His thesis:

I’ve argued that maybe we need a third party to break open our political system. But that’s a long shot. What we definitely and urgently need is a second party — a coherent Republican opposition that is offering constructive conservative proposals on the key issues and is ready for strategic compromises to advance its interests and those of the country.

This is, I think, a reasonable request as at the moment it does not seem that the Republican, as a coherent political collective, it especially interested in governing.  This is problematic because the nature of our system, one of separated powers and checks and balance, requires some degree of cooperation if governing is to take place.  This fact is further emphasized by the nature of the rules of the Senate.

Friedman focuses on three areas: globalization, debt and entitlements, and energy.

On globalization he is partially doing his Friedman thing, which is make bold assertions that ultimately sound interesting but at ultimately are more glittering phrases than useful analysis, i.e., “This is a world in which there will be no more “developed” and “developing countries,” but only HIEs (high-imagination-enabling countries) and LIEs (low-imagination-enabling countries).”  This leads to a similarly good-sounding but largely void formulation:  “We need strong government, but limited government, which enables our companies and individuals to compete globally.”

However, on debt and entitlements he hits the nail on the head:

The second of our great long-term challenges are our huge debt and entitlement obligations. They can’t be fixed without raising and reforming taxes and trimming entitlements and defense. We absolutely cannot just cut entitlements and defense. That would imperil the personal security and national security of every American. We must also reform taxes to raise more revenues.

But when all the Republican candidates last year said they would not accept a deal with Democrats that involved even $1 in tax increases in return for $10 in spending cuts, the G.O.P. cut itself off from reality. It became a radical party, not a conservative one. And for the candidates to wrap themselves in a cartoon version of Ronald Reagan — a real conservative who raised taxes, including the gasoline tax, when he discovered his own cuts had gone too far — is fraudulent.

This is simply true:  serious efforts are needed and pretending like cuts alone will fix the problem is simply wishful thinking (at best).  Likewise, “cartoon” Reagan is about right.

On energy he is likewise right when he states “can’t drill our way out of” the problem.  It sounds nice, but it ignores reality—this is especially true with, as he notes, “7 billion to 9 billion people by 2050, and more and more of them want to drive, eat and live like Americans.”

Fundamentally, the conclusion is spot on:

Until the G.O.P. stops being radical and returns to being conservative, it won’t provide what the country needs most now — competition — competition with Democrats on the issues that will determine whether we thrive in the 21st century. We need to hear conservative fiscal policies, energy policies, immigration policies and public-private partnership concepts — not radical ones. Would somebody please restore our second party? The country is starved for a grown-up debate.

Such competition is needed and is such a debate.  We aren’t getting such at the moment.  And yes, as some will no doubt state, the Democrats are far from perfect.  This is not a post about the virtues of the Democratic Party and it should not be interpreted as such.  It is, however, about the copious vices of the GOP.

An illustration from the piece:

Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government.

[...]

He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region’s long-serving Democratic congressman.

Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.

Now, on the one hand, the programs (EITC, free meals at school, etc.) exist and one can argue that one has the right to take what one can get regardless of philosophical objections.  One the other hand, however, there is a something deeply problematic about what appears to be (both in this specific case, as well as within the general politics of this topic) a serious contradiction in position v. alleged political preferences (or, perhaps even more likely, a profound misunderstanding of these policies in the first place).

Back to the specifics of this example:  Gulbranson is a small businessman, the very definition of entrepreneurial America and hence a “maker” and yet he also is taking free meals for his kids at school, amongst other things, which makes him a proverbial “taker,” yes?  (So much for easy dichotomies in the real world).

In fairness, Gulbranson did say the following in the interview:

Their difficulties, Mr. Gulbranson said, have made it hard to imagine asking anyone to pay higher taxes.

“I don’t think most people could bear to pay more,” he said.

Instead, he said he would rather give up the earned-income credit the family now receives and start paying for school lunches for his children.

“I don’t demand that the government does this for me,” he said. “I don’t feel like I need the government.”

How about Social Security? And Medicare? Can he imagine retiring without government help?

“I don’t think so,” he said. “No. I don’t know. Not the way we expect to live as Americans.”

But, of course, even if we eliminate school meals and the EITC, the major social spending by the federal government is Social Security and Medicare.   Any discussion about the size of government has to address this fact.  Further, these are programs that only work with some substantial amount of redistribution.  To wit:

A woman who was 45 in 2010, earning $43,500 a year, will pay taxes that will reach a value of $87,000 by the time she retires, assuming the money is invested at an annual interest rate 2 percentage points above inflation, according to the Urban Institute analysis. But on average, the government will then spend $275,000 on her medical care. The average is somewhat lower for men, because women live longer.

Medicare is often described as an insurance program, but its premiums are not nearly high enough. In simple terms, Americans are getting more than they pay for.

So, again:  if the Tea Party is serious about less government and even lower taxes, then this issues has to be addressed far more head on than has been the case.  And such an addressing has to deal with the fact that either we have to pay more in taxes, severely cut benefits, or some mix.  Simplistic calls for limited government are just that, simplistic.

One response to the column was by Tom Maguire (and who was quote favorably by the aforementioned Reynolds), who asked:

Wait – Medicare is now a “safety net” program? I thought that,like Social Security, it was an earned benefit – we all paid our taxes, and we are all eligible.  Medicaid is means-tested; Medicare is not.

Now, the distinction he appears to be making is that only non-universal programs are “safety net” programs.  However, this is not the case.

First, I would counter his assertion by stating just because a program is universal does not mean that it does not constitute part of the safety net.  A key rationale for both Social Security and Medicare was to prevent the occurrence of poverty amongst the elderly.  Indeed, as I noted not that long ago, there is a correlation between Social Security and the diminution of poverty amongst the elderly.  As such, these programs are very clearly part of the safety net, even if not all partakers of the policies use them to avoid poverty.  Indeed, one suspects that the vast majority of recipients would be risking poverty without these programs (and certainly a substantial number would not have anywhere near to adequate medical coverage—a situation leading either to an earlier death and/or bankruptcy).

Second, the article is about the fact that many persons who are not poor rely on various social programs despite the fact that they are political inclined to inveigh against government spending.  The issue is, therefore, about contradictory politics regardless of whether the programs are universal or targeted in some way.

Third, even if the policies in question are universal, this does not mean that each recipient received back simply what was paid in.  Quite the contrary:  even people well ensconced in the middle class will receive more in benefits than they paid in.

