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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.

A chance encounter at a July 4 picnic made the latest development in particle physics seem much more comprehensible. Here's what I learned.

So I was at a July 4 picnic on Wednesday where one of the other guests used to be a physics teacher at Stuyvesant High School, and he explained this whole Higgs boson thing to me in a way that made it make about as much sense as it's going to for someone who only took physics in college. And he did the whole thing without using food metaphors -- molasses, soup, etc. -- which I thought was impressive.

Basically, it's like this: Sub-atomic particles are either fermions or bosons. Fermions are the things you learned about in high school physics -- electrons, protons, neutrons and so on -- that share the quality that you can't have two of them in the same space on an atom. Think of them as the billiard balls: they can be all over the table, but not in the same space at the same time, and where they go is determined by the size of the tables. Most of the widely-known fermions are composites made up of other categories of sub-atomic particles, like quarks (which combine to form protons) and leptons, but the most important thing to know about them for the purposes of this discussion is that they are considered the matter particles.

Bosons are different. Bosons have the capacity to share space because they are more like a force than a thing in the way we normally think of "things" or "particles." And since the normal understanding of the word particle is that it's a small thing that has matter -- the mote in the sun, rather than the light itself -- perhaps a better way for lay people to think of bosons is as entities that have effects; they carry the forces (strong, weak, gravitational or electromagnetic) described by the Standard Model in physics, making them what physicists call force-carrying particles.

But if this whole particle-that-lacks-mass thing is still tripping you up, you don't need to use that word in your own head; bosons lose nothing for our purposes by being thought of as entities, even if they are still technically particles, which is to say something really small of which other things are made. Some bosons have mass and some don't. The Higgs boson has a very large mass for a sub-atomic particle, though of course it is still sub-atomic, which is to say tiny.

Yes, I am aware this is image looks technical and confusing. But it lays out the fundamental building blocks of particle physics and how they interact with each other. Leptons and quarks, at top, are the two categories of matter particles. Below that, the bosons.

There are an array of different kinds of bosons, of which the Higgs boson is only the latest to be (tentatively) confirmed as existing. Here are some of the other kinds of bosons:

* Gluons. So named -- seriously -- because they help glue quarks together, mass-less gluons carry the strong force but operate only at close range, like glue, in that glue will stick two adjacent things together but not attract something from the other side of the room.

* W and Z bosons. W and Z bosons carry the weak force and operate at close range.

* Photons. Photons are mass-less wave-like particles that are the basic building blocks of light and carry the electromagnetic force.

(Gravitational force is hypothesized to be carried by the graviton boson, but that has not yet been proven. Gravity is still a bit of a mystery.)

OK, so now to the Higgs boson.

The newly discovered boson thought to be the Higgs boson was measured by the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, which is a cathedral-sized underground mechanism for creating sub-atomic collisions that break things down into component parts. Part of why it's been hard to figure out from the news stories what the Higgs boson is is there are actually three Higgs things under discussion: 1) the Higgs field, 2) the Higgs boson and 3) the Higgs mechanism.

*The Higgs field is a quantum field that the Standard Model of physics predicts pervades the universe and creates drag on particles.

*The Higgs boson is a sub-atomic particle that acts as the intermediary between the Higgs field and other particles. All fields are mediated by bosons, some of which pop into and out of existence depending on the state of the field, sort of like how rain drops emerge out of a cloud when it reaches a certain point. The electromagnetic field that pervades the universe, for example, is mediated by photons. Finding the Higgs boson would confirm that the Higgs field exists, and that field has long been postulated as a way of explaining an array of other physical phenomena.

* This interaction between the field, the boson and other particles is the Higgs mechanism. The precise nature of the mechanism is still being worked out, but it is through its complex interplay of fields and bosons (Higgs and non-Higgs) that particles acquire mass.

Because the Higgs field was hypothesized to be massless and continuous, and because of the particular properties of the Higgs boson -- both massive and rapidly decaying -- it was really hard to observe and measure any individual Higgs bosons -- if, in fact, that's what was measured recently -- until the Large Hadron Collider came online with enough force and energy to slam some bosons out of the Higgs field into a state humans can measure.

Think of it a little like this: by smashing things hard enough, a little bit of the Higgs field got chipped off into a boson that could be measured before decaying. Sort of like throwing a rock really hard at a concrete wall -- eventually part of the wall will chip off. In this case, it was like a wall that only threw off a little bit of dust in response to a major collision, and then scientists were able to tell that the wall was there because they took a picture of the dust before it blew away. Except in this case the wall is also continuous and infinite, and invisible, and we all live inside of it, and it's what gives us mass, which is to say the quality of physical existence.

Which kind of explains why some have called the Higgs boson the God particle.

Bonus explainer: A hadron is any composite subatomic particle held together by strong forces. Neutrons and protons are hadrons. So that's what's getting collided at the Large Hadron Collider. It's a term that came into use in 1962 to replace "strongly interacting particles," which was considered clumsy at the time, though in retrospect had the advantage of being moderately comprehensible to lay people.

A lot of uncompensated health-care spending comes out of municipal budgets, not state ones, and the bill could save strapped cities money.

Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden, who worked to develop the health-care overhaul for President Obama before returning to Washington's think tank sector, laid out a reason rejection of the Medicaid expansion provision in the recently upheld law by Republican governors might not be so very popular at the state level.

"There is a sort of political economy problem on Medicaid," she said, turning to the part of the Affordable Care Act that was not upheld by the Supreme Court. States cannot be mandated to accept the expansion of Medicaid, even with a 100 percent federal match to begin with, or risk losing all their Medicaid funding, the court ruled. Ten GOP governors "have said definitively that they will not accept the funds, while 19 are still considering other options," according to a ThinkProgress survey.

"States save a lot of money through their Medicaid" through the new bill, Tanden told an audience Monday at the Aspen Ideas Festival. "...the problem for some states is that -- the challenge is that that occurs often at the local level."

