Let's see, where to begin?

We'll get to that provocative title in the Talking Points section, never fear. I felt the need for a sort of a rant this week, as well as a little humor to open it up with. Truth be told, I've been in a humorous mood all week, as evidenced by my column casting the Republican primary race so far as a climb up the polling mountain range. I think it's the spring weather or something. Since we're on the subject, though, Republican candidates seem like a good place to start today.

Newt Gingrich's health care think tank just filed for bankruptcy. Gingrich has reportedly now taken to charging fifty bucks for a photo with Newtie, which seems like scraping the barrel, when it comes to strategies for boosting campaign finances. But, as we've always believed, when you scrape the bottom of many Washington barrels, there you'll find Newt, deep in the gunk at the bottom. So to speak.

Newt wants everyone to know that he's not giving up the race yet, but unfortunately for him not only his donors have deserted him like rats leaving a sinking ship, but the media has also stopped paying attention to Newt. Unless you count late-night comedians joking about the $50 photo-ops, which isn't exactly the media coverage candidates dream of (to put it mildly).

The chairman of the Republican National Committee now thinks women voters are "caterpillars"... or something... it's hard to tell what any RNC chair thinks, if truth be told. It's hard enough just to spell the guy's name right (and this is coming from a person who knows all about the trouble "ei" and "ie" cause in names, I should mention). When asked whether he agreed that the Republicans were waging a "War on Women" or whether the whole thing was made up, Reince Priebus replied: "If the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars and every mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we'd have problems with caterpillars. It's a fiction."

Um, OK, Reince. We'll remind you of this in the fall, when all those fictional caterpillar-women burst out of their cocoons and become the beautiful butterflies of Democratic votes, just in case you've forgotten your metaphor.

One wonders what George W. Bush would think, since his favorite book to read to children was reportedly The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Ahem.

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The rhetoric surrounding the Supreme Court and the H.H.S. v. Florida case certainly ratcheted up on both sides this week. Expect this partisan fray to get even more intense in the weeks leading up to the decision on the constitutionality of Obamacare, expected in late June. But I'm not going to get into the midst of this fray today (perhaps I will do so tomorrow, though), because I thought it would be more intelligent to review some bedrock definitions of the terms involved.

The first is "constitutional." What is constitutional and what is not? The answer may sound cynical, but it is the absolute truth: what is constitutional is whatever a majority of Supreme Court justices currently say is constitutional. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. Of course, even this fact may not be constitutional in and of itself, but we'll get to that in a moment.

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I'm going to be honest, here. I'm just as bored with the Republican nomination race as everyone else is by now. The mainstream media pundits have done a mighty job of trying to keep the excitement alive, but it's just not working anymore. I can do math, and Mitt Romney has been the obvious winner for at least a month now -- which even the pundits are beginning to sheepishly admit.

So instead of dwelling on "what Mitt's Wisconsin win means" today, instead I'd like to invite you to look backwards with me, and recall the journey we've already made up to this point. Because I was bored, I created a semi-artistic image to chronicle the highs and lows of the 2012 Republican nomination race. I did this by taking a snapshot of the RealClearPolitics.com graph of the Republican polling for the whole field so far, and then filling it in to resemble a majestic range of mountains, stretching off into the distance (I left the original colors and lines intact, and also left the logo and color key to give full credit for my "artistic inspiration").

[Click on image to see full-scale version.]

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In the last primary season, back in 2008, three political entities clustered around the Potomac River all voted on the same day, and thus was born "Crab Cake Tuesday." This year, for some inexplicable reason, Virginia has decided not to vote on the same day as Maryland and the District of Columbia, and (again, inexplicably) Wisconsin replaced Virginia. Linking these three in a cute label has become much tougher as a direct result. The only thing we could come up with was "Crabby Badger Tuesday," which... well, we admit it, it's just too downright bizarre to be considered cute.

So we do apologize for the title of today's column, and invite others to come up with their own name for today's voting in the comments, if you should feel so inclined.

But enough of such nonsense, let's get on with our tradition of predicting the outcomes of today's races. As always, we start with a quick peek at our scoreboard for the year. The last contest was held in Louisiana, where we accurately predicted a Santorum win, which slightly boosted our score for the season:

Total correct 2012 primary picks so far: 38 for 57 -- 67%.

