Democrats who already were queasy about the site of their national convention could be excused after Tuesday's election in North Carolina if they asked, "Tell me again just why we're going to Charlotte this year?" In fact, many Democrats privately are asking exactly that after the state's voters overwhelmingly approved a measure outlawing not just same-sex marriage -- which already was illegal in North Carolina -- but also any form of civil unions. Almost immediately after the vote, more than 20,000 people signed a "move the convention" petition being pushed by a New York group called Gay Marriage USA. And Twitter accounts lit up with hundreds of angry tweets demanding the party pull out of Charlotte.

It's not our imagination. For seven of the last eight days, the Obama re-election campaign has been out with a new video or TV ad, all but one going hard after Mitt Romney. Spokesman Ben LaBolt says the Obama campaign is merely picking up a torch that had been carried by the Democratic National Committee, and he's not sure if the near-daily releases will continue. "We roll with the news cycle," he said in an email.

It's hard to imagine enough news - or enough Romney gaffes - to fuel the current blistering pace for the next six months. There's also the question of whether that would be productive for Obama over the long run. Does he want to live up to charges by Romney and the GOP that he's running a relentlessly negative campaign?

In the short term, you'd think Democrats would be heartened by Obama's aggressive moves, just as Republicans were happy to see that Romney could be ruthless when necessary toward his primary opponents. Obama's timing is good, too - early enough to help frame what could be a close race.

Not to dump on John Kerry and his 2004 campaign, but he locked up the Democratic nomination early in March and then ceded the airwaves for nearly two months. Although the Massachusetts senator was virtually unknown outside of early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire, Kerry's aides pooh-poohed the idea that immediate ads were needed to introduce him to the country. The upshot: He was a blank slate for Bush and his allies to write on. They wrote up a storm, defining Kerry in TV ads as a weak-on-defense flip-flopper while the Kerry campaign, perhaps fatefully, bided its time.

When it comes to defining Romney, Obama had a big assist from Romney's rivals in the lengthy and closely followed Republican nomination race. Even so, he's leaving nothing to chance. Here's what we're in for if the rest of the year is anything like the past week:

Rick Santorum went from being an annoyance to an afterthought in a matter of hours yesterday, but Mitt Romney, the GOP's newly anointed standard bearer, had no time at all to savor the culmination of his four-year campaign for the Republican nomination. Because down in Florida, President Obama launched a general-election broadside against the GOP that revealed in stark outlines what his emerging strategy will be. And Romney had better start rebutting it fast.

Another new national poll confirms that President Obama's lead over Mitt Romney is now powered largely by an overwhelming preference for the president among socially-liberal, well-educated women.

The ABC/Washington Post survey released Wednesday showed Obama leading Romney overall by 51 percent to 44 percent among registered voters, which replicates his margin of victory in 2008 over John McCain.

Like national, swing state, and state polls released last week, the ABC/Post poll found that Obama was benefiting from a huge gender gap: overall he led Romney among women by 19 percentage points, while trailing among men by eight points. But, as in those earlier surveys, the president's advantage did not extend to all women.

Vice President Joe Biden's speech in Iowa on Wednesday was more than a full-throated attack on Republican Mitt Romney's economic policies. It was also the latest indication that the Obama campaign intends to champion its manufacturing policies in battleground states in the Midwest, inviting voters, as Biden did Wednesday, to compare the president's program to what it casts as the likely Republican nominee's downplaying of manufacturing as a key part of America's economic recovery.

Biden pointedly quoted the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper rarely cited by Democrats, as stating, "Romney appeared to scoff, first in Detroit, then in Florida, at the notion of manufacturing as a job engine for the future." That, Biden said, sets up what he called the "choice in this election" between "our philosophy that believes manufacturing is central to our economy, and their philosophy that scoffs at it."

After a week of watching Rush Limbaugh under fire from both women and sponsors, conservatives are trying to change the subject. Or, at the least, make Democrats squirm and answer to the charge of hypocrisy. Their target is comedian Bill Maher, an outspoken liberal comedian who over the years has delighted in outrageous and controversial remarks about religion, politics and conservatives, particularly conservative women such as Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell.