She continued: "So Florida is a perfect example. ... So Florida overall will save, but its not clear entirely how much that Governor Scott will save." Scott has said he will reject the Medicaid expansion for Florida.

"I will say that as the leader of a state you should care about both the state level costs and municipal costs, but it's not entirely clear that every governor will. And I think that will be a friction."

Mayors might recognize a "big windfall" for communities in the Medicaid expansion as currently uncompensated local costs born by municipalities begin to be eased with the new Medicaid funds from the federal government. And they might turn against their governors if they see them getting in the way of easing one strain on tight local budgets, Tanden suggested.

More from the Aspen Ideas Festival

From the title of her story to whether she got her son's permission before writing about him, the Princeton professor answered some of the questions everyone's asking about her provocative piece.

Princeton Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter answered some of the most frequently made criticisms of her explosive Atlantic cover story "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" in a wide-ranging conversation with Katie Couric at the Aspen Ideas Festival Sunday morning. Here's what she had to say about some of the questions many have raised.

On the title of her story:

I think if I had an absolutely accurate title it would be "Why working mothers need better choices to be able to make it to the top."

On the idea of "having it all":

The reason I used "have it all" ... is that in my generation, I graduated from college in 1980 ... having it all just meant having a career and having a family. And that's why it became the mantra that it became. It's clear to me that many people hear it differently now. They think it means having everything you want. None of us have everything we want -- men, women. And frankly everybody in this room has far more of what we want than 99 percent of the people in this country.

On privilege:

Given all the privilege that I have, and the kind of job I have, I knew I was, as I said, I was writing for my demographic. There are many problems in this country.... I focused on one problem, and it's the same problem Sheryl Sandberg focused on. We have all these women, we have 50 percent of women entering the workforce, more than 50 percent of women coming out of top schools and yet as you go up, you have 20 percent in board rooms and CEOs and in government and legislatures.... So if you say the problem is not enough women at the top, you gotta write for the women who could make it to the top.

On the risk of being discouraging to women:

If I thought what I was writing would make women opt out I would never have written it.

On "opting out" and "dropping out":

I would like to abandon those words. They suggest failure. C'mon: I haven't opted out or dropped out. I've just taken a different path so I could be a parent and a career woman.

On her getting her son's permission to write about him:

Of course I would not have published any of this if he were not OK with it. Of course I showed it to him, I asked him, we debated it. He was perfectly cool with it and I would never have done it otherwise. And frankly right now, you know, every girl he knows is Facebooking this, sending it to him, calling him "rebellious teenager." He's having a great time.

She was reading SCOTUSblog on her iPad.

Top Obama aide Valerie Jarrett regaled the Aspen Ideas Festival crowd with a little tick-tock on where she was when the Supreme Court health-care decision came down Thursday. The White House did not know which way the decision was going to go, because that was one thing in Washington that did not leak. Jarrett herself was in her office with the White House Counsel and other attorneys, "tuned into SCOTUSblog on my iPad," she said.

"Fortunately we were not tuned into CNN so we missed that scare," she said.

But when another aide came in and described what CNN was saying, she "had someone scoot down to the Oval Office" and "make sure the president had the facts."

Major changes in family structure among high-school educated whites should reshape our understanding of who has social capital in America, he says.

Robert D. Putnam, author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, issued a strong warning to anti-poverty advocates at a forum on social connectedness at the Aspen Ideas Festival Saturday, urging the audience to get beyond talking about poverty and race and start thinking about social mobility and class instead.

"Those two conceptual moves, framing it as poverty and thinking about it as a matter of race, have a very deep history... and I think both politically and analytically that's an almost fatally flawed framework," said Putnam, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, in response to remarks from co-panelists Anne Mosle, vice president of policy at the Aspen Institute, and Mario Small, chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago.

The class gap is growing while the racial gap is shrinking.

"You say poverty to most ordinary Americans, most ordinary voters, they think black ghettos," he continued, whereas over the last couple of generations "class, not race is the dominant -- and becoming more dominant -- dimension of difficulty here."

"Relatively speaking, racial differences controlling for class are decreasing while class differences controlling for race are increasing in America," he said. "Non-white folks with a college education are looking more and more like white folks with a college education and white folks who haven't gotten beyond high school are looking more and more like nonwhite folks who haven't finished high school."

By continuing to frame the conversation as one about poverty rather than one about social mobility, even well-intentioned advocates are continuing frame the conversations as a discussion of the problem, rather that the objective, he said. Social mobility is how people get out of poverty.

The transformation that's led to the present moment has proceeded along two fronts. "Over the last 30 years there has been a remarkable growth in the black middle class while at the same we've seen a collapse in the white working class, especially when it comes to family structure," he said.

What that means, according to his research: "The class gap over the last 20 years in unmarried births, controlling for race, has doubled, and the racial gap, controlling for class, has been cut in half. Twenty years ago the racial gap was the dominant gap in unmarried births -- and now the class gap is by far."

"I do think its important for us to recognize that what we are talking about is now at least as much about class itself and not just about what we've already been talking about for the last 30 years, about race," he added.

Putnam's recent research has focused on what he's calling an impending cliff in social mobility in America as the children of the new wave of white, high-school educated unmarried mothers -- children who have less connection to sports, religion, school achievement, or community than at any time since measurements began in the 1960s, and who are at a radical disadvantage compared to children from two-parent, college-educated families -- come of age.

Putnam says that continued racial gaps are also in significant measure class gaps, but many would argue that race and class cannot so easily be disentangled.

Changing demographics among supporters have reshaped the coalition.

Talking about "Hearts, Minds and the 2012 Election" Thursday evening, National Journal Group's Editorial Director Ron Brownstein posed a question about the changing demographics of the Democratic Party: "Is this a party that makes sense as kind of an upstairs-downstairs coalition, primarily now of minority voters and then more socially liberal, right of, maybe economically moderate white-collar workers?"

