I normally don't do this sort of thing, but today I have to begin this column with a criticism of a single media voice, because the writing was just so offensive. I mean... bad puns? In today's polite society?

The boundaries between politics and show business have become murky ever since Ronald Reagan became president. The lines between the media and politics are equally as blurred. But the line between certain types of comedy and the political/media world should be brighter than ever. This is a lesson Dana Milbank of the Washington Post apparently has yet to learn.

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While the political world seems to be consumed with the news that (gasp!) a presidential debate just got cancelled, my eye was instead caught today by a sheerly speculative (and absolutely wonktastic) article, written by the incomparable Greg Sargent over at the Washington Post. He posits a very interesting "nightmare scenario" for Republicans, come convention-time:

Specifically: What if Santorum wins the bulk of contested primaries and caucuses and leads in national opinion polls -- but Mitt Romney wins the nomination? If that happens, the general election could get a whole lot tougher for him.

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Is the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party becoming irrelevant?

It's hard to draw any other conclusion to the news that the House Republicans have apparently agreed to extend the payroll tax holiday for the rest of the year -- without paying for it. The only open question is why the Republican leadership chose to throw in the towel without a fight. Perhaps the dismal single-digit approval ratings the American people have been consistently bestowing on Congress are beginning to be noticed. Perhaps, because it is an election year, Republicans in the House made a political decision that keeping their jobs was more important than grandstanding on the not-so-popular issue of raising everyone's taxes. Perhaps President Obama's call, in his State Of The Union speech, to move the bill through Congress with "no drama" sunk in (OK, well, probably not).

Whatever the reason, though, the Tea Party Republicans come out looking a lot weaker than they previously did. Tea Partiers, after all, are supposed to be all about the deficit and the debt. Yet here are the Republicans about to consent to adding $100 billion to this year's deficit, without even attempting to offset it with budget cuts. They're not even giving lip service to the idea any more. One wonders what the Tea Party rank-and-file voters are going to think about this deal, or whether a few Tea Party Republicans in the House will denounce it with fury in the conservative media.

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Being a watcher of not just politics but also the mainstream media which covers the subject (or at least attempts to), I am always a bit confused as to what merits the national media's attention. Why, for instance, is one horrific kidnapping or murder/suicide elevated to national obsession by the editors, when dozens of similar crimes go unreported? On a less dramatic level, why does one political soundbite or anecdote get covered by everyone in the punditary echo chamber, when others never even rate a mention?

Which is why I'm scratching my head today at the absence of headlines like the one at the top of this article in the national media. While the actual facts of the case are pretty mundane, the juxtaposition of a major presidential candidate would have allowed for even more sensationalistic headlines than mine (it's easy to come up with a "screaming banner" for the story, one would think).

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The primary season opens with so many Republican candidates for the party's nomination for president that it seemingly takes forever just to ask each of them a single question in the televised debates. Three different Republican candidates win the first three states' races, in a wide-open contest with no incumbent on the ballot. The first results thin the large field of hopefuls, as minor candidates run out of funding and throw in the towel. As more states vote, the two top candidates get to a point in early February where they are neck-and-neck in the number of individual states won -- with the third candidate lagging, because his support is based mostly in the South. Ron Paul is also running, but not winning any states. Dark mutterings are heard about the presumed-frontrunner not being able to "close the deal," and about his overall weak support among conservatives in the party. The media is in a frenzy, all but drooling over the prospect of an open convention, where no Republican candidate has the magic number of delegates to secure the nomination.

While this all sounds very contemporary, what I'm describing is the 2008 primary season. This may come as a surprise, because few in the media have picked up on these similarities.

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Before we get to the week that was, politically-speaking (and, with it, our final football metaphors of the season), we've first got to call another state in the Republican primary season race. Last week, we almost forgot to predict Nevada's race, and this column went out without containing such a prediction to many readers, for which we apologize (we had to quickly paste in an "Update" at ChrisWeigant.com, which smacks of last-minute-ism, we fully admit).

While many haven't even noticed it, the state of Maine will wrap up its caucuses tomorrow. If there has been any polling out of the state, we certainly haven't been able to find it, so predicting the outcome is a true gut-feeling exercise. From conversations with the Mainers we know, nobody seems to have a clue what the results will be.

One interesting comment: virtually no television ads have run in the state, from any of the candidates. Which just adds to the free-for-all nature of the race.

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[Program Note: When I wrote yesterday's column, I did something I rarely do -- I cut a big chunk of it out. When I had finished writing it, I realized that I was making two separate arguments, and that the second one interfered too much with the point I was laying out in the first one. So I cut it. Because the debate over yesterday's article has moved into some things in the section that I cut, I thought I'd just run that part of it as a standalone article today. It may have a bit of an "unfinished" nature to it, which is why I thought I'd write this note as a preamble, by way of explanation.]

