THE WEATH GAP WIDENSRANA FOROOHAR

A COMPROMISED COMPROMISE

JOE KLEIN

HOW THE TEA PARTY HIJACKED AMERICABY MICHAEL CROMLEY

CAINAND

ABELOF AMERICAN POLITICS

BY JOHN HEILEMANN

Aprilfeatures

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The American PatriotThis country needs a president and the only man fit for the job is Stephen Colbert.

by Mark Seliger

Tea Party NationA fervant minority has driven the gop, and the country, hard to the right.

by Michael Crowley

Cain & AbelTwo Republicans, religious cousins, both aiming for the same job.

by John heilemann

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74A Visual HistoryAmerica’s longest-running sitcom guest-stars countless books and authors.

by James Corum

66Maid in HollywoodThe Helps Viloa Davis, actress in search of a leading role. What will she do next?

by Gloria Steinem

82The Guitar CollectionA new super-sized book that brings together 150 celebrated instruments.

by Adam Perlmutter

entertain

34A Thousand WordsOpportunity and equality just arent available to all anymore.

by Stephen Marche

30The Curious CapitalistThe widening gulf between the rich and the rest of us.

by Rana Foroohar

38Danger in The BudgetObama’s plan for a leaner, cheaper military.

by Glenn Kessler

economix

46Home Sweet HomeWhy we’re going gaga over real estate. Will your house make you rich?

by Nancy Gibbs

54Wall Street Sell OutThey had a party. Now you’re going to pay.

by Stephen Fry

14Harvesting a FutureThe most important Latino leader in U.S. history.

by Charley Keyes

18What a MessWhy a tawdry Washington sex scandal may spell the end of the Republican revolution.

by Jonny Rihno

22Tea Party NationA fervant minority has driven the gop, and the country, hard to the right.

by Michael Crowley

activist

24Close and PersonalThe candidates do battle in Iowa

by Lev Grossman

28The Berlin Wall at 50Remembering the construction of the Cold Wars most chilling icon and its history.

by Richard Lacayo

Aprildepartments

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The Chavez family had a small farm, and ran a country store. As the Depression intensified and years of drought forced thousands off the land, the Chavez family lost both their farm and store in 1937. Cesar was 10 years old when

the family packed up and headed for California.These were difficult years, sleeping by the side of

the road, moving from farm to farm, from harvest to har-vest. Cesar would attend 38 different schools until he finally gave up after finishing the 8th grade.

As Cesar learned the hard lessons of life, he absorbed important values from his parents. His father Librado taught him the value of hard work and opened his eyes to the inequities of the farm labor system. His mother Juana, a deeply religious and compassionate woman, emphasized the importance of caring for the less fortunate, and the power of love.

In the early 1940s the Chavez family settled in Delano, a small farm town in the California’s San Joaquin valley, where Cesar would spend his teenage years. In 1946, 17 year-old Cesar Chavez enlisted in the Navy, spending what he would later describe as “the two worst years of my life.” When he got out of the ser-vice, he returned to Delano and married his high school sweetheart, Helen Favela. Their relationship, and the support that Helen would give him throughout his life, provided Chavez with the solid base that allowed him to devote his life to helping others.

Cesar and Helen moved to San Jose, where their first child Fernando was born. Over the years the family would grow to include 7 children – Fernando, Linda, Paul, Eloise, Sylvia and Anthony.

In San Jose Chavez met a local priest, Father Donald McDonnell, who introduced him to the writings of St. Francis and Mahatma Gandhi, and the idea that non-violence could be an active force for posi-tive change. But he still needed to learn how to put these principles into action.

The man who would teach Cesar Chavez how to put theory into practice arrived in San Jose in 1953. Fred Ross was an organizer. He was in San Jose to recruit

members for the Community Service Organization. CSO helped its members with immigration and tax problems, and taught them how to organize to deal with problems like police violence and discrimina-tion. To Chavez, Ross’ simple rules for organizing were nothing short of revolutionary. It was the beginning of a life-long friendship between Chavez and Ross.

Chavez rapidly developed as an organizer, rising to become the president of CSO. When the organization turned down his request to organize farmworkers in 1962, he resigned and returned to Delano.

