Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: ABCs of politics: Ads, Bachmann, Colorado

Wall Street Journal

Frank Bruni:

What I find most fascinating about Michele Bachmann ' and there are many, many more where she came from ' is that she presents herself as a godly woman, humbly devoted to her Christian faith. I'd like to meet that god, and I'd like to understand that Christianity...

Bachmann's concept of Christian love brims with hate, and she has a deep satchel of stones to throw. From what kind of messiah did she learn that?

NY Times editorial:

No one is paying attention to whether buyers have criminal histories or mental-health records. No one is monitoring bulk sales of ammunition to see who might be building an arsenal. Even after a young man in Colorado buys 6,000 rounds by mail order and uses them to commit mass murder, it is the rare politician who proposes to make the tools of terror slightly harder to obtain.

Eugene Robinson:

Will we even pretend to do anything to prevent the next mass shooting by a crazed loner? I doubt it. We'll just add Aurora to the growing list ' Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson ' and wait for the inevitable.

I'm with the guy who said we should think about it less as gun rights and more as massacre control.

WaPo's "5 Myths" series:

Five myths about campaign ads

Ads that trigger fear are better at persuading voters because they loosen the grip of partisanship. They scare voters into paying attention to new information about the candidates and issues, making them more likely to change their minds. President Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 'Daisy' ad, for example, dramatically raised the specter of a nuclear conflict at the Cold War's height. More recent ads have used dark images and ominous voice-overs to stoke fear about crime, immigration, terrorism, health care and jobs.

Anger, by contrast, does little to change minds; instead, it mobilizes voters to fight for their convictions. Campaign ads arouse anger by suggesting that people have been unfairly hurt and then casting blame, such as a recent Mitt Romney spot ('Where Did All the Money Go?') that tries to incite outrage at President Obama by saying that he misspent stimulus funds.

Obama is waging a "turn out the base" campaign; pithy observations that Bain and tax return attacks "don't work" usually miss that point entirely.

US News:

After showing independent voters the negative ad of Romney singing "America the Beautiful" off-key, for example, approval of Romney by those voters fell sharply from 16 points to 3 points. Obama's numbers, on the other hand, barely moved after independents watched a negative ad about the president.

"People have made up their minds about Obama," John Geer, political science professor at Vanderbilt and head of the project, told Whispers. "Whereas Obama's ads have extracted a price for Romney. They are what's moving the dial for the Obama camp. And the Obama campaign knows that."

When surveyed, half of independents also said they were "disgusted" by the "America the Beautiful" ad, and the majority didn't like it. But a voter's approval of an ad is not necessarily a measure of its success, the Ad Rating Project's results show.

Ipsos/Reuters:

Obama attacks on taxes and Bain hit Romney ratings

Sustained attacks by President Barack Obama's campaign on Republican rival Mitt Romney's business history and refusal to release more tax records appear to be working, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed on Tuesday.

More than a third of voters who are registered to a party or as an independent said in the online survey that what they had heard about Romney's taxes and his time at Bain Capital private equity firm had given them a less favorable impression of the Republican candidate...

And particularly worrying for Romney is that a large slice of independent voters -- whom he needs to win the November 6 election -- are also buying into the Obama campaign's portrayal of him as a ruthless businessman who may be hiding something in his taxes.

USA Today:

By more than 2-1, 63%-29%, those surveyed say Romney's background in business, including his tenure at the private equity firm Bain Capital, would cause him to make good decisions, not bad ones, in dealing with the nation's economic problems over the next four years.

The findings raise questions about Obama's strategy of targeting Bain's record in outsourcing jobs and hammering Romney for refusing to commit to releasing more than two years of his tax returns. Instead, Americans seem focused on the economy, where disappointment with the fragile recovery and the 8.2% unemployment rate are costing the president.

USA Today comes to the wrong conclusion by focusing on the wrong question.