Opinions

So the Senate did vote on Ninth Circuit nominee Paul Watford and confirmed him by a count of 61-34. That leaves just two vacancies on the Ninth Circuit. Just two? That’s two too many.

And lots of good stuff:

1. “Hetero Guilt and Narcissistic Groping.” Wisdom, from Ta-Nehisi Coates.

2. Very good piece on the Republican obsession with “vetting” Barack Obama, by Paul Waldman.

4. Relatedly, I agree with Steve Benen: attacks on a sitting president based on experience are highly unlikely to do any good. That includes attacks on Obama’s lack of business experience.

5. The NAACP’s evolution on marriage, analyzed by Adam Serwer.

And just like that, the Mitt Romney campaign is back to claiming he created not thousands of jobs, not tens of thousands of jobs, but “well in excess of 100,000” jobs at Bain. So says the Romney campaign’s Eric Fehrnstrom. This is normally something that Greg would handle, but since he’s not here I’ll just refer you back to his latest on these almost certainly mythical jobs.

Jamelle Bouie had a nice catch here: He notes (on Twitter; Greg did say you should be following him, right?) that The Hill’s story on Fehrnstrom’s claims about Romney’s record in Massachusetts and Obama’s as president are presented without any context at all. Fehrnstrom says that Romney, in the words of The Hill’s headline, “created more jobs as governor than Obama did as president.” Is that true?

In one sense, it depends. In another, voters want to know how Romney’s Massachusetts compared with other states at the time, and how the economy did under Obama, compared to plausible alternatives, and the story doesn’t explain anything about that.

The Senate has scheduled a cloture vote this evening on the nomination of Paul Watford, who was nominated in October to fill an opening on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

There doesn’t seem to be much reporting on how likely the Senate is to get 60 votes for this one. The Judiciary Committee split along partisan lines on his nomination, so while some conservatives have come out in favor of confirming Watford, it’s not clear what will happen.

The Senate has seen some progress at clearing the backlog of judicial nominations, but it’s been very slow and numerous “judicial emergencies” — where empty benches make for justice delayed — still persist. 75 vacancies remain, 14 of which are at the appellate level. About 30 of these vacancies have nominees pending in the Senate.

It’s good to see Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid bring the Watford nomination to the floor. He should keep forcing votes on these nominations. The worst that happens is that it will be more clear than ever that some Republicans are filibustering every single nomination; in some cases they’ve been able to keep in line enough of their conference to prevent the Senate from moving ahead with confirmation.

The other piece of this is that the Obama administration still needs nominees for more than 40 judicial vacancies. As long as there’s still time to confirm them, the administration should keep filling these slots (they’ve named three new nominees this month and four in April, but they could do much better). It’s true that the party out of power does tend to drag its feet on judicial nominations in presidential years, but it is not true that the entire process shuts down. Or at least that hasn’t been the case in the past.

Harry Reid — and President Obama — should keep the pressure on.

Update (3:19 p.m.): The Senate this afternoon suddenly agreed to skip the cloture vote and go straight to a final confirmation vote. That’s certainly unexpected. If the vote is now just a matter of needing a simple majority, this nomination shouldn’t have any trouble . . . and that also promises more success in the future, unless there’s another shoe to drop. As they say, stay tuned.

The latest Obama Web video is a great example of the centrality that Bain Capital will play in the campaign’s attempt to define Mitt Romney. This attack is more aggressive than anything we’ve seen so far. To borrow from one of the profiled workers, Romney is a “reverse Robin Hood,” who takes from the middle-class and gives to the rich, with no concern or regard for the lives of ordinary people.

The Obama campaign comes close to blaming Romney’s career at Bain for the devastation of entire communities, which — to me at least — seems like a stretch. In fact, I have my doubts about whether this will be an effective mode of attack. Yes, Romney has the appearance and affect of a wealthy patrician, and this helps the Obama campaign to paint him as aloof and distant from the concerns of regular people. But as much as we obsess over it in Washington, there’s no proof that voters are looking for someone who relates to them. What they want is someone who can fix the economy, and, at the moment, voters see Romney as best equipped to do so. Of the 79 percent of Americans who rank weak economic growth as an important problem, according to a recent Gallup survey, 52 percent favor Romney over Obama. Likewise, on the question of who can best deal with debt and deficits – which is often a proxy concern for the economy – Romney leads Obama by 15 percentage points.

Attacking Romney on Bain may convince some voters that they don’t like the Republican nominee, but I’m not sure it will push them to question Romney’s competence. The best strategy for that might be to highlight the extent to which Romney is pushing to restore the (deeply unpopular) Bush agenda. So far, however, President Obama has been reluctant to bring his predecessor into the action.

Yesterday, on “Meet the Press,” Newark mayor Cory Booker went off message and admonished the Obama campaign for its attacks on Bain Capital:

"It's nauseating to the American public. Enough is enough. Stop attacking private equity. Stop attacking Jeremiah Wright. As far as that stuff, I have to just say from a very personal level I'm not about to sit here and indict private equity. To me, it's just we're getting to a ridiculous point in America. Especially that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people invest in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality of Bain Capital's record, they've done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses."

The false equivalence here is easy to spot. The Jeremiah Wright controversy doesn't tell you anything about President Obama's presidency, and it actually is an attack on the president's character — an attempt to paint him as a dangerous black radical. Bain Capital, by contrast, provides an actual window into Mitt Romney's priorities and interests as a politician, which is why both sides have brought it to the center of their campaigns.

For Romney, it helps build the appearance of competence. Voters are dissatisfied with the economy, and if they believe Romney has the skills to fix the problem, he will have cleared an important hurdle in his fight for the White House. It's why he continues to cite the thousands of jobs he helped create at Bain, despite the lack of any actual proof.

For Obama, the focus on Bain's ugly side — vacant factories, abandoned workers and extracted wealth — is an attempt to flip Romney's competence into a liability; yes, he's good at his job, and for years, his job was to hurt the middle-class.   The strength of this attack is that it holds appeal to white working-class voters in states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Right now, those voters are the weakest link in his reelection effort. If he can improve his performance, or at least, bring it to John Kerry levels, he'll have a much stronger shot at reelection.

The danger is that the attack could alienate Democrats with a connection to the investor class, who are already uneasy with the administration. This includes politicians such as Cory Booker, who have a direct connection to Wall Street, as well as any other Democrat who relies on the finance industry for campaign contributions. What's more, the attack on Bain Capital comes close enough to the GOP charge of "class warfare" that it could harm Obama's standing with the affluent and college-educated voters that were crucial to his 2008 victories in Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado.

None of this is reason for Democrats to move away from the attack on Bain Capital; this has been a persistent drag on Romney's political career for a reason — when used by able hands, the attack on Bain highlights the worst aspects of Romney's political persona and places him on the defensive with voters. But the Obama campaign should know that it comes with the potential for blowback, and in a election that will probably turn on a few voters in a few states, that's a risk worth considering.

As an aside, Cory Booker’s gaffe — in the classic, truth-telling sense — gets to a broader, more important problem in American politics: the extent to which Wall Street has become the only viable funding mechanism for major national elections. For Democrats in particular, the decline of unions — and any other counterweight to wealthy interests — has put their political interests at odds with their substantive concerns. Liberals such as Booker might support Wall Street regulation, but they are effectively co-opted by the need for funding and support in expensive statewide elections. It's hard to imagine a viable, long-term progressive politics when electoral success depends on the generosity of the nation's wealthiest interests.