It's a topic he's addressing this week in his National Journal column (which you should all be reading!) too, arguing:

By endorsing gay marriage, championing free contraception in health insurance plans (over resistance from the Catholic Church), and administratively legalizing young people brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents, Obama has repeatedly subordinated the concerns of older and blue-collar whites to the preferences of the Democrats' emerging coalition: minorities, young people, and culturally liberal college-educated whites, especially women. "He's taking positions that are strongly opposed by culturally conservative whites, basically conceding that he is going to do poorly among them, in a conscious effort to increase enthusiasm among the coalition that put him in office," says GOP pollster Whit Ayres.

Each strand of that Democratic "coalition of the ascendant," as I've called it, is growing as a share of the electorate. But Obama's tightening embrace of its priorities nonetheless represents a historic gamble. Romney could still beat him by amassing large enough margins among the economically strained, culturally conservative older, and blue-collar whites whom Obama's recent decisions may further provoke.

The president isn't conceding those voters, who once anchored his party's base.... But far more than previous Democratic nominees, Obama seems willing to risk alienating them.... Win or lose, Obama seems destined to speed the Democrats' evolution away from the New Deal coalition centered on working-class whites toward one that revolves around the two titanic social forces he embodies: rising education levels and growing diversity.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, who was on the panel along with comedian Harry Shearer, BET CEO Debra Lee, CNN Political Director Mark Preston, and former congressman Mickey Edwards, worried that this upper-income tilt might undermine the historic progressive impulse of the party.

"If progressives are in business to do anything, it's to lift up hose who need the most help in helping themselves rise up," Dionne said. "The Democratic Party ... doesn't make sense as a party if it doesn't have that as an element in it. And so I think it is a problem, if you ended up with a party that depended so heavily on upscale voters. But it goes back to people who say that working class voters don't vote for their economic interest because they vote on social issues."

Shearer, for his part, said he thought the changing demographics make the new Democratic coalition more like that of the old GOP: "The template for an upstairs-downstairs Democratic Party in this era is the Republican Party in the 1970s, '80s and '90s. And what it delivered was tow things: it delivered economically for the upper middle class and upper class whites and it delivered cultural symbolism for the working class."

Of course, the twist is that the GOP never had a minority component, even as downscale conservatives and the wealthy hung out under its big tent. Here's more from Brownstein on the "upstairs-downstairs" Democratic Party, from a column in May:

As Democrats have solidified an upstairs-downstairs constituency of affluent, socially moderate white suburbanites and minorities (many economically strained), they have established a durable hold on states shaped by rising education levels and diversity. As Republicans have become a more monolithically conservative party, especially on social issues, they have tightened their control over heavily religious Southern and heartland states but watched more cosmopolitan states move at varying rates toward the Democrats in presidential races. "All of this is squeezing [and] compressing the map for Republicans," says Steve Schmidt, the campaign manager for GOP nominee John McCain in 2008. In fact, since 1992, Republicans have won a smaller share of the available Electoral College votes outside the South than in any five-election sequence since the party's founding in 1856.

Central to this role reversal is the rise of what I've called the "blue wall": the 18 states that have voted Democratic in at least the past five consecutive presidential elections. Democrats have not won that many states so often since Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman carried 22 in each election from 1932 to 1948....

Since 2000, the electoral map has broadened further for Democrats, as the same convergence of diversity and education that earlier tipped states such as California and Illinois has transformed previously red-leaning Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina, and Virginia into toss-ups. Hard times and, ironically, questions about his commitment to socially conservative causes offer Romney a chance to enlarge the GOP map and chip away at parts of the blue wall. If he can't, it will be the Republicans who must pull an inside straight to win.

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle says it's a no-brainer: Just go back to the old rules about holding the floor and bringing all other business to a halt.

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle on Thursday suggested that fixing the filibuster problem in today's Congress wouldn't be a big challenge, if there were the political will to do it. Asked during a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival if it was time to get rid of the filibuster, Daschle pointed out that it wasn't the filibuster per se so much as the way the contemporary Senate rules interact with it that's turned the parliamentary tactic into a problem in the upper chamber.

"We've done two things with the current rules of the filibuster that have changed everything," he said. "We've gone from roughly three to four filibusters a congress to 130 in the last Congress. We did two things that made it far more palatable. The first thing we did was to say we're going to start -- and this is a technical term -- dual tracking legislation.

"That is, we'll just set the filibuster aside and take up something else. And then we went from dual tracking to triple tracking. Believe it or not, we've actually in the last few Congresses gone to quintuple tracking -- moving aside things so we have five legislative tracks going simultaneously, making the filibuster so easy."

He continued: "But the second thing we did was even more important. It used to be ... when you were on the floor and you were filibustering you had to hold the floor. You no longer have to do that. And if you don't have to hold the floor, there's no price to be paid.... I'd just go back to the old rules. There's a reason we only had three filibusters. You can't triple track, you can't dual track and you gotta hold the floor until you can't hold it anymore and you gotta run to the restroom."

The panel, "Congress's Fall from Grace: Can We Reverse It?," might just as well have been titled "Why Washington Is Broken and No One Can Fix It," as Daschle and panelists Vin Weber, Jane Harman, Mickey Edwards, and Dan Glickman described the transformation they'd witnessed as the United States has undergone wave after wave of procedural reforms intended on increasing transparency, accountability, and the connection between party and ideology in the United States, leading us to a world where congressmen and women talk to the cameras instead of each other, spend far too much time fundraising, leave families behind in their districts and don't socialize with each other, are encouraged by electoral forces to avoid compromise, and now are members of the most disliked, most bitterly divided Congress in over a century. Many of their specific critiques were familiar, and after the forum I would up speaking with an attendee frustrated by the lack of "Aha!" moments in their catalog of civil woes.

