Opinions

I hope everyone has enjoyed the long weekend and had a good observance of Memorial Day. Plum Line will be back to normal tomorrow, with Greg refreshed and back to his usual blogging. Meanwhile, a little bit of good stuff to tide you over:

1. Purging the rolls in Florida. I have no idea what the eventual effect of Republican efforts to reduce voting particular will wind up accomplishing, but it really is a disgrace.

2. Good post by Dan Larison on campaign rhetoric about foreign policy and actions in the White House.

3. Paul Krugman on fiscal phonies.

4. Andrew Sprung: a false choice between hope and fear.

5. Those interested in the speculation I was doing earlier today about the economy should read what Jared Bernstein said about it, comparing the effects of Europe and oil prices. I’ll only add, again, that there’s a large margin of error on any economic forecasts.

6. More economics: Matt Yglesias on mobility in the modern economy.

7. How should reporters cover birthers and other fringe — or not so fringe — cranks? Mary Winter considers.

8. The Monkey Cage has links to studies of veterans in politics.

9. Timothy Noah on a long-ago and little-known documentary – by John Huston – about the effects of World War II on the mental health of veterans.

10. And watch the film, “Let There Be Light” (1946), now restored and available.

Richard Lugar was on “Face the Nation” yesterday and was hardly enthusiastic with his support for the man who defeated him in the Indiana Senate primary, Richard Mourdock.

I’m not convinced that Lugar’s willingness to campaign for Mourdock will make much difference in the Senate race there — odds are that Mourdock will win either way, and if he does get himself in trouble campaigning, I don’t see strong evidence that Lugar could bail him out.

On the other hand, there’s still several months left of voting in the Senate, including the key post-election lame duck session, and it’s hard to know how much loyalty Lugar is going to feel he owes the Republican Party.

Now, I don’t want to press this too far; Lugar has never done anything to make me believe he’s a closet liberal who just couldn’t vote that way because of his party responsibilities. However, we already had a couple of test votes that were worth noting. Lugar voted for three nominees since the primary: new 9th Circuit Judge Paul Watford and both Federal Reserve Board appointees.

Checking in on the state of the presidential campaign as the summer begins:

It’s still very early to put any serious weight on the head-to-head horse-race polls. For what it’s worth, President Obama is leading by a tick or two (just under a single percentage point in Pollster’s trend lines, a bit more than one point in the Real Clear Politics poll-of-polls average), but I wouldn’t pay much attention to that. Remember that horse-race polls can take a while to catch up to the underlying fundamentals of the race, and also that they can be distorted by short-term bumps.

For this year's Memorial Day, Gallup released a new survey that shows Mitt Romney with a double-digit lead over President Obama among the nation’s veterans. Fifty-eight percent support Romney for president, compared to 34 percent who think Obama should be reelected. The Obama team says that it wants to increase its share of the veteran vote this time around — and has begun to emphasize administration measures for veterans — but this poll shows that the campaign is in for a difficult fight as it attempts to boost its support among the group.

Obama's deficit makes sense when you consider the demographic composition of veterans. For starters, most veterans are men, and the percentage of men who are veterans increases as you move through age brackets. Only 9 percent of men ages 18 to 29 are veterans, compared to 57 percent of men ages 70 to 79 and 73 percent of men ages 80 to 89. Older men are among those groups most likely to vote Republican, and among veterans, they show the strongest support for Romney — with two-thirds supporting the former Massachusetts governor. Of course, we shouldn’t let that understate the degree to which younger veterans are also opposed to Obama; 59 percent of veterans under 50 support Romney, which exceeds the overall total. The veterans most likely to support Obama are women — 47 percent support the president, compared to 42 percent who favor Romney.

One week after Newark Mayor Cory Booker lit a Beltway firestorm over the Obama campaign’s attacks on Bain Capital, the Washington Post reports that Democrats are mostly united behind the strategy and eager to present the Republican nominee as a destructive tool of financial interests:

Democratic leaders, in numerous interviews over the last week, said they are hearing little or no resistance among the party faithful in their states to a strategy that Republicans have characterized as anti-capitalist. And Obama has no plans to back off; his campaign will roll out more stories in the coming weeks that advisers said will again show Bain Capital as a corporate menace that protects profits at the expense of people and jobs.

“He wanted to have this conversation,” Jim Burn, chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, said of Romney, the likely GOP nominee. “We’re going to have it. There should be no hesi­ta­tion or equivocation.”