There is a way to think about the up-and-down GOP nomination fight that at least partially explains its volatility and the seemingly endless array of short-lived challengers to front-runner Mitt Romney as well as Romney's surprising resilience.

It's been the battle between the rationals and the notionals.

Three senior administration officials just laughed when asked if they had decided to schedule a President Obama press conference for Tuesday to insert the White House into a busy news day that otherwise was guaranteed to be dominated by Republicans fighting for delegates in ten states. Noting - accurately - that reporters had been lobbying for an Obama press conference, they insisted that the scheduling just worked well for Tuesday.

Regardless of the motivation, putting the president out for a long give-and-take that will be carried live on multiple television channels does serve the purpose of pushing the Republicans aside, if only for an hour. This comes only a week after the White House worked to have the president break through the Republican news focus last Tuesday as well, with a fiery campaign-style speech to a gathering of United Auto Workers at the same time Republican voters were going to the polls in Michigan.

In the dark hours of World War II, surging German troops rode their grinding tanks across hundreds of miles of Russian territory, suffering precious loss of life and time with every mile gained. A division commander wrote of the importance of reducing losses "if we do not intend to win ourselves to death."

A new poll in Tennessee underscores the stakes for Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum in tomorrow's Michigan primary.

Like the Quinnipiac University Ohio survey released on Monday, the Vanderbilt Poll showed Santorum marshaling powerful support in Tennessee from the key elements in the GOP's populist wing- particularly tea party supporters and evangelical Christians, while remaining competitive with (or even leading) Romney among more managerial voters. Tennessee, along with Oklahoma and Georgia, loom as, in effect, the top second-tier of contests on March 6, behind Ohio, which is likely to hold center stage on that day. With polls in the GOP race gyrating wildly all year, the results in Michigan are likely to cast a long shadow over those contests.

The Tennessee survey, conducted from February 16 to 22 for Vanderbilt University's Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, showed Santorum leading Romney overall by a resounding 38 percent to 20 percent, with Ron Paul (15 percent) and Newt Gingrich (13 percent) lagging. Santorum's lead is grounded in big advantages among groups at the GOP's ideological vanguard. Three-fourths of Tennessee voters in the survey identified as born-again Christians and they prefer Santorum over Romney by 39 percent to 15 percent. Among the nearly two-thirds of likely primary voters who say they support the tea party's ideas, Santorum led Romney even more decisively-43 percent to 13 percent.

First came Mitt Romney's dismissive remarks about President Obama's "faculty lounge" pals. Now Rick Santorum is calling Obama snobby for urging people to go to college - and defending that view in a series of TV appearances.

"There are lot of people in this country that have no desire or no aspiration to go to college, because they have a different set of skills and desires and dreams that don't include college," Santorum said Sunday on ABC's This Week. "We should not look down our nose" at people who go to trade school to learn carpentry or plumbing, he added on NBC's Meet The Press, "and say they're somehow less" because they didn't get a four-year college degree.

For more than a year, Rick Santorum has labored to cast himself as an outsider ready to go to Washington to challenge business as usual, which makes it all the more puzzling why he decided to use the crucial debate in Mesa to sound like the ultimate Washington insider. Over and over again, Santorum came off as a defender of Congress, a champion of earmarks and a master of legislative minutiae.

Legislative ratings, Title X, Title XX, earmarks, voting for things you opposed - these are the things that the former Pennsylvania senator talked about. At one point, his tortured explanation prompted Mitt Romney to admit -- or taunt -- he hadn't understood what Santorum was talking about. At other points, his inside-Washington talk and use of legislative jargon set him up for jabs and jibes from Rep. Ron Paul.

It could not have been what Santorum wanted to do in what could be the final Republican debate, the first one held since Santorum surged into the lead in many polls. Perhaps his worst moment was his attempt to explain why he voted for No Child Left Behind even though he opposed it. There were echoes of John Kerry's "I voted for it before I voted against it" only without Kerry's coherence. He said he voted for it because President George W. Bush asked him to do so. "I have to admit I voted for that. It was against the principles I believed in. But, you know, when you're part of the team sometimes you take one for the team, for the leader. And I made a mistake." Not a great answer when you're running to be a leader of a party deeply suspicious of Washington's ways.