With that out of the way, let's move quickly on to our picks for tonight's races, which I regret to say, are about as conventional as you can get. In order of smallest-to-largest:

Washington, D.C.

This one's pretty easy, since Rick Santorum (whoops!) forgot to get his name on the ballot. Romney wins overwhelmingly -- perhaps by his biggest margin yet. Newt will likely come in a very distant second, over Ron Paul. No polling has been available for the District, but this seems like a pretty safe guess at this point.

Maryland

Mitt Romney wins a decisive victory in Maryland as well. If the polls can be believed, he'll likely get around twice the votes Santorum will manage, with Gingrich lucky to crack into double digits, and Ron Paul managing only fourth place.

Wisconsin

Wisconsin seems to be the race everyone's paying the most attention to, which is why we saved it for last. The Badger State would seem, geographically at least, to be a prime pickup for Santorum, as all the states he has so far won are contiguous on a map. Santorum has already won two of the four states which touch Wisconsin (Minnesota and Iowa), meaning Wisconsin would fit right in to his stronghold in the South and the Plains.

But the other two states which touch Wisconsin are Illinois and Michigan, and demographically Wisconsin is closer to these than to the states further west. This has shown up in the polling, where Romney has been maintaining what appears to be a 7-to-10 point lead.

The media may have missed it by focusing too much on Romney's "joke" about his dad closing down auto plants, but George Romney had strong ties to Wisconsin. The American Motors Corporation built Ramblers (and other cars we won't bother mentioning) in Kenosha for years and years -- something the older Wisconsin residents may fondly remember.

In any case, we're going to go with the conventional wisdom here, and call the state for Romney. Santorum will pick up second place in a closer race than the other two being held today, and Newt Gingrich will be embarrassed by a fourth-place finish behind Ron Paul.

The pundit universe appears to be ready to call the Republican race all but over should Romney win here decisively, but then my guess is that they're too addicted to the horserace aspect of our national nominating contest, and will continue to breathlessly present each primary or caucus as "a possible game-changer" for at least another month.

Those are my predictions, what are yours?

[Previous states' picks:]
[IA] [NH] [SC] [FL] [NV] [CO, MN, and MO] [ME] [AZ and MI] [WA] [Super Tuesday: AK, GA, ID, MA, ND, OH, OK, TN, VT, and VA] [Guam, KS, Virgin Islands, Northern Marianas] [Puerto Rico] [IL] [LA]

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

A Flat Month

President Obama had a fairly flat month of March in the polls. His approval rating slipped back a half a point, and his disapproval rating stayed unchanged from last month. While his approval stayed above his disapproval for the month, the gap between the two is smaller than it's ever been. All month long he teetered back and forth in terms of being "above water" but showed signs of at least stabilizing by month's end. This brought an end to five straight months of good news in the polls for the president, the longest streak he's ever managed to post.

Let's take a look at the graph, although because things are so flat, it's a little hard to see:

[Click on graph to see larger-scale version.]

March, 2012

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This week, the punditocracy had no Republican primary contest to distract their attention ("The upcoming primary/caucus in some state I've never traveled through because it's a flyover state could be the crucial turning point in the entire race... details at 11:00..."), and so the political pontificators and prognosticators had nothing else to talk about (one would think) except the serious business before the Supreme Court this week -- Obamacare.

After watching this media performance all week, I am left wondering whether Obamacare includes any treatments for groupthink (also known as "Herd Mentality Syndrome"). The subset of media mavens known as the "court-watchers" received prominence this week, because the anchors and various assorted politicos aren't required to understand legal issues (unlike the "good hair" requirement, for instance). These court-watchers decided to have some fun (that's the most charitable read I can come up with), and sent the rest of the media on a rollercoaster ride of gargantuan proportions.

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[This is going to be one of those short columns which rambles around and doesn't really go anywhere. Just to warn everyone in advance.]

