Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: One Sad Step for Mankind Edition

Above is pollster.com aggregate without Rasmussen and Gallup (Obama 47.8, Romney 44.6). See explanation.

Above is Rasmussen and Gallup alone (Obama 46.0, Romney 46.2). "All polls included" is here (Obama 46.4, Romney 45.5). Charts posted by Greg Dworkin (blame me.)

Maureen Dowd thinks it's a bit too late for Romney to ask for another do over.

Even if he wanted to, Mitt couldn't reveal himself. He has recast his positions so many times, he doesn't seem to know who he is.

He presents himself as a uniter who disdains negative campaigning, and then in the next breath, in his home state of Michigan on Friday, he makes a cheesy birther crack about the president ' a bat's squeak calling to the basest emotions...

Sometimes pols pander so much they never find their way back to their core, or try to find their way back too late.

Romney seems to be forever on a journey out of vagueness, an endless search for identity.

Even teaming up with the most policy-specific Republican House member in a bid for reflected ideological clarity has not worked. Rather than Mitt's gaining focus, Paul Ryan is losing it.

Those who expected Ryan to provide some consistency to the campaign forgot that Romney already has consistency -- it's a consistency somewhere between that of Jell-o and a jellyfish. Ryan's positions are just another opportunity for Romney to exercise the world's most reliable flip-flop.

David Leonhardt takes us through the first 100 days of a Romney presidency and shows us an America shaped into a Tea Party paradise.

For a Romney administration, one of the first questions will be how much to use a legislative process known as reconciliation. Under reconciliation, filibusters are prohibited and only a simple majority of 51 Senate votes, rather than 60, is needed. With Democrats likely to oppose the Romney agenda overwhelmingly and a couple of Republican moderates potentially having qualms, reconciliation would likely play a big role in 2013.

'To the extent that we can get Democrats to buy into it, great,' Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a conservative House leader, told me. 'But we need to go there and do what we told the voters we were going to do.' Mr. Cornyn said, 'There are a whole lot of very important things you can do with 51 votes.'

Nuh uh! It's takes 60 votes to get anything through the Senate. I know because we've been told it six million times in the last four years. But assuming the GOP refuses to wait politely behind the the yield sign that Democrats have treated as an unscalable wall, what next? First, Republicans make sure that the Bush tax breaks for billionaires remain intact. And then they do that some more.

given how hard tax reform is under any circumstance, the fallback may be a simple tax cut, making the Bush tax cuts permanent and taking some rates lower. Republicans would have to endure criticism that they were violating Mr. Romney's campaign pledges, by reducing the affluent's relative tax burden and adding to the deficit. They could counter that future economic growth would solve the problems, even if independent analysts disagreed. ...

Although Republicans could not repeal all of Mr. Obama's health law with reconciliation, they could undo most of the insurance expansion, because it relies on government subsidies for the uninsured. Congress could also shrink Medicaid, which covers about one in six Americans.

That sounds right. Top priorities: see that the wealthiest get even more wealthy, and take the last bit of hope from the poor and ill. That's certain to put America right back on track.  The track it was following in 2008.

Bill Marsh has a guide to Heffalumpus headinrumpus, breaking down the various subspecies of Republicans. His guide indicates that Tea Party members are one of the less reliable factions of the party, since they don't always follow the leader. Only Marsh has it a bit backwards. It's the Tea Party that's the party these days, not the "main streeters." The measure of any Republican is limited to how pleasingly they dance to the Tea Tune.

Adam Nagourney thinks that the outlook for the GOP is a lot less sunny than it used to be.

For more than 50 years, the Sun Belt ' the band of states that extends from Florida to California ' has been the philosophical heart and electoral engine of the Republican Party. ... From Richard M. Nixon through John McCain, a span of 48 years, every Republican presidential candidate save for Gerald R. Ford and Bob Dole has claimed ties to the Sun Belt. ...

Yet as Republicans gather here this week, they are nominating for president a governor of Massachusetts who was born in Michigan and, for vice president, a congressman from Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Sun Belt states that were once reliable parts of the Republican electoral map are turning blue or have turned blue, like California. Only Southern notches of the belt remain. And the sunny symbol of Ronald Reagan in a cowboy hat cutting wood, as good an image of the Sun Belt spirit as there was, has given way to the angrier politics of the Tea Party, which embraces much of the same anti-government message but with a decidedly different tone.

Why is the GOP able to remove its shades without fear? It's not just a matter of immigration and changing demographics, it's that the GOP version of the American dream -- a giant McMansion in the segregated suburbs -- is turning out to be a recipe for economic stagnation and accelerated decay. The Tea Party might be riding high on a buzz of anger, but it comes down to this.

'...there's no way a Republican can become president if you don't win Texas and Florida.'

And both of those states are going to be increasingly in doubt for the red column.

Robert Self warns that when Romney wishes the spotlight would move away from Akin's uncomfortably saying what the GOP actually believes so Romney can get back to talking about the economy, no one should be confused: these are not separate issues

...treating the economy, on one hand, and women and family, on the other, as if they are mutually exclusive is a fallacy. When Americans argue about gender, sex and family, they are arguing about equality, power and money ' in essence, about the nature and role of government. ...