 Forget the polls. You don't need to monitor the public opinion polls to track which Republican presidential candidate is surging. All you need to do is see which rival Texas Rep. Ron Paul is attacking - and how sarcastically he gets doing it. In the earlier debates, Paul went after Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Wednesday night, in Mesa, it was Rick Santorum's turn in Paul's sights.

The first question from CNN moderator John King was why Paul is calling Santorum a fake in his television commercials. With the bluntness that has gained him a cult-like following, the veteran congressman man responded, "Because he's a fake."

The Michigan primary will test one of the most common- but as yet unproven - assumptions in the Republican presidential race: the expectation that Rick Santorum will be a strong candidate for blue-collar voters.

From the moment Santorum emerged as a serious contender in Iowa, many analysts (present company included) have assumed he would run well among the growing ranks of non-college white voters in the Republican electorate. On a policy level, Santorum stresses his determination to rebuild the nation's manufacturing capacity and laments the decline of upward mobility for working-class Americans in language rare among Republicans. On a personal level, Santorum highlights his years growing up in Western Pennsylvania steel country, and his grandfather's experience as a miner; he also projects a regular-guy aura that contrasts with rival Mitt Romney's vast wealth.

President Obama has been quite insistent that he is not ready to engage the Republican presidential candidates until the GOP settles on its nominee. "Once they narrow it down to one of two, I'll start paying attention," he said several times. And in his Super Bowl interview with NBC's Matt Lauer, he insisted he will hold his comments "until the Republicans decide who their nominee is going to be." He added, "I think most people are thinking the election is nine months away; the last thing we need is to start it right now when the other side hasn't determined its nominee."

But it's not too early to call attention to the success of one of his policies that was opposed by the leading Republican candidate. And as the good news keeps rolling in from the U.S. auto industry, the president has not been at all bashful about calling attention to what the White House sees as the politically unpalatable position taken on U.S. automakers by that Republican candidate - even if the president is always careful not to mention him by name.

One key reason why Democrats have grown more competitive in presidential elections since 1992 (after losing five of the previous six) is the steady growth in the minority share of the vote. In 1992, when Bill Clinton was first elected, non-whites cast 12 percent of the vote. When Barack Obama won in 2008, the minority share stood at 26 percent, more than double. How much more it grows, if at all, looms as one of the critical variables for 2012. The Obama camp is beginning to zero in on its projection.

A common misconception is that the minority share of the vote experienced an unsustainable surge in 2008 because of Obama's history-making status as the first African-American presidential nominee. In fact, the growth in the minority role has been steady over the past two decades, according to network exit polls. From 12 percent in 1992, the minority share of the vote increased to 17 percent in 1996, 21 percent in 2000, and 23 percent in 2004, before reaching its 26 percent level in 2008.

Under fire from Republicans for a promise he won't be keeping about cutting the deficit, President Obama might consider emulating Franklin D. Roosevelt, who found himself in a very similar bind eight decades ago. In October 1932, Roosevelt told a crowd in Pittsburgh that he would balance the budget and cut government spending by 25 percent in his first term. But when he got in office, the only way to combat the Depression was to increase spending.

It was the right course for governing. But it presented Roosevelt with a real political challenge when he was running for a second term and returning to Pennsylvania. He asked speechwriter Sam Rosenman how to handle questions about the broken promise.

The national Pew Research Center poll released Monday confirms that President Obama, at least for now, is reassembling the coalition that powered him to his 2008 victory.

The Pew survey, closely tracking last week's ABC News/Washington Post poll, shows that in a potential general election match-up against Mitt Romney, Obama's support among many of the electorate's key groups has converged with his 2008 showing against John McCain. In almost all cases, that represents gains for Obama since polls from last year.