Maguire also asserts “the Democrats have long wanted to deliver middle-class entitlements paid for by “the rich”, because that is where the votes are” ( a point he hopes to return to).  This is, of course, a central theme of many who criticize these program and who call for limited government in general (it also asserts a political conspiracy of a sort that makes the situation sound like some sort of master plan to ensnare the public).  However, I would note, that the examples in the NYT undercut that assertion.  And yes, anecdotes are not data.   However, we know from survey research that there are a large number of people who both support these programs yet vote for politicians who seek to either cut and/or underfund said programs.  In other words, if voting was really about material benefits, we would see very different voting patterns than we do.

Indeed, the NYT piece addresses this issue to a degree:

One of the oldest criticisms of democracy is that the people will inevitably drain the treasury by demanding more spending than taxes. The theory is that citizens who get more than they pay for will vote for politicians who promise to increase spending.

This is correct:  the ancient Greeks criticized democracy (as they defined it**) as nothing more than rule by the poor who would eventually tear done society.  However, reality ends up being a lot more complicated.  As noted, voting preferences end up being more complex than this notion suggests.  One simple fact illustrates this:  citizens do not vote solely on class lines.

Further, ss the article notes:

Dean P. Lacy, a professor of political science at Dartmouth College, has identified a twist on that theme in American politics over the last generation. Support for Republican candidates, who generally promise to cut government spending, has increased since 1980 in states where the federal government spends more than it collects. The greater the dependence, the greater the support for Republican candidates.

Conversely, states that pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits tend to support Democratic candidates. And Professor Lacy found that the pattern could not be explained by demographics or social issues.

Now, granted, the red state/blue state dichotomy is problematic from an analytical point of view because it makes it sound as if states contain only one type of person, which is not the case.  Still, there is a disconnect here that is rather profound.  For example:  deep red southern states often contain a lot of people decrying the federal government and federal spending but seem to ignore the degree to which their own state economies rely upon and benefit from federal spending.

To be clear:  I think that there is a legitimate debate to be had over these policies.   However, I don’t think that an honest, legitimate debate can be had until there is a real understanding of what government actually does.  This has been an ongoing theme for me, and probably is, to me, the most significant fundamental issue for the improvement of our political debate. So,we can debate about the appropriate scope of government: what it should do and how it should be paid for, but to do so we have to fundamentally honest about what government does in reality right now as well as the ramifications of specific changes.  And yet, it does not seem that, in the main, we are anywhere near this kind of conversation.  Instead we get silly maker/taker, 53%/47%, etc. dichotomizations or simplistic appeals to “rugged individualism” that utterly eschew reality.

A side note:  this also gets mixed up in a simplistic dependency/liberty dichotomy (as exemplified by Heritage’s Index of Dependence and that is the hallmark of Ron Paul speeches).  Much could be said on this, but I would suggest that sometimes “dependence” (if defined solely as receiving a government benefit of some kind) can lead to the ability to have more personal liberty.  If I am a retiree who receives Social Security and Medicare to a sufficient level that I can afford to live on my own rather than having to turn to the charity of family, do I not have more liberty than I otherwise would have had?  If I am a parent of school age children, do I not, ultimately have more personal liberty if I have public schools where I can send my children to be educated?  Indeed, as an individual, is not a substantial amount of my personal liberty shaped heavily by the education I received, which is often the result of depending on government in multiple ways?  That is:  public K-12 (free to me) and then public university (subsidized) and perhaps paid for in some way via federal programs, e.g., Pell Grants, the GI Bill, student loans, etc.).  Without those things to depend upon, how much control over my life (i.e., liberty) would I have had?

I am not saying that this programs are perfect, that they must maintain their current funding levels, or that there is no room for alternatives.   I am saying, however, that we have a choice to make before we can have efficacious discourse.  That choice is between ideology/propaganda and reality.  And the reality has to reflective not just the downside of government, but the upside as well (and, indeed, it is an upside that we all enjoy more than we seem willing to admit).

*For anyone unclear on why I am using this specific language, please see the linked post and the Glenn Reynolds column I was discussing.

**Which isn’t really how we define in the modern era, but that’s a whole other conversation.

Newt Gingrich was just days away from the Jan. 31 Florida Republican presidential primary when he told reporters that his campaign was down to its last $600,000.

Five losing contests later, Gingrich and Winning Our Future, an outside political action committee supporting him, are almost silent on television airwaves, offering free water and coffee at events, and revamping a fundraising strategy based largely on the support of a single wealthy backer, Sheldon Adelson, and the Las Vegas casino owner’s family.

In the past seven days, Winning Our Future has spent $61,290 on broadcast television advertisements, compared with $636,920 spent by Mitt Romney and a super-PAC backing him, Restore Our Future, according to data compiled by New York-based Kantar Media’s CMAG, a company that tracks advertising.

For now, the Adelsons don’t plan to deliver another big check to float Gingrich’s campaign, according to a person familiar with their deliberations. The family has donated a combined $11 million to Gingrich’s super-PAC in the past two months, according to interviews and Federal Election Commission records. An Adelson spokesman declined to comment.

Winning The Future now say that it is going to concentrate on smaller donors, but that kind of fundraising isn’t necessarily going to help in the big media, multi-state contests to come. Combined with the fundraising problems that the Gingrich campaign itself seems to be having, there’s no way that this can be considered good news for Gingrich.

A groggy Rick Santorum, donning suit and tie, sans sweater vest, didn’t think much of Mitt Romney’s 38-to-31 percent win over him in last weekend’s CPAC presidential straw poll.

When CNN’s “State of the Union” host Candy Crowley said she was surprised Santorum didn’t do better with party conservatives, he shot back: “Well, you know, those straw polls at CPAC… for years Ron Paul has won those because he trucks in a lot of people, pays for their tickets, and they come in and vote and they leave. We didn’t do that, we don’t do that. i don’t try to rig straw polls.”

Did Romney rig CPAC?

“You have to talk to the Romney campaign and how many tickets they bought, we’ve heard all sorts of things,” Santorum said.

“We didn’t pay them to turn out,” he added, speaking of his supporters at CPAC, Missouri and elsewhere.

He went on to say that he didn’t think there was anything wrong with that, except he doesn’t want to engage in that kind of politics.

