Garance Franke-Ruta

The rebirth of Washington, D.C., and especially its U Street neighborhood, didn't happen by chance.

President-elect Obama and D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty had lunch at Ben's Chili Bowl on U Street on Jan. 10, 2009. (Reuters)

Is bemoaning the gentrification of Washington, D.C., a genre past its prime? I mean, there's considering the meaning of the transformation of the city from a majority-black metropolis to one that is no longer so, and there's reflecting on what it means to see all-black, working-class cultural communities replaced by middle-class, multi-ethnic, multi-racial ones that nonetheless have the kind of homogenized cultural aesthetic characteristic of the college-educated. And then there's just writing an ahistoric rant that ignores the successful decades-long effort by black political leaders and real estate developers and businesspeople of multiple races to rebuild a neighborhood decimated by the 1968 riots, drugs, and the flight of the black middle class, while also downplaying the significance of black American artists in the cultural life of not just white America but the entire world.

I speak, of course, of Stephen A. Crockett Jr.'s piece, "The Brixton: It's new, happening and another example of African-American historical 'swagger-jacking'", which set off lively Facebook and blog comment threads in my corner of D.C. and was among the Washington Post's most read local stories when published last week. Writes Crockett:

Look. I get it. The Chocolate City has changed. It isn't what it used to be, and I don't know what's worse: the fact that D.C. was once so marred by murder that it was nicknamed Dodge City or that there is now a hipster bar on U St. that holds the same name. Point is, there is a certain cultural vulturalism, an African American historical "swagger-jacking," going on on U Street. It's an inappropriate tradition of sorts that has rent increasing, black folks moving further out -- sometimes by choice, sometimes not -- while a faux black ethos remains.

In a six-block stretch, we have Brixton, Busboys and Poets, Eatonville, Patty Boom Boom, Blackbyrd and Marvin. All are based on some facet of black history, some memory of blackness that feels artificially done and palatable. Does it matter that the owners aren't black? Maybe. Does it matter that these places slid in around the time that black folks slid out? Maybe. Indeed, some might argue that these hip spots are actually preserving black culture, not stealing it.

But as a native of a then Chocolate City, I can remember when a Horace & Dickie's fish sandwich always felt like a warm hug, because they were cheap, and we were broke. It felt like the owner knew we were struggling, so he lowered the prices for us. It felt like home. ...

Maybe I want to sit at the doors of D.C.'s black culture and check IDs, making sure you deserve to appreciate what Marvin Gaye and Donald Byrd meant to a city that really didn't have much to be proud of when these cats came up.

Maybe there should be a quiz at Brixton about the neighborhood's cultural significance. Maybe there should be a box set sold behind the bar at Marvin. Or maybe these places should just be called something else...

This article rehearses the by now tired tropes of the anti-gentrification genre, harkening back to a mythic, culturally perfect moment that was somehow destroyed by white middle-class professionals and successful new businesses that -- entirely on their own -- made the decision to move into historically black neighborhoods. But the reality of the transformation of D.C. is that that is not what actually happened. And it's definitely not the story of the transformation of the U Street neighborhood.

It's very clear from the data on D.C.'s Census Tract 44 -- the heart of the U Street neighborhood, where I've lived since 2006 -- that the black population dropped dramatically long before any of the so-called "culture vulture" venues came in. More than 1,100 people left the neighborhood between 1980 and 2000 -- a third of the population. That is a profound population loss, and coincided with a time when just about the only new major development in the area was Marion Barry's Frank D. Reeves Center project, a government building that's had something of a troubled history. Again: the bulk of the black U Street population loss happened by 2000, more than a decade before the Brixton came onto the scene. That's doubtless why the property that now houses the Brixton was standing empty (excuse, me, was an "eyesore") and why it was available to become something new.

A close look at the Census data shows that black population loss in the neighborhood actually slowed as gentrification picked up, dropping almost in half from the previous decade's rate as whites and Asians flocked to the neighborhood in the first years of the new century, and as new amenities moved in. And the biggest reason so many people were able to move in was because there was a city-run effort to develop the parcels of land over the Metro, condemn nuisance properties, increase taxes on buildings left vacant for years, and push for new construction on the plethora of empty lots that peppered the neighborhood, the 1968 riots' ancient scabbed over scars. The result was that, starting with the opening the Harrison Square Townhomes in 2002 and continuing with the Ellington apartments in 2004, there began to be a lot of new housing for people to move into. The explosion of new places for people to live intensified as new projects planned early in the new century opened their doors.

What was it like to begin the redevelopment of the U Street area? It went in fits and starts, and there were a lot of failures along the way, like the late-'90s effort to attract a Fresh Fields (what Whole Foods used to be called), which floundered after "a group of African-American women" told the company "they wouldn't feel safe shopping at 13th and V." And if you listen to Harrison Square land development manager Billy Smith, they weren't so wrong in their assessment: "While most of the block was filled with abandoned buildings, there were three row houses across the street that were the epicenter of a very active drug market [in 2000]....The violence was pretty bad back then. At least once a week there would be gunfire, and our construction crew would dive into the trenches that were being built as a water inlet for the project. The gunfire was so frequent that diving into the trenches became a weekly routine. To shield ourselves from the bullets, we built a large mountain of dirt between the project and the street and an armed security guard was hired to patrol the site 24 hours a day."

Eventually the drug dealing across the street became such a problem that the properties were condemned. "After the third bust in the winter of 2001, bulldozers were called in by the city the very next day and the houses were demolished. The day after that the street filled with residents and neighbors, some of whom had lived in the area for 50 years but had been afraid to come outside," recalled Smith.

Encouraging new construction and trying to entice middle-class people to move into the District of Columbia has been the official policy of the city under at least its last four mayors -- Marion Barry (on his second go-round), Anthony Williams, Adrian Fenty, and Vincent Gray -- because of the city's desperate need to broaden its tax base and stop population outflow. These black political leaders -- each with distinctive views, constituencies and alliances -- have supported the federal First Time Home Buyer Tax Credit Bill Clinton first signed into law as part of the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, an idea that came straight out of the District of Columbia Economic Recovery Act proposed by D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton. The tax credit had a dramatic impact in encouraging moderate and middle-income people to put down roots in D.C., especially younger, college-educated white people, and invest their sweat equity in fixing up rundown housing stock. Indeed, a 2005 study by the Fannie Mae Foundation found that a third of the run-up in housing prices in D.C. between 1997 and 2001 could be attributed directly to the new tax policy.

Why did Congress undertake this measure after a two-year city planning process? Because 30 years after the riots that tore 14th Street NW apart, burned down H Street NE and devastated Washington's downtown, people were still not sure if the city would ever bounce back, or if it was destined to linger on as a kind of Detroit in miniature. Like the Motor City, Washington experienced a major decline in population, shrinking by nearly a quarter between 1950 and 1990 thanks to the end of the war economy; the growth of the suburbs; white flight following desegregation; the impact of the riots; crack and other drug epidemics; and the city's ongoing mismanagement and financial problems (which led to the federal control board era). But the most dramatic population loss came in the decade after the riots; the city lost more than 118,000 residents during the 1970s, according to U.S. Census data. CNN's boilerplate description of my current neighborhood in 1998, the year after I moved to D.C., was a portrait in doubt: "It's been three decades since Martin Luther King's assassination sparked riots in Washington, D.C., and parts of the nation's capital are still trying to recover from the impact of the violence. While some speak of a city renaissance, others are unsure whether the district will ever fully recover."