President Obama's ad-makers may have to pay royalties to Clint Eastwood after a remarkable two-minute Chrysler commercial that aired on the biggest of all stages - the Super Bowl - and gave a pretty good preview of what the president's reelection commercials might look like. At the very least, the ad and Eastwood's powerful narration make it much, much more difficult for Republican front-runner Mitt Romney to keep pushing his line that Washington should have let the automakers go into bankruptcy.

And don't think that Team Obama wasn't watching the Super Bowl along with millions of other Americans and immediately grasped the boost they could get from the commercial. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer quickly tweeted "Saving the America auto industry: something Eminem and Clint Eastwood can agree on." Senior strategist David Axelrod tweeted "Powerful spot. Did Clint shoot that, or just narrate it?"  Former White House aide Bill Burton tweeted, "Clinton Eastwood #winning."

Of course, this isn't the first time Eastwood has been identified with cars -- he starred in Pink Cadillac in 1989 and Gran Torino in 2008. But those weren't in the Super Bowl with a bigger audience than probably saw both those movies combined.

RELATED: Chrysler Super Bowl Ad Removed From YouTube

With 30 second spots selling for $3.5 million, the commercial cost Chrysler an estimated $14 million and was kept under wraps by the automaker, which, with the help of the Obama administration, has come back from the dead after being counted out in 2009. And one can only guess what the automaker paid Eastwood. Whatever, it was worth it for it was a master stroke. The 81-year-old actor has told interviewers he has always voted Republican for president, though he has endorsed some Democrats in California and has praised libertarians.

The commercial itself was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" commercials, though with the famous Clint Eastwood tough guy touch. Shown shortly after Madonna's halftime performance, it began with the silhouette of Eastwood, walking in the dark and recognizable only for his gravelly voice. "It's halftime. Both teams are in their locker room discussing what they can do to win this game," he says. "It's halftime in America, too." With scenes of an iconic front porch and a city skyline," he continues, "People are out of work and they are hurting. They are all wondering what they are going to do to make a comeback. And we're all scared because this isn't a game."

With more every day scenes flashing on the screen, Eastwood adds, "The people in Detroit know a little something about this. They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together. Now Motor City is fighting again." With the music punctuating his remarks, Eastwood goes on: "I've seen a lot of tough eras, a lot of downturns in my life. Times when we didn't understand each other. It seems that we've lost our heart at times. The fog of division, discord and blame, made it hard to see what lies ahead." As scenes of protesters give way to black and white photos of kids and firefighters, Eastwood builds, "But after those trials, we all rallied around what was right and acted as one. Because that's what we do. We find a way through tough times. If we can't find a way then we'll make one. All that matters now is what's ahead. How do we come from behind? How do we come together?

At this point, viewers see Eastwood in the light. "And how do we win? Detroit is showing us it can be done,. And what's true about them is true about all of us. This country can't be knocked out with one punch." To conclude, a close-up of Eastwood fills the screen. "We get right back up again and when we do the world is going to hear the roar of our engines. Yeah, its halftime America and our second half is about to begin."

All that was missing was him turning to Mitt Romney and challenging him to "make my day."

The Gallup state-by-state average approval numbers for 2011 released this week don't necessarily predict where President Obama will finish on Election Day, but they do measure the hill he must climb to win re-election.

The most important number in presidential elections, of course, is 270 - the number of Electoral College votes it takes to win. The best way to examine the Gallup numbers is to measure them against that yardstick.

In 2010, if you sorted down from Obama's highest approval rating to his lowest, he could reach 270 Electoral College votes by carrying the 22 states plus the District of Columbia where his approval rating stood at 46.9 percent or more. Since one of the states above that line was Mississippi, a state Obama has almost no chance of carrying in practice, a more realistic scenario was that to reach an Electoral College majority he would have to carry those 21 states plus Virginia, where his approval rating stood at 46.6 percent.

Newt Gingrich's woman problem may be finally catching up with him, just like his ex-wives ultimately seem to.