The Romney campaign denies “rigging” the vote, but in reality the charge is meaningless. There’s really no difference between the CPAC Straw Poll and the Ames Straw Poll last August. In both cases, campaigns do what they can to get supporters to the conference to score a victory in the belief, mistaken I think, that it would actually mean anything. Ron Paul’s campaign excelled at it for the previous three years, but with Paul passing up CPAC to campaign in Maine and other caucus states, there weren’t nearly as many Paul supporters in attendance this year as there were last year. The Romney campaign, by contrast, seemed to be all over the place, as did Santorum’s. Obviously, Romney’s get out the vote effort was effective.

Mitt Romney won the annual straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), edging Rick Santorum and well ahead of Newt Gingrich.

Washington Times (“Romney wins The Washington Times/CPAC Straw Poll”)

Mitt Romney won The Washington Times/CPAC Presidential Straw Poll on Saturday, and also nipped Rick Santorum as the top choice of conservatives nationwide, according to a new version of the poll conducted for the first time this year that suggests Mr. Romney retains strong support among self-identified conservatives.

Mr. Romney won 38 percent of the straw poll, which counted the votes of 3,408 activists gathered for the Conservative Political Action Conference, which ran from Thursday through Saturday at a hotel in Washington.

Mr. Santorum was second with 31 percent, Newt Gingrich was third with 15 percent and Rep. Ron Paul was fourth with 12 percent — far below his showing the last two years, when he won with 31 in 2010 and 30 percent in 2011.

[...]

The poll results have no official meaning in the GOP’s presidential nomination battle but do give Mr. Romney a boost as he seeks to regain the momentum he appeared to have lost last week as Mr. Santorum swept Tuesday’s three contests.

Mr. Romney’s 38 percent of the vote among CPAC activists is the highest of any candidate since George W. Bush won 42 percent of the vote in 2000, en route to the nomination and the White House. The poll wasn’t held from 2001 through 2004, but has been held every year since then.

My position on the CPAC straw poll–and, indeed, straw polls in general–is that they’re an insipid waste of time yielding little to no useful insight. That remains true this time. CPAC, in particular, is not remotely representative of even the Republican primary electorate (it’s incredibly DC-centric and dominated by college students and activists in their 20s). And the vote is easily manipulable by organization. Ron Paul routinely does much better than his national numbers–and won the last two polls coming it to this year. (This year, he finished dead last, apparently having decided for whatever reason not to flood the convention with supporters.)

What’s worth noting here, though, is that this isn’t the first time Romney topped this poll. While Ed Morrissey is “severely surprised,” he shouldn’t be.

For Mr. Romney, his victory marks a return to the top. He won the straw poll here from 2007 through 2009, when he was seen as the conservative choice as he prepared, fought and then lost his nomination battle with Sen. John McCain.

This is a point I’ve made time and again: While Romney’s conservative bonafides can reasonably be called into question–I’ve done it myself–he was in fact the “conservative alternative” as recently as 2008. I was at CPAC four years ago when he made his announcement that he was ending his campaign and endorsing John McCain and was bemused that the CPAC crowd considered Romney conservative and McCain a moderate when their records indicated the opposite. Indeed, Romney won the straw poll after withdrawing from the race and when McCain was unquestionably going to be the nominee.

The related point is how much the goal posts on American conservatism have moved in just four years. While I’d still contend that Romney is a moderate in relation to McCain, he’s unquestionably a conservative in the grand scheme of American politics. Yet, in the era of the Tea Party, it’s probably impossible to find a candidate who will fit the bill. Rick Santorum passes the litmus tests on the social issues but he’s not a fiscal conservative by Tea Party standards. He’s voted for all sorts of big spending programs, supports ear marks, and even endorsed Arlen Specter voted to confirm Sonia Sotomayor to the federal bench. Gingrich is a Big Government Conservative with all manner of absurd projects in mind.

In response to a reader query wondering if Rick Santorum’s strong showing in El Paso County in last week’s Colorado Caucus demonstrated a “military problem” for Mitt Romney that could come into play on Super Tuesday, Andrew Gelman points to some research by political scientists Jason Dempsey and Bob Shapiro from several years back showing a bifurcation within the military ranks.

It is true that the upper echelons of the military tilt right. My own research confirmed that about two-thirds of majors and higher-ranking officers identify as conservative, as previous studies found. But that tilt becomes far less pronounced when you expand the pool of respondents. That is because only 32 percent of the Army’s enlisted soldiers consider themselves conservative, while 23 percent identify as liberal and the remaining 45 percent are self-described moderates. These numbers closely mirror the ideological predilections of the civilian population. . . .

The political differences between officers and enlisted personnel can be partly explained by a demographic divide. Whereas officers are predominantly white, have at least a bachelor’s degree, and draw incomes that place them in the middle or upper-middle class, the enlisted ranks have a higher proportion of minorities, make less money than officers, and typically enter service with only a high school diploma. Nevertheless, even when controlling for factors like race and gender, officers are significantly more likely than soldiers to identify as conservative. . . .

In addition to its ideological moderation, the Army is not as partisan as popularly portrayed. Whereas 65 percent of Americans think of themselves as either Republican or Democrat, according to the Annenberg survey, my study shows that only 43 percent of the military identifies with one of the two major political parties. Two out of three officers consider themselves either Republican or Democrat, but only 37 percent of enlisted personnel do so.

Officers tend to be not only more partisan, but also more Republican, with GOP affinity strongest among the highest ranks. While I [Dempsey] was unable to fully parse the reason for this, the evidence strongly suggests the pattern is generational. Today’s senior officers entered the Army during the late 1970s and 1980s, a time when the Republican Party had a strong advantage on issues of national defense and the Democratic Party was seen as antiwar if not anti-military. By contrast, junior officers who joined the Army after 2001 are almost as likely to be Democrats as they are Republicans, foreshadowing a possible shift in officer attitudes.

Joshua Tucker posts a note from Major Jim Golby, a Stanford PhD and West Point instructor.

To my knowledge, there are no current polls about military preferences for the GOPcandidates. There are a few unscientific polls done by a newspaper, The Military Times, that measure military approval of the president, but that is it. They show approval for president Obama within the military at around 25%.

I have done some research in this field, however [paper available here]. One of the main take-aways from my research is that Republican officers in the military and elite veterans are no different, on average, than Republican civilian elites once we control for demographic factors. Although my work focuses on senior officers and veterans, Jason Dempsey’s book,Our Army, and Jeremy Tiegen’s paper support this general claim for soldiers and veterans, respectively.