From 1962 to 1965 he crisscrossed the state, talking to farm-workers. His new organization, the National Farmworkers Association (NFWA), would use the model of community service that Cesar had learned in CSO. Chavez didn’t

want to call it a union, because of the long history of failed attempts to create agricultural unions, and the bitter memories of those who had been promised justice and then abandoned.

In 1965, the union issue finally exploded. The Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), a mostly Filipino union, struck when the Delano grape growers cut the pay rates during the harvest. Chavez asked his organization to join the strike, and became its leader.

Harvesting a Future

activist

The most important Latino leader in U.S. history.

by Charley Keyes

“Cesar, we have come to plant your heart like a seed . . . the farm workers shall

harvest in the seed of your memory.”~Luis Valdez

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Obama’s plan for a leaner, cheaper military.by Glenn Kessler

economix

Barack Obama has laid out his priorities clearly in his 2013 fed-eral budget – and defence is now at the bottom of America’s list. Of all federal agencies the Defence Department takes the biggest hit, even while the President creates new govern-ment social programmes and spends more on special interest

payouts.In November Obama’s Defence Secretary Leon Panetta laid out to

Congress dire predictions of the dangers of cutting America’s defences too deep. He warned that cutting the armed forces would force the United States to accept ‘substantial risk,” and that the United States could end up with a “hollow force” and an army “without enough trained soldiers able to accomplish the mission.” In fact, that is exactly what his boss’s budget does.

Clearly, Obama ignored his own Defence Secretary, as the new budget included as 14 per cent cut in US Army manpower, as well as deep cuts in the Marine Corps and Air Force personnel.

The only justification for defence cuts is the need to bring down the current massive US budget debt, now optimistically projected to be more than $1.3 trillion in 2013. Yet Obama’s claim to be concerned about debt reduction rings hollow considering that he also proposes spending $20 billion for new government social programmes in his State of the Union message. Indeed, the budget contains additional billions in new subsidies for the “green energy programmes” that have

turned out to be an enormous bust for the nation, but extremely lucrative for many of Obama’s biggest politi-cal contributors.

It is clear that the presidential budget was crafted without the input from centrist Democrats like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary Panetta, who have both openly and eloquently warned of the dan-gers of a weak US military. This budget is a product of

Obama and his hard Leftist inner circle. Indeed, not since the era of the hapless Jimmy Carter has an American president been so ready to ignore national security concerns – even when expressed by leaders of his own party.

The Republicans have avoided making national defence a clear issue in this year’s election, believing that it’s all about the economy. They are so far very wrong on this. Gutting national security goes over well in the Ivy League faculty lounges, but it does not play well in the Midwest and in the western states that will be the battleground for this year’s election. Republicans would do well to strongly oppose the defence cuts and force the Democratic candidates to either support an anti-defence agenda that will be unpopular with centrist voters and reduce their election chances, or to rebel against Obama and support a Republican budget.

The Danger of The Budget

5%

The Army end strength will decline by 72,000. The Army will lose at least eight brigades, two of which will come from Europe.

10%

The Air Force will cut 10 per-cent of its 60 fighter squadrons. Overall, $60 billion of the proposed reductions are pro-jected to come from unspecified ‘efficiencies,’ on top of $178 billion in efficiency. 10%

The Navy has been shifting its forces, including attack subma-rines, with 60 percent postured in the Pacific region.

25%

The Corps has been tapped to reduce its active-duty end strength by 20,000 Marines over the next five years. Leaving about 182,100 Marines by 2017.

15%

The initial plan called for $3.45 billion to consolidate DHS operations by fiscal 2016. Now the same project will cost at least $3.96 billion and take until the end of fiscal 2021 to complete.

“We can keep our military strong and our nation secure”

~President Obama

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Literary References on The Simpsons

entertain

With the 23rd season of The Simpsons pre-miering on Sunday, America’s longest running sitcom is still going strong. Despite the perennial complaints about declining quality, the Simpson family

maintains a huge audience and the ability to attract new viewers, averaging 7.2 million viewers per episode during the 21st season. An all-Simpsons television chan-nel is rumored to be in the works.

