she excites the party, he hopes she runs, but would not "speculate" as to whether he would choose her as his Vice President. (Here's a reminder: it didn't work out the last time someone tried that!)

Karger intimated that he would be "filing some papers next week" in Massachusetts about Romney's residency. "He's kind of fudged a lot in his political career and I'm going to be calling him out on that." Interesting!

"That was smashing," Frost said of Karger.

[WATCH, interview begins at the 16:56 mark]

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Surrogates from the camps of Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin have been a-feudin' this week, because newly-minted Bachmann consigliere Ed Rollins went on the radio and said that Palin "has not been serious over the last couple of years." Which, relative to Bachmann, who has an actual job in politics and is mounting a presidential campaign, is fairly objectively true. But Rollins caught flak for the statement, and yesterday, did one of those limited walk-backs where he apologized for overstepping while simultaneously scoffing at the Palinistas' demand for a "retraction."

Of course, Rollins has been working pretty hard this pre-primary season, primarily on building a campaign infrastructure for Mike Huckabee. Huckabee declined to take Rollins up on the offer, so now he's trying to seamlessly plug Bachmann into the "campaign-in-waiting" he'd already built. So, from Rollins' perspective, is Bachmann a more serious candidate? Sure! After all, she hired Ed Rollins! The folks at First Read basically agree with this:

Michele Bachmann's emerging campaign team took a shot at Sarah Palin, with new strategist Ed Rollins criticizing her for not being serious. "But the most significant thing about Bachmann's hiring of Rollins is that it should end -- once and for all -- the simplistic/conventional Acela Corridor analysis that always puts her in the same space with Palin. The fact is, Bachmann went out of her comfort zone and hired a top Republican strategist. Palin hasn't, and she probably wouldn't ever do that.

In fact, it's not just that Palin "probably wouldn't ever do that." Palin's going to have a hard time attracting a "top Republican strategist" even if that's what she wanted. Let's recall that in "Going Rogue," Palin went out of her way to torch McCain campaign consultants Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace. So if you were a top strategist, why would you sign up with Palin, knowing that she's got a big bus under which to throw you? Well, you wouldn't. As such, that's going to be a limiting factor to Palin's "seriousness" as well.

But who was the last person Rollins deemed to be unserious? Why, it was Michele Bachmann. That could prove to be somewhat nettlesome.

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Last week, Mitt Romney rolled out his formal announcement about his presidential ambitions and was met with a torrent of criticism from fellow candidates, other non-candidates, outside groups, and failed Senate candidate Joe Miller, for some reason. For the most part, the internecine opposition has focused on the fact that Mitt Romney invented "Obamacare" in Massachusetts. But Romney's enjoying a break from all of that this week. Now everyone is mad at him for his position on climate change!

And what is that position? Well, it's pretty prosaic:

"I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that," he told a crowd of about 200 at a town hall meeting in Manchester, New Hampshire.

"It's important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors."

Romney also said some rather ordinary things about energy efficiency:

ROMNEY: I also want to see us become more energy efficient. I’m told that we use almost twice as much energy per person as does a European, and more like three times as much as does a Japanese citizen. We could do a lot better. I’d like to see our vehicles, and our homes, and our systems of insulation and so forth become far more efficient. I believe that we have a role in trying to encourage that to happen.

As Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard points out, back in 2008, it was pretty ho-hum to hear a GOP candidate say stuff like this, but now, "conservatives have declared Romney's statement to be 'political suicide.'" Today's Washington Post contains much the same message:

So far, Romney’s reviews from the right are not positive. His views about climate change in particular put him at odds with many in his party’s base.

“Bye-bye, nomination,” Rush Limbaugh said Tuesday on his radio talk show after playing a clip of Romney’s climate remark. “Another one down. We’re in the midst here of discovering that this is all a hoax. The last year has established that the whole premise of man-made global warming is a hoax, and we still have presidential candidates that want to buy into it.”

Then came the Club for Growth, which issued a white paper criticizing Romney. “Governor Romney’s regulatory record as governor contains some flaws,” the report said, “including a significant one — his support of ‘global warming’ policies.”