[...]

[T]here is no evidence suggesting that any GOP nominee would have trouble winning the ‘military vote’ since there really is no such thing. There are not many Democrats in the military and there are even fewer liberals in the ranks; in general, most Democrats in the military are moderate or conservative Democrats (especially in the higher ranks).

In the comments, our own Chris Lawrence observes,

I’d caution against conflating officers and enlisted personnel; officers do tend to be overwhelmingly Republican, but NCOs and lower enlisted are much more mixed in partisanship and ideology, although also much less likely to vote, particularly in the E-1-4 ranks, probably in large part due to age. As Jim suggests probably a large part of the differences between the military and the public at large are due to ethnicity, SES, and region (the officer corps of the Army and Air Force, at least, tend to be substantially more southern than the public at large).

As far as the “military vote” might go, given the relatively small size of the officer corps and their lack of political organization or geographic concentration (military people, including their spouses and other dependents, tend to retain residency in their hometowns rather than registering to vote locally when reassigned, so even “military towns” will have few active-duty military/dependent voters), I doubt it could ever be all that influential even if their turnout was much higher.

There’s a lot to unpack here but the takeaways would seem to be:

1. The military, and especially its senior officers, are more Republican and conservative than the country as a whole. But the extent of this is grossly exaggerated, because the media naturally focuses on the attitudes of the officer corps, particularly more senior officers.

2. These differences are almost entirely explainable by the demographic makeup of the military, which is self-selected.

3. As with the rest of the country, the younger cohorts of the military–including its officer corps–are less Republican and less conservative. See, for example, the enormous swings in attitudes on gays in the military over the last 20 years.

4. The notion that the “military vote” plays a major role in choosing our presidents is vastly overstated. In addition to the issues Lawrence notes, a third of the states essentially disenfranchise military personnel by mailing absentee ballots too late. The caveat is that, because a disproportionate number of military personnel claim Florida as their home of record in order to avoid paying state income taxes, they could potentially serve as a decisive swing vote in an incredibly close contest along the lines of the 2000 election. Those are, of course, quite uncommon.

Faced with a Republican base that clearly doesn’t seem to like Mitt Romney and the apparent rise of Rick Santorum, Jazz Shaw wonders if maybe the GOP shouldn’t just go ahead and nominate the former Pennsylvania Senator and hopefully bring some resolution to a debate that has been ravaging the GOP for years now:

One of the chief sources of internecine scrapping and grumbling among Republicans has come from the ranks of the social conservatives, or Socons as they are frequently known. We have already spent time speculating what would happen if Mitt Romney becomes the nominee. If he loses to Obama in November, the Socons will once again say that it was because cowardly, establishment party leaders failed to push forward a sufficiently conservative warrior who would fire up the base as a champion of socially conservative principles. If he wins, the Socons could quietly grumble that he’d simply gotten lucky against a deeply flawed president running on a failed record and bide their time until the next open seat in the Oval Office came up for grabs.

Similarly, if Newt Gingrich were to lose to Obama, the blame could be heaped on his own shortcomings and extensive, frequently controversial biography. After all, his three marriages and “complicated” history didn’t exactly make him a darling among evangelical Christians. The same excuses could be applied with slight modifications.

But Rick Santorum is a horse of an entirely different color who could serve as the ultimate test of this theory and put the question to rest once and for all. Is the secret to electoral success truly found in a take-no-prisoners, hard-core, rock-ribbed conservative? Is this truly what America is pining for?

As Jazz goes on to point out, when it comes to the core issues of social conservatism, there’s nobody left in the race that’s as hard core as Santorum. Whether it’s abortion, marriage and other rights for gays and lesbians, or even evolution, Santorum takes the social conservative position on each issue and turns it up a notch. This is the guy, after all, who doesn’t recognize any exception to his opposition to abortion even in the case or rape or incest, who wants to roll back Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and who said that same-sex marriage would one day lead to men marrying dogs, and who peppers his speeches with warnings about the threat to the Republic posed by the so-called “gay agenda.” If you’re a social conservative, there’s a lot to like about Santorum. Of course, at the same time, if you’re not a social conservative there’s a lot to dislike about him as well.

That last part, and the fact that most Americans don’t share the extreme positions that Santorum takes, would seem to make the electoral outcome of a Santorum- Obama General Election inevitable:

If you were worried that Team Obama could turn a Gingrich nomination into a referendum on the speaker’s history, Santorum would make that look like child’s play. Gone would be discussions of the president’s paltry record on job growth or the disastrous downstream effects of his environmental regulatory policy. The DNC would dump hundreds of millions of dollars into running 24/7 advertisements in the fall featuring grainy, black and white clips of Rick Santorum reading off the quotes I cited above and many, many more. Tens of millions of moderate and independent voters who are currently looking with dismay at Obama’s record and are kicking the tires of a possible Republican alternative would thunder for the exits. In short, I believe a campaign such as that would lead to Barack Obama winning in a landslide.

That would seem to be the logical outcome of a Santorum candidacy, although Santorum’s supporters inside the GOP will argue differently. There are people here at CPAC, for example, who think that the way to win the election in November is to emphasize a Santorum-like position on abortion and hammer the President with it for months on end up through the General Election. One can call these people detached from reality, and for the most part many of them do seem to have no real conception of how politics works in the United States or how you win elections, but perhaps the only way to convince people like this of the fact that reality is, in fact, real is to let them have what they want. Put that hard-core social conservative on the ballot and let them run their campaign based on those issues even though poll after poll shows them to be out of touch with the mainstream of the electorate. At the very least, maybe it would be what’s needed to finally start reconstructing the Republican coalition that put Ronald Reagan into office 30 years ago rather than letting the GOP continue to drift down the road.

If the reaction of the attendees at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, and the conservative pundits who have been watching the proceedings here at the Marriott Wardman Park, are any indication, it’s pretty clear that Mitt Romney is still not sealing the deal with the conservatives who have had doubts about him from the beginning of this process:

Mitt Romney wanted to use his CPAC speech Friday to allay concerns about his candidacy on the Republican right, but with one ad-libbed word he reinforced conservative fears that he’s not one of them.

“I was a severely conservative Republican governor,” Romney told the annual gathering.

The response was immediate.

“Severely?”

“I have never heard anybody say, ‘I’m severely conservative,’” Rush Limbaugh noted on his show.