What we call the culture wars are only the tip of a historical iceberg, the visible part of a protracted and wrenching fight over American citizenship that dates from the 1960s (and beyond to the suffrage movement). The fight over feminism cannot be confined to a narrative about 'culture wars.' Indeed, the very idea of a culture war clouds what's really at stake. ...

Before the Akin flare-up, the many fronts of the right's war on women might have seemed little more than attempts to inflame the passions of the conservative base, but Mr. Akin has done us a favor. He has drawn the curtain back on how central women are to a presidential campaign in which no women are actually running.

Ross Douthat says that Democrats should stop talking about social issues. Because, you know... stuff. And besides, there are people who actually believe Akins, or think that women who are raped should be forced to carry a rapist's child. Democrats don't want to risk offending those people, do they? Besides, people who think women have the right to choose in any situation are just as far outside the mainstream as Akin. (Seriously, he says this.) So Democrats should get back to fighting on exactly the issues where Romney wants them to fight, because that would be better for them.

David Ignatius gets out his Scooby snacks to investigate the Mystery of the Missing Foreign Policy.

When reporters are writing stories and don't yet have a necessary piece of information, they sometimes write 'TK,' meaning 'to come.' I feel that way about Mitt Romney's foreign policy. Other than his support for Israel and rhetorical shots at Russia and China, it's a mystery what Romney thinks about major international issues and where he would take the country. ...

The fuzziness of Romney foreign policy was painfully evident in the fracas following the announcement that uber-realist Zoellick would head his foreign-policy transition team.

Not to worry, neo-conservative uberhawks. Zoellick was just the choice that Romney made before anyone exerted the slightest amount of pressure. As soon as that happened, Romney backed away from his decision and completely reversed himself. Isn't that exactly the kind of hard-nosed negotiating skill you want from a commander in chief?

Dana Milbank looks at the GOP platform, and finds more than a few knotholes in the planks.

Let us give thanks to our Judeo-Christian God for the Republican Party. It is the only thing standing between us and the triumph of sharia in our land. ...

This is just one of many policy innovations to appear in the Republican platform. The most discussed one, following the Todd Akin flap over his comments on rape, has been the antiabortion language: no exceptions, no way, no how. Just for kicks, the drafters tossed in a 'salute' to states that have informed-consent abortion laws such as Virginia ' the state (led by Gov. Bob McDonnell, who also led the platform committee) that brought transvaginal ultrasound into the national discourse.

But there is also a plank calling for a study of whether to return to the gold standard, a call for auditing the Federal Reserve, positions denying statehood to the District but seeking to introduce more guns onto its streets, a provision denying women a role in combat, and others calling for a constitutional amendment that makes tax increases a thing of the past and for a spiffy new border fence ' with two layers!

All this can be yours, America. And all it will cost you is a permanent tax cut for the wealthy, your health care, your education system ... and your soul! Only kidding, you get to keep your soul. Just as long as your soul is properly enrolled in a GOP-approved religious organization and has a concealed carry permit.

John Noble Wilford has the task of writing the New York Times obituary for a man whose name will be remembered when all the rest of us are forgotten.

Mr. Armstrong and Colonel Aldrin left a plaque on the Moon that read: 'Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.'

After leaving the space program, Mr. Armstrong was careful to do nothing to tarnish that image or achievement. ... Ignoring many high-level offers in business and academia, he returned to Ohio as a professor of aeronautical engineering at the University of Cincinnati and bought a farm near Lebanon, Ohio. ...

'He remained an advocate of aviation and exploration throughout his life and never lost his boyhood wonder of these pursuits,' his family said in the statement.

Last September, Mr. Armstrong testified to a House committee that NASA 'must find ways of restoring hope and confidence to a confused and disconsolate work force.'

In my youth, I watched men bounce across the surface of another planet. Chopped down to just six missions by budget cuts, Apollo delivered only twelve men to the Moon. With the death of the most famous of those men, only eight remain.  The youngest of them, Air Force pilot Charlie Duke, who guided Apollo 16 lander Orion to a landing in the rugged Descartes highlands, is now 76.  The odds are very good that all too soon there will be no living person who has visited another world. No living person who has been further than low Earth orbit. In my nightmares, I think it will always be that way. I worry that humanity reached its high tide at Tranquility, that we ventured this far into the universe and then became... smaller.

I fear that a thousand, or a thousand million, years from now, someone will come across Neil Armstrong's footprints in the gray lunar soil, as crisp and fresh then as they are today. They'll find the abandoned base of the Eagle. They'll see the stiff flag still laying where it landed after being buffeted by the force of the ascent stage. They'll test their own feet against the impressions Neil left behind. Maybe pose for a picture in just the place where Buzz stood.

They will look up at the planet that dominates the sky, a planet perhaps not quite so blue and not quite so inviting. They will say, "Whatever happened to those guys? They had so much potential."