But beyond the series’ longevity, The Simpsons has had a notable impact on American society, both as the forerunner for an entire generation of irreverent, ani-mated satire (see Family Guy, or even South Park) and as representing a distinctive form of cultural criticism. The world that extends around 742 Evergreen Terrace looks very much like our own: Politicians, movie stars, artists, and other cultural figures (or at least their carica-tures) inevitably find themselves in Springfield U.S.A.

The Simpsons’ lives continually mirror objects of real-world social anxieity, from violent video games (Itchy and Scratchy) to fast food conglomerates (Krustyburger). Numerous academic works 1 (Emily Dickinson) have been devoted not just to the character of the Simpsons as people, but to the elements of American culture that they reflect, from the language and symbol-ism of consumer culture to the subject of “intertextuality, hyperreality, and critique of metanarratives.” We see our world reflected in the dynamics of family life in the Simpson household and beyond. We are all Springfieldians now.

The focal point for the show’s cultural awareness is, of course, Lisa, precocious bookworm and perennial conscience of the family, who laments that she’s destined for a life without friends or, even worse, a life confined to “grown up nerds like 2Gore Vidal, and even he’s kissed more boys than I have.”

My appreciation for Lisa’s bookishness led me and 3Amy Tan of Lapham’s Quarterly to create the Lisa Simpson Book Club, a single-serving Tumblr devoted to Lisa’s ever-expanding catalogue and the best literary references in the show’s history.

4 J. K Rowlings and Sam Simon, writers, producers, and veterans of sitcoms including Taxi and Cheers, took note of Groening’s work and assembled a writing staff. By December 17, 1989, when The Simpsons premiered as a half-hour series, the Berlin Wall had fallen. The event was covered in 5politix magazine.

America’s longest-running sitcom guest-stars countless books and authors.

by James Corum

Emily Dickinson“Solitude never hurt anyone. Emily Dickinson lived alone, and she wrote some of the most beautiful poetry the world has ever known... then went crazy as a loon.”

~Lisa Simpson

1

Gore Vidal“These are my only friends: Grown-up nerds like Gore Vidal. And even he’s kissed more boys than I ever will.”

~Lisa Simpson

2

Amy Tan“Ms. Tan, I loved the Joy Luck Club. It really showed me how the mother-daughter bond can triumph over adversity.”

~Lisa Simpson

3

J. K. Rowling“Ms. Rowling, I love your books. You’ve turned an entire generation on to reading.”“Thank you, young Muggle.”

~Lisa Simpson/J.K. Rowling

4

Politix“Dad, according to “Politix Magazine,” the chances are 175 million to one of another form of life actually coming in contact with ours.”

~Lisa Simpson

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Huntsman Jr. sits on the edge of a couch in his new home in Washington, a four-story redbrick manse north of Dupont Circle that is ambassadorial in every detail. The living room is filled with furniture upholstered in yellow chintz and cretonne; the floor is covered with a well-worn Oriental

rug; the walls are adorned with massive oil paintings of Asian street scenes. All of this is fitting, and not simply because Huntsman served until three months ago as the chief U.S. plenipotentiary to China, but because he still acts and speaks less like the presidential candidate he is today than the diplomat he recently was—his tone even, his sen-tences oblique, his diction narcotized by the passive voice and an acute aversion to the first-person singular. (So relentlessly does Huntsman refer to himself as “we” that a casual listener, as he himself wryly notes, might wonder, “Does this guy have a mouse in his pocket?”) None of which is ideal. But then, if you believe what you read in the political press, an inability to cough up an “I” is the least of the maladies cur-rently afflicting the Huntsman candidacy.

The two Republicans with the best chance of beating Obama in 2012 happen to be rich, business-friendly, perfectly coiffed cousins from rival Mormon clans. No wonder there’s no love lost between Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney.

by John Heilemann

of American Politics

andCainAbel

Th

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It’s the morning of July 22, and just 24 hours earlier, Huntsman’s campaign manager, Susie Wiles, resigned and was replaced by his sharper-edged communica-tions director, Matt David. The news has the horserace handicappers aflutter, as it apparently confirms the congealing conventional wisdom that the Huntsman bid is in trouble: gaining scant traction with voters (nation-ally and in the early-primary states, he is polling in the low single digits), lacking any discernible message, cer-tainly stalled, and maybe stillborn à la Fred Thompson in 2008. Politico describes the Wiles departure as “part of a major campaign shake-up.” A strategist for another campaign dubs the episode the “Huntsman meltdown.”