The other thing largely missing from this debate is the previously-mentioned fact that 28 states already have this rule on their books (NARAL has a handy map you can use to see these 28 states). This is a political misstep, more than a journalistic failure. News stories about the controversy have begun, in the past few days, to include this fact by at least mentioning it in passing. Obama and supporters of the White House's decision should focus on this fact when responding to the decision's critics. When faced with a quote from a bishop from New York, for instance, the immediate response from the administration should be: "I'm not sure why the bishop would say that, since his own state already mandates this coverage for these workers. Nothing will change in New York state -- this is actually the status quo there. The Catholic Church in New York already pays for contraception, so please tell me what, exactly, will change?"

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The Obama administration recently ruled that churches and other religious organizations who provide health insurance to their workers at their non-church businesses must include free birth control, as indeed all health insurance plans are now required to do. This decision does not affect the churches themselves, but instead such satellite operations as hospitals and universities. The churches still have a "conscience clause" which allows them to choose not to provide contraceptives to church or other religious employees, and the new federal rule mirrors laws already on the books in 28 states. Even so, the new policy has engendered a huge debate from the pulpit, from politicians, and from the media. The real glaring omission from the media reports, however, is the lack of the voices of women who work for religious hospitals and universities -- in other words, those directly affected by the new rule.

Pro and con, the people I see being interviewed and otherwise weighing in on the debate are not the ones directly affected by it. I have no idea why this gaping hole in what should be a basic journalistic assignment exists, personally. As I've been watching the debate rage, I see a lot of older men debating women's sexual morals. I see a lot of celibate priests and bishops being interviewed. I see old, male lawmakers weighing in. To be fair, I also see a lot of women being interviewed, usually from either a pro or con advocacy group. I've even seen some doctors and health policy officials of both sexes offering up scientific reason and logical advice.

You know what I have yet to see either on television or in print? A poll of the workers affected. Maybe that's too tough a thing to ask for -- polls are time-consuming, after all, and the debate hasn't been raging all that long. But I have also yet to see in the media even a single woman interviewed who actually works for a religious hospital or university. Not a single "woman on the street" interview, not a single union representative who speaks for these women, not a single spokesperson for the women themselves. Not one. No nurses, no janitors, no administrators, no security guards... nothing.

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Today is the first multi-state event in the 2012 Republican primary schedule, and I am shocked -- shocked! -- that the punditocracy has miserably failed to come up with a cutesy-poo name for today's voting.

Back in 2008, for instance, we had events such as the "Crab Cake Tuesday" (my favorite) in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Now that's a tasty name we can all sink our teeth into!

But today? Nothing. Maybe I'm reading the wrong news sources or something... somewhere, somebody's got to have dubbed today "[fill-in-the-blank] Tuesday," right? Well, heck, we can do something about it if we put our minds together here... let's see, we've got Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri all on the slate today. Hmmm... that's a bit tough, because it's hard to run a connecting thread through such diverse states. How about "MinneMizzouRocky Tuesday"? Well, a bit tough to say, I'll admit. Or maybe we could go with state nicknames... the "Show Me The Rockies And 10,000 Lakes Tuesday"... well, maybe not.

I throw it open to the readers in the comments, somebody's got to have a better idea than either of those, right? With that out of the way, let's take a crack at predicting the races.

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I'm in this race because I care about Americans. I'm not concerned about the very poor -- we have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I'll fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich -- they're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of America, the 90 to 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling. ... I'm not concerned about the very poor that have a safety net, but if it has holes in it, then I will repair it.
--Mitt Romney, in an interview with CNN's Soledad O'Brien

Mitt Romney's gaffe last week (reproduced in full, above) is going to wind up the "gaffe that keeps on giving" for Barack Obama and the Democrats in this election cycle. Because the more Romney's comment is examined and dissected, the worse it looks for him. This could, in fact, be the defining moment for Mitt Romney as a national political presence. That phrase is often bandied about in politics, but I use it here in the full literal sense of "defining moment" -- a point in time which absolutely cements an image in the public mind of who you are and what you stand for as a politician. The image, quite obviously, is not a good one for Romney.

The statement caused an initial media frenzy, which almost exclusively focused on the sound bite -- "I'm not concerned about the very poor" -- which was being spliced into Democratic ads before the sun had even set. Even Newt Gingrich piled on that part of Romney's statement, fulminating that anyone running for president should have the good sense to be concerned with all Americans (or at least say so in public, for Pete's sake). This is Politics 101, folks, and the fact that it took Newt Gingrich to point it out to Romney was highly amusing to Lefties everywhere.

Romney desperately tried to spin his statement, and wound up floundering: "You've got to take the whole sentence, all right, as opposed to saying -- and then change it just a little bit, because then it sounds very different." Um, well, that would be true of just about any political gaffe, wouldn't it? If you got to go back and re-edit your own words in such a manner, then gaffes wouldn't even exist. Unfortunately for Mitt, they do.

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