Michael Tomasky looks at Mitt Romney’s speech in Des Moines, Iowa, and wonders why the Republican nominee would tie himself so closely to the radical right of the Republican Party:

Obama can say to voters: “Look at how far-right congressional Republicans are going lead this guy around by the nose if he becomes president.” Most independents may want tough talk on the deficit, but they certainly don’t want the Tea Party running the country.

The Obama and Romney campaigns have released to competing ads, both concerning Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital. The Obama ad, which Jamelle posted here, attacks Bain Capital for buying, eviscerating, and then selling off a company called GST Steel in Kansas City, leaving the good hard-working people there jobless and desperate. The Romney ad, on the other hand, tells an entirely different story, that of Steel Dynamics, a company that employs thousands of good hard-working people, thanks to Mitt Romney. So which story should we believe? I'll give you the answer in a moment, but first, let's look at the Romney ad:

In an excellent column over at the Daily Beast, former Prospect czar Michael Tomasky points out Mitt Romney's enormous likeability deficit, which seems to grow worse with each passing week. It's not only true impressionistically, polls back it up: Gallup recently found 60 percent of Americans saying Barack Obama is likeable, compared to only 31 percent for Romney. Tomasky does a good job of breaking down all the reasons why, and points out that the last time the candidate considered less likeable won the presidency was 44 years ago, when grumpy Dick Nixon edged smiling Hubert Humphrey. This could well be one of those interesting-but-probably-meaningless correlations, like the taller candidate always winning (which held true for many years until 2004). But given the preponderance of "gut" voting among the American people, it's likely to make a significant difference in November.

But what is it that makes a person–not a politician, but someone you meet face to face – likeable? There are some specific things you could point to: they seem genuinely interested in you, they display values similar to yours, they're modest, they're considerate, they appear happy, they have a sense of humor. Of course, there's also something ineffable, a quality that you can't define but you sense. But if we put that last part aside for the moment, we see that the definable parts of likeability are qualities that every politician has, or at least wants us to believe they have

The presidential campaign story of the day is Jason Horowitz's lengthy portrait of Mitt Romney's days as a student at the elite Cranbrook prep school in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. While the story contains a lot of detail that paints the picture of who the youthful Mitt Romney was and what kind of environments he grew up in, the headline-grabbing part is Romney's leading role, corroborated by several witnesses, in a vicious assault on a classmate whom everyone thought was gay. Partisan Democrats are certainly going to use this to make the case that the incident gives us important insight into Romney's character.

So I open up my dead-tree edition of the New York Times today, and see an article entitled "Liberal Donors' Plan Worries Top Democrats," about how the fact that some rich Democratic donors have decided to put their money into grassroots organizing instead of the kind of superPAC Republicans have, where nearly every penny goes to fund television ads, has got some Democrats fuming. The article quotes exactly one complainer, Harry Reid's chief of staff, who says, "Why go off and build a redundant grass-roots and get-out-the-vote organization that the Obama campaign is clearly invested in?...Why would they rule out this tried-and-true medium?" The Republicans will be investing so much on TV, and Democrats will be outgunned!

Right below that story, on the same page of the Times, is a profile of Obama campaign ad guru Jim Margolis, discussing all the groovy ads he's going to create for the Obama campaign to destroy Mitt Romney with. Which is a good reminder that Democrats fretting about their outside money should chill out...

Three years ago, Mitt Romney was a naysayer on the auto bailouts, warning that they would result in the destruction of the American auto industry. But now that President Obama is running on the success of the bailout, Romney has decided that he’s responsible for the revival of auto manufacturing:

“I pushed the idea of a managed bankruptcy, and finally when that was done, and help was given, the companies got back on their feet,” Romney told a Cleveland TV station while visiting a local auto plant Monday. “So, I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry has come back.”

Did you hear? The Republican former governor—long anointed as the presumed candidate—officially gained the party's nomination over the weekend. No, I'm not talking about Mitt Romney. Come November, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson will be on the ballot in all 50 states under the banner of the Libertarian Party. Johnson spent last year running in the Republican primary, but he abandoned his dream of securing the nomination after only making in into two debates and barely registering in the polls.