The term "hot button issue" first appeared in the mid-1980s, but came into common usage during the 1988 presidential campaign, when the nation soberly contemplated such questions as whether Michael Dukakis was planning to unleash a horde of dusky criminals to prey upon our precious white women. Alas, this year's campaign is nearly devoid of hot buttons for the candidates to push. God? Mitt Romney is the last person who wants to talk about religion. Guns? The Obama administration has done nothing to restrict their ownership, and the NRA's fevered warnings of government confiscating your weapons grow ridiculous even to gun owners themselves. Gays? Just a month and a half after President Obama surprised almost no one by announcing his support for marriage equality, Republicans haven't bothered to make it an issue, probably because they understand that the public has little taste for their past demagoguery. So aside from the occasional temporary flare-up over things like contraception or...

The Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act soon, and that has concentrated some Republicans' minds. It was all well and good to shout "repeal and replace!" when there wasn't really anything they could do about it, but if the Court actually strikes down some or all of the law, they'll be under greater pressure to put their money where their mouths are. The central quandary is this: if the law's least popular provision—the mandate for everyone to carry insurance—is struck down, that means the law's most popular provision—the requirement that insurance companies accept everyone, regardless of pre-existing conditions—has to go as well. Not only that, some other popular provisions, like the requirement that insurers allow young people up to age 26 to go on their parents' insurance, would disappear if the Court strikes down the whole law. Should that happen, President Obama and other Democrats will immediately begin attacking Republicans for taking away...

Today, POLITICO had a big scoop : Wall Street has a huge crush on Mitt Romney. Surprising news, to be sure, especially given the candidate’s propensity to name drop his business experience when discussing any policy issue, his distaste for regulation, and the many corporate conglomerates Romney considers allies. The more startling news in the article is the numbers: The Romney camp is outraising Obama among financial-sector donors $37 million to nearly $5 million. That’s a 7-to-1 margin, and 19 of the top donors supported the Democratic ticket in 2008. This is more scary news for the Obama campaign, recently hobbled by May fundraising numbers and a seemingly perpetual inability to call rich liberal donors into action—and more than a little ironic given that Zachary Goldfarb reported at the end of 2011 that “During Obama’s tenure, Wall Street has roared back, even as the broader economy has struggled.” That wasn’t the only news on the campaign front that strikes another point in Romney...

Let's say you're a Democratic political consultant who has never worked for Barack Obama. How do you feel about him and his team? Well, chances are that although you respect their skill, you also think they're too insular and too unwilling to listen to outside advice. Like yours! Because after all, if you're a Democratic political consultant and you don't work for the Obama campaign, you probably wish you did. There's a lot of prestige, and not a little money, in working for the president's re-election effort. If you didn't work for the historic 2008 effort, you probably feel a little left out. And you probably also feel that you're just as smart as David Axelrod or David Plouffe, and you ought to be going on Meet the Press to share your wisdom just like they do. But you can't. So what can you do? You can complain anonymously to reporters that the Obama campaign is doing it wrong : That kind of unflappability is a hallmark of the Obama political operation — and was a crucial...

Obama hasn’t had the sunniest of weeks on the policy or campaign front. Jobs numbers are falling and he said some poorly chosen words at a campaign event last week. But while Obama’s economic legacy is being crafted at a mile a minute, his foreign-policy legacy is being chiseled into the marble more slowly, as his supporters, detractors, and observers try to work out whether his administration's achievements thus far are works of greatness or unsalvageable breaches of civil liberties. And, as George Packer noted today : “If Obama loses—a possibility that’s become the wisdom of the week—I think he’ll be remembered most for his foreign-policy achievements. And if he wins, the same will be true, except that he’ll have a chance of being a great foreign-policy President.” All in all, this is a strange set of affairs for a president who ran in 2008 mainly on his ambitious domestic-policy agenda—and who’s fate in November rests almost solely on the state of the economy over the upcoming...

On Friday, President Obama gave a press conference, and in one of his answers to questions he said that "the private sector is doing fine." You may have heard about this. When I got my Washington Post on Saturday morning, I found that the editors of the capital's most important newspaper had judged this comment to be so momentous that it required not one but two separate articles devoted to it. This morning, determining that this subject required much, much more investigation, the paper had a column by Chris Cillizza explaning why this comment is so very important. Plenty of things Cillizza said are perfectly valid as far as they go, though it would have been better if he had mentioned that "gaffes" like this can't become important unless he and his colleagues decide that they're important. There are a couple of lines in his column that deserve particular notice, since they really hold the key to understanding the absurd focus on "gaffes" like this one: Then there is the reality that...

New polling from Gallup shows the president’s support among Jewish voters has dropped to 64 percent from 74 percent during the 2008 elections. Though the Gallup report noted that Jewish voters, at 2 percent of the population, “typically are not critical” in determining presidential elections, in a state like Florida, where Jews were 4 percent of the electorate in 2008, such support could be crucial in the electoral battle. Some conservative commentators have interpreted the president’s lower numbers among Jewish voters as a referendum on his stances toward Israel; Obama called for a settlement freeze in 2009 and set Israel's pre-1967 borders as the starting point for negotiations to create a Palestinian state. Liz Cheney summed up their message at the most recent AIPAC convention, asserting that "there is no president who has done more to delegitimize and destabilize the State of Israel.” Unless unprecedented levels of aid, public shows of support, and military cooperation are all...