Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Style, image and substance

_{Visual source: Newseum}

NY Times:

Komen Works to Revive Its Image

Although the breast cancer foundation rescinded a decision to curb funding for Planned Parenthood, support for affiliates in Indiana, above, and elsewhere still lags.

Komen can't recover its image until CEO Nancy Brinker and her board loyalists resign. That stubborn fact won't go away.

Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein:

Let's just say it: The Republicans are the problem.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The best "centrist" article you'll read in a long time.  It's so obvious, even the "worship at the alter of non-partisan" crowd is coming around, and these two are well respected for their knowledge of Congress. The fact is that it is the Republicans that are the problem.  Good for Mann and Ornstein for saying so.

Frank Luntz, in attempting to correct myths about conservatives, writes that conservatives are really your Occupy Wall Street allies.

Fully 66 percent of conservatives consider the growing gap between the rich and the poor a 'problem,' according to a poll I conducted in January, while 21 percent call it a 'crisis.'

Even if he is correct, that has nothing whatever to do with the radical Republicans in Congress (see Mann and Orenstein). PS, for Luntz to claim kinship means Occupy has won the debate (see Boehner and the House get slammed on Congressional defense of student loans and how it's paid for).

Charles Blow:

Judging by this week's debate, you would think that student loans are young people's only priority. They're not. In fact, a cleverly designed survey released this week by Harvard University's Institute of Politics asked respondents ages 18 to 29 to choose between pairings of issues to determine which ones they felt were more important. Among domestic issues, creating jobs almost always won, while combating climate change almost never did. Immigration is also a losing issue (except when paired with climate change), while access to affordable health care is a winner. I found the results so interesting that I wanted to share them. Enjoy. [link]

Kathleen Parker writes Yet Another Stupid Article (YASA®) about how Obama's slow-jamming the news on Jimmy Fallon is good for John McCain. I will remind you that when Bill Clinton played the sax on Arsenio, the world ended as we know it. Clinton, of course, went on to lose the election in 1992'oh, wait. He didn't lose. Never mind. And do note the complaint against Obama isn't that the bit on Fallon didn't work. It's that it did. Note to Parker: when you got nothin', you write nothin'. It's a pundit risk whenever you start a column.

John Sides on predicting the election winner:

Does all of the above this mean that the Post model is wrong in recent elections?  Not really.  If you care about estimating vote share (which I don't), there are clearly cases between 1992 and 2008 where the model overestimates the incumbent party's vote share by 3-5 points, and also a couple cases'in particular, 1996 and 2000'where the difference between the model's prediction and what actually happened is small.  If you care about picking the winner'and this is what I'm more attentive to'in only one case (1992) did the model call the popular vote winner incorrectly.  (Of course, I would never rely on only one model anyway.  Averages of models are more likely to be accurate [pdf].)

The model called 1992 wrong? That's the year Clinton played Heartbreak Hotel on Arsenio.