But what if the problem with our political system, which is more polarized than at any time since before the Civil War, is not one that can be solved with one big sexy new idea? What if instead it is one more akin to the problem of a neighborhood that has fallen into disrepair, beset by a multitude of problems that are well-recognized but extremely difficult to solve, because the product and responsibility of so many different actors, each responding to slightly different pressures? Reading about the antebellum Congress in Adam Goodheart's 1861: The Civil War Awakening last year, I recognized a familiar portrait of legislative conflict and stalemate. That era's Congress unwound its entrenched partisan positions only after political battles gave way to military ones in a bloody and protracted internal conflict. Our present stalemate is of a different nature, not so much about one big thing (slavery) as the results of many little things, now that America has changed so that geography, party, and ideology are more closely aligned than ever before, thanks to what journalist Bill Bishop calls "the big sort."

But to the extent that our problems have to do with this geographic sorting -- geography, after all, is the fundamental organizing principle of our democracy, so it stands to reason anything that impacts how the population is organized across space will have profound political effects -- it is possible the cure to what ails us politically will have the qualities of what it takes to rebuild a physical community. Chief among them: It will be slow -- decades long -- and require the political equivalent of anchor tenants who can draw others into reinvesting in the system. And it may also require the passage of enough time for the great sort -- the political downside of the flight of educated creative class types into specific geographic areas, giving rise to the cultural hubs Richard Florida has so well described -- to ebb, and the flow of people and energy to return to communities rendered homogeneous by both outflow and a lack of new citizens.

Meanwhile, Harman suggested that one way of pushing back against the new extremism is for states to move to open primaries, like they have in her home state of California, where the top two vote getters of whatever party then face of in a general election. That would lessen the power of small groups of committed partisans and factions of all sorts, and their power to drag politicians from the center, or off the stage entirely. But anything that's up to the states takes time, and will be adopted only if it suits local circumstances (meaning: if it is seen as in the interests of local powers that be). In short: don't hold your breath.

We may just be in an era of learning to live with the political equivalent of eyesores on the corner, an ugly time of broken institutions. One day, the fire that animates today's political gangs will burn itself out. Some old thing will be judge unsalvageable and need to be razed. Someone new will move in to the neighborhood and plant some flowers and repaint a house. But there doesn't seem to be a magic way out, a snap your fingers instant solution to the political and ideological stalemates, any more than there is to rebuilding a neighborhood in physical space.

University of Chicago law Professor Randy Picker tries to catalog the many different legal rulings in the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act (via @FrankPasquale). Click to enlarge:

Read The Atlantic's full coverage of the Supreme Court's health-care decision.

From health care reform to immigration, President Obama is counting on Washington's inertia to make changes that last.

Republican reaction to the Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act was swift and outraged. Romney Press Secretary Andrea Saul tweeted that he'd raised more than $300,000 in the first hour after the verdict was announced. "The only way to save the country from ObamaCare's budget-busting government takeover of health care is to elect a new president," said Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus as Republicans launched a #FullRepeal hashtag on Twitter and announced another (and largely symbolic) House vote to repeal the ACA the week of July 9.

But with the Supreme Court having upheld the ACA, Republicans are now clearly fighting a rear-guard action against a law that is partially implemented and which seems likely to grow in popularity now that it has been ratified and turned into something people can look forward to taking advantage of over time. The Supreme Court decision forces Republicans to express their conservatism not through new program proposals but by standing athwart history yelling stop. Obama has created a set of facts on the ground, and the inertial power of Washington and massive complexity of the health-care field that made universal health-care coverage little more than a Democratic fantasy from 1948 through 2009 will now tip the balance of power in the direction the president has set. Republicans can rail about it all they like, but in Washington, it is hard to ever completely undo what has been done.

Obama has created a set of facts on the ground -- real change -- and the Republican promise to repeal the ACA on day one of a Romney Administration is now a promise to re-litigate the past rather than move America forward. I mean seriously: After four years of arguing about health care, do the American people really want another four-year argument that turns the national conversation into something as annoying and frustrating as tangling with an insurance claims agent? Or will they want to move on, let the ACA be settled law, and argue around the margins on the implementation complications that are sure to arise?

My money is on the latter. That doesn't mean Republicans won't fight it, and keep fighting it. Heck, we're still relitigating the 1973 Supreme Court decisions legalizing abortion nearly 40 years later. But abortion also still remains legal, even if access has been severely restricted in some areas, and that's also an issue about which there is deep moral passion. The moral passion to strip people under 26 of the ability to be on their parent's insurance and to prevent people from getting insurance despite pre-existing conditions will be much thinner. In Washington, it is hard to undo what has been done.

That's a central understanding we can see underlying some of Obama's recent other moves, as well.

In issuing an executive order allowing prosecutors to use their discretion to stop deportation proceedings against young illegal immigrants raised in this country, Obama has created another set of facts on the ground. Not only does the order help win over Hispanic voters in advance of the 2012 election, but it creates a policy that Republicans will either have to keep or overturn should Obama lose the election. It will be much harder for Republicans to undo his policy without even further alienating Hispanics than it would have been to simply fumble on comprehensive immigration reform. The new policy creates facts on the ground that strengthen the inertial forces to continue it.

You might even call that a legacy.

Read The Atlantic's full coverage of the Supreme Court's health-care decision.

His message for more than two years has been that the president should have focused on jobs instead of health care during his first year in office.

Molly Ball's curtain raiser on what Mitt Romney might say today in reaction to the Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare reminded me that he's been nothing if not consistent in calling it a waste of time and a distraction from fixing the economy. Take this March 2010 speech at the National Press Club in Washington, which did not get much attention at the time. My report:

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney had some sharp words Friday for President Obama's economic and foreign policies, criticizing him for spending the past year on health-care reform instead of focusing narrowly on job creation.

Appearing at the National Press Club, the potential 2012 Republican presidential primary contender accused Obama of having the most anti-business, anti-enterprise, anti-employment agenda "since the days of Jimmy Carter" and taking an approach that "has prolonged the recession."