Exit polls of Florida's Republican primary voters exposed a distinct gender gap between reinvigorated front-runner Mitt Romney and Gingrich. Although Romney beat Gingrich among most demographic groups, Romney's yawning lead among women, especially married women, was noteworthy. Romney beat Gingrich with men, 41 percent to 36 percent, but he beat him with women, 52 percent to 28 percent.

The gender gap was even more pronounced among married couples. Married men split about evenly between the two, giving Romney 37 percent and Gingrich 36 percent. But married women preferred Romney, 51 percent to 28 percent.

MIAMI -- When Newt Gingrich pounded Mitt Romney's immigration policy as inhumane and unrealistic at last Thursday night's GOP debate, the sound of silence was deafening at the debate-watching party of a prominent Republican Hispanic group here.

After a day in which he was blind-sided by multiple attacks and suggestions that he was never quite the Reagan disciple he has intimated during the campaign, Newt Gingrich fired back hard in the Jacksonville debate, blaming rival Mitt Romney for the broadside.

"It's increasingly interesting to watch the Romney attack machine coordinate things," said the former Speaker. "All of a sudden today there are four different articles by four different people that show up" questioning his Reagan credentials.

Perhaps the most biting article was written by former Reagan assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams, who said the young Gingrich "often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides and his policies to defeat Communism." He quoted Gingrich in 1985 calling Reagan's Cold War policies "pathetically incompetent."

It turns out becoming president was not always Ron Paul's dream. Like so many other Americans in the 1960s, he wanted to be an astronaut. "I actually had a daydream of becoming the first physician to go into space," he confessed during the Jacksonville debate, noting that when he entered the Air Force in 1962, right after John Glenn's historic flight in February of that year, he studied aerospace medicine.

But even though he never became an astronaut, it doesn't mean he doesn't still have dreams about space. Now, he said with a laugh, he doesn't want the country to spend the money to return to the moon. But, he added, "I think we maybe should send some politicians up there sometimes."

Paul also was grilled about his age. Now 76, he would be the oldest president in U.S. history if elected, prompting moderator Wolf Blitzer to ask if he will release his medical records."Oh, obviously, because it's about one page, if even that long," he said. But then he challenged his younger rivals "to a 25-mile bike ride any time of the day in the heat of Texas."

More seriously - or at least, he seemed to be serious - he told Blitzer that questions about his health have come up "sometimes in fun, but sometimes not in fun." He warned Blitzer, "There are laws against age discrimination, so, if you push this too much, you better be careful."

In the almost six decades that Fidel Castro has ruled Cuba, Republican presidential candidates have elbowed each other and fought to portray themselves as the toughest on Castro - until Thursday night when Rep. Ron Paul showed again that he is quite willing to be different. To a question suggesting that the United States has not been involved enough in influencing governments in Latin America, Paul called for an end to the half-century-old U.S. trade embargo of Cuba.

"Free trade is an answer, the answer to a lot of conflicts around the world," he said. ""I'm always promoting free trade. And you might add Cuba, too. I think we'd be a lot better off... trading with Cuba." Later in his answer, he added, "I believe with friendship and trade you can have a lot of influence. And I strongly believe that it's time we had friendship and trade with Cuba."

None of the other three candidates - who have been ardently wooing the state's influential Cuban community, most of whom are stridently anti-Castro - jumped in to agree. Former Sen. Rick Santorum indicated he did not agree with Paul's response but turned his answer into an attack on President Obama. The president, he said, has a policy of "siding with leftists, siding with Marxists" and seeking common ground with Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.

After months of campaigning in which they rarely encountered Latinos, the Republican candidates are suddenly hunting for votes in the state with the third highest number of Hispanics. But in the Tampa debate, neither Mitt Romney nor Newt Gingrich backed down from their tough stands about the English language and immigration - even when confronted with what seems to many to be a little hypocrisy in their campaigns. Beth Reinhard of the National Journal noted that both candidates want to make English the official language and outlaw ballots being printed in Spanish. But Gingrich is sending out Florida press releases in Spanish and Romney is running some Spanish language advertising.