As Neely Tucker described it in a 2004 Washington Post look-back, the block where I now live was the epicenter of the destruction:

Moments after the [Martin Luther King Jr.] assassination, Washington began to erupt. Stokely Carmichael, a former Howard University student who was leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, led an unruly group from the intersection of 14th and U streets NW, demanding that stores close out of respect. The crowd spun out of control; windows were shattered and looters piled into men's fashion shops, appliance stores, five and dime discount marts, women's clothiers and liquor stores.

The city spun into full-blown riots the next day along the black business corridors of 14th Street NW and H Street NE. In the ensuing three days, there were 12 deaths, 1,097 injuries and more than 6,100 arrests. More than 900 stores lay in ruins. ...

More than 2,500 jobs had been lost. Washington's black business districts were devastated. Piles of rubble marked buildings destroyed in the April riot. Insurance rates in the areas soared, if policies would be written at all. The two corridors of the riot remained crime-ridden shells for decades.

Patricia Kearney, then a teenager who was working one block from the epicenter of the 14th Street riot, lived out those years in her home town. ....

"The saddest part was that [the rioters] destroyed everything we owned and used," she said. They "burned down the corner stores, the areas we shopped. . . . It's taken three decades for things to even begin to come back."

Ben's Chili Bowl stayed open through the whole thing because Carmichael demanded it of owner Virginia Ali, despite the curfew imposed on the city, so that he and other militant leaders could have a place to use as their base of operations, she told Washingtonian in a 2008 reflection on those frightening days.

The downtown area of D.C. suffered a similar wave of looting and burning and was, if anything, even harder to turn around after the riots than were the residential areas. But, starting around 1997, it finally began to happen. Of course there were people and businesses pushed out of D.C. during the city's turnaround years -- pushed out by policies implemented in concert with or by its black leadership, I might add, as well as the meddlesome hands of members of Congress and rising rents and property taxes -- but the U Street area was not a target of one of the centrally-run plans to bust up old urban neighborhoods. That was reserved for SE, where the crime-ridden, rat-infested Capitol Gateway and Arthur Capper and Carrollsburg Dwellings housing projects were razed in 2005 an effort to break up concentrated poverty in the District and reduce crime. (It worked.)

A city plan put into place in 2003 forsaw a future in which, by "strategically developing and preserving housing, Washington's citizens and government can create a city of mixed-income and mixed-race neighborhoods across the city -- not just in select areas -- and increase today's population by 100,000 residents during the next fifteen years."

That has for at least the past 16 years been the culture that was developing on U Street -- "a Benetton boardwalk scene -- black, white, Latin, gay and straight," as the Post described it in 1996.

* * *

I've lived upstairs from Busboys and Poets since it was a lonely beacon in the night on a corner that was dark on the three other sides, and all the way down 14th toward U Street, too. I was so grateful it stayed open late or else my block would have been nothing but vacant lots, shuttered stores and abandoned properties at night that first year. Most of my building was built on a vacant lot. There was probably a building there before the riots, but by the time I got to D.C. in 1997, whatever had been there was long since razed and the spot was paved and being used for weekday parking and a weekend flea market cum junk sale. The yuppies who live across the street from me in a new P.N. Hoffman building live on what was another underused lot. The Hilton Brothers' Blackbyrd Warehouse healed my block by filling in its broken tooth, a mid-block rowhouse-sized vacant lot between their Belgian/soul food restaurant Marvin -- "Inspired by the story of Marvin Gaye's infamous two years in self-imposed exile in the small Belgian town of Ostend" -- and the long-vacant corner building that ultimately became the steakhouse/club Lost Society. These businesses and condo buildings gave loud new life to a block that had been dead too long.

Ideas about naming buildings and restaurants in the area after regionally -- and internationally! -- significant black literary and musical figures ping-ponged between developers and restaurant and bar owners, but since at least 1998 those who would help dream the new neighborhood into being were turning to the area's rich pre-riot, and even pre-World War II, cultural history as the thing that might be able to give it new life:

It's a commonplace, especially, perhaps, among white Washingtonians, that the city has no distinct identity of its own, nothing of the grit and fire of Chicago, say, or New York, or New Orleans. But that is wrong. This city does have an identity, and it is black, and the heart of it is on U Street. It's just that because of the way we live, if you're white, or even black, you may not know much about it, or think that it has much to do with you.

U Street's boosters and visionaries -- historians and architects and artists -- see a lot of commercial potential in this history....

The Ellington apartments, named after Duke Ellington, were developed by Donatelli Development in conjunction with Gragg and Associates, a black-owned firm, back before other new construction led the giant mural of Duke Ellington a block from their project on U Street to be moved further east. I asked developer Nigel Gragg how the Ellington got its name. "There was a distinct discussion about honoring the history and the heritage" of U Street, he recalled. In particular, club impresario Marc Barnes had revived the Republic Garden brand elsewhere on the 1300 block of U, opening a nightclub just steps from and with the same name as an old U Street performance space where Ellington, Charlie Parker and Pearl Bailey had all performed during its time as a mainstay of the old "Black Broadway." And that got people thinking about Ellington.

Next came the Langston Lofts, which opened in 2005, named after Langston Hughes, who was discovered as a poet while working as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel nearby. The Metropolis Development Company that built the lofts was led by Harvard MBA Scott Pannick and Merrick Malone, who had been Sharon Pratt-Kelly's deputy mayor for economic development and director of housing and community development from 1992-1996, where he was involved in efforts to restore the Lincoln Theater on U Street, among many other notable projects. Busboys and Poets, in turn, took inspiration for its name from the condo development on whose first floor it was housed, Iraqi-American owner Anas "Andy" Shallal recalled in 2011:

The invasion of Iraq energized the left, but "there wasn't a place where people actually got together socially and culturally to be able to connect. ... I wanted to create a place that was unapologetically progressive."

He intended it to be steeped in Washington's identity as none of his other restaurants had been. But he didn't get the idea to go back to the poet and the poem until he saw the name of the condo project where he proposed his project. The Langston Lofts. Eureka.

Eatonville, which opened in 2009, was an extension of Shallal's proven concept of marrying literature and food -- there are now four Busboys restaurants, and they all contain progressive, slightly radical or Afrocentric booksellers. If it were just about naming a restaurant after Hughes' early job or Hurston's former hometown of Eatonville in Florida, maybe the charge of empty marketing would fit. But Shallal is selling ideas, too -- providing bricks-and-mortar outlets for contemporary black authors and poets (and also white and other race ones) to find an audience through a series of small independent bookstores and performance spaces that have, amazingly, taken root across the area during the great era of bookstore decline, and through wildly popular spoken word and poetry nights. While I, too, never expected to see a giant painting of Zora Neale Hurston in the entryway of a restaurant, she's hardly the only author referenced in the area. Down 14th Street sits Bar Pilar, named after Hemingway's boat, the Pilar, and Café Saint Ex, named after Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the French aviator and author of The Little Prince. U Street is a neighborhood of restaurateurs with strong literary passions, it turns out. Or at least it is now. The big question is whether we as a society are ready to accept that black writers like Hughes and Hurston belong to the world the same way writers like Hemingway do -- or whether the difficult facts of American history and continued racial inequalities will always make such claims somehow discomfiting, no matter how canonical the writers have become. (To be clear: I don't know the answer.)