Post reporters Philip Rucker and Peter Wallsten say that Romney "could easily have said what he knew many in his party’s base wanted to hear." And, indeed, why didn't he? One campaign adviser provides the answer:

“The fact that he doesn’t change his position...that’s the upside for us,” said one Romney adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on behalf of the campaign. “He’s not going to change his mind on these issues to put his finger in the wind for what scores points with these parts of the party.”

Oh, he's not going to put his finger in the wind and pander to people by changing his answer? I don't know. History has borne out that flip-flopping on positions is the cornerstone of Romney's political strategy. (That's probably why the guy saying otherwise is anonymous and "not authorized to speak on behalf of the campaign.")

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WASHINGTON -- During the 2008 campaign, the ultra-reductive way of looking at what each candidate wanted to do about the country's economic calamity was to say that then-Senator Barack Obama wanted to stimulate the economy, and Senator John McCain wanted to institute a spending freeze. As such, there was a lot riding on the debate over the stimulus package.

I was of the opinion that the Obama's approach was the right one to counter the downturn. And I have to say, I'm in agreement with Harold Meyerson when he says that if things go poorly for Obama in 2012, you can point right back to the early months of 2009 to see why:

Of course, by the standards of a conventional recession and conventional American politics, Obama did a lot. He sent an $800 billion stimulus package to the Hill, where it encountered rocky going from Republicans and center-right Democrats who thought it too large. It did look large at the time, even though critics pointed out that its chief features -- an incremental payroll tax cut, aid to state governments, and funds for infrastructure projects that trickled painfully slowly through the normal state and local bidding and approval processes -- might halt the economy's slide but were hardly sufficient to turn it around. And by opting for barely perceptible tax cuts, preserving public services and a glacial rollout of public works, the Obama administration had devised a stimulus whose price tag was apparent to all but whose achievements were all but invisible.

If I recall correctly, many of the "critics" who held that "its chief features... might halt the economy's slide but were hardly sufficient to turn it around" weren't necessarily critics of this sort of stimulus. But regardless of how they felt about it, they were precisely right: The effort arrested the downward trend, but we're still waiting for anything that even remotely resembles a robust recovery.

There's a lot of blame to go around. The stimulus was made less effective through GOP intransigence, Blue Dog timidity and, ultimately, White House compromise. If we're talking in terms of the raw-throated politics that get presidents re-elected, the smarter play for Obama might have been to refuse to settle and hang the bad consequences on congressional Republicans. Of course, even if that had proven to be effective political strategy, the practical impact would have been that more ordinary Americans were ground up in the gears of the downturn. Obama chose instead to sign the half-measure into law, cross his fingers and hope for the best.

Nobody's best hopes were realized. But while I'd say Meyerson is correct in framing the early stimulus battle as a potentially important moment of context, should Obama fail to win a second term, it's Zachary Goldfarb in today's Washington Post who documents a mistake that has hurt Obama's chances much more:

By early last year, Geithner was beginning to gain the upper hand in a rancorous debate over whether to propose a second economic stimulus program to Congress, beyond the $787 billion package lawmakers had approved in 2009.

Lawrence Summers, then the director of the National Economic Council, and Christina Romer, then the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, argued that Obama should focus on bringing down the stubbornly high unemployment rate. This was not the time to concentrate on deficits, they said.

Peter Orszag, Obama's budget director, wanted the president to start proposing ways to bring spending in line with tax revenue.

Although Geithner was not as outspoken, he agreed with Orszag on the need to begin reining in the debt, according to current and former administration officials. Some spoke for this article on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Even before the president had been inaugurated, Geithner had been urging him to set a target for the budget deficit that would require shrinking its size to 3 percent of the U.S. economy. At that level, the national debt would eventually become manageable.

"From the earliest moments of the administration and even before, he clearly had a big focus on long-term deficit reduction and making clear, not just to the markets but for the entire economy, that the government is living within its means," Goolsbee said in an interview.

The economic team went round and round. Geithner would hold his views close, but occasionally he would get frustrated. Once, as Romer pressed for more stimulus spending, Geithner snapped. Stimulus, he told Romer, was "sugar," and its effect was fleeting. The administration, he urged, needed to focus on long-term economic growth, and the first step was reining in the debt.

Wrong, Romer snapped back. Stimulus is an "antibiotic" for a sick economy, she told Geithner. "It's not giving a child a lollipop."