Both candidates insisted there is nothing hypocritical about this. "I think campaigning, historically, you've always been willing to go to people on their terms and in their culture, whether it is Greek Independence Day or something you did for the Irish on St. Patrick's Day," said Gingrich. "I'm perfectly happy to have a lot of support in the Latino community." But he said that "it is essential to have a central language" to unify the country. He added, "Look, English is the language of this nation. People need to learn English."

The only dissenting voice was Ron Paul who favors English as the national language but chided his rivals for trying to impose their policy on the states. "Our system really gives us a way to be more generous," he said. "Because if Florida wanted to have some ballots in Spanish, I certainly wouldn't support a federal law that prohibited Florida" from having them. The others, he said, were "dictating one answer for all states."

The imperative of the issue is clear from the numbers. In the three states where the candidates have spent most of their time campaigning, there is a grand total of only 371,000 Latinos - 37,000 in New Hampshire, 130,000 in Iowa and 204,000 in South Carolina, according to the Pew Hispanic Center numbers for 2009. In Florida, there are 3.9 million. Hispanics in the other three states are either three or four percent; in Florida, they are 22 percent of the population.

It took less than a minute into the latest Republican presidential debate for longtime front-runner Mitt Romney to show what lesson he took from his surprisingly big defeat in South Carolina: Bare the teeth and go for the jugular of the man who beat him so solidly.

The attacks on former House speaker Newt Gingrich were almost non-stop. Before most viewers had a chance to settle in to watch NBC's broadcast, Romney had lashed Gingrich as a Washington "influence peddler," a disgraced speaker forced out of office, a failed political leader, a lobbyist and a traitor to the conservative cause.

Asked by moderator Brian Williams how he squared those attacks with his lament last week that he wanted to avoid personal criticisms of other Republicans, Romney adopted a tight smile and recalled his Saturday shellacking. "I learned something from that last contest in South Carolina," said Romney. "And that was I had incoming from all directions, was overwhelmed with a lot of the attacks. And I'm not going to sit back and get attacked day in and day out and without returning fire."

Gingrich was not bashful about fighting back, though he refused to get dragged into many of the specifics. He seemed more saddened than angry at the barrage from Romney. "He just went on and on and on," he said of Romney, adding that "he may have been a good financier. He's a terrible historian." Yet Gingrich, who really is a historian, offered up some questionable history himself.

Mitt Romney employed some of the toughest rhetoric of his campaign in Thursday's South Carolina debate, ripping into President Obama as a job-destroying disaster who practices "crony capitalism," listens to labor "stooges," and so misunderstands capitalism that Romney will have to "stuff it down his throat" in the fall campaign.

And that was just in Romney's first response in a debate he clearly wanted to serve as a preview for how he'd go after Obama.

The GOP front-runner was also the first in the debate to attack the president for his decision this week to kill the Keystone pipeline. "Because he has to bow to the most extreme members of the environmental movement, he turned down the Keystone pipeline, which would bring energy and jobs to America," said Romney. "This president is the biggest impediment to job growth in this country. And we have to replace Barack Obama to get America working again."

Romney also raised the Obama administration's $535 million loan to Solyndra, the California solar company that went bankrupt last year, accusing the president of "practicing crony capitalism." He added, "He stacks the labor stooges on the NRB so they can say no to Boeing and take care of their friends in the labor movement."

Romney also turned an attack on his work for Bain Capital into another attack on Obama. "There's nothing wrong with profit," he said, adding that much of Bain's profits went to pension funds and charities and hired more people. "I'm going to stand and defend capitalists across this country. I know we're going to get it hard from President Obama. But we'll stuff it down his throat."

As Rick Perry ignominiously departs the presidential race and sheepishly returns to Texas, his oh-so-short campaign should serve as a humbling reminder to those who prognosticate about politics. For when Perry burst on the scene with an Aug. 13^th announcement in South Carolina that overshadowed the Iowa Straw Poll, no one foresaw that he would crash and burn only 159 days later, not even making it to the South Carolina primary.

