I am unhip and ignorant but would like to get the joke. Could someone explain, por favor, in a sentence or two?

 "Congratulations, Mr. President, and welcome to the Oval Office. Chief of Staff Daniels has made all the arrangements."

Look, K T, we all resent candidates who go negative against "our guy." I assure you I was every bit as furious as you when the whole gang, Newt included, were indulging in the manifestly false "he ran to the left of Ted Kennedy" silliness -- and well before Iowa. Then the leftist "vulture Bain" stuff. Then Cayman Islands. Then Mitt and his millionaire friends do this or that. You know the drill.

But it happens. If Mitt wins, I hope you'll come around. If Newt wins -- or Rick or whoever -- I certainly will.

Re The Pledge:

Not signing it is wise, so far as I can tell. Vowing to "promote and sign all measures leading to its defunding, deauthorization, and repeal" precludes a president from using his best judgment and advocating one measure over another, or one strategy over another.

For instance, must he promote both a Bachmann defunding bill, say, and a Ryan defunding bill even if the two are at odds in certain tactics? Can he promote a Senate measure over a House measure?

As a general rule, a president shouldn't tie his hands with such specific vows written by others.

Repeal will require 60 senators -- at least a half dozen of them Democrats. The 60 number will be easier to reach with a less divisive figure in the White House. A partisan firebrand like a President Gingrich would give Dems great cover to dig in, while a President Romney would allow them to join in while still saving face.

I'm not saying full repeal will happen in either case, but the challenge would be greater with Gingrich.

My understanding was that Newt ushered in the modern era of ramped-up earmarking to congressional districts -- the mother of all self-indulgent perks.

Then in retirement he went on to "get his" as a member of the governing class -- in "the way it's done."

First, primary campaigns haven't hit full stride "until Iowa".

Second, if true, then Newt's painfully naive. But I doubt he's naive. The "relentlessly positive campaign" was a strategy, nothing more, and as with any strategy, he ran with it for as long as it was useful. Then he got dirty.

Nothing at all new here.

 I read somewhere (sorry, can't remember where) that bombing the entrance ways to these sites would do great damage-- collapsing the access tunnels and effectively shutting the facilities down for quite a long time.

We might be in for a decade of varying degrees of sabotage, these strikes included, and not a single thumping end to the threat.

We could use Hitchens now -- a voice from the left making the moral case that Israel shouldn't bear this burden alone.

I do wish we'd stop the confident "we have a year; no more" stuff. Krauthammer ended a column in 2004 with the very same line. It might very well be true this time -- who knows? -- but after a decade of use, such a claim can no longer be considered a reliable timeline for those of us on the outside.

But these are very strange and scary times.

 All along the supposed virtue of Newt is that he's the man most capable of coping with the Alinsky tactics of Obama in the fall, yet, as Heather says, he appears to be falling prey to similar tactics now.

So the main argument for Newt (as I've understood it anyway) has proven to be false.

 Palin's point of view in a nutshell:

The guy most capable of overcoming Alinsky tactics in October is being crushed by Alinsky tactics in January.

 Does anybody think for a millisecond that Gingrich would not exploit a similar incident in Romney's past if he could? Come on, people. 

Both these guys are cynics in a street fight. Both are proving to have more than their share of "nasty", even outright lying about the other on occasion -- although maybe Newt's proving to be a shade less clever and subject to it's-not-fair tantrums in a way that Romney is not.

 So as Leigh explains, Stuart, you're wrong. But let's assume you're right for the sake of argument -- that Romney came to stand with Ryan and his band by pure cynicism. Fine.

His behavior is still better than Gingrich's, no? He turned his back on Ryan and the united House Republicans with his rhetoric in the spring and with his inaction now.

Who cares what Gingrich did or did not say, or did or did not mean, in the 1980's re Reagan. It's now the 2010's, and the man has chosen to undermine -- or at the very least shy away from -- today's great conservative cause.

Duane Oyen is right: anti-Romneyism, and now Newtism too, have become religions.    

60.

Tired and sore at the end of each day; never driven anything other than a pickup; most of childhood was in a two bedroom apartment.

But...married to an editor and don't have TV.

Interesting quiz. Murray gives neat stats on some of those questions. 

Note the date. This was before Romney rolled out his Medicare reform, which Ryan has since modeled.

The editorial is right that Romney is cautious in his tax reform proposals, but it misses a point that Romney grasps: that there's already the ability to pass significant and bipartisan right-of-center tax reform (see the Simpson-Bowles Commission, which Ryan himself has praised).

There's therefore no reason to burn precious political capital on detailed tax proposals which can be deceptively demagogued by Obama. Better to be avoid too many specifics in the campaign while saying, "But hey, Mr. President, I'd certainly be willing to consider the ideas in your bipartisan debt commission."

Meanwhile Gingrich demagogues Romney's wealth while proposing to cut Romney's taxes to zero -- the single most convoluted campaign strategy in the history of mankind.   

Thanks, Leigh. If anyone's interested, here's a detailed explanation of the Ryan-Wyden proposal and how it conforms with Romney's plan and is at odds with Gingrich's feckless plan.

Romney has twin virtues vis-a-vis entitlement reform: bravery in his proposals; caution in his rhetoric -- precisely the right approach to getting reforms passed into law, but perhaps not ideal to winning Republican primaries.

 All very interesting, but I'm more interested in Newt's and Romney's responses to the brave, transformational conservative figure of today: Paul Ryan.

The House Republicans who put their names on the Ryan budget are every bit as heroic as the Reaganites of a generation ago. That budget was more than a bill; it was a declaration: "We are all in; we hang together, or we hang separately."

How did our two frontrunners respond to such bravery?

Romney stood with the Ryanites, submitting a plan for entitlement reform entirely consistent with Ryan's (in fact it was so good that Ryan himself altered his own plan to conform with Romney's, an adjustment that allowed him to coax Dem Sen. Wyden on board -- a development crucial to its prospects of success).

Gingrich responded to the Ryanites heroism by distancing himself -- even undermining the effort ("rightwing social engineering" etc) -- and to date has not proposed a workable reform of Medicare.

So enough with the Reagan stuff already -- be it Newt in the 80's or Mitt in some '94 debate. Today, now, Romney's the brave one, and Newt's overly cautious -- his bombastic rhetoric notwithstanding.