Campaign professionals tend to believe that the most potent attack you can make uses your opponents own words against him, preferably if they're on video and can be replayed over and over. If you don't have that, it helps to have third-party validation of your attack from the most credible, non-partisan source you can find. Which is why it's so helpful when an established news organization reports something damaging about your opponent, which you can then talk about and put in your ads. If the third-party source is credible enough, you won't have to argue about whether the allegation is true, but merely about what it means and how much it matters.

Which is why the Obama campaign was so pleased when the Washington Post reported that under Mitt Romney (and after he departed), Bain Capital invested in a number of companies that specialized in helping other companies outsource work to foreign countries. Not only was this new information that could be used to attack Romney, but it had the imprimatur of the Post. Within days, the story was showing up in the president's speeches and the campaign's ads. So the Romney campaign is doing what it can to wind back the clock on the story:

In the search for silver linings to a Supreme court decision striking down part or all of the Affordable Care Act, many people have suggested that should it happen, Americans will turn all their displeasure about the health care system on conservatives. Specifically, it is that that they will "own" the health care system. James Carville says that if the ACA is overturned on a 5-4 vote, "The Republican party will own the health care system for the foreseeable future." Former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger says, "If the court were to strike down this major reform effort, 40 years in the making, the court would own the resulting health care system for the next decade and beyond. It’s a slightly highbrow version of the universal rule: 'You broke it, you bought it.'" The Republican party is one thing, but the Supreme Court "owing" health care? What does that mean? That people will be protesting outside the Court when their premiums go up? First of all, they won't, and second of all, I don't think the Court's conservative justices could care less if they did.

Mitt Romney adopted a clever strategic vagueness strategy on yesterday's immigration ruling, which so far hasn't seemed to get anyone too angry at him (although I doubt it will do anything to stanch the bleeding of Latino votes away from him. As somebody tweeted yesterday, if you asked Romney what kind of pizza he wanted, he'd reply that Barack Obama has failed to lead on pizza choices. We've often talked about how uncomfortable Romney is when he gets questioned about his policy positions, but we should take a moment to extend our sympathies to the people who actually have to do most of the talking at times like this, the beleaguered campaign flaks whose job it is to say the things Mitt Romney would say if he were talking to reporters, and not say the things he wouldn't say. One of those flaks, Rick Gorka, found himself surrounded by reporters after the ruling and had to deliver one of the most painful dances of evasion you'll ever see. It went on and on, but here's a taste. You can almost see his soul slipping out of his body and finding an overhead bin to curl up in until it's all over:

When Rick Santorum said during the campaign that inequality is a good thing, a lot of people were surprised. Santorum was attacking a straw man—he was arguing that everyone shouldn't have precisely the same income, while no one actually believes that they should—but it was revealing. One of the questions that we've neglected to ask in our health care debate is just how much inequality we are willing to tolerate—or in the case of conservatives, want desperately to maintain—in this particular arena.

For today's edition of Idealistic Reggae Tunes About Personal Empowerment and the Power of Individual Action to Produce Meaningful Change, we have Ben Harper, doing "With My Own Two Hands." Which I thought would be a nice thing to play, since next week the Supreme Court may well undo the most meaningful piece of social legislation passed in the last half century. Enjoy!

Mitt Romney went before a group of Latino public officials today to offer some remarks on immigration. Calling it a "plan" would be too generous, although there were a couple of details, some of them perfectly reasonable, like giving green cards to people who get an advanced degree at an American university. But the part everyone has been waiting for—his reaction to President Obama's recently-announced mini-DREAM Act—was pretty disappointing, because it engaged in a kind of magical thinking that has become increasingly untenable...