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It’s amazing how President Obama’s stance on gay marriage has “evolved”. Was there ever any doubt what his position was; and that the “evolving” line was a smokescreen to aid him at the ballot box? There wasn’t, at least, not until yesterday.

Most pundits are saying he did it to energize his liberal base. Well, speaking as a member of that base, I don’t feel particularly energized. I already knew where he stood on the issue, and understood that he simply wasn’t saying it explicitly for political reasons. Unfortunate, perhaps, but an understandable move given that gay marriage faces heavy opposition in many swing states.

The whole thing reminds me of the long-form birth certificate incident last year. Everything made sense: Obama wasn’t releasing the long-form birth certificate because that wasn’t what the State of Hawaii gives a person who requests a birth-certificate. The short-form is good enough for everyone else, so why should  it not be good enough for the President of the United States? To go to the trouble of getting the long-form would be to capitulate to conspiracy theorists.

And then he went and released the long-form birth certificate. This muddied the waters, and suddenly what had been a perfectly logical stance on his part became somewhat mystifying. It is much the same thing here: the original plan was quite understandable and rational. Then the sudden, seemingly impulsive change at the strangest possible time. I really don’t know what to think.

It may be Obama has decided to simply “draw a line in the sand”, as they say, and make clear the differences between him and the Republicans. Not an unreasonable idea, though again an odd change of strategy for someone who has typically been a moderate, non-standoffish type.

The thing is, most opponents of gay-marriage had simply taken for granted that Obama supported it. This is because most opponents of gay-marriage are people who will not hesitate in ascribing all manner of things they consider “evil” to the President. By all appearances, they have simply assumed that he is a Marxist, Muslim Kenyan usurper who means to destroy both the economic and moral fabric of the country, and anything he says or does to contradict such claims they assume to be lies or deception. This may indicate to him and his advisers that whatever he may say about gay marriage–or really, anything–is irrelevant to how the public perceives him.

I think Obama is a great President, but sometimes he does have an odd way of timing things. In the end, though, I don’t think this will change anything about the election. I think the fact that he did this suggests he is very confident.

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John Nance Garner once said the Vice-Presidency was “not worth a bucket of warm spit. “  (Some say he mentioned a different liquid.) Well, clearly Tea-Partiers disagree with him. I already blogged about the possibility of Representative Allen West being Romney’s V.P. and today I saw this NPR story which quotes Tea Partier Bill Miller as saying: “At this point, the only thing [Romney] can possibly do is who he picks for V.P.”

Well, the V.P. slot has been getting more attention lately. Why, there’s even a new HBO series about it. Shows you what John Nance Garner knew.

I assume Romney plans to follow this Miller’s advice, and pick a Vice-President who will excite the base. This is a good plan because it will make appeal more to the Tea-Party crowd without having to hand any actual power to an extreme conservative. Though, as John McCain discovered, this method is not altogether foolproof.

Besides, it’s not that the Vice-President has no power; if the Veep is clever enough, the position can certainly be a powerful one. Dick Cheney practically revolutionized the position, and I suspect that his actions in office has made subsequent Presidential candidates be much more cautious about who they select for the role. But there’s no denying Cheney was one of the most powerful Vice-Presidents ever.

So, the question is: will Romney go for an insider in the mold of Cheney or an exciting figure in the mold of Palin?

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…of abysmally boring Presidential campaigns, that is.

Whether singing the praises of ancient Sparta or doing his best Joseph McCarthy impression, Congressman Allen West has shown himself more than capable of being to Mitt Romney’s ticket what Sarah Palin was to John McCain’s.

Really, why not have West for VP? No less than Ted Nugent has testified to Mr. West’s readiness for this role. (I assume he did so only after his own Presidential campaign floundered on finding that “Commodus 2012″ made a poor slogan.) But Nugent is surely right that West would be a much-needed “game changer” for Romney’s campaign. Specifically, he would change Romney’s game from The Corporate Machine to Gears of War.

Moreover, it would give the writers at Saturday Night Live something to work with, which, as Maureen Dowd reports, is something they desperately want. The only real question would be: could they get Samuel L. Jackson to portray West? If yes, then the catchphrases very nearly write themselves.

Yes, all in all, I think West definitely has the potential to be 2012’s version of Sarah Palin. Don’t you agree?

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You have all heard Hilary Rosen’s comment that Ann Romney “never worked a day in her life”, and subsequent apology. You have all also probably heard the liberals saying she shouldn’t have apologized; as she was entirely right.

My take: Rosen was sort of right, but she spoke clumsily and was right to both clarify and apologize. But it’s not really Rosen’s fault. Nor is it Mrs. Romney’s fault. It’s not even Mr. Romney’s fault, although he was misleading people with the comments he made that started the whole thing. It’s Simon Kuznets’s fault. (I hate that tired, cliché ending: “the economist did it.”)

Kuznets invented the Gross Domestic Product, a measure of economic output which does not include household work. So, for this and other reasons, it is not an accurate measure of economic output. Kuznets himself said it was not a good measure of economic welfare, but he seems to have been ignored on that score.

So, what Rosen should have said by way of apologizing was: “Ann Romney has not done work that is counted in the widely-used measure for economic welfare. Therefore, her comments and advice aren’t relevant to women participating in the economy as it is presently measured by politicians and economists. I apologize for implying Mrs. Romney did no work at all.”

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Paul Krugman is excited that the press is calling Romney out for cherry-picking data. Krugman also believes they are treating Romney with a more critical eye than they did George W. Bush.

And he’s right. But, I suspect the reason for this is a rather depressing one: Romney is less charismatic than Bush was. This, rather than any new-found commitment to truth on the part of the national press, is what has caused this. Both Romney and Bush are rich sons of politicians, but Bush could more credibly pull off the “I’m just like the average Joe”  act. Whereas Romney just seems like an awkward rich guy when he tries that.

In terms of both who they are and, what is more important, what they mean to do to the country, Bush and Romney are quite similar in my eyes. The differences are superficial, but superficial differences are, as it happens, quite important in Presidential campaigns these days.

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Mitt Romney has acquired something of a reputation for trying to be “all things to all people”, that he will say absolutely whatever it takes to get elected. The “Etch-a-Sketch” comment only reinforced this notion. As Andrew Sullivan put it:

It sums up every single worry about Romney in one metaphor: that he is a machine, that he can say or stand for anything, and that, from time to time, depending on which segment of the population he is appealing to, he will simply become something completely different.

It does remind me of another quote by a politician:

I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.

The politician in question was one Barack Obama, in his book The Audacity of Hope.

Republicans are probably thinking that this just goes to prove the existence of the “liberal media”. They would be wrong. What it goes to prove is the power of charisma. Obama’s statement is entirely accurate and, what is more, it is true without any effort on Obama’s part. Whereas Romney has to twist in the political winds, Obama gets stuff projected onto him effortlessly. This is one of the differences between a charismatic politician and an un-charismatic one.