President Obama last night unveiled a new twist on an old idea in his State Of The Union address to Congress -- limit the loopholes and tax giveaways that very wealthy people use to reduce their taxes far below the rate honest workers pay. Obama called for a minimum tax rate of 30 percent on income over one million dollars. To some, this sounds like a radical idea, but it really isn't. It is merely a refinement of a part of the tax code that has been with us for decades: the Alternative Minimum Tax.

The A.M.T. was enacted for precisely the same reason Obama is calling for a 30 percent tax rate on every dollar made over and above the first million per year -- fairness. The ultra-wealthy have always been able to afford spending money to use tax shelters and tax attorneys to move their dough around so they avoid paying what they should be paying -- the same rates everyone else pays. So the A.M.T. was introduced to fix the problem. If you make a substantial amount of money, you must figure your income taxes two ways: the traditional way, and using the A.M.T. worksheet. Whichever's higher, in essence, is what you must pay (if you fall under the rules for using the A.M.T.).

Now you may be thinking, "I've heard of the A.M.T. before... something about Congress 'fixing' it...." This is where we get into some massive budgetary fiction, or (if you prefer) blatant hypocrisy by our lawmakers (of both parties, it bears mentioning). The problem stems from the fact that the A.M.T. has not been truly modernized in quite a while. The income limits it set when it was enacted covered people who made a lot of money back then -- but when you fast-forward three or four decades, the same dollar amount now regularly hits people in the middle class (and really hits people in the upper middle class), rather than its intended target: the truly wealthy.

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I haven't written one of these snap-judgment reactions to a speech in a while, so forgive me if this is a bit choppy and disorganized. As always, I am writing this before looking at other opinions of President Obama's just-completed State Of The Union speech. I feel this keeps my opinion unsullied by any sort of "groupthink" effect. Sometimes I read other speech reviews the next day and find I agree with them, sometimes not, but this way at least you know I'm not just regurgitating others' thoughts.

OK, well, I do have to regurgitate one thought, because it pretty much sums up all I have to say about Mitch Daniels' response to the president's speech. On PBS, right after Daniels spoke, center-right columnist David Brooks had a funny line: "That was actually the most charismatic Daniels ever gets." Wow. "No wonder this man didn't run for president this year," was my first thought, in response.

But we're not here to talk about the yawn-fest that was the response, we're here to talk about Obama's speech to the nation, right?

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What a difference a week makes, at least in the Republican primary contest.

Last week, I was (along with many other pundits) of the opinion that Mitt Romney was going to wrap things up quickly with a victory in South Carolina and Florida, and the rest of the primary season would be all but a foregone conclusion, as Republican voters lined up behind their assumed-nominee.

This, quite obviously, did not come to pass. Newt Gingrich won South Carolina by a commanding margin over Mitt, and it's now a whole new race. Gingrich appears to be the "last man standing" in the struggle to be the "I'm not Romney" candidate. Rick Santorum is now fast becoming an afterthought in this campaign, and right now I'd put his chances at dropping out before Florida votes as about even. Ron Paul is still Ron Paul, and is still in the race -- he's not going to drop out at all, and will be in the race until the very end, trying to scrape together enough delegates to be considered a power player at the Republican convention.

But the Republican race, for all intents and purposes, is now a true two-man contest between Newt and Mitt. In fact, if Newt wins Florida, he may have built up so much momentum that people start using the word "inevitable" to describe his nomination, rather than Mitt's.

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We're going to start off in an odd way today, as two of my column series collide. Because the South Carolina primary is tomorrow, first we're going to announce our picks. Afterwards, we'll get on with the usual Friday blathering, rest assured.

South Carolina is a real dart-at-the-wall pick, due to the extreme volatility of the race. Two candidates dropped out this week (Huntsman and Perry), but that won't affect the race much since neither of them had much support. But the fight between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney has certainly heated up, with two debate performances which showed Newt at his best (Newt just loves debates, for good reason). Romney has been fighting the headwinds of all the Bain criticism, and this week plowed into another political morass, this time around the question of releasing his tax returns. The elitism Mitt just exudes is apparently not playing very well down in South Carolina. Add into this mix an interview with a Gingrich ex-wife, just to remind everyone what a horn dog Gingrich has been, and the polling has been a real rollercoaster ride all week long.

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A few weeks back, I was watching a political chat show on television (I tried to track down a transcript, but couldn't find it, sorry), and the roundtable of pundits was asked what they thought the unemployment rate would be on election day in November. The responses (from a wide range of political viewpoints, left and right) were universally pessimistic -- from memory, they ranged from 8.7 percent to above 9.1 percent. No one was willing to go optimistic, at least on the air.

But what if they're all wrong? Even raising this question may lead to accusations of Pollyanna-ism, or rosy-colored-glasses-ism or whatever else you'd like to call it. The economy has been in the doldrums for so long that it seems nobody believes it will ever change, and even suggesting such a thing leads almost immediately to being seen as "out of touch."