"When you have an enterprise in trouble, the Number One rule is this: Focus, focus, focus," said Romney, the former chief executive of a management consulting firm, Bain & Co. "Make sure you concentrate on the Number One priority with all your energy and passion."

Instead of getting the economy back on track and creating jobs, "the president decided to focus his energy on health care," said Romney. "As a result of his agenda, the opposite of what he has hoped for has occurred."

Skipping over the $862 billion economic stimulus bill that was Obama's first major legislative achievement, Romney said the focus on health-care, coupled with other domestic policy goals, have created an environment of uncertainty for American businesses that was impeding the economic recovery....

It was the GOP message of the day -- "Instead of trying to ram through a health care overhaul ... the President and Speaker Pelosi should focus on getting our fiscal house in order and getting Americans back to work," House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said Friday in a statement....

That's some impressive message discipline.

Now that the Affordable Care Act has been upheld by the Supreme Court, however, on the grounds that it's constitutional under the government's power to tax, the GOP focus is once again turning to repeal -- along with with a fresh line of attack objecting to the law as a tax increase on middle income Americans. Majority Leader Eric Cantor announced this morning that he'll schedule another House vote to repeal it for the week of July 9.

Allow me to make a brief public service announcement: I follow Mitt Romney on Facebook because I want to know what his campaign is up to online. I also follow President Obama and a number of other politicians. But, to paraphrase the standard Twitter disclosure, liking is not an endorsement. Anyway, the image at right was sent to me by a friend today. If you, too, would like to avoid be rolled up in a social promotion for a politician's site on Facebook, go to Account Settings in Facebook. Select the "Ads and Friends" section under "Facebook Ads." Choose the option "no one" in the drop-down menu. Save changes. That is all.

Welcome to the Mittness Protection Program, general-election style: The man accused of having no core beliefs thinks the way to win is to keep his views to himself.

"When is Romney going to look like a challenger? Seems to play everything safe, make no news except burn off Hispanics," media mogul Rupert Murdoch tweeted Sunday.

It's been the plaintive cry of worried supporters and the shrewd observation of reporters for going on a year now: Mitt Romney's favored strategy for pursuing the presidency this cycle is to hide in plain sight, avoiding hot-button issues except when forced to articulate positions on them, as during debates, and then reverting to close-lipped type. He's declined to release tax returns dating to before 2010. He doesn't make his bundlers known. He tells his donors more about his policy ambitions than the public, as reporters discovered in April when his remarks were "overheard by reporters on a sidewalk below" the room where he was speaking. He holds "secret meetings" with voters to collect campaign anecdotes. Most recently, he's avoided taking a firm stand on the Supreme Court's decision partially overturning Arizona's strict immigration law. But as in the primary, where Romney's cautious style caused worry he was setting himself up for a protracted battle -- something that in fact came to pass -- there are real dangers in his approach.

"You're running for president and there's a golden opportunity for a challenger, given the economy, given the many failed initiatives of the Obama administration. It's somewhat confusing as to why he's playing it so close to the vest," conservative Republican strategist Keith Appell told Politico's Ben Smith last August.

Plus ça change. Here's why it could be good tactics but bad strategy for Romney to stay too far above the fray in the general:

1. It makes Romney look weak.

Former President Clinton famously said after the 2002 midterm elections, in which the Republicans, the party in power, anomalously picked up seats, "When people are insecure, they'd rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than someone who's weak and right." Failing to take stands on the major issues of the day because they are controversial makes Romney look like he lacks the courage of his convictions. That reemphasizes the attack on Romney that he lacks convictions at all. But a say-nothing candidate is actually not the same as a say-anything one; the latter looks craven, the former, afraid.

And to the extent that President Obama makes bold moves on potentially divisive social issues, Romney's fear of coming too distinctly into view -- his "attack-and-dodge strategy" -- is cast into even greater relief.

2. It makes him look like he has something to hide.

Between the overseas bank accounts, the lack of financial disclosure, and the destruction of his gubernatorial records in Massachusetts, it already looks like Romney is trying to hide his record and the true extent of his vast wealth. Failing to takes stands on major issues besides makes Romney look like he must believe something terrible in his heart of hearts.

The perception that Obama contained multitudes, even if he did not, worked for him in 2008. He was a newcomer on the scene onto whom voters projected their fantasies, hoping he would be a less conventional political actor than he in fact has been. But there's a real risk for Romney, who is better defined in the public mind than Obama was, that attempts to remain a bit of a cipher will just make him look sneaky.

"Trust me" is not a compelling campaign message for our our low-trust era.

3. It gives new weight to the argument he has no core and doesn't believe in anything except his own success.

All of this adds up to the idea that we can't know who Romney is. This is just anecdata, but a year ago, a number of Democrats of my acquaintance looked at Romney and saw a credible alternative to a president they were mad at -- a well-educated moderate Massachusetts Republican for whom they could vote without fear or embarrassment. Today, that warmth has passed and I hear a growing nervousness about him, a fear he would be worse than George W. Bush in office because of his lack of core convictions and the greater fractiousness and power of grassroots Republican activists, whom he seems open to indulging.

They are worried, in short, that "he who stands for nothing will fall for anything."

Romney's issue positions look increasingly like the negotiations of an attorney trying to close a deal -- he'll say what he needs to say, he'll tack and trim, and he'll change course if need be in order to get the result he wants at the great public bargaining table. But once in office, how will such a man govern? Romney's campaign is trying to play it safe by not revealing too much. But there's a real risk people also will look at that caution and develop some hesitations of their own.

Pretty much exactly what you'd expect, as pulled by the Public Campaign Action Fund for a Pinterest board.

As Mitt Romney prepares for a weekend in the resort community of Deer Valley, Utah -- an even posher, often gated enclave just outside Park City, full of enormous private ski chalets -- with Republican leaders and major campaign donors, you might want to take a look at the Public Campaign Action Fund's Pinterest board picturing 33 billionaires who have donated to Restore Our Future, a pro-Romney super PAC. The Romney gathering will be for donors to the Romney Victory Fund, but billionaires who donate large amounts to outside groups tend not to skimp on the formal campaign, once they've committed, and some of these folks seem likely to make an appearance in Utah, too.