“That didn’t get a lot of applause,” firebrand Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) observed with a tight smile.

“Some things are too funny to comment on,” a laughing Newt Gingrich commented as he walked into the conference to give his own speech.

Romney’s address won repeated applause. He outlined his conservative credentials, both in his public and private life, and offered a strong indictment of President Barack Obama. But by going off-script to use an awkward modifier that no movement conservative would ever affix to themselves, he made clear why, despite vast advantages in money and organization, he’s still struggling to win the trust of a party base needed to secure the GOP presidential nomination. He’s just not a natural fit.

Success at CPAC is hardly a perfect indicator for how a candidate will perform with the Republican electorate. Romney knows this well, having captured the straw poll here in the past only to lose the nomination to a candidate, John McCain, who was booed when he addressed the conference just weeks before securing the GOP nod.

Yet Romney’s trio of losses Tuesday and his all-out effort to woo the base here — he used some variation of “conservative” 25 separate times in his speech — underscores the degree to which the party has shifted in the four years since McCain captured the nomination.

The old nominating game standbys, the notions of inevitability and success begetting success, have proven irrelevant in 2012. Romney rolled in Florida and cruised in Nevada — and then, without an aggressive campaign, had nothing to show for it in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado. This election has proven momentum-proof to date.

That’s not to say that Romney’s speech got boos yesterday, because it didn’t. In fact, the applause was generally pretty loud and sustained at the right times and the speech was, overall, fairly good for a Romney speech (at least he didn’t break into an extended discussion about America The Beautiful). At the same time, though, it seemed at many times that he was trying far too hard to emphasize his conservatism as a way to address the doubts that many in the crowd no doubt have about him, and it seemed force at times. The “severely conservative” line, for example, got heavy applause but at the time seemed even more forced than it reads on paper. Would Romney have used a line like that if it weren’t for the fact that his opponents primary argument against him has been to accuse him of not being conservative enough? I doubt it.

Based on the entirely unscientific discussions I had with several people after the speech, it didn’t seem like Romney’s speech did much to win over the doubters, either. If you were an “Anybody But Mitt” person before the speech, you still were one after the speech. One speech isn’t going to change minds overnight, but the fact that it seems to have done little to alleviate the doubts suggests that Romney still has a way to go to win the base over. Of course, there’s nothing that succeeds like success and if Romney is the guy who ends up winning the nomination I personally have little doubt that most hard-core conservatives will get in line behind him rather quickly, because if there’s one person in the 2012 race they dislike more than Mitt Romney it’s Barack Obama, and they’re not going to pass up the chance to vote against him in November.

If the conservatives at CPAC are not buying Romney, though, they appear to be really warming up to Rick Santorum:

The man who’s making the latest bid to become the once-and-for-all Romney alternative, Rick Santorum, all but grabbed the CPAC activists by the lapels in his speech Friday, arguing that conservatives ought to nominate one of their own this time.

“Conservatives and tea-party folks,” Santorum said near the top of his remarks. “We are not just wings of the Republican Party — we are the Republican Party.”

The GOP, he argued, “will no longer abandon and apologize for the policies and principles that made this country great for a hollow victory in November.”

Later in his address, Santorum directly brought up the tea party-infused Republican 2010 wave, claiming that Republicans won because they were enthusiastic about their candidates.

Turning to this year’s election, and clearly alluding to Romney, the former Pennsylvania senator asked: “Why would an undecided voter vote for a candidate of the party who the party’s not excited about?”

Santorum’s introducer and the chief patron of his super PAC was more blunt.

“It didn’t work with Bob Dole, it didn’t work with John McCain,” said Foster Friess, warning against nominating establishment favorites.

But with Santorum re-emerging and Newt Gingrich still lingering, Romney is making a newly aggressive case about what separates him from both Dole and McCain and his current conservative rivals.

Romney’s response to the rise of Santorum this time around looks like it’s going to be the same as his attacks on Gingrich, to point out the fact that Santorum’s record in Washington reveals him to be far from the conservative that he now claims to be. Whether that will work coming from a guy like Romney remains to be seen, but the more important point is that attacking your opponent’s bona fides isn’t necessarily the best way to convince the conservative base that they can be comfortable with you. And that, in the end, is the problem that Mitt Romney has had from the beginning of this process.

Photo via The Daily Caller

Late yesterday, the nation’s Catholic Bishops came out with a statement that noted at least two strong objections to the revised contraceptive coverage plan unveiled yesterday by the White House:

Hours after calling the Obama administration’s contraceptives compromise a “first step,” the Catholic bishops said Friday night they have “two serious objections” to the new policy and will fight its enactment.

First, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said the administration’s plan still includes a “nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients.”

“This is both unsupported in the law and remains a grave moral concern,” the bishops said in their statement. “We cannot fail to reiterate this, even as so many would focus exclusively on the question of religious liberty.

And while Obama’s new plan allows religious-affiliated employers to refrain from paying for contraceptive coverage — insurers would be obligated to provide the coverage for free — the bishops said the change doesn’t go far enough.

“It would still mandate that all insurers must include coverage for the objectionable services in all the policies they would write,” the bishops said. “At this point, it would appear that self-insuring religious employers, and religious insurance companies, are not exempt from this mandate.”

(…)

[The Bishops] made it clear that a “lack of clear protection for key stakeholders — for self-insured religious employers; for religious and secular for-profit employers; for secular nonprofit employers; for religious insurers; and for individuals — is unacceptable and must be corrected. And in the case where the employee and insurer agree to add the objectionable coverage, that coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer’s plan, financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer. This, too, raises serious moral concerns.”

This last part seems to be a bit of moving the goalposts on the part of the bishops. Previously the discussion was about religious institutions that run entities like hospitals, now it’s been expanded to included entirely new classes of people, some of whom arguably have far less of a “religious liberty” claim than an organization like the Catholic Church might. Should the owner of a small manufacturing company be treated the same, for the sake of this argument, as the Catholic Church? I think there’s a fairly weak case for doing that, which is why I don’t think the religious liberty argument doesn’t really work in this case. The real question, for which no answer has been provided to date that I’ve seen, is why the Federal Government should have any power at all to tell employers and insurance companies what the contents of their contracts should be. That’s the real issue here, not some culture war argument over a non-existent “war on religion.” Why the right isn’t making it is beyond me.

