Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Are you in touch with your inner voter?

_{Visual source: Newseum}

NY Times editorial:

It clearly does not bother Speaker John Boehner that he pushed the United States to the brink of default last year. It does not matter that the deep spending cuts in the resolution he demanded to end that crisis will hurt economic growth. It does not even matter that the House he leads is determined now to break that agreement with even deeper cuts in vital programs.

Eugene Robinson:

Republicans say they're eager for the presidential campaign to turn away from 'distractions' and focus instead on the economy. Someone should warn them that if they're not careful, they might get their wish.

Charlie Cook:

Jan van Lohuizen worked for two of the three pioneers, Lance Tarrance and Bob Teeter, in Republican polling (the other was Dick Wirthlin). In 1986, van Lohuizen served as polling director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He has long been Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell's pollster. He was also the principal pollster for George W. Bush's 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns and was one of the key pollsters involved in Mitt Romney's 2008 campaign. Only the most wired-in political operatives and reporters know him. That is not by accident. Van Lohuizen has always worked to keep a low profile. He doesn't have a self-promotional bone in his body and thus is far more given to understatement than to exaggeration.

That's why his May 11 memo to party officials is all the more remarkable. Van Lohuizen starts off by reviewing the state and direction of polling on same-sex marriage. He points out that support grew at about 1 percentage point a year up to 2009 but has 'accelerated' to a 5-percentage-point growth rate since 2010, pointing to the late-February/early-March NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that shows supporters outnumbering opponents by 49 percent to 40 percent. (A USA Today/Gallup poll found 50 percent saying same-sex marriages should be valid and 48 percent saying they should not). Van Lohuizen notes that support for gay marriage has increased across the board, although obviously Democrats are more supportive than Republicans. While younger voters are more supportive than older ones, he points out that 'all age groups are rethinking their positions.' Van Lohuizen emphasized: 'This is not about a generational shift in attitudes; this is about people changing their thinking as they recognize their friends and family members who are gay or lesbian.'

Ross Douthat:

It's possible to imagine a gifted political figure emerging to fuse elements from the Tea Party and O.W.S. critiques into a plausible third party challenge to politics as usual. But such a candidate would look nothing like Michael Bloomberg or any other high-minded Davos/Brookings type of technocrat. Instead, he or she would be more disreputable, more eccentric, and probably more demagogic as well. Such a candidacy (Pat Buchanan meets Ralph Nader) wouldn't have to actually govern the country; instead, its purpose would be to jolt the two parties out of their usual habits and arguments and to persuade one or both of them to adopt some of its ideas.

These are not the sort of qualities and goals that the founders of Americans Elect envisioned for their project. But that's precisely why they failed ' because they didn't recognize, or didn't want to recognize, what it takes for a third party to actually sting like a bee.

More wasted column space on an organization no one (except the pundits) has heard of, and no one (except the pundits) gives a rat's ass about.

More claptrap from Dana Milbank:

Faced with this twin disappointment ' desirable candidates being uninterested and interested candidates being undesirable ' Americans Elect has announced that it is abandoning its online nominating process because no candidate had reached its minimum threshold. This is profoundly depressing, and not just because it dashes the Domagala plan to admit Cuba to the union. It's discouraging because it shows politics may be too broken to fix.

Actually, all it shows is that the media is too broken to fix, with some major exceptions. Faced with the truth that this is a Republican problem, Milbank retreats into third party fantasy.

Maureen Dowd:

After the economy nearly atomized in a cloud of cupidity, Dimon became known as America's least-hated banker. But now the blunt 56-year-old Queens native who snowed Democrats in Washington with all his talk about not lumping in 'good banks' with 'bad banks' has fallen off his pedestal.

If Jamie the Great and his 'good bank' can make such a gigantic blunder, sending déjà vu shivers down America's back, what hope is there for lesser bankers?

As Noam Scheiber writes in The New Republic, 'we now have ironclad proof ' as if we really needed it ' that everyone is capable of disastrous stupidity.'

Mark Bittman:

A few weeks ago, in 'The Ethicist,' Ariel Kaminer asked readers of this paper's Magazine to explain why it's ethical to eat meat. The contest generated around 3,000 submissions, and as a judge I read about 30 of them. (Here are the responses from the winner and the finalists.)

A fascinating discussion. But you need not have a philosophy about meat-eating to understand that we ' Americans, that is ' need to do less of it. In fact, only if meat were produced at no or little expense to the environment, public health or animal welfare (as, arguably, some of it is), would our decisions about whether to raise and kill animals for food come down to ethics.