Reports Utah's Deseret News:

The exclusive event is one of the perks for donors who have given at least $50,000 or raised a minimum of $250,000 for the Romney Victory Fund, which shares contributions with the Republican Party.

The more than 700 guests expected will hear from what's being billed as the GOP "Dream Team," a list that includes the party's 2008 nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, strategist Karl Rove, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

Besides panel discussions Friday and Saturday on banking, health care, Israel, innovation and the media, there's a barbecue at the Utah Olympic Park, a tea with Romney's wife, Ann, and Olympic ice skating gold-medalist Dorothy Hamill, and golf.

"This is about rewarding your big donors," University of Utah political science professor Matthew Burbank said. "There won't be any average Utahns there at all unless they're serving food or something."...

The Deer Valley retreat is one of two that will be held for top donors and fundraisers. Details of the fall retreat, including where it will be held, have yet to be announced. The same group will also receive special access to the GOP's national convention in Tampa.

Hagle said such treatment is typical for big campaign backers, Republican and Democrat. "It's that access," he said, "that causes them to open their checkbooks."

(via TPM)

It's not just unemployment. All the downsizing and devaluation folks have been through is profoundly affecting the national mood -- and our politics.

Maybe if you filed your expenses more regularly that would help?(Shutterstock)

The New York Post recently ran a story on the suicide of former Lehman Brothers "star" Charles Hopper, which the paper said provides "a glimpse of the terrible legacy that lingers on, even among the wealthy, years after the economic crash." He went from earning seven figures a year to earning $150,000 a year -- what most people still consider a very good salary, but a major downsizing for him -- after two years unable to find work, only to lose his new post and, most recently, have another job fall through. He was underwater on his house, having borrowed against it during the boom, and started having marital problems during the long period in which he wasn't working. In May, he hung himself. "He was under tremendous financial pressure, and he felt aged out of his industry," his wife told the paper.

Suicides in the financial sector stand out because they're seared into national memory as iconic of the great crash of 1929, after which the national suicide rate jumped from 13.5 per 100,000 to 18.9 per 100,000 in a year. We haven't seen anything like that this time around, and the fact that the very wealthy have done so very well for themselves during the past few decades has led to the Occupy movement's drive against the 1 percent, rather than any kind of public sympathy for those who've been forced into the 5 percent, or from the 5 percent to the 10 percent, or even from the 25 percent to the 35 percent.

And yet it sometimes seems as though our obsessive focus on the very wealthy -- envying them and valorizing them before the crash; critiquing them after it -- is as politically distracting as attacks on programs for the very poor. There is so much space in American life between the 1 percent and the unemployed, between those who can donate millions to political campaigns and those who don't even have health-care coverage, but the amount of attention devoted to the extremes and the margins can make it harder to see what's happening in this vast middle.

As National Journal's Ron Brownstein observed in January, "on most questions measuring changes in economic circumstances, the slowdown has imposed greater costs on those at the economy's margins -- lower-income families, those without advanced education, and, in many cases, minorities. But partly because the downturn has affected not only income and employment but also housing and stock prices, it has reached into leafy cul-de-sacs often sheltered from such storms."

A March 2011 Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll found that "families earning at least $100,000 were more likely than those earning less to report that their homes had declined in value" and an October 2011 one found that "more than two-fifths of such affluent families, and nearly three-fifths of college graduates, said that the downturn had forced them to cut back on their spending either to pay down existing debt or avoid adding to it," Brownstein reported.

Because people don't have to be 99ers to find their own financial strains politically relevant in the voting booth, it matters when even those who, when seen from the bottom 25 percent, appear to be among the more privileged in American life feel that they are struggling. Not only do such people vote -- they consistently have higher turnout. Sixty percent of those from households earning above $75,000 voted in 2010, compared to 40 percent from those earning less than $50,000. And 61 percent of those with a college degree or above voted, as compared to 35 percent of those with a high-school education or less. Even in the high-turnout, demographically unusual 2008 election, the gap was there: 59 percent of those with incomes of $50,000 or less voted, compared to 76 percent of those who earned more than that.

The New York Times tried to get at some of this Tuesday in a piece looking past all the talk of unemployment to examine the many American workers who find themselves underemployed or underpaid. But as is typical of the contemporary hard-times genre piece, it led with a non-college educated person making an hourly wage who'd seen her wages cut so that she made but $233 last month -- which is less than one full-time week's worth of pay at the federal minimum wage.

The political problem for the incumbent president is that it's not just older bus drivers in Atlanta like that hourly earner who are living in the churn of the troubled economy. It's nearly everybody, still, in one way or another. Even professionals with graduate degrees are having trouble finding appropriate work, according to The National Law Journal:

Slightly more than half of the class of 2011 -- 55 percent -- found full-time, long-term jobs that require bar passage nine months after they graduated, according to employment figures released on June 18 by the American Bar Association.

The statistic was perhaps the most sobering in a season of bad news about new lawyer employment. Less than one week earlier, the National Association for Law Placement reported that only two-thirds of new graduates landed any type of job requiring their law degree, and that the overall employment rate hit an 18-year low at 85.6 percent.

People in their prime earning years are in especially bad shape, The Huffington Post reports, compared to their parents -- a classic benchmark of lifetime success against which people measure themselves:

The average Gen X family is nearly 70 percent poorer than its counterparts of the same age in 1984, according to a Pew Research Center study from last year. Over time, this gap has widened. The latter now has 47 times more assets than the former, according to Credit.com's analysis of Pew data.

Part of this is because Americans lost a huge amount of their wealth in the crash, and haven't gotten it back:

The recession has affected individuals of all ages. Last week, newly released government data showed that Americans lost a record-breaking 38.8 percent of their wealth from 2007-2010.