A new poll from Public Policy Polling shows Rick Santorum surging far ahead of Mitt Romney in among Republicans in a new nationwide poll: Riding a wave of momentum from his trio of victories on Tuesday Rick Santorum has opened up a wide lead in PPP’s newest national poll. He’s at 38% to 23% for Mitt Romney, 17% for Newt Gingrich, and 13% for Ron Paul.

It used to be that Gingrich was leading with all these groups and Romney was staying competitive enough with them to hold the overall lead. No more- a consensus conservative candidate finally seems to be emerging and it’s Santorum.

The best thing Romney might have going for him right now is Gingrich’s continued presence in the race. If Gingrich dropped out 58% of his supporters say they would move to Santorum, while 22% would go to Romney and 17% to Paul. Santorum gets to 50% in the Newt free field to 28% for Romney and 15% for Paul.

It’s all quite improbable, really. The former Senator from Pennsylvania who lost his 2006 re-election bid by one of the highest margins of any incumbent Senator in American history, and who spent most of 2011 languishing at the bottom of the polls now the front runner in the race for the Republican nomination? Well it’s worth noting that the PPP poll is not consistent with other nearly contemporaneous polls that were released shortly before it was. Fox News’s poll, for example, showed Romney leading by ten points and the latest iteration of the Gallup Daily Tracking Poll shows Romney up by 12 over Santorum, although it’s worth noting that Gallup’s poll does show that Romney’s support level has been steadily declining while Santorum’s has been steadily increasing.  At the same time, though, neither poll (and no other poll so far) shows the kind of massive surge for Santorum that PPP does in this poll so, we could be looking at a poll that is catching the cutting edge of a real trend or, we could be looking at a massive statistical outlier due to bad sampling or some other factor.

Nonetheless, it’s fairly clear that Santorum’s victory on Tuesday, as symbolic as they may have been, have benefited him. Additionally, his speech at CPAC yesterday was fairly well received and his supporters appear to be mounting an aggressive campaign for support in the CPAC Straw Poll, the results of which will be released later today. So, this really could be Santorum’s moment, and Nate Silver argues that he has a better chance at winning the nomination than some might think:

Republicans have so far declined several opportunities to coalesce around Mr. Romney. They did not do so after he announced his candidacy, nor after Mr. Perry sunk in the polls, nor when Mr. Cain withdrew, nor after Mr. Romney’s apparent win in Iowa and actual win in New Hampshire. And after big wins in Florida and Nevada, he is struggling yet again.

Mr. Santorum is a fresher face, comparatively speaking. He clearly did not get much momentum from his strong showing in Iowa. But his Iowa surge had been largely confined to that state to begin with, and he was hurt by the fact that the next state to vote was New Hampshire, a bad fit for him culturally, as well as the fact that he was not announced as the actual winner until after the New Hampshire voting. On Tuesday, by contrast, he earned victories in three states, and he seems to be on the move in national polls as well.

But Mr. Santorum will not be as easy a mark for Mr. Romney as someone like Mr. Gingrich. The results in Florida had seemed to suggest that Mr. Romney could win a state any time he wanted to by blanketing it with advertising dollars. But almost all of those ads were negative, and almost all of them attacked Mr. Gingrich — most of them on his personal failings like his resignation from Congress and his ties to Freddie Mac.

Mr. Romney’s attacks on Mr. Santorum, by contrast, have focused on more venial sins: that he is a “career politician” who defended earmarks.

Meanwhile, Mr. Santorum closed strongly and outperformed his polls in several states so far, including Iowa, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri and South Carolina (where he was projected to place fourth by the polls but finished in third). That could indicate that voters like Mr. Santorum the more they get to know him — indeed, his favorability ratings are strong among Republican voters — or that his supporters are more enthusiastic. Either quality would be an asset going forward, allowing him to win his share of close calls against Mr. Romney.

Thus, it seems at least possible that Mr. Santorum’s momentum will be more sustainable. To have a chance at winning in the delegate count, he will need to supplant Mr. Gingrich as Mr. Romney’s major rival in the South. The results in Missouri, a borderline Southern state where Mr. Santorum beat Mr. Romney by 30 points without Mr. Gingrich on the ballot, suggest that he could run strongly if Mr. Gingrich were to bow out.

Like I said, it all seems very improbable, and the idea of Rick Santorum as the Republican nominee should scare the crap out of any Republican who actually wants to have a chance of winning in November. But this is been a year of improbabilities and, given the continued reluctance of conservatives to make peace with Mitt Romney, maybe it isn’t all that improbable after all that they’d coalesce behind the most improbable, and seemingly unelectable, candidate of them all.

The Marine Corps on Thursday once again did damage control after a photograph surfaced of a sniper team in Afghanistan posing in front of a flag with a logo resembling that of the notorious Nazi SS — a special unit that murdered millions of Jews, gypsies and others.

The Corps said in a statement that using the symbol was not acceptable, but the Marines in the photograph taken in September 2010 will not be disciplined because investigators determined it was a naïve mistake.

The Marines believed the SS symbol was meant to represent sniper scouts and never intended to be associated with a racist organization, said Maj. Gabrielle Chapin, a spokeswoman at Camp Pendleton, where the Marines were based.

“Sniper scouts?”  That’s a new one. 

Here’s the photo, that apparently first appeared in a blog entry (url not cited) at the Knight’s Armament website:

It is impossible to know, just from the photo, what the deal is.  One thing is for sure:  it is a pretty shocking (and indeed, jarring) image.   At best is an example of howling ignorance and at worst is suggesting something more sinister (at least in terms of one or more of the individuals in this photo).  To wit:  where in the world would the flag have come from in the first place?  It would seem that someone would have had to have brought it with them to Afghanistan (as I can’t imagine that there is a local branch of “Neo-Nazis R Us” out in rural Afghanistan).  This is suggestive that someone in this group has unsavory political leanings.  It is bad enough to own such a flag and several quanta worse to think that it was sufficiently important to a person that it was something that they would have brought with them to a combat zone in the middle of nowhere.

As anticipated, earlier today the Obama Administration announced a change in the requirement for employers to provide contraceptive coverage in the insurance they are required to provide to employees under the PPACA. Unfortunately it seems like more of a smokescreen than a solution and seems to be based on the idea that there is such a thing as “free” birth control:

Seeking to allay the concerns of Catholic leaders and head off an escalating political storm, President Obama on Friday announced an adjustment to the administration’s health-care rule requiring religiously affiliated employers to provide contraceptive coverage to women.