As big as the shift in the racial and ethnic composition of the neighborhood has been, an even bigger shift has occurred in its educational background. Nearly half of Census Tract 44 residents in 1980 had not finished high school, while by 2005-2009 that number was down to less than 10 percent. But far from having trouble surviving, a number of the more down-home establishments with long histories in the area -- such as Ben's, or the Florida Avenue Grill -- are thriving. Ben's, founded by Howard University-educated Trinidadian immigrant Ben Ali, has grown so much it opened a second spot, Ben's Next Door, and is planning a new outpost on H Street NE. (I date the mainstreaming of Ben's to Obama's nationally-covered visit there in the days before his 2009 inauguration. After that, it became a tourist destination.) On weekends, it can be hard to find a seat at the once sparsely populated Florida Avenue Grill, which has been in business since 1944. Even relative newcomer Oohs & Aahs (serving soul food since 2003) got so hot it massively jacked up its prices. But the influx of a huge number of establishments targeted to the new college-educated, middle-class residents diluted the cultural significance of the older ones, and some less successful establishments, such as the AM-PM Carry Out, were not able to find a new clientele that would allow them to survive the neighborhood's transition and concomitant rise in commercial rents.

As for Hilton Brothers Ian and Eric -- who are, in just the U Street area, behind Marvin, The Gibson, Brixton, Patty Boom Boom, American Ice Company and the soon-to-open Satellite Room -- are they "jacking" black musical and literary history? Or are they helping to write some new sentences in its D.C. chapter while teaching a multi-ethnic, multi-racial generation of Washingtonians raised elsewhere about some of the history of the local scene? Certainly I'd never heard of former Howard University Prof. Donald Byrd and the Blackbyrds before Blackbyrd Warehouse opened. And why would I have? It is not the 1970s and "Rock Creek Park" doesn't come up no matter what I start a Pandora channel with. As for Marvin, it may not sell box sets (people still buy CDs?), but in April it hosted "Life & Legacy: A Celebration of Marvin Gaye," a benefit concert whose invitation promised members of Gaye's old band, as well as his children, grandchildren and brother, to mark what would have been the D.C. original's 73rd birthday. It was the only restaurant in D.C. to honor him so.

The reason Marvin is called Marvin is simple, says Ian Hilton. "Eric [Hilton] is a huge Marvin Gaye fan and Marvin is from around here," having grown up in Northeast Washington and gone to high school at Cardozo High School in Columbia Heights. Adds Sheldon Scott, the chief marketing officer for the Hilton's ESL Management Group and a former staffer at both Busboys and Marvin, "The fact of the matter is that Eric, the mastermind behind this, is a musician at heart." Along with Rob Garza, Eric Hilton co-founded the eclectic lounge music group the Thievery Corporation in 1995, which since has collaborated with musicians of a wide variety of different genres (as well as sampled and mixed music from them), including "Godfather of Go-Go" Chuck Brown on what turned out to be his last major release.

The key theme that unites the Hilton brothers venues is music. Several outposts are not just named after musicians, but are venues for musicians and DJs to perform, because the Hilton brothers are not just restaurateurs but, through Eric Hilton, part of a world of recording and producing musical acts. Whatever you think of their music, this is not a pose but a real thing, and a part of the cultural fabric of D.C. since they opened the Eighteenth Street Lounge in 1994. Today the Thievery Corporation and its affiliated bands still tour; Hilton also has a record label, ESL Music, whose bands you can check out here. The Brixton was named after a London "neighborhood rich in musical history," says Scott, from David Bowie to reggae and ska. Patty Boom Boom was named after a reggae song, he adds, since "there's a huge amount of reggae and ska in the music that [Eric Hilton] is creating" (see for example: The Archives). And the Gibson is named after a musician "who used to play in a trio in the Eighteenth Street Lounge," says Ian Hilton.

On the other side of the new D.C., Crockett's beloved Horace and Dickies Seafood Carryout, founded in 1990 on H Street NE, has been written up in Zagat's. These days it's got a Twitter feed and a press page and cameos on cable TV food shows, as well as fried whiting on bread. Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor just bought a condo in the U Street area. "My president is black" went from a song to reality -- though Obama is, as he says, "not the president of black America" but "of the United States of America." He makes more than $400,000 a year, sends his kids to one of the poshest private schools in D.C. and is worth millions. The president of France has gone to Ben's for a half-smoke, and the Washington Nationals baseball team uses Chuck Brown's 1979 hit "Bustin' Loose" as its home-run anthem. Times have changed in all kinds of interesting ways, even if they have not changed everywhere as much as some think. Drive-by shootings on U Street in 2010 and 2011, as well as two shooting so far in 2012, suggest the area is still not totally past its "dodge city" days.

Meanwhile, two wars and the administration of the national stimulus package kicked a lot of money into the D.C. area, keeping it afloat even as the rest of the country has struggled since 2008. D.C. is still smaller by about 200,000 people than it was at the end of World War II, but its more than half-century long population slide was finally arrested during the first decade of this one, thanks in part to a population spike since the recession began and the D.C. economy emerged as a port in the national storm.

One day a couple of years ago I came home after work and noticed there was a movie screening in the park behind my building. I wandered over to see what it was, and sitting in the dark on the grass between the Langston and the Ellington, with the sounds of U Street drifting over in the evening air, watched the documentary Duke Ellington's Washington on a big screen just around the corner from where he used to perform. I could have caught the same documentary on PBS in 2000, but it felt different somehow when viewed with neighbors, in that particular neighborhood. Not cooler (people come to D.C. to be cool?), but nonetheless kind of cool, in that way that it always is to learn more about the history of where you live.

D.C. has enough statues of white men and venues and buildings named in their honor. Lord knows it has a boatload of statues of white men on horses. It does not, in the grand scheme of things, have many statues of major figures in African-American history. The U Street area is not Chinatown, where banks and random non-Chinese stores are fronted by a script that outsiders cannot read, while since the late 1990s the heart of the local Chinese-immigrant community has been in suburban Maryland. And it is not Clarendon, Va., or even Cleveland Park. It is a real living, breathing, multi-ethnic, muti-racial neighborhood and cultural melting pot whose establishments have realized the mid-90s dream of reconnecting D.C.'s future to memories of its past. Sometimes these days it is a bit too lively for my taste. But it never fails to teach those of us who live there a thing or two.

Move over Obama Girl: 2008's worshipful indie videos have given way disappointed and satirical takes.

We've come a long way since "Yes We Can" and "Crush on Obama." After the most negative presidential primary contest in memory we're getting a highly negative general election campaign, and that's spilled over to the "pro-am" community, the professional amateurs and outside groups who since the rise of the online media campaign have sought to boost their favored candidates -- or critique those they don't love -- through independent creative efforts.

Above from Ryan Newbrough and Justin Monticello of Just New Productions in Los Angles is an excruciating ballad of disappointment in President Obama (excruciating because of the look on the singer's face, not the content) done in the video style of Gotye's 2011 break-up song "Somebody That I Used To Know." You really have to watch the Gotye video to properly appreciate this riff on it; Just New replicates the vulnerable opening shot and the body painting in Gotye's video, but using Shepard Fairey's Hope icon of Obama instead of an abstract pattern.