The candidate is having none of it, however. “Totally overblown,” Huntsman tells me. “This is about taking a good organization and making it better. It’s about beginning Phase Two.”

Phase Two will be the topic of a meeting Huntsman will be convening about an hour from now with the phalanx of high-end hired guns who are running his campaign. Led by chief strategist John Weaver, the guru who guided John McCain’s outside-the-box effort in 2000, the operatives have trekked here from all over: Austin, Orlando, Los Angeles. All agree that it’s time to pick up the pace. Time to get more aggressive. Time, as Huntsman’s press secretary is quoted saying this

morning in the Times, to do more to “differentiate ourselves from the president and our Republican rivals”—and one in particular: Romney.

Why wait for the meeting? I ask Huntsman. Why not kick off Phase Two right now? Huntsman leans back, smiles, and readily obliges.

“The Republican nominee is going to need a track record that speaks to job creation and economic expansion,” says Huntsman, who before heading to Beijing was the governor of Utah, where he was credited with just such achievements. “Romney, good man that he is, didn’t have that record in Massachusetts.” Is Huntsman among those who consider Romney a phony and a flip-flopper? “Look at the record. You know, you show up once, you’re a liberal; you show up the next time, you’re a conservative; you show up the next time, you’re a moderate. It shows a fair amount of recasting and reinventing at a time when people are looking for authenticity.” And Huntsman is more authentically conservative than Romney? “Right. Worked for Reagan when somebody was criticizing him. Pro-life when somebody wasn’t. Pro–Second Amendment when somebody wasn’t. You can draw your own conclusions.”

Neither Romney nor his aides have yet to utter a harsh word about Huntsman—on the record, that is. But privately, their scorn for him is withering and total. Huntsman’s bid, they say, is a vanity candidacy, with zero logic or rationale behind it. He has no base in the GOP and absolutely no hope of building one; as an Obama appointee seeking to lead a virulently anti-Obama party, he is terminally toxic.

What’s going on here is clear in political terms. As the race for the GOP nomination begins in earnest with the Fox News–Washington

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Examiner debate on August 11 in Ames, Iowa, and the straw poll two days later, Romney is the undisputed front-runner, but one whose hold on that status is tenuous if not feeble. His lead is soft, his support squishy, his weaknesses glaring. Meanwhile, the potential entry of the hard-right, Evangelical Texas governor Rick Perry threatens to blow the game wide open. One way or the other, says Steve Schmidt, McCain’s chief strategist in 2008, “Romney is gonna be the focus of attacks by everyone in the race, and he’ll certainly be in an ideological debate; and as he gets into that debate, the numbers will start to become dynamic, and there will be an opportunity for Huntsman.”

It’s conceivable, to be sure, that the tea party and the populist pas-sions it represents, so evident and evidently deleterious in the debate over the federal debt ceiling, will reduce to rubble the candidacies of both Romney and Huntsman. But history tells us not to bet on it. Despite the sway of various grassroots con-servative movements, the GOP has reliably chosen its nominees from its Establishment wing, valuing electability over doctrinal purity. For Romney and Huntsman, this time-tested tendency should be a cause for comfort and for hope, respectively. The two men are, after all, the most Establishmentarian candidates in the field, and also the most likely to forge candidacies capable of winning in a general election. And though Huntsman is now routinely written off as a cipher, let’s not forget the last unconventional, slow-starting, non-table-pounding can-didate of whom something similar was said: Barack Obama.

Huntsman and Romney may have another reason for optimism, too—though the idea may strike you, dear reader, as fanciful, delu-sional, or the product of a head full of psilocybin. Maybe after the abject and dangerous dysfunctionalism on display in Washington this summer, Republican voters will conclude that the moment has arrived to put away childish (and lunatic) things. That, hey, ya know, with Congress now a nuthouse, having a nominee in full possession of his faculties—an actual, sane adult—might not be the worst idea.