Women still will be guaranteed coverage for contraceptive services without any out-of-pocket cost, but will have to seek the coverage directly from their insurance companies if their employers object to birth control on religious grounds.

Religiously-affiliated non-profit employers such as schools, charities, universities, and hospitals will be able to provide their workers with plans that exclude such coverage. However, the insurance companies that provide the plans will have to offer those workers the opportunity to obtain additional contraceptive coverage directly, at no additional charge.

Churches remain exempt from the birth-control coverage requirement. And their workers will not have the option of obtaining separate contraceptive coverage under the new arrangement.

The administration’s decision to make an adjustment reflected the high political stakes of an issue that had generated intense criticism in recent days from a growing chorus of Catholic and Republicans leaders, as well as some Democrats. In Congress and on the campaign trail, leading Republicans attacked the Obama administration’s position as a war on religion.

In an appearance in the White House briefing room, Obama said he instructed aides to craft a solution quickly in the wake of the outcry.

“After many genuine concerns were raised over the last few weeks — and the more cynical desire to make this into political football — it became clear that spending months hammering out a solution not an option; we had to move this faster,” Obama said, flanked by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, whose agency is administering the rule.

“I’ve been confident from the start we could work out a sensible approach here,” the president added. “Some folks in Washington may want to treat this as another political wedge issue, but it shouldn’t be. I never saw it that way. It’s people with goodwill on both sides of the debate sorting through a complicated issue to find a solution that works for everyone. Today’s announcement has done that.”

White House officials said Obama called Archbishop Timothy Michael Dolan, Keehan and Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards to explain the new rules. The officials declined to elaborate on the nature of the conversations.

During a conference call with reporters to explain details, a senior White House official said that the impact of the change on insurers would be cost neutral–and even potentially cost-saving–because on balance it would reduce the need to provide medical coverage related to unwanted pregnancies and other conditions that can be avoided with birth control.

“The new policy ensures women can get contraception without paying a co-pay and addresses important concerns raised by religious groups,” the White House said in a statement.

Not surprisingly, Administration allies and other groups on the left are hailing the new compromise — after all, who doesn’t like to get stuff when other people are going to be paying for it? — but it’s unclear how Church groups are going to react to this. To some extent, it seems like a shell game after all. Unlike the Hawaii Rule, the new plan does not contemplate employees paying for the additional cost of contraceptive coverage (which is, in all likelihood marginal at best) but it also doesn’t require religious employers to pay for the coverage. Instead, the payments will be made by that abstract entity the “insurance company” who some people in the White House apparently think has a pot of money somewhere that comes from some unknown source. However, as Sarah Kiff notes, there is a huge catch in the plan as revised that is likely to make it difficult to sell:

The catch here is that there’s a difference between “revenue neutral” and “free.” By one report’s measure, it costs about $21.40 to add birth control, IUDs and other contraceptives to an insurance plan. Those costs may be offset by a reduction in pregnancies. But unless drug manufacturers decide to start handing out free contraceptives, the money to buy them will have to come from somewhere.

Where will it come from, since neither employers nor employees will be paying for these contraceptives? That leaves the insurers, whose revenues come from the premiums that subscribers pay them. It’s difficult to see how insurance companies would avoid using premiums to cover the costs of contraceptives. They could, perhaps, use premiums from non-religious employers. Those businesses wouldn’t likely object on faith-based grounds, but they probably wouldn’t be keen on footing the bill for people who aren’t on their payrolls.

The proposal is also likely to raise concerns among religious employers, who may think (not entirely incorrectly, I would submit) that the cost of the contraceptive coverage will still ultimately come out of the insurance premiums they pay, and that it will be taken into account when premium increases are calculated over the life of the plan. From the perspective of the Catholic Bishops and the other religious organizations that have been protesting about this rule, it’s hard to see what has really changed from the original rule. As I said, it’s not as if the insurance companies have sources of revenue independent of the premiums they receive (or that it would even be proper for them to use those revenues for insurance purposes if they did), so ultimately the only entities that pay for the cost of coverage are the employer or the employee.

As I’ve said since the start of this debate, for me this isn’t a religious argument. I’m still not entirely convinced by the religious liberty arguments that the Church and its allies make, although whether or not those claims succeed in court is less important than the political impact that they might have. For me, the issue is whether Congress and the White House should be dictating the terms under which employers provide non-salary benefits to their employees at all. That’s a much larger debate, of course, and it will likely end up being resolved by the Supreme Court. However, if the Obama Administration truly wants to accommodate the concerns of religious institutions, then it needs to get off the high horse and admit that there is no such thing as “free” birth control, or “free anything else for that matter. Someone will end up paying for it in the end and, unless they want to take the political risk of alienating Catholics and other religious voters with a change that seems to be little more than a fig leaf, then maybe they need to consider something like the Hawaii Rule even if that means that employees end up picking up the cost.

Update: This statement from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, while not an endorsement at all, is more positive than one might have expected:

WASHINGTON— The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) sees initial opportunities in preserving the principle of religious freedom after President Obama’s announcement today. But the Conference continues to express concerns. “While there may be an openness to respond to some of our concerns, we reserve judgment on the details until we have them,” said Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, president of USCCB.

“The past three weeks have witnessed a remarkable unity of Americans from all religions or none at all worried about the erosion of religious freedom and governmental intrusion into issues of faith and morals,” he said.

“Today’s decision to revise how individuals obtain services that are morally objectionable to religious entities and people of faith is a first step in the right direction,” Cardinal-designate Dolan said. “We hope to work with the Administration to guarantee that Americans’ consciences and our religious freedom are not harmed by these regulations.”

Obviously, if the Bishops ultimately sign off on this proposal then the issue is closed. The statement, however, makes it seem as if there is at least some negotiation still to be had here.

In what has to be the most hilariously unconstitutional piece of legislation that I’ve seen in quite some time, senators in the Arizona state legislature have introduced a bill that would require all educational institutions in the state — including state universities — to suspend or fire professors who say or do things that aren’t allowed on network TV. Yes, you read that right: at the same time the Supreme Court is poised to decide if FCC-imposed limits on “indecent” content in broadcast media are an anachronism from a bygone era, Arizona state legislators want to limit what college professors say and do to only what is fit for a Disney movie (excluding, of course, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. After all, those films are PG-13!).

