Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Who's paying for this election, anyway?

Visual source: Newseum

EJ Dionne:

For those who believe money already has too much power in U.S. politics, 2012 will be a miserable year. The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, lassitude at the Federal Election Commission and the growing audacity of very rich conservatives have created a new political system that will make the politics of the Gilded Age look like a clean government paradise.

Americans won't even fully know what's happening to them because so much can be donated in secrecy to opaque organizations. It's always helpful for voters to know who is trying to buy an election, and for whom. This time, much of the auction will be held in private. You can be sure that the candidates will find out who helped elect them, but the voters will remain in the dark.

Still, we can guess.

NY Times:

In recent days, Mr. Adelson, a billionaire casino owner, and his wife, Dr. Miriam Adelson, gave $10 million to Restore Our Future, a 'super PAC' backing Mitt Romney, people with knowledge of the contribution said Wednesday. The move leaves the Adelsons by far the most prolific campaign donors in the country.

NY Times editorial:

Some Democratic senators did challenge Mr. Dimon, notably Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Jeff Merkley of Oregon. But until more lawmakers commit to the toughest possible rules, the nation's financial system will remain vulnerable to all of that 'greed, arrogance, hubris, lack of attention to detail' that Mr. Dimon acknowledges, even as he resists the rules that would curb it.

Dana Milbank:

Ostensibly, Dimon went to Capitol Hill to be grilled about his bank's loss of more than $2 billion on an investment strategy that amounted to a glorified game of craps. Members of the Senate banking committee were to determine whether stronger financial regulations would be needed to prevent such gambling. But tougher regulation is unlikely, given Wall Street's bankrolling of panel members' campaigns, and lawmakers acted as though they were wholly owned subsidiaries of JPMorgan.

'Mr. Dimon,' said Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.), it 'occurs to me that an enterprise as big and powerful as yours, you've got a lot of firepower and you're ' you're just huge.'

Gush, gush, Mr. Dimon. By the way, can you sign here, sir?

And now some rare humbleness form the pundits:

Nate Silver:

We're now at a phase of the election cycle where there is just enough information to get yourself in trouble. With a half-dozen polls being released every day, you'll have some ability to shop around in support of whatever narrative you might wish to advance. But there is not yet so much data that all these anomalies will wash out in the average.

Nate's forecast is here, continually adjusted.

Jonathan Bernstein:    

Barber's win was seen as resulting in large part from Democratic efforts to define Kelly early on as being against Medicare and Social Security in the district with the 11th-oldest population in the country. In their ads, Democrats ran footage and quotes of Kelly talking about getting rid of the entitlement programs.

That's good reporting, but it's reporting on myth and superstition. No one knows why Barber won. No one knows what role the Democratic messaging played. Or the Republican messaging. We can measure some objective factors ' partisan lean to the district, money, even some indicators of candidate qualify ' but without extensive survey research and experimental studies, we're not going to really know anything. That's especially true in a contest like this one, where something so extraordinary was the backdrop for everything else. Blake reports that 'Giffords played a bit part in the campaign,' but perhaps she didn't need to; unlike in almost every other House election, voters presumably knew all about the candidate resigning from the seat, why she resigned and what she would want to happen. Or maybe it really was the Medicare ads. I don't know. Neither do the party operatives (Josh Marshall had a nice post about that earlier today).

Josh Marshall:

There's chatter this morning that Dems are worried that President Obama can't get his economic message right. He should be talking more about the future, not just what's happened over the last three and a half years. He should be arguing that his policies are better than his opponent's. All sorts of things. For my part, I think he should be focusing more on things that can be done right now to improve the economy, but which Republicans are blocking.

But here's the key to remember on messaging advice. Commentators have very little grasp of what works or doesn't work ' what will work or won't work ' in terms of messaging.

Paul Waldman:

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...

When a consultant says the Obama team is "resistant to advice," what he or she means is, "They won't take my advice."