For all of you spending your Friday night reading political analysis of dubious accuracy, check out my latest offering on the front page of The Huffington Post: Picking Romney’s VP Harder Than It Looks. You lucky, lucky bastards.

This one might be more accurate than Game Change.

Sometimes the best way to kill a bad idea is to leak it. That’s what happened to Republican media guru Fred Davis who wants to re-litigate a losing case by using Jeremiah Wright to attack Barack Obama. Sorry, it’s Barack Hussein Obama in the donor prospectus that’s on the New York Times’ website now. Despite the bad publicity, Fred Davis is talented enough—and wealthy Republicans are angry enough—to get a hilarious ad on the air that will go viral instantly. No one will be able to refrain from talking about it, and it will end any chance Mitt Romney has to become president of a Rotary Club much less the United States of America.

That’s not because arguing about Obama’s Christian preacher might confuse Tea Partiers who think the President’s a Muslim. Fred Davis’ modest proposal will also distract voters from the Republicans’ economic doom & gloom message, but that’s not the problem, either.

Miles Park Romney

And despite what you’re thinking, Davis and his band of Super PACkers will go out of their way to “lessen any elements that could reasonable be deemed ‘racist,’” according to the proposal that was leaked to the New York Times, though in a way that only highlights the Republican Party’s discomfort with black people. The proposal calls for hiring a spokesperson who is an “extremely literate conservative African-American.” So there’s that.

The real problem with talking about the preacher whom Obama disavowed in 2008 is that it would make talking about religion fair game. Republicans want to bring up Wright’s “Confusing God and Government” sermon in which he says “God damn America?” Then Democrats get to ask why Miles Park Romney, Romney’s great-grandfather, abandoned America for Mexico just so he could have lots of wives. I’ll see your angry black preacher and raise your polygamist great-granddad who had five wives.

The best part of this attack is that we already know that Obama knocked this pitch out of the park in 2008 with his “A More Perfect Union” speech directly addressing all the touchy issues raised by Wright’s provocative sermons. The Pew Research Center found that 84% of the country was aware of what is widely accepted as one of the most successful campaign speeches in American history. If Mitt Romney wants to talk about magic underwear, golden plates and posthumous planets, have at it. It’s a free country.

Obama cut ties with Wright when the preacher refused to drink his “shut the hell up” juice. If the Republican Super PAC tries to reunite them, then it’s opening up another can of crazy for Romney. Leading Republican abstinence scold and former coven maven Christine O’Donnell has recently endorsed Romney. Do we get to talk about witchcraft now? Romney also recently kissed the withered hand of the allegedly Rev. Pat Robertson, who thinks lesbians cause extreme weather events. Where’s the super PAC talking about Sapphic meteorology?

Even if Democratic partisans don’t drop hypocrisy bombs behind Republican lines, the attack on Rev. Wright is still liable to blow up in Romney’s face for one reason: They’re talking about Oprah’s preacher. Oprah is universally loved by women of all creeds and colors. In fact, getting Oprah activated is the best way to get my Republican grandmother to vote for Obama. She has her own TV network and more money than everyone in the Yankees lineup as well as the entire Red Sox disabled list.

Playing the Jeremiah Wright card could instigate a holy war that will move Republicans off the battleground they can win and force them to defend aspects of a religion that they would prefer to ignore. Most Democrats are tolerant people who respect the different religious choices other people make. They would prefer not to attack Mitt Romney for his religion. I swear on the Book of Mormon, others of us aren’t so nice.

This post was published in Politico Arena on May 17, 2012.

There are more kinds of lies in politics than there are Inuit words for snow. And when Mitt Romney said the other day that he didn’t have a short list for VP, he was telling a “Washington lie,” a false statement meant to forestall further questions without actually deceiving anyone: “We really haven’t had a discussion yet of putting together a list or evaluating various candidates,” Romney said.