"We could have been so much more than just friends with healthcare benefits," the parodists tag their song.

Also premiering this week in negative independent videos is The Agenda Project Action Fund's parody of Danish-Norwegian group Aqua's 1997 "Barbie Girl" song and video. It's pretty well done, or at least has pretty decent musical production values. I think we'd all forgotten about that particular moment in dance pop.

"Tonight, on the planet Mars, the United States of America made history."--President Obama

-- Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 6, 2012

Or as White House science advisor John Holdren put it tonight during NASA's live telecast of the historic landing of the Mars rover Curiosity, "We are actually the only country that has surface landers on any other planet."

Democrats retracted statements about the Republican megadonor, proving that you can't actually just say anything in politics, even if it sometimes seems that way.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee issued this statement late Thursday:

In press statements issued on June 29 and July 2, 2012, the DCCC made unsubstantiated allegations that attacked Sheldon Adelson, a supporter of the opposing party. This was wrong. The statements were untrue and unfair and we retract them. The DCCC extends its sincere apology to Mr. Adelson and his family for any injury we have caused.

The apology comes in response to a letter Adelson's attorney sent the DCCC a couple of weeks ago calling on it to "Immediately retract and apologize for defamatory statements falsely accusing Mr. Adelson of encouraging and profiting from prostitution, maliciously branding Mr. Adelson as a pimp who has given 'Chinese prostitution money' to your political opponents."

"These false allegations constitute libel per se entitling Mr. Adelson to compensatory and punitive damages," the letter said.

On June 29, the DCCC had sent members of its press list an Associated Press article published in the Boston Globe, "Sheldon Adelson Approved 'Prostitution Strategy': Fired Former Sands Executive." That article is no longer available on the Globe's site at the link sent out, though it can still be found at other media outlets.

Harry Reid says an anonymous Bain investor told him Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. But people who've seen the returns say otherwise.

Reuters

A former McCain staffer who saw the summary of Romney's tax data independently confirmed former Republican presidential nominee John McCain's account that there was nothing disqualifying in it, but said he was not authorized to provide more detail from the confidential report.

Earlier this month Senator McCain, who was able to review 23 years of Romney's tax returns while vetting the former Massachusetts governor as his potential vice presidential running-mate in 2008, told Politico there was nothing in Romney's filings that would have raised a red flag. "Everything was fine," McCain said. "I can personally vouch for the fact that there was nothing in his tax returns that would in any way be disqualifying for him to be a candidate."

The former McCain staffer's account appears to contradict Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's allegation to The Huffington Post Tuesday that Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. A Bain investor who claimed to have inside knowledge of Romney's tax returns told the Nevada Democrat this, Reid said.

"Harry, he didn't pay any taxes for 10 years," Reid recounted the person as saying.

"He didn't pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that's true? Well, I'm not certain," said Reid. "But obviously he can't release those tax returns. How would it look?" ...

Tellingly, neither Reid nor his office would reveal who the investor was, making it impossible to verify if the accusation is true. And as his quote makes clear, he's uncertain if the information is accurate. The Romney campaign's press secretary, Andrea Saul, has previously denied rumors that Romney didn't pay "any taxes at all."

Other McCain aides have pointed to Romney's many houses as a principal reason for why Romney was passed over, as McCain was embroiled in a controversy at the time about his own inability to recall the number of houses he owned. Also, Sarah Palin was thought to be a fresh-faced political dynamo well-positioned to appeal to women voters, whose support the McCain campaign was in dire need of. (See also: Game Change, which described concerns over Romney's well-documented public history of moderate positions as something that made him unpalatable to the conservative base.)

None of this is to say that there's nothing in Romney's tax returns Democrats would be unable to make hay over, such as evidence of additional foreign accounts or use of legal loopholes and exotic accounting procedures taken advantage of only by the very wealthy. It's also possible he was able to get his tax payments down to a very low level. But so far, there's no evidence that Romney arranged his taxes so that he paid no taxes at all. The Romney campaign denies it flat out and there's every indication the McCain campaign -- already sensitive to the perception that McCain looked rich and out of touch in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression -- would have considered having paid no taxes at all for a decade a red flag.

What Reid was doing in passing along an anonymous quote whose veracity he couldn't even vouch for is called, in Washington, playing politics. The more outrageous theories are spun by Democrats about what's in Romney's tax returns, the more the pressure builds on him to release them to clear the air -- and thereby give Democrats an opportunity to comb them for "anger points" that can help add to their narrative about Romney's character.

The former president praised Palestinian industriousness during a visit a Riyadh, saying, "I have never met a poor Palestinian in the United States."

Former president Bill Clinton had a very, very different take from Mitt Romney on Palestinian culture and its impact on Palestinian economic success when he visited Saudi Arabia in the winter of 2011. According to a report in the Arab News:

"Ever since I left office I have tried to stay in touch with my friends in the Palestinian community and continue to press my friends in Israel on the case for peace," Clinton said. "It is a different world than it was 10 years ago when we brought the Palestinians and the Israelis together to strike a peace agreement, but then the underlining realities have not changed; political realities have not changed."

He said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad have done a remarkable job in the West Bank. "It is just an example of what would happen for the Palestinian people if they are given a chance to govern," Clinton said. "Palestinians are a hard-working and an incredible community. They have done remarkably well outside their country. I have never met a poor Palestinian in the United States; every Palestinian I know is a college professor or a doctor."

The problem in Israel, he said, is what happens in multiparty democracies around the world. "If you take a poll today, two-thirds of Israelis will support peace and a peace agreement," Clinton said. "However, it is hard to get an Israeli Parliament that reflects the people's views on this one issue. But we all have to keep pushing."

Clinton's diplomatic skills are not only demonstrably superior to Romney's here, Clinton appears to be using a more up to date understanding of the facts on the ground in the Middle East. Romney's original comments, as he's described them, appear to reflect an analysis of the situation formed during his years as a businessman in the 1980s and 1990s.

(Via National Journal's @mattizcoop.)

He's been citing the same tomes for at least five years, but the conservative case for the primacy of culture sits poorly on the international stage.

Mitt Romney in Jerusalem. (Reuters)]

In the summer 2007, I followed Mitt Romney around Iowa for a few days. In a small town west of Des Moines, I heard him speak at an "Ask Mitt Anything" town hall and point to America's culture as the reason for its success, citing Jared Diamond's 1997 book Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and David Landes' 1998 book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some Are So Poor in part as having influenced his thinking. His takeaway from those two works seemed like a classic extension of the frequently heard conservative argument that values help breed economic success, but applied to the international arena, and trotted out as a way of back-patting an audience worried about America's place in the world in the wake of the Iraq War. Don't worry, he seemed to be arguing -- as long as we've got our culture and stick to our conservative values, everything will be OK. He made the same basic case at an August 2007 luncheon with David Brooks and other journalists, and later that year, The New York Times' Michael Luo, who traveled with Romney more frequently, noted that Romney often cited these books:

Mr. Romney stands out among the presidential candidates for how often he cites books, from across the ideological spectrum, in his speeches and forums. When talking about globalization, he often mentions ''The World is Flat,'' by the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman; he likes to contrast the perspectives of David S. Landes in ''The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,'' and Jared Diamond in ''Guns, Germs, and Steel,'' on what explains the rise and fall of countries ...

