Opinions

If you think the Mitt Romney campaign isn’t having a blast on the Bain story you’re probably not getting its now-daily “see what rotten coverage Obama is getting” memo. There are at least five reasons Romney's team would like this to go on.

1. Gloria Borger now sounds like Sean Hannity:

Obama’s consistent strength is that more than half of Americans really like him. They see him as in touch with their lives and their aspirations. And his poll numbers only increased last year, for instance, when he shared America’s disgust during the distasteful debate over extending the payroll tax cuts. House Republicans seemed in desperate need of day care; Obama was the adult in the room. That’s what people want. When a president who wants to be transformational runs a campaign that wants to deliver transparent caricatures, there’s a downside. The candidate starts looking like all the other pols. And nobody likes them.

2. The Bain flap prompted Romney to give his most compelling explanation of why his experience in business is helpful:

Th most fascinating aspect in the lead up to the resumption of the “P5+1” talks with Iran is the bipartisan and widespread fretting that President Obama will give away the store. The latest indication of the lack of confidence in the president comes in a statement from Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), James Risch (R-Idaho), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). It reads:

[The] P-5+1 meeting in Baghdad is the latest in a decade-long string of opportunities for the Iranians to reach a peaceful settlement with the international community by abandoning their pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability. We hope they will seize this chance. Given the Iranian regime’s long track record of delay and deception, however, we remain extremely skeptical about its willingness to engage in good faith diplomacy. For this reason, we also believe that it is critical for the United States and our partners to be guided by four principles in these talks, which we outlined in a letter to the President earlier this year:

The Iranian regime has come to the negotiating table only because of increasingly crippling pressure from sanctions. Therefore, any hope for real diplomatic progress depends upon a continuing and expanding campaign of economic pressure on the Iranian regime.

The pressure campaign against Iran should continue until there is a full and complete resolution of all components of the Iranian nuclear problem.

We should expect that the Iranians will seek to buy time and fragment international unity by offering partial measures that fail to address the totality of their illicit nuclear activities. Such tactical maneuverings are a dangerous distraction and should not be tolerated.

Given the Iranian regime’s pattern of deceptive and illicit conduct, it cannot be trusted to maintain any enrichment or reprocessing activities on its territory for the foreseeable future — at least until the international community has been fully convinced that Iran has genuinely decided to abandon any nuclear weapons ambitions. We are very, very far from that point.

We agree with President Obama that the window for diplomacy is closing, and that it is a vital national interest of the United States to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. No option should be taken off the table in order to achieve this goal.

Now if the lawmakers had perfect confidence that Obama would be immune to Iranian gamesmanship such public line-in-the-sand drawing would not be needed. But the lawmakers, and I would suggest wisely so, think the president needs some spine-stiffening.

President Obama was embarrassed last night, The Fix notes: “With 61 percent of precincts reporting in Arkansas, Obama took 60 percent to 40 percent for [John] Wolfe. In Kentucky, with nearly all precincts reporting, 42.1 percent of Democratic primary voters opted for “uncommitted” rather than backing the president, who received 57.9 percent. Those results come two weeks to the day after Keith Judd, a convicted felon incarcerated in Texas, won 41 percent of the vote against Obama in the West Virginia primary.”

Certainly Obama will be his party’s nominee. He sure isn’t betting on winning Kentucky, West Virginia or Arkansas in the general election. But still.

For a sitting president to evoke such opposition in his own party tells us something about Obama’s problems, not just in limited regions of the country. (The Fix noted that significant opposition to Obama popped up in the New Hampshire and North Carolina primaries.)

Until recently, few Americans ever heard of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). But then Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) got interested in what the agency, supposedly neutral in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was up to. As Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies reminds us:

Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) is trying to get a handle on the real number of Palestinian refugees in the Middle East -- a move that could result in a change of status for millions of Palestinians. . . .

The aim of this proposed legislation, Kirk’s office explains, is not to deprive Palestinians who live in poverty of essential services, but to tackle one of the thorniest issues of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: the “right of return.” The dominant Palestinian narrative is that all of the refugees of the Israeli-Palestinian wars have a right to go back, and that this right is not negotiable. But here’s the rub: By UNRWA’s own count, the number of Palestinians who describe themselves as refugees has skyrocketed from 750,000 in 1950 to 5 million today. As a result, the refugee issue has been an immovable obstacle in round after round of negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians.

How have these numbers swelled, particularly as the Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes in 1948 and 1967 grew old and died? This question lies at the crux of the Kirk amendment. And the answer is UNRWA.

The knock on UNRWA is that it exists to perpetuate the refugee problem, not solve it. It was UNRWA that bestowed refugee status upon “descendants of refugees,” regardless of how much time had elapsed. As a result, the Palestinian refugee population has grown seven-fold since the start of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

As I discovered when I started figuring out how UNRWA pulled off this demographic stunt and what it is up to, I learned that there is plenty to keep Kirk busy.

The Post reports: “Tax hikes and spending cuts set to take effect in January would suck $607 billion out of the economy next year, plunging the nation at least briefly back into recession, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday. Unless lawmakers act, the economy is likely to contract in the first half of 2013 at an annualized rate of 1.3 percent, the CBO said, before returning to 2.3 percent growth later in the year.”

To prevent “taxmageddon,” Republicans want to extend the Bush-era tax cuts; President Obama refuses to discuss tax reform with Congress; Even worse, he’s threatening to veto an extension of the tax cuts if it includes those making more than $250,000, thereby socking it to the very individuals and small-business people who we need to invest, hire, etc.

To put is differently, Obama would rather do nothing now (that might prevent a slowdown) and is willing to endure a recession so he can stick it to the “rich.” This approach perfectly exemplifies his ideological attachment to income distribution at the expense of growth and jobs. Really, isn’t this pretty much why the recovery never got off the ground?