(…)

he bill doesn’t even require that the profanity be uttered in the classroom, it just generally says that if a professor or, for that matter, a K-12 teacher, engages in FCC-regulated conduct or speech at all, he or she can lose their job. Of course, even if this were limited strictly to classroom speech it would still be laughed out of court as unconstitutional on its face.

(…)

he law not only hobbles the ability to teach about sexuality and other non-Victorian topics, but it also puts teachers in jeopardy for teaching such mainstays as The Canterbury Tales, The Catcher in the Rye, certainly Ulysses, and probably every work by an obscure English writer named William Shakespeare. These days, such a law could certainly make any professor or teacher think twice about teaching Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut. And how on earth could you possibly teach a class about cinema studies without showing movies like The Godfather, The Graduate, Annie Hall, or for that matter, Pulp Fiction?

The proposed law would b e unconstitutional for a number of reasons, but that’s not even half the story here. What, exactly, is it about Arizona schools that makes legislators so concerned about potty-mouthed teachers? Things sure have changed since I was in third grade.

I noted after Tuesday’s contests in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado that turnout in those contests was down across the board, continuing a trend that we’ve seen since the beginning of the year in every contest with the exception of South Carolina. This has led many pundits, and especially many Democrats, to speculate that Republican voters are less enthusiastic about the 2012 race than some might have anticipated, which potentially does not bode well for November. Today in the Wall Street Journal, however, Peggy Noonan notes that there are other signs out there that there may be something else going on other than disaffected Republicans:

There are some small indicators something else may be going on. Cable news ratings, which should spike in an election year, and which indicate interest on both the left and the right, are relatively flat, with mild increases here and there. Broadcast evening news ratings continue their gradual decline. One network anchor, on being urged to capture more of the joy and ferocity of the Republican contest, sighed. “Every time we show those guys, our numbers go down.” A major website operator tells me people aren’t clicking on political stories.

But it’s not confined to the Republican side. Look at President Obama’s State of the Union numbers. That speech famously blankets all television and radio networks. His first speech to a joint session of Congress, in February 2009, drew 52 million viewers. A year later the State of the Union had an understandable fall-off to about 48 million. In 2011, another fall: 43 million watched. A few weeks ago his 2012 State of the Union drew just 38 million. From 52 to 38: That’s quite a decline. And again, during an continuing crisis and in a presidential election year. As for the president’s interviews and other speeches, well, when was the last time you heard someone ask excitedly, “Did you hear what Obama said?”

Whose numbers are up? The NFL’s.

Maybe the story the political class is missing is not “They don’t like the Republican field,” or “They don’t like Obama.” Maybe the story is that people are tuning out altogether. Maybe they’re bored with politics, and most especially with politicians. Maybe they don’t think our government can’t solve anything. Maybe, even, our political class has done such a good job depicting the crisis we’re in that the American people, with their low faith in institutions, think nothing, really, can be done about it.

There’s a problem with trying to draw a conclusion based on television ratings, of course. With the constantly expanding menu of choices available on television and online, it’s somewhat inevitable that the audience for any particular broadcast will be lower as people go off in search of other offerings. Additionally, the ratings services don’t currently track people who watch cable news online or on mobile devices, which is segment of the population that is only going to grow lager. At the same time, though, something like the State Of The Union Address is broadcast by pretty much every cable news outlet, and every broadcast network so a drop off of 14 million voters over three years, and lower viewership in an election year when people are arguably starting to pay more attention to these issues may indeed be indicative of something other than Republicans who are annoyed at a crappy field of candidates.

There’s other evidence to support Noonan’s thesis that we’re looking at an electorate burned out on politics in general rather than something indicative of the only the state of affairs in the Republican Party. Public dissatisfaction with Congress is higher than it’s ever been, and the only direction that public disapproval of Congress seems to be moving these days is lower and lower. In the new Gallup poll, for example, Congressional job approval hit the lowest point it has ever been at since galup has been polling that question. Eventually, Congressman is likely to be as disreputable a profession as Mafia Hit Man, and at least Mafia Hit Men bring some canoli along.

You can also see evidence of public dissatisfaction in the bellwether Right Track/Wrong Track poll which, while off the highs it hit in November, is still higher than its been at any time in the Obama Presidency. Given the still fragile state of the economy it’s not surprising that Americans would still think that the country is heading in the wrong direction. but I think there’s more to it than that. For three years or more now, they have seen a Washington incapable of doing anything to address their problems. Three times last year, they saw Congress drag a budget dispute down to the wire because of an inability to either compromise or seriously address the issues facing the country, only to “resolve” it by reaching a deal that accomplished nothing but kicking the can even further down the road. They’ve seen a United States Senate that’s gone more than 1000 days without passing a budget and House Republicans who have embraced a no-tax orthodoxy that even their great hero Ronald Reagan would not (and did not) embrace. And they’ve seen a President who seems more comfortable being a follower than a leader. And through it all they see a stagnant economy and a world where they can’t be sure that their children will have a better life than they did. Is it any wonder that people are pessimistic about the future of the country, or that they might be coming to have a “to hell with it all” attitude about politics?

Barack Obama was elected President four years ago on a message of “hope and change” and a promise to change Washington. Those who had faith in that message were, by and large, naive in the belief that change could or would happen quickly. However, when they look around and see that nothing has changed at all, one has to wonder if they’re just going to conclude it’s not worth caring about this crap anymore.

With the White House under fire for its new rule requiring employers including religious organizations to offer health insurance that fully covers birth control coverage, ABC News has learned that later today the White House — possibly President Obama himself — will likely announce an attempt to accommodate these religious groups.

The move, based on state models, will almost certainly not satisfy bishops and other religious leaders since it will preserve the goal of women employees having their birth control fully covered by health insurance.

Sources say it will be respectful of religious beliefs but will not back off from that goal, which many religious leaders oppose since birth control is in violation of their religious beliefs.

There’s no word on what form this compromise will take, but it will apparently not go as far as the so-called “Hawaii Rule” that allows religious institutions to opt out of the requirement as long as they provide employees with information regarding the availability of additional coverage for contraceptives:

Sources say it will involve health insurance companies helping to provide the coverage, since it’s actually cheaper for these companies to offer the coverage than to not do so, because of unwanted pregnancies and resulting complications.

So, instead of the employer picking up the cost of coverage, insurance companies would. The devil is, as always, in the details, but this may be a way out of what has become something of headache for the Administration.