Garance Franke-Ruta

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.

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.