The topic of the week in the political world has been President Obama's signature health care reform law, officially the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Early on, most folks realized that "PPACA" wasn't really the best thing to call it (although some still do use this term, pronounced "puh-pack-ah"). In general, Democrats stink at this whole "name a bill so its initials spell something" game on Capitol Hill. If this had been a Republican idea, my guess is it would have been called something like the "REAGAN IS AWESOME Act," or something equally clever (no, I'm not going to take the time to figure out something that spells that, but if you've a mind to, or to suggest an equally-plausible Republican name, feel free to do so in the comments). Getting back to the Democratic law, however, most Democrats have taken to shortening the name to just the "Affordable Care Act" or "ACA" -- up until very recently. I haven't heard anyone attempt to pronounce ACA yet (ack-ah? ass-ah?), instead just the initials are used. But while "Ay Cee Ay" is better than "puh-pack-ah" it still doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

Of course, I am being deliberately obtuse here. Early on, before the law even passed (I am not interested enough in that factoid to check whether it is true, I should mention), Republican opponents labeled it "Obamacare." Or, sometimes, "ObamaCare." Before we get to that, though, we have to run through a quick history, which is mostly accurate (but not obsessively so), of the use of "-care" to name these things.

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For the past three days, the political world has been largely focused on the Supreme Court, and the arguments over whether President Obama's signature legislative achievement is constitutional or not. At the heart of the argument is the "individual mandate," a section of the law which would require Americans to pay more money on their income taxes if they could afford health insurance but chose not to purchase it from a private company.

In the 2008 presidential election campaign, Barack Obama disagreed with Hillary Clinton on this issue. Clinton was for the individual mandate, Obama was not. Once he got elected and started wheeling and dealing with the insurance industry, however, Obama agreed to include the individual mandate in the law now universally known as "Obamacare."

While we're all waiting for the verdict from the Supreme Court, I thought it would be worthwhile to dig into the actual origins of the concept of the individual mandate. Now, the idea itself may have been around for much longer than the documentation I could find online, but the real political push behind the idea seems to have started in 1989, from the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation.

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Since the subject is pretty much the only thing people in the political world are talking about today, I thought it would be a good time to re-run the following column, which originally appeared here September 21, 2010. You might also find interesting another article I wrote, on Mitt Romney and the politics of health care in April of 2011, since it was fairly prescient as to the arc of Romney's campaigning on the issue. I offer up both in case anyone needs a break from Supreme Court transcripts today.

Howard Dean is (as he is often wont to do) making all kinds of sense on healthcare reform today. His idea is to jettison the "individual mandate" part of the healthcare reform law passed this year. And he's right, on both political and practical grounds.

The individual mandate is the least-liked part of healthcare reform. It really has no natural constituency other than insurance companies. There was no call from the public to include this in the final law (as there was with the "public option," in comparison). The Left wasn't in favor of it, and it causes apoplexy over on the Right. President Obama did not campaign on the individual mandate (although Hillary Clinton did, I should point out), so he obviously didn't think it was all that important (or all that good an idea, take your choice) before he got elected. Since the mandate appeared, very few people have bothered defending it in public. Its appearance in the debate was obviously a direct result of demands from the health insurance industry, who will be the obvious beneficiary of the plan.

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The Republican primary race this election year was planned in advance to be more competitive and less of a "coronation" of whichever candidate emerged as the early frontrunner. Republicans had looked at the 2008 Democratic race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and concluded it would serve as a good model for their own next primary season. Two major changes were instituted by the party to further this goal: stretching the primary schedule out, so it wasn't so front-loaded; and making the earlier states award their delegates proportionally, instead of awarding all of them to the winner (even if he or she won by only one vote). Both of these innovative modifications to party rules were meant to make the race "more competitive" and, hence, more exciting to the viewers at home. During the 2012 race as it has run so far, most political pundits (myself included, in all honesty), have repeatedly pointed to these two changes as the reason the race has been so drawn out. But while we pundits may have been right about the schedule, looking at the actual data on proportionality shows something very counterintuitive: awarding proportional delegates has actually made the race less competitive, not more.

Of course, this depends on how you define the terms "more competitive" and "less competitive," but the upshot is that if all the states which have so far voted had been "winner take all" (or "winner takes all," depending on your grammatical predilection) then Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum would be in an even closer race than they are now. To put this bluntly: if there were no proportional delegates at all, Rick Santorum would be doing a lot better.

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