The experts inside the Republican Party, political analysts and journalists were aware of potential pitfalls for Perry when he announced. But they were all more impressed by his executive experience in Austin, his ability to raise money, his influential backers and a jobs record he could highlight in an election that all expected would be dominated by the economy. Fueled by the high expectations and advance reviews, everything seemed to be falling into place. Only ten days after his announcement, Gallup reported "Perry Zooms to the Front of the Pack for 2012 GOP Nomination." He was beating second-place Mitt Romney by 12 points, 29 to 17 percent.

But the collapse was almost as quick and agonizingly inexorable. Accusing the head of the Federal Reserve of treason; calling Social Security "a Ponzi scheme"; aligning himself with the already-discredited birthers. And all that long before that "oops" moment or any of his other missteps in the many debates.

Forget about potentially losing the evangelical vote in South Carolina. Marianne Gingrich's interview on ABC News tonight puts her ex-husband's presidential campaign in jeopardy with a much bigger segment of the electorate in South Carolina -- women. Be they evangelical, Catholic or agnostic, women are going to see in Marianne Gingrich a highly sympathetic version of that American classic -- the middle-aged woman abandoned by her ambition-addled husband for a younger version of herself. The fact that he heaped insult onto injury by asking her for an open marriage, so that he could keep both his marriage and his young mistress, makes it highly unlikely that women will be willing to overlook Newt Gingrich's character and vote for him on the economy.

Although most of what Marianne Gingrich has to say about her ex was reported in 2010 in a long interview with Esquire, her decision to say it on television, just two days before the South Carolina primary, is potential dynamite. One has to wonder whether she waited for precisely this moment to drop the bomb, when in all probability she had multiple interview requests over the several months that Gingrich has been in the race for the Republican nomination for president. If revenge is a dish best served cold, she made sure she reached into the fridge at just the right moment.

Her claim that Gingrich requested an open marriage is believable, given the candidate's reputation for grandiosity and for, well, his ability to dream up novel approaches to problems. When Gingrich admitted his six-year affair with Callista, while he was the House speaker and she was a congressional aide, Marianne Gingrich said she pleaded with her husband that they had been married for 18 years.

CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Mitt Romney is still waiting for his victory lap. Three different national surveys released Wednesday showed his overall support among Republicans at 33 percent or less -- hardly a stirring number after his feat of becoming the first Republican other than a sitting president to win both Iowa (at least until final results are announced Thursday) and New Hampshire under the modern primary calendar.

Jay Carney could be excused for his incredulity at Wednesday's White House briefing. To his surprise, he found himself on the defensive amid suggestions that somehow President Obama should not be traveling to Florida on Thursday. The criticism is that because Republicans are about to descend on the state prior to the Jan. 31 primary, the Democratic president should somehow leave them free to attack him uncontested.

Four years after it was trendy in Democratic circles to liken Barack Obama to Franklin D. Roosevelt, it is safe to conclude that no one in the Obama re-election campaign will be borrowing FDR's "Happy Days are Here Again" as the theme song for 2012. Judging by recent speeches by the president and the first lady, a much likelier choice is the 2009 tune by He is We, "A Mess it Grows." Or maybe Avril Lavigne's "I'm With You," with its line, "'Cause nothing's going right. And everything's a mess."

Both Obamas left little doubt this week that things are still a mess even after three years of Obama rule. In a speech in Richmond, the first lady talked about "this mess." But she struck the right campaign theme, adding ,"Fortunately, over the past three years, we've worked very hard to dig ourselves out of this mess. Your president has worked very hard. And there's been a lot of wonderful progress made."

Then on Friday, the president pitched his government reorganization plan, even making rare use of a colorful chart. "I don't usually use props in my speeches," he acknowledged to laughter. But he wanted to show how complicated the current government makes things. "This is the system that small business owners face.  This is what they have to deal with if they want even the most basic answers to the most basic questions like how to export to a new country or whether they qualify for a loan."  Reflecting on the way, government treats businesses, he concluded, "It's a mess."

Ever since April, people have been speculating that President Obama's campaign may shatter all fund-raising records and may even become the first-ever billion-dollar campaign.. But in the last month, campaign officials have struggled to knock down that notion -- sometimes very colorfully -- because they realize that the perception the president's campaign coffers are overflowing actually hurts fund-raising.