Also causing a crunch: health-care costs have doubled since the Clinton years:

The cost of health insurance for many Americans [in 2011] climbed more sharply than in previous years, outstripping any growth in workers' wages and adding more uncertainty about the pace of rising medical costs.

A new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit research group that tracks employer-sponsored health insurance on a yearly basis, shows that the average annual premium for family coverage through an employer reached $15,073 in 2011, an increase of 9 percent over the previous year....

Over all, the cost of family coverage has about doubled since 2001, when premiums averaged $7,061, compared with a 34 percent gain in wages over the same period.

The cost of college is also way up, even at historically affordable public universities:

Nationally, state and local spending per college student, adjusted for inflation, reached a 25-year low this year [2012], jeopardizing the long-held conviction that state-subsidized higher education is an affordable steppingstone for the lower and middle classes. All the while, the cost of tuition and fees has continued to increase faster than the rate of inflation, faster even than medical spending. If the trends continue through 2016, the average cost of a public college will have more than doubled in just 15 years, according to the Department of Education.

College debt is also up, as are struggles to pay it off:

The balance of federal student loans has grown by more than 60 percent in the last five years .... But even if student loans are what many economists consider "good debt," an increasing number of borrowers are struggling to pay them off, and in the process becoming mired in a financial morass.

Education Department data shows that payments are being made on just 38 percent of the balance of federal student loans, down from 46 percent five years ago. The balances are unpaid because the borrowers are still in school, have postponed payments or have stopped paying altogether.

Nearly one in 10 borrowers who started repayment in 2009 defaulted within two years, the latest data available -- about double the rate in 2005.

Though still down from their recession peak, foreclosures were again on the rise in May:

U.S. home foreclosure filings increased 9 percent last month over April, according to a new report from RealtyTrac, an online marketplace that tracks foreclosures.

Foreclosure filings were reported on 205,990 homes in May -- that's one in every 639 homes nationwide. That's about 4 percent lower than this time last year, but the rising monthly rates underscore how difficult it will be to restart the devastated housing market.

So were foreclosure starts:

Foreclosure starts -- default notices or scheduled foreclosure auctions, depending on the state -- were filed on 109,051 U.S. properties in May, a 12 percent increase from April and a 16 percent increase from May 2011.

Meanwhile, there are not enough job openings to go around:

Job openings fell to a five-month low in April and showed their sharpest percentage decline in about seven and a half years, according to a government report Tuesday that helped confirm a slowdown in the labor market.

The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, indicated 3.4 million job openings at the end of April, an 8 percent decline from the previous month.

The pace of total hiring also slowed, with 160,000 fewer jobs filled during the month.

Moreover, the drop showed weakness across the employment spectrum, with manufacturing seeing 62,000 fewer job openings and construction dropping by 2,000.

Hiring has slowed and firings are up:

Job openings in the U.S. decreased in April by the most in almost four years, the latest sign that the labor market is cooling.

The number of open positions dropped by 325,000, the biggest decline since September 2008, to 3.42 million from 3.74 million the prior month, the Labor Department said today in Washington. Hiring slowed from the prior month and firings climbed.

The decrease in openings coincides with the slowdown in hiring seen in April and May, signaling employers are pulling back as the economy cools. The number of jobs available is down from an average 4.46 million in the two years before the recession began, showing the labor market continues to struggle.

Nor are enough new jobs being created to keep pace with the size of the population:

Anyone hoping for a healthy labor-market recovery is going to be sorely disappointed by the May jobs report. The U.S. economy added just 69,000 jobs last month -- far below expectations. The unemployment rose to 8.2 percent. And the details of the report are even more dire.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics revised down its job estimates for previous months, too. Remember when everyone gulped in April because the economy added only 115,000 new jobs? Turns out that was actually just 77,000 new jobs. March also got bumped down, from 154,000 to 143,000. For the past two years, BLS revisions have frequently been upward. That streak appears to be broken.

Much of the job carnage seems to be driven by the construction sector, which lost 28,000 jobs last month. As Jed Kolko of the housing research firm Trulia notes, construction jobs now make up just 4.1 percent of all employment -- the lowest level since 1946. And the United States hasn't added any new construction jobs, on net, since the beginning of last year. There's still a massive hangover from the housing bubble. ...

All told, the U.S. job market appears to be sputtering out.

No surprise then that wages are down, and mobility along with it:

adjusted for inflation, the median hourly wage was lower in 2011 than it was a decade earlier, according to data from a forthcoming book by the Economic Policy Institute, "The State of Working America, 12th Edition." Good benefits are harder to come by, and people are staying longer in jobs that they want to leave, afraid that they will not be able to find something better. Only 2.1 million people quit their jobs in March, down from the 2.9 million people who quit in December 2007, the first month of the recession.

The government sector is downsizing, too, now that the stimulus moment has given way to the austerity era:

Government payrolls grew in the early part of the recovery, largely because of federal stimulus measures. But since its postrecession peak in April 2009 (not counting temporary Census hiring), the public sector has shrunk by 657,000 jobs. The losses appeared to be tapering off earlier this year, but have accelerated for the last three months, creating the single biggest drag on the recovery in many areas.

***

This all adds up to a portrait of an economy that's in a much more multifarious kind of trouble than you can see just from the unemployment rate. And one much harder to untangle from Washington, D.C.

Know something else wrong with the economy? Add it in comments, below.

Newt Gingrich tells ABC News (during an interview at the Washington National Zoo, natch) why the former Massachusetts governor gets to be President Obama's challenger:

"In the end, he had, I think, sixteen billionaires and we had one."

With a new book alleging John Edwards had multiple affairs, his famous mistress lengthens the already long odds of a political redemption.