In his 2011 book, No Apology: Believe in America, Romney again returned to the argument he'd pioneered on the stump, this time extending it to a comparison of high-tech Israel and the Palestinians' "not yet even ... industrial" economy to make precisely the argument he did Monday when he attributed Palestinian poverty to Palestinian culture, and contrasted it with the values found in Israel. That argument offended some prominent Palestinians.

"All I can say is that this man needs a lot of education. He doesn't know the region, he doesn't know Israelis, he doesn't know Palestinians, and to talk about the Palestinians as an inferior culture is really a racist statement," Saeb Erekat, an aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, told The Washington Post. "The harm he has done to American interests throughout the region is enormous," he added.

Here's the relevant excerpt from Chapter 10 of Romney's book:

What's most extraordinary about this passage is that Romney repeated it -- a passage keyed to woo conservative domestic audiences in a nearly all-white midwestern American state -- with little variation before a diverse international audience in Jerusalem, rather than writing new material for the occasion or thinking through how his words might play in the tetchy world of Middle East politics. Here's what Romney had to say in Israel:

I was thinking this morning as I prepared to come into this room of a discussion I had across the country in the United States about my perceptions about differences between countries.

And as you come here and you see the GDP per capita for instance in Israel which is about 21,000 dollars and you compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority which is more like 10,000 dollars per capita you notice a dramatic, stark difference in economic vitality. And that is also between other countries that are near or next to each other. Chile and Ecuador, Mexico and the United States.

I noted that part of my interest when I used to be in the world of business is I would travel to different countries was to understand why there were such enormous disparities in the economic success of various countries. I read a number of books on the topic. One, that is widely acclaimed, is by someone named Jared Diamond called 'Guns, Germs and Steel,' which basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth. And you look at Israel and you say you have a hard time suggesting that all of the natural resources on the land could account for all the accomplishment of the people here. And likewise other nations that are next door to each other have very similar, in some cases, geographic elements.

But then there was a book written by a former Harvard professor named 'The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.' And in this book Dr. Landes describes differences that have existed -- particularly among the great civilizations that grew and why they grew and why they became great and those that declined and why they declined. And after about 500 pages of this lifelong analysis -- this had been his study for his entire life -- and he's in his early 70s at this point, he says this, he says, if you could learn anything from the economic history of the world it's this: culture makes all the difference. Culture makes all the difference.

And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things. One, I recognize the hand of providence in selecting this place.

Romney got the income gap between Palestinians and Israelis wrong -- it's more like $1,600 to $31,000 in per capita GDP -- but the bigger issue is that Romney has for years been making an argument about the causes of international supremacy that's anything but uncontroversial, without anyone calling him on it.

The New York Times in 2007 reported that there was a backlash to Diamond's book, which seemed to naturalize the causes of inequality and erase the impact of politics from the equation:

Although "Guns, Germs and Steel" has been celebrated as an antidote to racism -- Western civilization prevails not because of inherent superiority, but geographical luck -- some anthropologists saw it as excusing the excesses of the conquerors. If it wasn't their genes that made them do it, it was their geography.

"Diamond in effect argues that no one is to blame," said Deborah B. Gewertz, an anthropologist at Amherst College. "The haves are not to be blamed for the condition of the have-nots."

That is, in many ways, exactly the conservative argument in America on behalf of inequality of outcomes. Inequality of opportunity resulting from historic acts of domination or government action becomes, in Romney's telling, the result of cultural pathologies among the have-nots. But that is, oddly, a much harder argument to make around the world than it is at home.

Gallup's latest survey reveals a GOP message geared to exactly what people are most concerned about.

While it sometimes seems as though President Obama is winning the day-to-day messaging war of late -- putting Republican challenger Mitt Romney on the defensive over his tax returns, or sitting back as Romney stumbles on the international stage, upsetting British and Palestinian leaders with remarks deemed insulting -- it's worth noting that Romney's overall message appears to be more in sync with the top concerns of Americans, as measured by a July 19-22 USA Today/Gallup poll.

You can also see from this how Romney's relentless focus on job creation, "crony capitalism," the deficit, and failed solar-energy company Solyndra plays not just to the top concerns of Republicans but to those of all voters, who are not that into environmental issues but care a lot about the deficit and perceived government corruption. You can also see how Obama's focus on raising taxes on the wealthy, while appealing to Democrats, is not nearly as important ground to fight on when it comes to Americans' top concerns.

Gays have a positive impact on home values in liberal areas. But in conservative ones, same-sex couples drag down prices -- probably because people don't want to live near them.

Time to thank your neighbors for their nice flower boxes. A new study summarized by the Harvard Business Review confirms what's become conventional wisdom in many urban areas that gay couples have a positive impact on a community's home values. But there's a surprising twist:

The addition of one same-sex couple for every 1,000 households is associated with a 1% increase in home prices in U.S. neighborhoods that are socially liberal, but a 1% drop in neighborhoods that are extremely conservative, say David Christafore of Konkuk University in South Korea and Susane Leguizamon of Tulane University. Their study of more than 20,000 real estate transactions in Ohio in 2000 supports previous findings that migration of same-sex couples to an area increases home values, in part because these residents tend to develop or enhance cultural amenities. But the new research suggests that in socially conservative areas, housing prices reflect prejudice against gays.

The stereotypes about gays and gentrification and home improvement are so entrenched that it's easy to forget that one of the most characteristic events in contemporary gay life is that of needing to get the hell out of the town where they were raised. Gay people often have to move to get away from communities prejudiced against them if they want to live authentic lives or avoid frequent unpleasant social interactions. The data on home values provides a hint of what happens when they don't.

(h/t AmericaBlog)

Democrats are even less enthusiastic about voting for Obama than Republicans were about reelecting Bush in 2004.

Gallup data out today confirms what everyone feels: Even if it's The Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes (TM), campaign 2012 is just not all that. Not only do Democrats say they are considerably less enthusiastic about going to the polls this fall than were Democrats last cycle, they're only about as enthusiastic as voters anticipating voting for John McCain. That has Gallup warning direly, "if Democrats do not close the enthusiasm gap between now and Election Day, it would put Obama's re-election chances in serious jeopardy." But enthusiasm is not fantastically high on either side, and the gap so far between Obama and Romney is less than the one between Bush and Kerry, who energized Democrats, according to Gallup. Bush still won, though.

On Sunday, President Obama visited with the injured in Aurora, Colo., and spoke of a young woman whose presence of mind and courage kept her friend alive.

After visiting with families of survivors of the shooting in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater and also those recovering from their injuries, President Obama on Sunday spoke about the tragedy and told a story of remarkable courage by some of the first victims in the theater:

There's one particular story I want to tell because this was the last visit that I had and I think it's representative of everything that I saw and heard today. I had a chance, just now, about five minutes ago, to visit with Allie Young -- Allie is 19 years old -- and I also had a chance to visit with Allie's best friend, Stephanie Davies, who's 21. Stephanie was actually downstairs with Allie as well as Allie's parents when I walked into the room.

And I don't think this story has been heard -- at least I hadn't read it yet -- but I wanted to share it with you. When the gunman initially came in and threw the canisters, he threw them only a few feet away from Allie and Stephanie, who were sitting there watching the film. Allie stood up, seeing that she might need to do something or at least warn the other people who were there. And she was immediately shot. And she was shot in the neck, and it punctured a vein, and immediately she started spurting blood.

