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Larry McCarthy is one of the driving forces behind the Restore Our Future super PAC. This group is going to be Romney's chief attack dog in the battle for the airwaves for the next six months. Meaning McCarthy is going to have an enormous influence on how the Romney campaign slings mud. And McCarthy is a mudslinger extraordinaire -- he's a master of the art form.
The Republican primaries, for all intents and purposes, are over. Mitt won. But since this has become general knowledge, I certainly haven't noticed Mitt tacking anywhere but far to the right. Perhaps he took a "centrist" position in there somewhere, and I just missed it. Or perhaps, as I started with, he is just now realizing the corner he's painted himself into.
If you've been hiding under a rock somewhere all week, you may have missed the fact that an anniversary just happened. One year ago this past Wednesday, special operations forces killed America's "Enemy Number One," Osama Bin Laden. When it happened, it was a time for some sober reflection -- and some unsober and spontaneous celebration on the streets. Whether such was a good thing or not, it is what happened.
President Barack Obama had another uneventful month in the polls last month. I realize that's a pretty dull way to start a column, but we do the best with the data we are given, so to speak. Obama's average approval rate and disapproval rate both got better by the slimmest of margins -- one-tenth of a point -- which places him pretty much where he ended the past two months. His approval rating stayed above his disapproval rating, but by a margin of less than a full percentage point.
Jimmy Kimmel is right... sort of. In this past weekend's schmooze-fest between media organizations and the president (and, for some inexplicable reason, Hollywood), Kimmel performed a comedy routine for the president and the assembled crowd. Towards the end (around 19:40 on the video), Kimmel made a few marijuana jokes. He started by directly asking the president "What is with the marijuana crackdown?" Of course, being a comedian, a few punchlines followed. But the most notable one -- like all good comedic roasting -- had a kernel of truth in it: "You know, pot smokers vote too. Sometimes a week after the election, but they vote."
We begin by saying we certainly hope we can live up to such an exuberant headline. You will have to judge for yourself whether all those exclamation points were justified or not.
We speak today, instead, on the subject of verbizing. Verbizing, for those who have never heard the term, is the process of turning innocent nouns into verbs. This verbizing interlude is brought to you today by the trademark: "Etch A Sketch."
Which brings us back to John Quincy Adams. In 1825, newly-installed in the White House, Adams bought a billiard table for $50 (to liven the place up a bit, one assumes). He used his own money for this purchase, and one would think it wasn't really all that big a deal. One would be wrong.
There's an element to American political campaigns which everyone hates and almost everyone loves to denounce: the negative campaign advertisement. From now until November, many will fulminate against the "coarsening" of our political culture these ads supposedly usher in, and many will call for Mitt Romney and Barack Obama (and all the candidates further down the ballot) to renounce negative campaign advertising -- to absolutely no avail. The mudslinging will continue apace right up until Election Day, for one very simple reason: such ads work. They are effective. Which means -- especially for those living in "battleground" states -- that the only way to avoid the onslaught of political negativity will be to stop watching television altogether, until the election is safely over.
To put it another way: don't expect things to get better any time soon. Campaign season 2012 is off to an insanity-laced start, folks! No wonder so many across this great nation have decided that today would be a good day to celebrate tetrahydrocannabinol instead. You can see their point... through the billowing clouds of smoke.