Despite his denial, Romney has a short list for VP that includes Gov. Mitch Daniels and Gov. Bobby Jindal. Romney also has a list of tall people.

Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, a Romney adviser, told NPR that Romney’s list of possible vice presidential nominees is 20 names long, including Marco Rubio, Kelly Ayotte, and Rob Portman. I was shocked to discover recently that “Rob Portman” is not a generic placeholder name but was actually George W. Bush’s U.S. Trade Representative when he traded our jobs for magic beans. Later Portman was Bush’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget when that administration turned a surplus into record deficits. That experience could help a President Romney deal with the budget deficit much in the same way the Leonardo Dicaprio character in Catch Me If You Can helped the FBI catch check forgers and con men after he was arrested for similar crimes. Or it could just be a really bad idea.

One person no longer on the short list is New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez. She checks a lot of boxes as a swing state Latina, but she crossed herself off when she criticized Romney’s self-deportation strategy on illegal immigration, adding, “I have no doubt Hispanics have been alienated during this campaign.” A simple “no thank you” would also have been acceptable.

But don’t mention any names to Romney. Diane Sawyer dangled the Rubio carrot in front of him but failed to get Romney to bite. “Well I think he’s one of the terrific leaders in our party, but I think it’s way too early to begin narrowing down who the potential vice presidential nominees might be,” said Romney. “But we’re beginning that process, we’ll talk about a lot of folks, and then go through the kind of vetting and review process that you have to go through to make sure whoever you select will pass the evaluation that’s required by the American people.”

In other words: Not Sarah Palin, nor anyone like her.  And definitely someone who knows Africa is not one country and that Queen Elizabeth is not the head of England’s government.

Picking a vice presidential nominee is usually an exercise in overcompensation. Weak in the South, JFK picked LBJ. Weak on decency, Richard Nixon chose Gerald Ford to replace Spiro Agnew. And when George W. Bush seemed like he needed parental supervision, he tagged Dick Cheney. It’s not a perfect system.

Republicans would be safer if Mitt Romney overcompensated for his shortcomings by buying a sports car. Romney can’t pick a well-loved candidate without highlighting that he’s the least-liked nominee in a generation. Besides, choosing someone who is better liked than Mitt doesn’t narrow down the list at all.

The last nominee who chose a VP to accentuate his own positives was Bill Clinton, who probably knows a little something about how a wingman can help you close the deal. Al Gore Jr. amplified Clinton’s virtues—a young Southerner with a new take on Democratic ideals. Romney could pick a running mate who amplifies his own special brand of “You must pay the rent” capitalism, but Ken Lay is dead, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase is under FBI investigation, and Montgomery Burns is a fictional character.

Ironically, the best advice on picking a travel buddy for the campaign trail comes from Mitt’s dad, George Romney. When George ran for president in 1968 he released 12 years of his taxes, saying, “One year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show.” This year, Mitt has only released one year of his taxes. In other words, Romney should choose someone after getting a heck of a lot more information from them than he has deigned to share with voters about himself.

There’s a special someone out there for Mitt Romney who will look just perfect standing next to him atop the Republican ticket. In fact, there are dozens of Republicans out there qualified to be Vice President. The real problem is that Mitt has too many weaknesses for any one running mate to overcome.

This post was published in Politico Arena on May 16, 2012.

The Texas legislature only meets for a few months every other year because when they’re in session they can do more damage than Mötley Crüe in a hotel room. And in 2011, they got a little out of hand. Rick Perry was nursing his presidential ambitions like a bad hangover and made the Republican legislature cut $5.4 billion from public schools to avoid raising taxes.

Now they’re trying to say they never trashed the hotel room in the first place. Comptroller Susan Combs, whose job is to count the state’s money, recently got a “Pants on Fire” rating from Politifact for claiming they actually increased school funding. Fiscal policy pronouncements from this crowd have as much validity as the Soviet crop reports under Joseph Stalin.