And apparently, as she dropped down on the floor, Stephanie -- 21 years old -- had the presence of mind to drop down on the ground with her, pull her out of the aisle, place her fingers over where she -- where Allie had been wounded, and applied pressure the entire time while the gunman was still shooting. Allie told Stephanie she needed to run. Stephanie refused to go -- instead, actually, with her other hand, called 911 on her cell phone.

Once the SWAT team came in, they were still trying to clear the theater. Stephanie then, with the help of several others, carries Allie across two parking lots to where the ambulance is waiting. And because of Stephanie's timely actions, I just had a conversation with Allie downstairs, and she is going to be fine.

I don't know how many people at any age would have the presence of mind that Stephanie did, or the courage that Allie showed. And so, as tragic as the circumstances of what we've seen today are, as heartbreaking as it is for the families, it's worth us spending most of our time reflecting on young Americans like Allie and Stephanie, because they represent what's best in us, and they assure us that out of this darkness a brighter day is going to come.

As the days pass, more and more stories of heroism and altruism in the theater emerge. The New York Daily News describes some devastating ones in its weekend story, "'Dark Knight Rises' shooting: Three heroes died in Aurora taking bullets for their girlfriends."

The way mass casualty stories unfold in America has taken on a chilling familiarity.

As New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg again calls for gun-control efforts from our national leaders and critic Anthony Lane examines whether the shooter in Aurora, Colorado, could have been inspired by the villain in The Dark Knight Rises, it's clear that we as a nation have developed an awful template for reacting to our growing catalog of domestic mass-casualty events.

The age of new media being now well-established, it goes a little something like this:

First we get the shaky camera phone videos and the tweets. Then the distraught eyewitness interviews and 911 call recording. Quickly, the shooter is identified. Politicians issue statements of shock and sorrow. The shooter's parents, if interviewed, are confused and abashed or else hide. The social media forensics begin. People with the same or a similar name as the shooter are harassed. There is speculation he is part of a right-wing group, or an Islamic terrorist, or a former Army veteran. The FBI and the armed forces check their records and issue denials or confirmations. Calls for better gun control efforts are issued once again. Defenders of the Second Amendment fight back immediately, or even pre-emptively. The victims of the shooting are blamed in social media for being where they were attacked. More eye-witness interviews. The shooter's parents are castigated. Survivors speak. Warning signs are identified as the alleged shooter's past is plumbed. We ask if violent movies are to blame for his actions. Or cuts to mental-health services. And talk about what kind of country we are, if we have culture of violence. The death toll fluctuates. International voices from countries where guns are heavily regulated shake their heads at us. People leave piles of flowers and teddy bears at the shooting site. There are candlelight vigils, and teary memorials. Everyone calls for national unity and a moment of togetherness. Eventually, the traumatized community holds a big healing ceremony. It is moving, and terribly sad, and watched by millions on TV or online. A few activists continue to make speeches. The shooter, if still alive, rapidly is brought to trial. There is another wave of public discussion about our failures, and the nature of evil. Politicians make feints at gun-law changes, which fail. And then everyone forgets and moves on. Everyone, that is, except the survivors.

Live stream from 9News.com in Denver about the shooting in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater midnight showing of the latest Batman movie:

Cellphone video from inside the theater as people are evacuated:

Theatergoers in the parking lot as the evacuation continues (via The Denver Post):

From Barack Obama:

Michelle and I are shocked and saddened by the horrific and tragic shooting in Colorado. Federal and local law enforcement are still responding, and my Administration will do everything that we can to support the people of Aurora in this extraordinarily difficult time. We are committed to bringing whoever was responsible to justice, ensuring the safety of our people, and caring for those who have been wounded. As we do when confronted by moments of darkness and challenge, we must now come together as one American family. All of us must have the people of Aurora in our thoughts and prayers as they confront the loss of family, friends, and neighbors, and we must stand together with them in the challenging hours and days to come.

And Mitt Romney:

Ann and I are deeply saddened by the news of the senseless violence that took the lives of 15 people in Colorado and injured dozens more. We are praying for the families and loved ones of the victims during this time of deep shock and immense grief. We expect that the person responsible for this terrible crime will be quickly brought to justice.

The worlds of major finance and capital are as weird and skeezy as politics, but they're just so much less transparent that people rarely see what goes on.

From Sheldon Adelson to Norman Hsu, there's always been a lot of gross-looking money in politics, and available to support the ventures of former politicians once they leave office. But apparently there's even more gross-looking money in the money business.

Joseph Tanfani, Melanie Mason and Matea Gold have a revealing story in the Los Angeles Times this morning peeling back the curtain on how Bain Capital got started.

"Previously unreported details, documented in Massachusetts corporate filings and other public records, show that Bain Capital was enmeshed in the largely opaque world of international high finance from its very inception," they write.

When Bain Capital launched in 1984, Romney "struggled at first to raise enough money for the untested venture. Old-money families like the Rothschilds turned down the young Boston consultant. So he and his partners tapped an eclectic roster of investors, raising more than a third of their first $37-million investment fund from wealthy foreigners."

Here are the three most notable foreign investors the reporters name:

JACK LYONS, a financier later convicted of "theft, conspiracy, and false accounting" for dealings in the mid-'80s.

The first outside investor in Bain was a leading London financier, Sir Jack Lyons, who made a $2.5-million investment through a Panama shell company set up by a Swiss money manager, further shielding his identity. Years later, Lyons was convicted in an unrelated stock fraud scandal ....

Records show the first investment in Bain Capital -- $1.25 million in June 1984 -- was in the name of Jean Overseas Ltd., registered in Panama by Marcel Elfen, a Swiss money manager. Later, the investment was doubled.

The Panamanian shell company apparently was a vehicle for Lyons, the British businessman and philanthropist. Lyons died in 2008 ...

Jack Lyons worked as an outside consultant for Bain & Co., but that ended when he and three others were charged in the Guinness Affair, a stock scandal that rocked Britain. Convicted of fraud in 1990, he was spared prison time due to his failing health, but was stripped of his knighthood.

ROBERT MAXWELL, the publishing magnate, Rupert Murdoch "archrival" and "pension plunderer" who died under murky circumstances.

Other early investors included Robert Maxwell, the British publishing baron, who invested $2 million. After his drowning death in 1991, investigators discovered Maxwell had stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from his company's pension funds.

THE DE SOLA FAMILY, relatives of an alleged death-squad backer now in prison for fraud.

Among the Bain investors were Francisco R.R. de Sola and his cousin Herbert Arturo de Sola, whose brother Orlando de Sola was suspected by State Department officials and the CIA of backing the right-wing death squads, according to now-declassified documents.

Orlando de Sola, who has denied supporting the death squads, is now serving a four-year prison term for unrelated fraud charges. In an interview at the prison in Metapan, El Salvador, he said he did not benefit from the family investment in Bain Capital.

For more on this particular connection, see also ProPublica reporter Justin Elliott's January piece, "The Roots of Bain Capital in El Salvador's Civil War."

Unmarried mothers are now the majority of new moms under 30, and 41 percent of non-college educated moms. Too bad they don't vote so much.