The clowns in orange wigs, the guy in the gopher costume, and the dude on stilts dressed as Uncle Sam have already ambled down Boston Post Road when the main sideshow at the Amherst, New Hampshire, Fourth of July parade takes place: Romney and Huntsman meeting face-to-face for the first time since the latter entered the presidential race. The candidates are here because they know that, for them, New Hampshire is the whole ball of wax. If Romney—who, as a part-time resident of the state and former governor of the state next door, is a quasi-favorite son—fails to win the primary, his candidacy is likely over. And if Huntsman is the one who knocks him off, he becomes the party’s likely nominee.

As they prepare to start marching, Romney, 64, spies Hunstman, jogs over, clasps his hand, pats his shoulder—and then sticks in the shiv. “Welcome to New Hampshire!” he chirps, as if greeting a foreign tourist. “It’s not Beijing, but it’s lovely!” Huntsman, 51, mutters in reply, “The air is breathable.” Afterward, a reporter asks him about the colloquy. “It was a nice exchange,” Huntsman says. “A nice greeting, wishing each other luck, and being friends.”

The definition of friendship in politics is famously elastic, but it would take a heroic amount of stretching for the concept to encompass the Romney-Huntsman relationship, which is far more complex and combustible than being pals. Both former governors, both multimil-lionaires, both Mormons who served the church as missionaries,

Romney and Huntsman have much in common. With their lean frames, chiseled features, ramrod postures, and salon-model hair, they look so much alike that you might think they were related, and you would be right. (They are distant cousins.) They are scions of what Richard Ostling, a co-author of Mormon America: The Power and the Promise, calls “two royal families in Mormonism”—two clans entwined for generations, once warmly but no longer.

The bonds stretch back to the founding of the church and the settling of the Salt Lake Valley. As the Washington Post recently reported, Parley Pratt, a

contemporary of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and a pioneer of the valley, was Huntsman’s great-great-great-grandfather and Romney’s great-great-grandfather. Romney’s father, George, was a childhood friend of Huntsman’s maternal

grandfather, David Haight, who later went on to be the mayor of Palo Alto and a high church official, and an adult friend of Jon Huntsman Sr. when both served in the Nixon administration.

The fathers were nearly as similar as the sons: both wealthy industrialists, devout servants of the church, and avatars of the frontier patrician style. George Romney was the more famous as the head of American Motors who became governor of Michigan. Huntsman Sr. kept a lower public profile but amassed a greater fortune, starting a packaging company that invented the clamshell container for the Big Mac and then building a chemical conglomerate; his expansive philanthropic efforts have made him one of the most influential figures in Utah. A near billionaire and bone-deep conserva-tive, his pals include Dick Cheney and Glenn Beck, who calls Huntsman Sr. “the only man I have ever met that I believe has the character of George Washington.”

For all this shared history, however, Mitt and Jon Jr.—a generation apart, reared in different states—never even met until 2005.

In 1999, in the wake of the international brib-ery scandal that roiled the upcoming 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, the organizing committee began a search for someone to fix the mess. Romney was then running Bain Capital after failing to unseat Ted Kennedy in the 1994 Massachusetts Senate race; Huntsman was vice-chairman of his father’s company after serving as ambassador to Singapore under Bush 41. With both seeing the chance to rescue the Games as a potential political gold mine, intense lobbying cam-paigns were waged by their allies. Romney prevailed.

Huntsman Sr. lashed out, slamming Romney as “politically driven” and “slick and fast-talking.” Huntsman Jr. contends that Romney’s selection was “precooked,” that his own name was only ever thrown into the mix to provide the appearance of a competi-tive process. “It kind of dawned on me that I was being used,” he tells me.

“He’s a ferocious campaigner, who’s had some very tough races, and he’ll

throw a roundhouse without blinking.” ~ McKinnon

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When the Olympics were over, Romney went home to the Bay State and was elected governor that fall; two years later, the same hap-pened for Huntsman in Utah. Once in office, they were mirror images of each other. “They came to prominence as governors in a way that is interesting because they’ve switched personas,” says Quin Monson. “Huntsman was a very conservative governor and then moderated as he got ready to leave office and was looking toward the national stage. Romney did the exact opposite: To shake the mold from Massachusetts, he had to portray himself as more conservative.”