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The 2012 Republican primary election season, so far, has been a fairly normal one, at least on the surface. The "next in line" candidate (traditionally either a sitting vice president or the guy who lost the last GOP nominating contest) seems about to coast to a pretty early and pretty easy victory. Pundits everywhere are predicting Mitt Romney will win both South Carolina and Florida, and at that point they will pronounce the race all but over (except for Ron Paul's campaign, of course, which they will ignore). By the time the race solidifies into a "two-man race," one man will likely already have won the contest, to put it another way. Some folks are even predicting Mitt's inevitability, should he handily win South Carolina this weekend. If this script plays out according to the normal Republican playbook, the party will soon fall into line behind their nominee, and all agree to ignore all the things they don't like about him, to present a unified face of the party in the fall general election.

Of course, underneath this surface read of the situation, there's a roiling fight going on. This, too, isn't all that out of the ordinary for Republicans, because (after all) the second-place finish in the Republican primaries may become determinative in 2016, should Obama win a second term -- the same way Mitt's second-place finish in 2008 has set him up in this cycle. I'm not saying that's necessarily what's going to happen, but rather that it fits in with the way Republicans normally nominate people in each cycle.

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The Huffington Post ran an article today titled "Gov. Martin O'Malley Urges Dems To Focus More On Romney's Governing Record, Less On Bain." In it, the governor of Maryland makes the following case:

"I think a point that needs to be emphasized was that in easier times when he [Romney] was governor of a pretty innovative state, Massachusetts ranked 47th out of 50 [in job creation]," he said. "You contrast that to the tougher times we have now, under Governor Deval Patrick's leadership, Massachusetts is 5th in the nation."

O'Malley makes a good point. President Obama's re-election team should heed it.

Democrats have been amused at the attacks on Romney's tenure at Bain Capital, mostly because they've all come from his fellow Republicans. I guess Ronald Reagan's "Eleventh Commandment" (which is usually stated "speak no ill of a fellow Republican") is officially dead and buried, eh? But while Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul (and others) have been launching these broadsides against the good ship Mitt, they miss a much larger point: the real issue to put before the voters is what Mitt Romney did after he left the private sector for politics.

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[Program Note: I am taking the day off today. But I did want to post this link to a transcript of Martin Luther King Junior's "Drum Major Instinct" speech. This is the speech that was misquoted on his new memorial in Washington D.C., and you really have to read the speech itself to understand why the misquotation twisted the meaning of his words so drastically that people denounced it and demanded it be removed and replaced with his actual words. King was speaking about the "Drum Major Instinct" idea, which was not his own. He was using the speech to point out that being the one leading the parade is a natural, human instinct, but also one which led to some very negative places. He foreshadows his own funeral at the end of the speech, the important part which got misquoted. Even if you're pressed for time, read the first dozen paragraphs and the last dozen. And may King's legacy never die.]

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone!

The last Friday the 13th of political note took place last year, when Ron Paul announced he was running for president last May (which we noted in FTP [167]). Nothing as momentous seems to have happened today, at least as of this writing, but there are still hours and hours to go, so we'll just have to wait and see, won't we?

Not a whole lot has been happening in Washington, due to Congress being out on one of their countless month-long vacations. Not a whole lot of Democrats have been in the news, either, since the Republican primary season is sucking all the oxygen out of the political arena right now.

President Obama's Chief of Staff quit, but this news wasn't as momentous as the departure of his predecessor, since Daley never went out of his way to personally insult the base of the Democratic Party in the way Rahm Emanuel routinely did.

What has been happening in a quiet sort of way is what I like to call "Flagpole Season." This is the time of year when the White House runs a few things "up the flagpole, to see who salutes" (as the saying goes), in preparation for the State Of The Union address at the end of the month. Various policy ideas are trotted out to gauge reaction, and the ones that are received favorably will wind up in the big presidential speech to Congress. Today's news that Obama is considering consolidating some federal agencies is merely the latest in a series of policy proposals which will be steadily leaking out for the next week or so.

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What is hiding in Mitt Romney's tax returns?

That question is being asked more and more often these days, after Romney insisted he would be the first modern presidential candidate not to release his tax returns to the public (read: to the media). John McCain got a pass (by the so-called "liberal" media) when he only released selected portions of his own tax returns -- but at least he released something. So the question immediately follows: if Mitt's not willing to release his taxes, then what exactly is he afraid of the public finding out?

The "conventional wisdom" answer to this question seems to have now become: "Mitt would be embarrassed at the tax rate he actually pays, which would be far lower than your average cop or firefighter, since Mitt makes most of his income as capital gains." This is entirely possible. If Romney's tax returns showed he only paid something like 12 or 13 percent of his actual income in federal taxes, how would that make an average worker feel who pays a rate which is much higher? Perhaps this would lead to voter resentment, which would indeed be an excellent reason for Mitt not releasing such data to the public.

But there's another possible reason, which nobody so far seems to have brought up. Perhaps this is because the issue is a touchy one to even mention. Since it calls for rampant speculation about what Mitt does with his money, there is no factual basis for even bringing it up -- which will remain true if Mitt succeeds in keeping his tax forms secret.

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