What if the goal of women's equality within the American political system is partly dependent on the persistence of marriage as an institution here? The rise in the percentage of women who have kids outside of marriage in the United States without a concomitant transformation of unmarried mothers into more engaged political participants suggests that, far from experiencing a long-forecast and organic increase in political power in the years ahead, women will actually see it decline.

How's that? Let me walk you though some of the studies pointing in this direction.

Over the weekend, Jason DeParle wrote a provocative piece about growing class divisions in family structure. Though there was some debate over how he described one of the studies cited in the piece, in the main his New York Times piece was provocative not because of anything he wrote, but because the topic is one that is so fraught (with defenders of single moms, in particular, sensitive to any hint of woman-blaming for a social transformation many women feel helpless to fight given the changes in working-class male values and economic prospects). Observed DeParle, describing one partial source of the new inequality:

College-educated Americans ... are increasingly likely to marry one another, compounding their growing advantages in pay. Less-educated women ... are growing less likely to marry at all, raising children on pinched paychecks that come in ones, not twos.

Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns -- as opposed to changes in individual earnings -- may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes. ...

About 41 percent of births in the United States occur outside marriage, up sharply from 17 percent three decades ago. But equally sharp are the educational divides, according to an analysis by Child Trends, a Washington research group. Less than 10 percent of the births to college-educated women occur outside marriage, while for women with high school degrees or less the figure is nearly 60 percent. ...

Long concentrated among minorities, motherhood outside marriage now ... is growing fastest in the lower reaches of the white middle class -- among women ... who have some postsecondary schooling but no four-year degree.

Heather Boushey and I described the same educational/family structure divide back in 2002, at the front-end of the wave of out-of-wedlock births to white working-class women, and in the context of explaining the so-called baby bust among high-achieving women:

The so-called baby bust thus has far less to do with female accomplishment or age-related infertility than it does with the persistence of traditional values among economic elites. For high-achieving women, it might as well still be the Eisenhower era, which was the last time the nation as a whole had such a low rate of unmarried births. Because of high-achieving women's greater behavioral conservatism, it is marriage -- not degree of professional success -- that is the single largest determinant of whether they will have children.

So why don't these women just get married? The answer is, they do. Remember, high-achieving women are just as likely to be married at 28 to 35 and at 36 to 40 as are all other working women. And once they marry, they are just as likely to have kids, though they tend to do so somewhat later in life. The difference is that the ones who don't marry rarely have kids.

The class division in unmarried motherhood has implications beyond economic inequality, a divide in life experiences for a whole new generation of children, or an increase in the percent of women who never have kids because they don't marry. The new family structures also have potentially profound implications for our political system, and for the power of mothers within it, according to data crunched for a presentation by Lake Research Partners for The Voter Participation Center earlier this year.

The number of unmarried mothers is rapidly increasing as a fraction of the potential voting population because it is rapidly increasing as a fraction of women with children, but their turnout out and the percent of the electorate they comprise has not kept pace with that increase: The problem for women's political power is that unmarried mothers turn out at the lowest rate of any group of women, when you divide women by whether they are married and have children. That was true in 2008, when 56 percent of unmarried moms voted -- versus 69 percent of married moms and 72 percent of married women without kids: And it was even truer in 2010, when only 30 percent of unmarried mothers voted, compared to 47 percent of married moms and 58 percent of married women without kids (turnout generally goes down during mid-term contests, and overall Democratic turnout was down that year as the groups Obama's candidacy had pulled into the electorate failed to return at high levels for the state-by-state contests):

In short, as more and more women become unmarried moms, more mothers will find themselves too pressed to vote. And yet unmarried moms are a group that could only benefit from increasing their political power -- potentially improving their place in society, and within the economy. According to The American Prospect's report on poverty in America:

Households with only one wage-earner -- typically those headed by single mothers -- have found it extremely difficult to support a family. The share of families with children headed by single mothers rose from 12.8 percent in 1970 to 26.2 percent in 2010.... In 2010, 46.9 percent of children under 18 living in households headed by a single mother were poor.

Lake Partners found the new wave of unmarried moms doing poorly in other ways, too:

What are the long-term political implications of the impoverishment and political disengagement of mothers, now that the majority of births to women under 30 -- the population of women that is most likely to have new kids, for obvious reasons -- are to unmarried ones?

When they do vote, unmarried mothers (just like unmarried women, more generally) vote heavily Democratic. In 2008, according to the Lake Partners data, 74 percent of unmarried mothers voted for Barack Obama, as compared to 51 percent of married ones.

All of which adds up to an unavoidable logical inference: The transformation of motherhood into a non-marital phenomenon -- a social practice that at the same time hurts women economically and pulls them away from the political world -- could well lead to a decline in political power for mothers, and eventually for all women, since more than 80 percent of women eventually have kids. And it also could lead to a decline in the political fortunes of Democrats in all but the most motivating contests.

Given that, it's hard to see how we get to the world Anne-Marie Slaughter is calling for, where women have more power to influence the governance of their country, and eventually transform the workplace to make it more family friendly.

"Having a mate who will be an equal partner is absolutely essential for women" to achieve workplace success, Slaughter told attendees at the Aspen Ideas Festival at the start of the month.

But unless we reach some new and unforseen tipping point, provoking some new and unforseen organization of women on their own behalf, it seems more likely the feminist transformation of the workplace outside of the most elite circles will stall out as a consequence of the way the decline of marriage threatens to pull mothers away from political engagement.

Romney's real issue here is how to explain to normal people how you can be president of something but not in charge of it.

Boy, are Democrats jumping all over the Boston Globe story showing that documents filed with the Security and Exchange Commission described Mitt Romney as "sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president" of Bain Capital for three years after he said he left the company to run the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

The Romney camp's response this morning, by way of spokesperson Andrea Saul: "The article is not accurate. As Bain Capital has said, as Governor Romney has said, and as has been confirmed by independent fact checkers multiple times, Governor Romney left Bain Capital in February of 1999 to run the Olympics and had no input on investments or management of companies after that point."

Elspeth Reeve has a great rundown at The Atlantic Wire on why Romney's quit date matters, citing campaign controversies over outsourcing and "corporate raiding," as well as potential legal issues.

But the bigger issue is that it goes against every single thing normal people know about the workplace for both the Globe and Saul stories to be accurate at the same time. As FactCheck.org reported earlier this year when it explored this question, which has come up before:

We have never disputed that Romney remained the owner of Bain while he was running the Olympics committee. The issue always has been, who was running Bain? Nothing in the SEC documents contradicts what Romney has certified as true.

The idea that Romney -- who is running on the strength of his record as a manager to replace Obama -- could keep titles at, earn from, and own a major company for years while at the same time doing nothing to run or manage it, is not something that will be easily absorbed by your average worker. That is not how most workplaces run (those no-show jobs on The Sopranos excepted). But at the very highest levels of American business, things work differently, apparently.

Explaining the complexities of this business arrangement to the American people will be as complicated for Romney as explaining away the overseas accounts he legally opened. It's not the legality of the strategies that's at issue so much as how foreign they will seem to most Americans -- as hard to comprehend as examples of how the world really works as the idea that there's an invisible force that gives all matter mass.

Update 12:34 p.m.:Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler also has a good round up on the issue here.

Opinion on the Affordable Care Act remains divided, but only a minority support repeal.

One of the most accurate polling outfits in the country found this week that President Obama's signature achievement is no longer unpopular with the majority of the country.

