Weigel

Early this morning, Wisconsin media picked up the news that Scott Walker's Department of Workforce Development would put out new job numbers. Early numbers. Different numbers than the ones the national Bureau of Labor Statistics had been using.

By noon, according to a friend who covers the state, this ad was already on the air.

Democrats, who've been raising hell every day of the Walker era, are raising fresher hell today, holding two (2) availabilities to discuss "illegal coordination" between Walker and the state's bureaucracy. That might be a stretch, but it's closer to it than anything that's bugged Kim Strassel about the Obama campaign.

(Please note that Walker's slogan, like Obama's, is "forward." That's also the motto of the state. Clip and save for the next time the slogan is tied to international socialism.)

Sen. Richard Lugar's landslide defeat this month was a minor humiliation for a whole lot of Republicans. Among them: Sen. Rob Portman. The freshman and Bush administration vet, who has droned his way to the top of veepstakes charts, had sent money to Lugar via his PAC. Yesterday, at one of the Peterson Foundation panels that the press actually paid attention to, Portman gave his spin on the loss.

A lot of it had to do with the fact that he didn’t have a residency in his home state. The media has picked up some of the other aspects of the race but missed the fact that there was a legitimate concern when he couldn’t vote in his own election.

This is... well, yes, spin, but not untrue. When I shadowed Mourdock a few months ago, I was struck by how much time his campaign spent pushing the story that Lugar didn't really live in Indiana anymore. Eventually, the local election board in Lugar's Indianapolis ruled the Mourdockians were right. Lugar survived, sort of, and got to stay in the race, but his poll tumble can be tracked alongside the residence story. It prevented him from regaining an initiative.

Look now to Nebraska, home of Debra Fischer and a stunning, Palin-fueled upset. (Palin endorsed Fischer late last week, after Fischer had asked for the help.) Palin helped, absolutely. But Alex Burns obtained solid data on how much the three candidates were able to spend on TV ads.

Jon Bruning -- $1.2 million
Don Stenberg -- $1.3 million (candidate and outside groups)
Deb Fischer -- $0.3 million

This didn't quite track as a Tea Party upset. It looks more like what happened to Rick Santorum in Iowa, or Creigh Deeds in Virginia (2009) -- a third candidate sneaking past the two front-runners beating the hell out of each other.

After Chris Christie's silly little video with Cory Booker started to get pick-up, I got lost in a YouTube hole and found this 2008 vintage piece from Lou Dobbs -- the classic, CNN vintage Lou Dobbs. Back then, Christie was no conservative hero. He was the U.S. attorney in New Jersey, who had the audacity to say that it was "not a crime" to exist in the United States as an immigrant.

What elevates the clip to greatness is the commentary from Dobbs's expert: a "former Justice Department attorney named Kris Kobach.

That's kind of a silly statement. Illegal aliens are not just standing here, being present, and doing nothing else. There are a multitude of crimes associated with the life of an illegal alien in the United States. That's jiust the way our laws are written.

Since then, Kobach has helped Arizona and Alabama write laws that effectively turn all law enforcement officers into immigration enforcement agents. He's also been elected Secretary of State in Kansas. Oh, and he's a Romney adviser.

Public Policy Polling's survey of Wisconsin suggests that Scott Walker is winning his recall election. Not really a surprise right now. But what about that presidential number? It's got Obama up only one point on Mitt Romney, closer to the 2004 Kerry-Bush squeaker than the 2008 landslide Obama won in the state.

Should it worry Obama? Possibly. Should it worry the recall campaign Democrats? Oh, yes. Look at the internals. PPP's sample found that 28 percent of likely voters were Democrats, and 35 percent were Republicans. In 2008, 39 percent of voters were Democrats and only 33 percent were Republicans. That's a 13-point swing. In PPP's poll, 17 percent of voters call themselves liberals and 41 percent call themselves conservatives. In 2008, the exit poll numbers were 23 percent and 31 percent -- an 8-point conservative lead, not a 24-point lead.

When I journeyed to Wisconsin last week, I saw a surge of public support for Walker -- signs, bumper stickers, little tokens like those -- unlike anything I've ever seen in a non-presidential race. The polling bears this out. It's not necessarily doom-saying for Obama. It does explain why the DNC is quietly backing away from the race. Easier to give up then to try and narrow this enthusiasm gap twice.

Yesterday I published this pre-obituary for Americans Elect. It was late in the pre-obituary cycle, honestly. The smart geeks at Tech President had been shoveling dirt on AE for months. Irregular Times, the only new organization doing real digging on the group, had proved and proved and re-proved that the organization was bending its own rules to avoid collapse.

After this piece went up, I talked to Richard Winger of Ballot Access News -- one of the few people who reports, analyzes, and truly groks the struggles of non-duopoly campaigns. He gave me a note of caution: Wait until Thursday.

"I wouldn't be surprised if Americans Elect decides to get rid of some of the silly thresholds," he said. Currently, AE's "national primary" requires a candidate to get 1000 delegates from 10 states to even be eligible for the next stage. "That doesn't even honor the one-man-one-vote principle," pointed out Winger -- it's much easier for, say, Californians to rustle up support, than for Wyoming supporters to do so.

What would happen if AE changed the standards? It could lower them enough to spark a "primary" between Buddy Roemer (currently above 6000 total delegates), former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, and some well-meaning academics. The risk, however, would be that current third party candidates like Gary Johnson, newly intrigued by the AE ballot lines, encourage their supporters to buy in. In about half of states, candidates are allowed to appear on multiple ballot lines.

