As Klein explains in this week's issue of Time (in an article that bears a title "Racial Slant Aside, Newt's Poverty Plan Could Work"), "When you strip away the racial appeals, though, Gingrich proposes some very creative ways to address poverty and dependency."

He added:

And yes, as Newt suggested, that last idea did come from me--although I put a slightly different twist on it.

I first made the suggestion in 1991, after the New York City janitors negotiated a gaudy contract that required them to mop the cafeteria floor only once a week.

The difference, apparently, is that Klein wanted to see "students and their parents help keep the schools clean," and "not just poor students--all students, even those attending the city's elite high schools. It was a form of public service, intended to build a sense of responsibility and community in students of every income level."

Well, at least Gingrich was going to pay the kids.

How about expanding the idea further, though: Why not let high school students take turns writing a column for a national news magazine? It'd be a nice form of public service. And consider the benefit to Time readers.

All the reasons Romney is disliked are all the reasons he would be an excellent president. Let's start by recognizing that principled politicians are highly overrated--consider Jimmy Carter as Exhibit A. Despite our pretensions to pretension, we are not a country that loves ideology--we're not, heaven forbid, France--so much as we are a can-do people that, after all, last elected a yes-we-can president. We like what works, not what it says in The Communist Manifesto, which reads like a guidebook for a republic of dreams, and of course ends in a Stalinist bloodbath. Romney's, shall we say, flexibility (I refuse to use the word that refers to summer footwear) with his positions on abortion and just about everything else that makes the weasel go pop just shows that he is responsive to his constituents' desires. When they were a pro-choice crowd, that's where he stood, and when he fell in with the right-wing lunatics, he learned to speak in tongues. I think giving the people what they want is what we want.

This echoes Ann Gerhart in the Washington Post (12/11/11):

And in service of these goals, Romney's flip-floppery could be interpreted as a flexibility of thinking that might help him bust through warring ideologies in Washington--an asset, not a deficit--and fix his biggest set of problems yet.

And Frank Bruni in the New York Times (1/2/12):

But what if his doubters, his nemeses and many of us pondering the protean wonder of him have it all wrong? What if changeability is his strength? Someone not fixed in a single place can pivot to more advantageous ones. A vessel partly empty has room for the beverage du jour. And Romney is ready to be filled with whatever's most nutritive....

In the primaries, that’s a liability, and Santorum, with his ideological rigidity, could haunt Romney for a while. But if Romney nabs the nomination, his malleability may be an asset, allowing Obama-soured voters to talk themselves into him. After all, a creature without passionate conviction doesn’t cling to extremes.

Later in the Times, Helene Cooper and Mark Landler (1/5/12) warned the Obama campaign to avoid attacking Romney as a political shapeshifter, again depicting that as one of the Republican's hidden strengths:

Independent voters might view Mr. Romney's shifting positions as pragmatic. And by highlighting his evolving views, political analysts say, the Obama campaign risks unintentionally promoting the image of Mr. Romney as a moderate.

The very things that have made Mr. Romney less palatable to the conservatives who populate the Republican primaries and caucuses--his past moderate positions--are what make him more palatable to the independent voters who will turn up next November.

Note that this is not the way that media pundits talk about Democratic primary candidates when they attempt to make ideological appeals to their party's base. (See Extra!, 7-8/06, for some good examples of this.) In media mythology, Democrats win when they attack their base--trying to appeal to them makes them seem "craven, weak and untrustworthy," in Joe Klein's words (Time, 9/25/05).

Why are Democrats and Republicans seen so differently? Well, the Democratic base likes it when you make populist economic appeals--that is, when you point out that the sort of people who own the media have too much wealth and power. From the corporate media perspective, that's not clever, that's dangerous.

Appealing to the Republican right, on the other hand, generally involves a little harmless racebaiting and god-bothering. Media pundits are confident (probably overly confident) that when the election is over, Romney will go back to the technocratic champion of moderate austerity and defender of corporate profits who they believe him to be at heart. And that's the kind of candidate who appeals to the media's base.

UPDATE: See Peter Hart's post "Pundits and the Romney Pass" (1/10/12) for more on this phenomenon.

Well, what about that plan to have kids work as janitors cleaning their schools? Klein's problem with it is that it doesn't go far enough:

I've known him for 25 years. I've had more creative policy conversations with him than with any other elected politician (with the possible exception of Bill Clinton). He is one Republican who is legitimately interested in improving the lives of the poor--although his ideas, which almost always involve market incentives, are quite different from the suffocating paternalism that many Democrats favored until Clinton came along. As early as 1990, Gingrich was paying poor children in Atlanta $2 for every book they read. He also proposed paying foreign-language-speaking students to tutor their English-speaking classmates in their native languages. He also proposed giving every literate child in the poorest neighborhoods a laptop. His recent idea of paying poor kids to help clean their schools--which has been the subject of a shrill, silly gust of liberal ire--is more of the same. It's a good idea, which would be much better if it were expanded to all public middle and high schools, with the work seen as an unpaid form of public service, a way to build community spirit and teach civic responsibility.

It calls to mind Paul Krugman's line about Gingrich--that he's "a stupid man's idea of what a smart person sounds like."

Why has Michele Bachmann suddenly become the It candidate?

With her impressive New Hampshire debate performance, Bachmann has gone from a conservative Sarah Palin-lite curiosity to a potential game changer. For two hours onstage with her GOP rivals, Bachmann appeared polished, serene and in command. Her smooth performance was partly the work of a top-shelf team of veteran advisers (manager Ed Rollins, pollster Ed Goeas, forensic coach Brett O’Donnell). They sanded down some of her rough edges but let Bachmann be Bachmann, complete with zinging anti-Obama applause lines and sunny-side-up conservatism.

Halperin gave some advice on what Bachmann needed to do to keep things going:

Most of all: avoid the kinds of gaffes, misstatements, self-promotional moments and wacky behavior that would cause the media and many traditional Republicans to--once again--write her off.

Huh. Remember that this was a debate where her economic plan boiled down to calling for certain government agencies to be abolished-- especially the Environmental Protection Agency, which she called the "Job Killing Organization of America." That didn't cause the media to write her off--or most voters, either, since they mostly didn't hear about it.

Or when she said:

The Congressional Budget Office has said that Obamacare will kill 800,000 jobs. What could the president be thinking by passing a bill like this, knowing full well it will kill 800,000 jobs?

This is, as you might expect, not true. But maybe it qualifies as "sunny-side-up conservatism."

It's not just Halperin, though. Time columnist Joe Klein writes:

Bachmann is often linked with Palin as a Tea Party pinup, but she is a different breed of cat: She knows her stuff. She actually gives factual, informed answers. She lacks Palin's bitter, solipsistic edge. She skillfully framed even her most extreme responses in an amenable way, smothering her opposition to abortion in cases of rape and incest within a paean to the sanctity of life.

If you scan the debate transcript, Bachmann didn't give many factual answers to any of the questions. (This is probably not all that unusual in a debate.)  When she tried to--see above about the 800,000 lost jobs--her "fact" was totally inaccurate. As has been the pattern in the past with her--like when she claimed on CBS there was a study showing 30 percent of doctors were leaving the field due to the healthcare law. There is no such study. CBS viewers didn't know the truth, and it seems like journalists are unwilling to tell people that Michele Bachmann's not telling the truth.