The Affordable Care Act, according to a Washington Post/ABC News survey, is now backed by 47 percent of Americans, up from 39 percent in April 2012. Opposition to the law in the wake of the Supreme Court decision upholding it is also down, from 53 to 47 percent.

The topline conclusion The Post put out is that opinion on the law remains deadlocked, which is very much the case. But another way of looking at it is that support or opposition to the law is increasingly partisan, which is what pretty much every survey shows, including the Post one.

People forget that for a long time part of the law's broad unpopularity came from Democratic dissatisfaction with it. But "the legislation is now viewed less negatively than it was before the [Supreme Court] ruling," according to The Post. And while the poll doesn't say who changed their views, it stands to reason Democratic unhappiness with the bill is more likely to have softened than GOP objections since it was upheld.

As well, "just one-third of all Americans favor repealing the legislation in its entirety or in part," a number that's been pretty consistent in these polls since 2010. The Republican-controlled U.S. House yesterday made its 33rd failed attempt to repeal part or all of the law (failed only because Democrats still control the Senate, not because the bill didn't pass the House).

Romney has made "repeal and replace" into a campaign mantra, promising to undo the law. But that vow is a promise to his base voters and to partisans rather than an appeal to the majority of the country: "Thirty-eight percent of Americans consider Romney's support for repeal a major reason to vote for him, compared with 29 percent who say it is a major reason to vote against him."

According to The Post:

Partisans are also fairly well lined up behind their parties' presidential candidates on the issue: 80 percent of Democrats have favorable views of President Obama's plans for health care; most, but fewer Republicans -- 62 percent -- have positive views of Mitt Romney's ideas.

One potential trouble spot for both campaigns, however, is that independents tilt away from both approaches. Independents lead away from Obama's plans: 38 percent favorable to 52 percent unfavorable. The percentage of independents with negative views of Romney's plans outnumbers positive impressions by twenty percentage points (46 to 26 percent, with a sizable 28 percent expressing no opinion).

In short, independents don't really like what either candidate is offering -- one more reason for both sides to shy away from making health-care into a major focus in the presidential campaign going forward.

Republicans play FarmVille, Democrats read Buzzfeed. Mapping the social web against your political preferences. Click to enlarge.

Writes Engage President Patrick Ruffini:

Over the past few months, we've crunched countless "Likes" from thousands of users of Trendsetter, our first-of-its-kind platform that ties together polling, social influence data, and consumer preferences. We've used it to map the politics of the social web, analyzing the political partisanship of the user bases of various social properties. Using predictive modeling of Facebook likes, we tied political preferences and engagement to one's choice of social media, and this bubble graph is the result....

Sites that tend to skew more Republican include those oriented towards commerce and personal finance -- like PayPal, eBay, Zillow and LinkedIn (not to mention Amazon, albeit at lower levels of political engagement). Sites that index higher for political engagement include Quora, BuzzFeed, and Wikipedia, which emphasize information and knowledge. Meanwhile, visual pinboards and social games may be fertile ground for the campaigns to find new voters, as those sites often demonstrate defined political leanings combined with lower levels of political engagement.

In short:

Campaign 2012 is a contest between Etsy-shopping, Spotify-listening Tumblr readers and eBay-shopping, Pandora-listening FarmVille players. As I suspect you may have suspected.

Update 7/11/12 5:15 p.m.: If you're interested in more on how consumer preferences are allied with political ones, check out Terrence McCoy's April Atlantic story on how "Political strategists buy consumer information from data brokers, mash it up with voter records and online behavior, then run the seemingly-mundane minutiae of modern life -- most-visited websites, which soda's in the fridge -- through complicated algorithms and: pow! They know with "amazing" accuracy not only if, but why, someone supports Barack Obama or Romney." McCoy reports on a different data set, developed by National Media Research Planning & Placement, which showed that heavy Internet users overall skew slightly Republican, but that Pandora and Twitter users skewed Democratic while Facebook users were about in the middle and auction site users leaned the GOP.

People who pay the equivalent of a salary for a meal are different from you and me.

Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney held three posh fundraisers in the posher precincts of the New York resort community of the Hamptons on Sunday as part of the massive ongoing fundraising push that helped him pull in $106 million in June, with hopes to raise another $100 million each month from now until the election.

But when you're charging people $50,000 for lunch or dinner (or $75,000 per couple), you can't always expect them to sound in tune with the downtrodden American workers whose plight Romney has made a focal point of his campaign. Indeed, it's extraordinary that the displays of ostentatious wealth at political fundraisers come in for as little notice as they do, and to what an extent political donations are considered socially akin to charitable giving when they do not have any direct charitable impact.

Two stories that came out of the Romney fundraisers in fact suggest that that in a post-Citizens United world of largely unfettered campaign giving, the only brake on the power of the wealthy within the political system may turn out to be social. What if it were considered déclassé to give large sums to candidates or committees within a democracy, and especially in a nation where so many have other needs? Further close observation of the people who attend major-dollar fundraisers could begin to bring about such a possible future.

From the Los Angeles Times:

The line of Range Rovers, BMWs, Porsche roadsters and one gleaming cherry red Ferrari began queuing outside of Revlon Chairman Ronald Perelman's estate off Montauk Highway long before Romney arrived, as campaign aides and staffers in white polo shirts emblazoned with the logo of Perelman's property -- the Creeks -- checked off names under tight security.

A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. "I don't think the common person is getting it," she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. "Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.

"We've got the message," she added. "But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies -- everybody who's got the right to vote -- they don't understand what's going on. I just think if you're lower income -- one, you're not as educated, two, they don't understand how it works, they don't understand how the systems work, they don't understand the impact."

And from The New York Times:

A woman in a blue chiffon dress poked her head out of a black Range Rover here on Sunday afternoon and yelled to an aide to Mitt Romney. "Is there a V.I.P. entrance? We are V.I.P." ....

A few cars back, Ted Conklin, the owner of the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, long a favorite of the Hamptons' well-off and well-known, could barely contain his displeasure with Mr. Obama. "He is a socialist. His idea is find a problem that doesn't exist and get government to intervene," Mr. Conklin said from inside a gold Mercedes, as his wife, Carol Simmons, nodded in agreement.

Ms. Simmons paused to highlight what she said was her husband's generous spirit. "Tell them who's on your yacht this weekend! Tell him!"

Over Mr. Conklin's objections, Ms. Simmons disclosed that a major executive from Miramax was on Mr. Conklin's 75-foot yacht, because, she said, there were no rooms left at the hotel.

Update 12:51 p.m.: Of course Obama also holds high-dollar fundraisers, such as a $40,000-per plate one at George Clooney's residence in the spring, though notably the president draws considerably more small donors than does Romney (more than half of his donors vs. 9 percent of Romney's, according to a study early this year). But the main difference between Romney in the Hamptons and Obama in Hollywood is that the rich people who back Obama have yet to be quoted talking about how their servants are too ignorant to know how the economy works. Rather, they tend to be quoted being critical of the president himself. Also, everyone expects Hollywood fundraisers to be over the top; Hollywood's lavish lifestyles and movie stars' sense of entitlement have been amply documented through a wide array of popular magazines for nigh on eight decades. That's why some said it was a risk for Obama to reach out to that community this year. Romney's showing us such values are not just to be found in Hollywood: they are in the Hamptons, and Park City, and Aspen, too.