What would happen if AE just falls apart? The party would still appear on the 27-and-counting ballots they've made it onto -- it would violate the rights of people who signed petitions if the party was taken off. In some states, Americans Elect will stay on the ballot for four whole years. The power to choose candidates, this year or in 2014, rests completely with the people listed in the state ballot applications -- AE staffers. They exercise enormous control over who gets the lines. They may be irrelevant, but they're not dead.

An interesting Americans Elect side-story: The advocacy of official advisors who weren't suppose to advocate for candidates.

Sean Sullivan explains the Nebraska upset.

Also, I asked the Gary Johnson campaign about Ron Paul spox Jesse Benton's pledge that the congressman won't endorse the Libertarian. Johnson campaign strategist Ron Nielson responds:

Continuing and growing the Ron Paul revolution is not about endorsements.  It is about making sure civil liberties, non-intervention and a real commitment to smaller government are in the national conversation, and they will not be if the conversation is only between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. While Governor Johnson would obviously like to have Congressman Paul's endorsement, we have not asked for it, nor do we expect it.  Ron Paul has an important role to play in the Republican Party in the months ahead, and Governor Johnson has an important role to play in offering voters a third choice in November.

We are confident that Governor Johnson will successfully appeal to Ron Paul voters on the basis of shared values and his position as the only proven proponent of constitutionally-based smaller government and an anti-war foreign policy based on non-intervention.

State Sen. Deb Fischer has won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Nebraska, making her the odds-on favorite to replace Ben Nelson. What you will hear: Sarah Palin endorsed a Mama Grizzly and pushed her over the top. The larger backstory: Fischer benefitted from a yearlong, bloody, stupid primary between state Attorney General Jon Bruning and Treasurer Don Stenberg. The former, working his way up the greasy pole for years, had spooked Chuck Hagel out of running for re-election in 2008, then gotten chased out of the primary by then-Agriculture Sec. Mike Johanns. The latter had lined up conservative support -- Jim DeMint, Rick Santorum, Erick Erickson. The two of them tore chunks out of each other, leaving Fischer alone. So it goes with the three-way race.

This is a pretty astute use of two overexposed politicians from the New York media market.

Jokes about Christie running for vice president are the new jokes about Mike Bloomberg running as an independent.

Thanks to Andy Newbold, I see that Fox News has glommed on to Kimberly Strassel's bizarre -- presumably ongoing -- series of columns about the Obama campaign's huff-and-puff act about Mitt Romney's bigger donors. The first column went viral -- 37,000 Facebook shares -- but Strassel had lost me early on, when she compared the KeepingGOPHonest site to Nixonism.

Richard Nixon's "enemies list" appalled the country for the simple reason that presidents hold a unique trust. Unlike senators or congressmen, presidents alone represent all Americans. Their powers—to jail, to fine, to bankrupt—are also so vast as to require restraint. Any president who targets a private citizen for his politics is de facto engaged in government intimidation and threats. This is why presidents since Nixon have carefully avoided the practice. Save Mr. Obama, who acknowledges no rules.

That explains the problem with the enemies list, which John Dean described -- before he switched sides -- as a guide on how to "use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies." It doesn't explain the problem with a public guide to a candidate's biggest donors, whose names and donation sizes were made available on FEC forms. Strassel informs us that these men have committed no crimes -- which nobody's disputing -- and provides no evidence of the administration using incumbent powers to nail them. She just lists a number of times that Obama has criticized -- sorry, "PUBLICLY TARGETED" -- donors/industries spending big to defeat the Obama campaign. The closest she gets to an abuse of power is that the administration's "ginned up an executive order (yet to be released) to require companies to list political donations as a condition of bidding for government contracts." That's not quite a frivolous IRS audit, is it?

This takes us to Strassel's second column, an In Cold Blood-style investigation of a Democrat who followed up on one of the donors listed at KeepingGOPHonest -- Frank VanderSloot.

Through 2011, nearly every mention of Mr. VanderSloot appeared in Idaho or Washington state newspapers, often in reference to his business. That changed in January, with the first Super PAC disclosures. Liberal bloggers and media have since dug into his past, dredging up long-ago Idaho controversies that touched on gay issues.

What's the operating assumption here? The reason that someone like VanderSloot can give unlimited money to Restore Our Future, basically, is that the Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech. When you speak loudly about something, people notice, and gather opinions about it. VanderSloot decided to speak softly but spend big. The response: More attention on his previous political activism. This, according to Strassel, is an affront. The president

swore an oath to protect and defend a Constitution that gives every American the right to partake in democracy, free of fear of government intimidation or disfavored treatment.

Can someone point me to the part of the Constitution that guarantees your free speech won't result in disfavored treatment? Strassel is like an activist judge assigning some new right -- the right never to have to explain yourself if you bankroll a candidate who'll get to write or sign laws.

The date was May 23, 2000. Al Gore had been the presumptive Democratic nominee for months. He had no real competition. Then came the Arkansas primary, and -- right the hell out of nowhere -- Lyndon LaRouche got 22 percent of the vote. This, according to partly bylaws, gave him the right to Democratic delegates. But the party found a way to claw them back.

May 18, 2004. John Kerry's competition was vanquished. Only Dennis Kucinich was sticking around to try and win delegates. Then came Arkansas -- 23 percent of the vote going "uncommitted," against Kerry.

May 15, 2012. Barack Obama is still president. In one week, he faces voters in Arkansas. Comes a poll of the state's fourth district -- the last one held by a Democrat -- which has Obama up only 7 points on some dude named John Wolfe.

The fourth is a fairly good screen for Arkansas as a whole. Obama won 38 percent there in 2008; he won 38 percent statewide. Arkansas is one of five states that gave Obama a smaller percentage of the vote than John Kerry won in 2004. West Virginia, the last one of these states to vote, gave a convicted felon 41 percent of the anti-Obama vote.

So: Get ready for this next week.