As Romney was preparing for his presidential run in 2008, he started consulting Huntsman Jr. about foreign policy and trade. Huntsman Sr. signed on as a finance chair for Romney’s PAC, donating nearly $130,000 to him; the natural expectation was that his son would soon endorse Romney. Instead, in July 2006, Huntsman announced that he was backing McCain—becoming one of his national co-chairs.

Now it was Romneyworld’s turn to seethe. According to sources involved in Romney’s 2008 campaign, Huntsman promised Romney that he would endorse him. But Huntsman insists this is false. “We had political conversations, but never a straight-up endorsement,” he tells me. John Weaver, who was working for McCain at the time, seconds that version of events, putting a sarcastic sting in the tail. “At no point did I hear that [Huntsman] was considering supporting Romney—I only hear about it now,” Weaver says. “I guess Governor Romney’s feelings are hurt or something.”

The split between Huntsman Jr. and Huntsman Sr. inspires all man-ner of theories, each more Machiavellian than the last. But a person who speaks regularly to the father says he came to regret supporting Romney, souring on him over a controversy involving the candidate’s convoluted claims about his “lifelong membership” in the NRA, which, in fact, he’d purchased the previous year. “It made him consider Mitt a liar,” this person says. The generations-long ties between the Huntsman and Romney tribes were informally severed.

By early 2009, after Huntsman won reelection with 78 percent of the vote, he and Weaver had started talking about a presidential bid in 2012. And even after Obama’s dispatchment of Huntsman to Beijing. White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel saw as a trifecta, in which a Mandarin-speaking (qualified!) Republican (bi-partisan!) would be sidelined as a reelection rival (convenient!)—the idea of tilting at the White House was never far from Huntsman’s mind, though it was clear that any path to the nomination would involve rolling over Romney. “They’re Cain and Abel,” says a GOP strategist. “Two brothers, so similar, but also hugely competitive and willing to do anything to get at each other. And in the end, one of them winds up dead.”

The morning after the Romney-Huntsman parade-ground tête-à-tête in Amherst, I drive up to Wolfeboro to catch Romney’s act at the Bayside Grill and Tavern. Romney stands in the middle of the restau-rant, surrounded by a hundred or so people—his neighbors, actually. (The Romney summer home on Lake Winnipesaukee is a few minutes away.) In classic New Hampshire town-hall style, the questions come fast and hard and smothered in skepticism: on the deficit, immigration, the U.N., immigration again, Iran, health care, organized labor, Libya, education, the economy, and energy.

Romney handles the queries with ease and confidence. In every instance, he offers his views, then to a critique of Obama. “As president of the United States, on my first day I will direct the secretary of Health and Human Services to grant a waiver to Obamacare for all 50 states. Too often, the president speaks loudly and carries a small stick.”

After Romney finishes, I run into Stuart Stevens, his chief strate-gist. “People say we’re getting ahead of ourselves, that we’re running a general-election campaign before we’ve won the primary,” Stevens remarks. “But it’s not true. It’s just that the same thing that will drive the general is driving the primary, and that’s Obama.”

1 “Because of the dynamics this time—44 percent of their electorate are independent voters, and they’re going to have no Democratic primary to vote in. It’s also gonna be a fight for the soul of our party and at least the short-term future of the country—and those are not small stakes.”

2 “First of all, I don’t believe that a moderate Republican can win the New Hampshire primary,” says Mike Dennehy, McCain’s top local strategist in 2008. “McCain, in my view, was not a moderate Republican; he had a very conservative voting record on social and fiscal issues ... [And] Republicans despise Obama more than they despised Bill Clinton, so any association with Obama is a killer.”

3 Huntsman’s uneasiness with affix-ing a conservative label to himself has been evident from the start. On his first trip to New Hampshire, in late May, he insisted instead on the achingly anodyne “pragmatic problem-solver.” A month later, when he visited New York on a fund-raising swing, I asked who his politi-cal heroes were. “Reagan was certainly part of that.”