An actual button being sold by Democrats during the 2004 presidential campaign, produced by a union shop and everything. (Garance Franke-Ruta, personal collection)

It's no accident that in politics we talk of candidates wooing voters or courting the electorate, and joke that some are ones to date and others to marry. The language of politics and the language of romantic love have been intertwined since the emergence of early modern English literature, in part because the Renaissance flowering of such coincided with the rule of a female queen in England, and was a product of her court. But the relationship between the language of romantic courtship and of political courtiers, the wooing of women and the wooing of the politically powerful, goes back even further and speaks to something fundamental in our understanding of what it means to seduce and to create allegiances and passion.

Which is why it's so striking in all the tales of politicians philandering there's so little actual seduction involved. So John Edwards's mistress Rielle Hunter will say in her book What Really Happened: John Edwards, Our Daughter and Me, to be released next week, reiterating tales she's told for years and newly revealing that she was not Edwards's only one. He'd had two affairs before, she writes.

To which one might reply, as Buffy the Vampire Slayer would say, "Does the word 'duh' mean anything to you?"

All you need to know about a man is how he has strayed to know whether he is a player or a fool for love. As I wrote after the Anthony Weiner scandal, where the story of a single graphic mistweet rapidly morphed into the story of sexting with multiple women, the iron law of political sex scandals is that there is no such thing as two. Either someone strays once -- think of former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford's teary confession that he'd "developed a relationship" with a "dear friend" -- or does so over and over as part of a pattern of behavior. And you can usually tell from the description of the affair or straying in question which of the two scenarios you're looking at.

According to a copy of the book obtained by ABC News, Hunter says she met Edwards in February 2006 and told him, "You're so hot." He then called to invite her back to his hotel room at the New York Regency Hotel. And that was that. This kind of behavior comes across pretty plainly as the actions of a man who was not nervous at all about what he was doing and also not afraid of rejection or being exposed. The most logical explanation for his demeanor and approach of course is the one she now says was the case -- that he'd been down that road before. In short, it was never probable that Hunter was the only other woman in Edwards' marriage, based solely on the evidence of his actions, and the manner in which their affair began.

The apparently frankness of Hunter's forthcoming book -- which she will discuss in an interview airing on ABC News Friday -- will likely close off the only avenue for redemption Edwards might have had. As Chris Cillizza has pointed out, the usual path to political redemption for straying politicians begins with forgiveness by the person closest to him -- his wife. That's not an option in Edwards's case.

Unlike Spitzer and Vitter, whose spouses stood by them and pledged to make it work, Edwards' wife, Elizabeth, passed away in December 2010. There was no forgiveness. And there will be no chance for it.

Unlike Vitter or Spitzer, who can hope for future stories about how they weathered a very rocky time in their relationship, Edwards will forever be burdened by the fact that he cheated on his terminally ill wife.

In the eyes of the American public, that makes any chance to forgive and forget about what Edwards has done next to impossible. For Edwards to have any reasonable hope about reemerging as a public (or political) figure, there would need to be a parallel storyline about how his wife was prospering and enjoying her life. And that's not possible.

The only conceivable exception to this rule is the marriage exception as demonstrated by Prince Charles, who managed to restore his reputation after the death of Lady Diana by sticking with his long-time paramour Camilla Parker-Bowles and eventually marrying her. It's hard to imagine Edwards and Hunter developing a real relationship and marrying at this point, though she's apparently also vague in the book about the nature of her current relationship to Edwards.

Still, "he has a long history of lying about one thing only -- women -- and I mistakenly thought I was different," Hunter writes. That doesn't sound like the basis for a strong alliance, whether political or romantic, going forward.

First, he came out for same sex marriage. Now a second bold move on behalf of a marginal group will dominate the conversation.

Is this how Obama's 2012 campaign is going to go? Boring economic speeches that have trouble breaking through, mixed with daring pronouncements in support of long-standing drives toward a more equitable society for some of America's most marginalized residents?

First President Obama came out in support for same-sex marriage in a move bolder than even many gay and lesbian activists expected. Now he's using the authority of the bully pulpit and the power of the regulatory state on behalf of young Americans born abroad but raised here, the illegal immigrants/undocumented Americans (how awful that there is no longer even any neutral term for such residents of this country, so partisan has the issue of their rights and future become) who would have been covered by the DREAM Act, should the U.S. Congress ever have seen fit to pass it. The executive order taking advantage of prosecutorial discretion in deportation cases will cover individuals brought to the United States through no fault of their own before the age of 16 who have lived in the U.S. at least five years and have no criminal record. They must also have earned a high school degree or served in the military, and still be under 30. Those who meet the criteria can get deportation proceedings (or the threat of same) deferred for two years and seek work permits.

Coming in the wake of the publication of a cover story in Time magazine on the plight of "undocumented Americans" by Jose Antonio Vargas, founder of Define American (and a former colleague of mine at The Washington Post), the move seems certain to electrify the presidential race and solidify the support of Hispanic Americans.

Vargas says the administration's move in support of "deferred action" on deportation will allow all but three of the 36 "undocumented Americans" pictured on the Time cover to "now be legal residents," though it won't impact him, since he's over the age cut off outlined in the new "deferred action" executive order. His full statement:

Today our country embraces upwards of one million young new Americans: DREAMers. They grew up here, they were educated here and they have so much to give back to the country they call home. With a stroke of President Obama's pen, our country lives up to its ideals and finds a fair and pragmatic solution, ending the nightmare of a generation of young people who are Americans in all but documents. Every social movement in the world is led by young people, and DREAMers are the beating heart of this growing immigrant rights movement. Like generations of immigrants before them, they have insisted on a better life not just for themselves and their families but for the country they love. This is a victory for DREAMers and the members of their underground railroad -- educators and faith leaders, friends and neighbors -- who have aided and supported them. The journey is far from over for the remaining millions of undocumented Americans like me -- at 31, I am past the age limit -- but this is a big, bold and necessary step in the road to citizenship. Thank you, President Obama, for this principled and courageous act.

The executive order does not constitute amnesty and won't provide the young people with a path to citizenship, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters on a conference call Friday morning.

"These young people do not represent a risk to safety or security," she said.