While the right hand was cutting, Perry’s far-right hand was spending—in the belief that measuring our kids makes them smarter. Despite the budget crunch, Texas gave a $470 million contract to Pearson Education to design the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness. And exactly no one was surprised that Pearson’s lobbyist was Sandy Kress, the father of No Child Left Behind under George W. Bush.

Sandy Kress

That’s when Robert Scott, head of Perry’s education agency, shocked the hell out of everyone. Scott testified under questioning before the State Board of Education that high-stakes testing is a “perversion” of proper accountability. He then promised a group of thousands of school administrators—remember this, it’s on the test—that he wouldn’t enforce a ban on social promotion unless schools received enough money to offer remedial classes to failing students.

No one’s supposed to read the crop reports. When Scott told the inconvenient truth that schools were being strangled by budget cuts and over-testing, the fertilizer hit the fan. The state’s leading business lobby ran a full-page newspaper ad criticizing Scott’s comments, and Bill Hammond, the group’s leader, called him a “cheerleader for mediocrity.”

That was enough to quell the uprising in Austin, but it started another one in the hinterlands. At first, 30 school districts adopted a resolution slamming high-stakes testing that is “imposing relentless test preparation and boring memorization of facts to enhance test performance.” Hammond’s remarks had lit a fuse. Soon, other school districts were adopting the resolution. “We all wanted in,” said John Kuhn, the superintendant of a North Texas school district. “There is amazing consensus among ‘regular folk’ public school educators—teachers, administrators, and board members—especially in rural and suburban areas-that testing has gone off the deep end.”

When the number of school districts that had adopted the anti-testing resolution crested 100, the Washington Post took notice. Now 447 districts representing nearly 2.6 million students have joined the uprising. And the Texas Association of School Administrators—that group that cheered on Robert Scott—has sided with the rebellion, posting the resolution and the list of school districts that have adopted it on its website. The anti-testing insurgency has also spawned a mutiny among parents who cite a parental rights provision in state law allowing them to remove their children from state mandated testing.

This has all gotten wonderfully out of hand, leaving Sandy Kress mystified. “We’re going to break the policy in the law for what end? Is it freedom for people? Ending a war? No. It’s not showing that you’re competent in reading, writing, and arithmetic, science and social studies,” said Kress.

Among the school districts that have adopted the resolution is Austin, where many children of politicos attend school. Not Kress’ kids, though. The Kress children attend private schools in Austin where they don’t have to take the STAAR test.

“I think it speaks for itself that the man who created test-based punitive accountability for 90% of the children of Texas has chosen a school for his own children that is free from his grand invention, his hateful guillotine of test-and-label,” said Kuhn. “Seems to me that Mr. Kress loves his children but wants to make fistfuls of money off mine. I’m not okay with that. While his kids get discovery and exploration, my kids get stress and STAAR tests. If these policies that Sandy Kress champions were good for children, he would subject his kids to the STAAR test.”

Scott recently announced he’s quitting the education agency this summer, prompting questions about whether he’s leaving on his own terms or being exiled for telling the truth. Perry will miss Scott in 2013 when the legislature returns to deal with another budget deficit—as well as little revolution.

One more time, with feeling. He was born here:

The black Kennedy has become the black LBJ.

In the hyper-political circles I travel in, the release of Robert Caro’s latest Lyndon Johnson biography, The Passage of Power, was received with the glee that’s usually reserved for an Obama rally. To paraphrase Joe Biden, the fourth book in Caro’s promised five-volume LBJ biography is a big flipping deal.

So when Obama came out for gay marriage, I couldn’t help thinking about a passage early in Caro’s book in which his aides cautioned him against spending political capital on the Civil Rights Act. “What the hell’s the presidency for?” asked Johnson. Johnson rose through the legislative ranks as a segregationist Southerner, so when he ended a speech to a joint session of Congress with the phrase “We shall overcome,” Johnson fundamentally changed the American political landscape.