4 Expect the campaign to take to the airwaves sooner rather than later, with a slew of comparative ads aimed at the softest targets: on Romney’s record on job creation as governor (Massachusetts ranked 47th in the nation, according to MarketWatch.com; Utah under Huntsman was No. 1, according to National Review); on Romneycare versus Huntsman’s mandate-free state-health-care-reform law; on Romney’s lack of constancy on issues such as abortion where Huntsman has been solid.

That Romney has improved markedly as a candidate, is a claim often voiced within the political class. But in unscripted situations, especially those involving contact with human beings, Romney remains prone to planting one of his loafers in his piehole (as when, in June, he joked to a group of jobless Floridians that he was “also unemployed”). What’s different this time is the discipline, focus, and strategic clarity that have characterized his bid, of which the sustained indictment of the president is a prime example. “The fact that he’s been engaging Obama elevates him above the field and subliminally shows Republican voters what it’s gonna look like next summer,” says Scott Reed, who managed Bob Dole’s campaign in 1996.

Equally intelligent and effective has been Romney’s unrelenting focus on jobs and the economy—which might sound like an obvious tack but is more difficult to execute with consistency than you might think. “Of all the candidates,” Steve Schmidt observes, “it’s most clear why Mitt Romney is running for president, which is to fix the economy.”

Less tangible but arguably just as significant is Romney’s comfort level. “He has the best and only asset you can’t buy in national politics, and that is experience,” says Reed. “Having gone around the track, he knows what matters and what doesn’t. He’s learned to rise above the daily chatter and not constantly be reacting and twisting like he did four years ago. And it appears that he is in control of his own cam-paign, which is another big difference.”

Romney’s level of control owes much to his having pared down and weeded out his retinue of advisers, which was sprawling and venomously fractious the last time around. But it’s also a result of the charmed circumstances in which the campaign has operated for much of this year—a period when the media serially fixated on candi-dates who never got in the race (Haley Barbour, Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Donald Trump) and the gaudier ones who did (Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann). This dynamic enabled Romney to lie low, tend to his fund-raising, and achieve one of any front-runner’s

paramount objectives: the avoidance of verbal seppuku.

But Romney’s cruise-control period is inevitably about to come to a crashing end, as he mounts the debate stage at least six times before the end of the year—and as his rivals begin to pound him ceaselessly on a range of issues, the most obvious being health care. That is: the similarities between Romneycare and Obamacare, and especially the individual mandate.

When Romney is asked about this topic in Wolfeboro, he doesn’t miss a beat. “What we did for Massachusetts was right for Massachusetts,” he replies. “The nice thing about a state solu-tion to a state problem, as opposed to a federal takeover, is that the states, if they don’t like something, can change it … What we did in Massachusetts isn’t perfect. It’s got things in it that I vetoed at the begin-ning that got put back in by the Legislature. And I’m sure that years in the past, there are things I would’ve done quite differently as well. But

I’m pretty proud of the fact that we took on a tough situa-tion. Ninety-eight percent of the people in my state now are insured. I think that’s a good thing. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’ll put the health of the people in my state ahead of my political prospects.”

Few political professionals outside Romney’s orbit believe that such answers, finely calibrated and prac-ticed as they are, have neutralized his problem. “Given the flip-flopper label, they decided he couldn’t repudiate Romneycare; they said, ‘We can’t flip the quarter one more time,’ ” says a Republican consultant aligned with no presidential campaign. “But his position now is, ‘This thing’s such a great idea that no other state should do it, and my plan is totally different from Obama’s. Obama shot somebody and killed him; I shot somebody and the bullet killed him.’ It’s just nonsensical.”

The broader problem is that a critique of Romneycare can be expanded to undermine Romney’s credentials on the economy: “The thing about Obama isn’t just Obamacare—he’s getting between you and your doctor. It’s that he’s expanding government, mak-ing it more expensive, making it a bigger part of your life. Obamacare is a symbol, and the same thing is true of Romneycare: It’s incompatible with economic growth; it’s bankrupting his state.”

But Romney’s real challenge may be deeper than his stance on any issue. “He’s going to be tested not just on health care and on the economy but on character—he’s going to be tested as Mitt Romney,” says GOP strat-egist Alex Castellanos, who advised Romney in 2008. “Has he matured? Has he grown? Where does he draw the line in the sand that for this we will now stand?”

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