In the end, Obama signed into law only a relatively modest $13 billion jobs program, much less than what was favored by Romer and many other economists in the administration.

"There was this move to exit fiscal stimulus a lot sooner than we should have, and we've been playing catch-up ever since," Romer said in an interview.

Some of Obama's Democratic allies felt let down. Andrew Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union, said in an interview that Geithner looks at the world "from his experience, which is predominantly a Wall Street, Treasury, fiscal and monetary policy point of view."

Here's where the administration says, "Let's try it John McCain's way, then!" It's no wonder the recovery has slowed down and leveled off.

When you have a "predominantly ... Wall Street, Treasury, fiscal and monetary policy point of view," it's no big thing to, say, lend out $9 trillion in emergency loans to major banks, and you certainly don't worry about how it could affect the deficit. At the moment, the deficit battle is little more than a pageant of partisan pre-election posturing, designed to allow deficit peacocks to display their plumage to voters in order to retain their seats.

So, if we're keeping score here, Wall Street got taken care of, magnificently. And incumbency is also being well-served. Ordinary people? Well, they got a half-assed stimulus effort and a few kind words.

The story here is a story of disconnect. Lawmakers have become tragically disconnected from the real lives of ordinary Americans. That bespeaks a broken system. But Geithner and Obama also have clearly chosen a disconnected course all on their own.

I have to imagine there's a very good chance that ordinary Americans will return the favor.

RELATED:
How will history judge Obama's economic policy? [Washington Post]
Geithner finds his footing [Washington Post]

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Herman Cain has an exciting vision for the future, everybody! See, he's so sick and tired of Congress passing long bills that take more than 10 minutes to read. So he's going to do away with all of that, and as president, he's only going to sign bills that can fit on a 16-inch pizza, written in green pepper slices are three pages long. Your free-ride days of getting adequately funded through appropriations bills are over, U.S. military!

Per Marie Diamond, here's what Cain told the audience at the Family Leader Presidential Lecture Series in Pella, Iowa:

CAIN: Engage the people. Don’t try to pass a 2,700 page bill — and even they didn’t read it! You and I didn’t have time to read it. We’re too busy trying to live — send our kids to school. That’s why I am only going to allow small bills — three pages. You’ll have time to read that one over the dinner table. What does Herman Cain, President Cain talking about in this particular bill?

Indeed, 2,700 pages sure seems daunting, until you realize that the typesetting technique used by the Congres features "a significant amount of whitespace including non-trivial space between lines, large headers and margins, an embedded table of contents, and large font," as Computational Legal Studies points out. You know, so that you ancient legislators have a fighting chance of being able to read these bills.

CLS analyzed the health care reform bill back in Nov. 2009, and found that it essentially contained 234,812 words that "impact[ed] substantive law." That's pretty long, of course. But it's shorter than the popular novel "Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix" -- a book that small children read.

As Diamond points out, a three-page restriction would have prevented many important measures from being enacted.

The vast majority of substantive bills passed by Congress are longer than three pages. Under this bright-line rule, Cain wouldn’t have signed such landmark pieces of legislation as the Civil Rights Act, the Social Security Act, or the PATRIOT Act. In fact, he wouldn’t have even been able to sign the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which ran 114 and 18 pages, respectively.

Cain was a big supporter of the Troubled Asset Relief Program's bank bailouts back in the day, so it's a real pity that he's suddenly switched positions on that issue, because the original TARP bill is one of the few pieces of legislation I can recall that came in under three pages.

Of course, one of the things that Cain says he supports is the enactment of the Fair Tax. But now, he'll be unable to sign it into law, because that piece of legislation is 131-pages long. (Though maybe it can be condensed to a single page containing this graph showing the way it will jack up taxes on everyone besides people making $200,000 a year and a note written in Sharpie that reads: "WE DO THIS NOW. SIGN HERE: _____________"

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This week, Mitt Romney made news by formally announcing that he is running for president, as you may have suspected if you happened to have been alive and living on the planet Earth at any time since about 2003, when it became clear that's what Romney wanted to do with his life.

Yeah, okay, so it was something of an anticlimax, wasn't it? And you can tell that's exactly how the media received the news as well.

Fox News Channel was the first to cut away from Mitt's formal announcement, though whether it was because they were bored or just irked that someone not from Roger Ailes' approved stable of presidential showponies was taking up the screen time.