That’s the nearest equivalent to Obama’s evolution on gay marriage, but apparently it’s not change that Republicans can believe in. The leader of the Log Cabin Republicans, the pro-gay outhouse for the Republicans big tent, even called Obama’s support for marriage equality “offensive and callous” because it came the day after North Carolinians banned same-sex marriage in their constitution.

When LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, Johnson told an aide, “We have lost the South for a generation.” Obama should have an easier time of it because Democrats have already lost the Deep South, where a good chunk of people still don’t approve of interracial marriage. The rest of the country has moved on.

The real question isn’t how Obama’s support for marriage equality will affect his re-election chances. Romney’s family, after all, is only a couple generations away from living in Mexico to avoid laws against polygamy. And that’s before you bring up the letter he wrote to the Log Cabin Republicans to seek their support for his 1994 race against Sen. Ted Kennedy in which he claimed, “I am more convinced than ever that as we seek to establish full equality for America’s gay and lesbian citizens, I will provide more effective leadership than my opponent.” All this makes Romney a slightly damaged floor model for traditional marriage.

Pat Bagley / Salt Lake Tribune

Where does the Republican Party go from here? Yes, Democrats have lost the South, but Republicans have lost blacks in the process. Republicans only get a third of the Hispanic vote on a good day, and they haven’t had one of those for a while. Republican opposition to equal pay, reproductive healthcare and nice manners has widened the gender gap, and now gays and lesbians will be part of the Democratic base vote for a generation.

But what of the moderate Republicans who are staring in horror as their party digs foxholes on the wrong side of history’s last civil rights battle?

“Long term it’s probably not a comfortable place to be,” said former Republican congressional leader Tom Davis. “It’s a generational issue.”

Socially conservative Republicans are so, um, married to their opposition for gay rights that the party can’t moderate on the issue without losing their church-going base. But Republicans can’t stand pat without losing moderates such as Ted Olson, the lawyer who argued Bush v. Gore for the Republicans.

“It is very sad to me that people who belong to the party of Abraham Lincoln are resisting so strenuously the equality and decency and integrity and treatment of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters,” Olson said. “This seems to be one of the last major civil-rights battles of our country. And for people in our country to come out in numbers like this and say, ‘Well, we don’t want the persons next door—who are decent, God-fearing, taxpaying, obeying-the-law citizens who simply want to have happiness like the rest of us’—to say ‘No, I have that right and you can’t have it.’ That just seems mean to me.”

It’s going to be hard for the Republican Party to claim the mantle of freedom and liberty if they oppose those values for people they don’t like. In order to function as a viable political party, Republicans will have drop their opposition to marriage equality just as they eventually had to do with racial integration.

The alternative is to stay on the wrong side of history. The rest of us are moving on.

This column appeared on Politico Arena on May 12, 2012 and The Huffington Post on May 14, 2012. It was also syndicated by Cagle Cartoons on May 14, 2012.

The brilliant Molly Ball of The Atlantic asked me yesterday whether Texas Republicans were about to see their own Tea Party in the Senate primary. I don’t think so:

National conservatives’ next favorite target has got to be Texas, where a bright young Cuban-American conservative named Ted Cruz has the endorsement of Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund, the Tea Party Express, and FreedomWorks. Yet Cruz has struggled to gain traction against the favorite, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, a multimillionaire rancher and GOP good ol’ boy.

DeMint’s PAC has poured nearly $1 million into the race, and Cruz has ardently worked the national conservative circuit. But in Texas, “he hasn’t quite caught fire,” said Austin-based strategist and commentator Jason Stanford. Among Texas conservatives, “There’s some angst about it. If you’re a die-hard Republican, you don’t really trust Dewhurst. But the smart money is, there’s not even going to be a runoff.” That is, most think Dewhurst can win a majority of the primary vote.

Somewhere, Jordon Brown is eating his heart out.