Campaign manager Jim Messina on Thursday tried again to rebut the billion-dollar notion, at least his third such attempt in the last month. This time, it was a video sent to supporters. After boasting of "a pretty good quarter" in which the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee raised $68 million, Messina praised the enthusiasm of the president's supporters, calling it "in stark contrast to what we've seen on the other side."

But, somewhat ominously, he complained of "a challenge that keeps coming up -- too many Obama supporters think we don't need their money. Or they don't need to give now."  He spoke of recent emails that said the campaign is going to raise $1 billion, so more contributions aren't needed. "Look," responded an exasperated Messina, "I totally get why people would think that. But they are completely wrong." He said the $1 billion speculation "is completely untrue."

Messina made the same point in an end-of-the-year email in which he wrote that such speculation "turns people off from politics." He added, "We do not and will not have a billion-dollar war chest." The campaign manager was even more colorful in a December video to supporters. "People have speculated this is a billion dollar campaign," he said. "That's bullshit."

The St. Anselm debate got a little nasty and awfully personal when Rep. Ron Paul stuck by his accusation earlier this week that former Speaker Newt Gingrich is a "chicken hawk" because he accepted deferments that kept him out of military service during the Vietnam War. "At least I went when I was called up," said the 76-year-old Paul who was a flight surgeon in the Air Force in the early '60s.

Paul made the charge on Wednesday when he first talked about Gingrich's reaction when he was eligible for the draft. "Guess what he thought about danger? He chickened out on that and got deferments and didn't even go."

Asked by ABC's George Stephanopoulos if he would again call Gingrich a chicken hawk, Paul responded, "Yeah, I think people who don't serve when they could and they get three or four or even five deferments... they have no right to send our kids off to war."

There must be something in the Iowa air that impels politicians to give off-key speeches after the votes have been cast in the caucuses. Eight years after Howard Dean committed political suicide by screaming out the names of states and four years after Hillary Clinton put so many oldsters on stage that she looked like she was taping an AARP commercial, the Republican candidates Tuesday night gave us so many fresh memories to cherish.

There was Ron Paul declaring, "I'm waiting for the day when we can say we're all Austrians now." The Texas congressman was referring to the Austrian school of economics and his favorite economist, Freidrich von Hayek. But television viewers could be excused if they wondered whether the rally would break into a rousing singing of "Edelweiss." And Paul wasn't finished with the strangeness. In a first in modern American politics, he welcomed to the stage an active-duty soldier wearing his camouflage uniform and critical of American foreign policy.

Corporal Jesse Thorsen, of West Des Moines, is only 28 years old so perhaps he could be excused for forgetting the Defense Department regulation hammered into all members of the Armed Forces that they may not "participate in partisan political... rallies" and "cannot appear at any kind of political forum in uniform." But Paul, himself a veteran, should have known better than to put Thorsen in a position where he could be disciplined by the Army.

A lighter - but also odd - touch was in Rep. Michele Bachmann's valedictory after her sixth place finish. She praised her husband, Marcus, but drew a wince from him when she disclosed that on the day before the caucuses "he was out buying doggie sunglasses for our dog Boomer."

BEDFORD, N.H. - Bill Cahill says he has visual proof that Rick Santorum's campaign has built an organization outside of Iowa capable of carrying on the momentum he gained after Iowa.

"It's here, the schedule is here," Cahill said Tuesday, holding up a thick stack of papers. Behind a cover page labeled "confidential," it contains a detailed itinerary of the former Pennsylvania senator's schedule for the next six days in the Granite State, Cahill said, evidence he'll be able to hit the ground running when he arrives for this first post-Iowa event Wednesday night.

After his 8-vote loss to Mitt Romney in Iowa on Tuesday, Santorum will have to prove whether he can succeed in states even without an aggressive retail-politicking effort. His near victory in Iowa was attributable largely to campaigning in the state longer and harder than anyone else in the field, a luxury he won't have now that the primaries take place one week after another.