It didn't matter, though: MSNBC, in short order, cut away as well. CNN lingered a bit longer, and then, perplexingly, cut to a studio shot seconds before Romney finally said that he was running for the White House. Was it poor timing, or is CNN just "the most trusted name in talking over news that is suddenly happening?" It's tough to say.

Apparently, it also became tough this week to say anything nice about the guy. On the coattails of Mitt jumping into the race, came a clutch of statements that seemed to indicate that Romney wasn't going to benefit from Reagan's Eleventh Commandment. Sarah Palin, who was all up in Romney's grill, geographically speaking, warned him that the Tea Party didn't care for his invention of ObamaCare. Rudy Giuliani said the same thing, only more bluntly. Tim Pawlenty dinged Romney for being inauthentic. Ron Paul set up Romney as the villain to inspire his coming "money bomb." FEMA failure-boy Michael Brown threw a barb at Mitt. And since everyone else was getting in on the act, train-wreck Senate candidate Joe Miller announced that he was starting a "Stop Mitt Romney" campaign -- proving once again that in America, if you work hard and are a biped, you too can grow up to start your very own "Stop Mitt Romney" campaign.

Speaking of Alaska's many semi-professional vagrants, most of the rest of this week's 2012 campaign coverage was dedicated to Sarah Palin's publicity vacation, which traveled up the East Coast, media in tow. Donald Trump took her out for pizza at New York City's worst pizza chain, in an apparent effort to teach the suddenly-wearing-a-Star-of-David-because-I-hear-there-be-Jews-afoot Palin what a shonde was. Speaking of deep and relentless shame, it turns out that Palin's concept of who Paul Revere was and what he did was largely based on the Beastie Boys song, or something.

Between Mitt and Sarah -- and Anthony Weiner's crotch mysteries! -- there wasn't much of a newshole left to go around for the other candidates. Rick Santorum is set to reveal his plans this coming Monday, so get excited for that. Buddy Roemer has made the entire state of Iowa an intriguing offer. Herman Cain continues to ascend in the eyes of voters and pundits.

And does anyone know where Newt Gingrich has gone? Rumor has it that he's off on some cruise in the Greek Isles, actually. I suppose he won't be able to bring continual ruin to his candidacy if he stays on vacation, so good for him!

For all the campaign news, please enter the 2012 Speculatron for the week of June 3, 2011.

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Time's Mike Murphy has some things to say about George Pataki.

(Pataki was once the governor of New York, remember? And he has been making infrequent, teensy president noises that very few people seem to notice.)

My bet? Pataki is going to try to steal the New Hampshire primary: First, ignore all the silly inside games and get on television pronto with a good message. Move up quietly in the polls — with Mitt Romney sitting at a third of the vote, Palin unelectable and Tim Pawlenty drifting near the margin of error, Pataki could televise his way into second or third place in Granite State polls by midsummer. Then let the national media discover the Pataki surge and get bonkers about it. With that national attention, reboot the once massive Pataki money machine in New York State and start attracting more national money and support. Light the right match, and if it combusts correctly, stand back and watch the fire grow.

My thoughts? Well, I think that this has the potential to kill at the comedy club if Murphy tightens the joke a bit and really gets the delivery down.

___________________

Steve Benen provides some useful context to consider the economic climate in which President Barack Obama is seeking re-election, which we promise to thoughtfully chew over for a little while before returning to our typical sense of panic over the fact that the economic climate is even worse for all the people who are currently not running for president. [Political Animal @ Washington Monthly]

Mark Halperin has some very stupid things to say about politics. [War Room @ Salon]

Donald Trump's new plane is way more presidential than his old plane, but sorry, we are still not going to fall for your fake campaign. [Taegan Goddard's Political Wire]

Pollster Stan Greenberg: “Paradoxically, Democrats must forget the past and the financial crisis. That is counter-intuitive and painful because conservative policies were so destructive and Democrats did right and brave things. Voters understand this more than you appreciate, but that is at least three years ago now, and voters think a focus on that misses the country’s urgent current reality. They want to serious plans, not triumphalism about jobs reports.” I had no idea that "jobs reports" existed that one could get "triumphalist" about, actually. [Politico]

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