The New York Times sports page, covering the U.S. Open at Congressional Country Club, in Bethesda, Md., writes about politicians who don’t want to be seen playing golf, noting, “with two wars, a tight economy and a high national unemployment rate, the prevailing belief is that constituents do not want to see their representatives having fun at the golf course.”

President Obama is mentioned, ten paragraphs into the story, declaring that the president “has not publicly expressed an interest in attending this year’s tournament, nor has he ever played Congressional. Obama and Boehner’s own golf competition has trumped the Open, with their first meeting on the links scheduled for Saturday at an undisclosed location. How that outing will play with voters is still unclear.”

Unmentioned is that the round with Boehner Saturday will be the president’s 73rd round since taking office, and the twelfth straight weekend.

Quite a few readers will write in and point out that presidents are entitled to some free time and relaxation, too. Of course, if there’s nothing wrong with golfing so frequently, one wonders why they object to the frequency being mentioned, and why the Times didn’t think Obama’s regular devotion to the game was worth mentioning.

How much can a strong debate performance help an aspiring Republican president? It can rocket you to second, at least in Rasmussen’s survey:

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney continues to lead the race for the Republican nomination, but Michele Bachmann has surged into second place following her Monday night entry into the campaign.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely GOP Primary Voters, taken following the candidates’ Monday night debate, shows Romney earning 33% support, with Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann a surprise second at 19%. Georgia businessman Herman Cain is in third place with 10% of the vote.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich picks up nine percent (9%) support, followed by Texas Congressman Ron Paul with seven percent (7%), ex-Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty at six percent (6%) and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum also earning six percent (6%). Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, who did not participate in the debate but is expected to announce his candidacy on Tuesday, gets two percent (2%) of the vote. Eight percent (8%) prefer some other candidate.

It’s way too early to think about running mate options for the Republican presidential nominee in 2012. And there is no shortage of good options for whoever ends up winning the nomination.

But this morning, Quinnipiac surveys Pennsylvania’s registered voters and finds first-term Sen. Pat Toomey has a 45 – 28 percent approval rating, and some fans of Toomey are wondering aloud, “hey, he would make a good running mate, wouldn’t he?

Mark Penn, chief adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, tells GQ five ways Barack Obama could lose in 2012

Bafflingly, his number one is a raid on Mullah Omar going wrong and number two is too much chest-thumping about killing Osama bin Laden. Three and four are the ones that I bet came quickest to readers’ minds, an economy that continues to sputter between now and Election Day 2012, making Obama’s presidency feel like one long four-year recession.

Number five is a sex scandal; if I were GQ I would be wondering how seriously Penn took these questions.

On Hillary’s campaign, Penn was famously unaware of which states awarded their Democrat delegates proportionally and which ones were winner-take-all, getting a great deal of blame after her campaign ended. This interview raises the question of whether his judgment has improved.

No, no, if you want to get an exponentially more likely reason than a botched raid on Omar, take a look at Gallup this morning: “Americans’ satisfaction with the way things are going in the country fell to 20% in early June from 26% at the start of May. Seventy-eight percent of Americans are now dissatisfied with the nation’s direction, according to a June 9-12 Gallup poll.”

Over on the home page, I take a look at Jon Huntsman with some brief comments from the soon-to-be candidate.

He is currently widely derided as a “moderate,” but it’s worth asking whether a moderate in the most heavily Republican and most socially conservative state in the union automatically equates to being a squish.

Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign announcement gets a teaser trailer:

I guess after Tim Pawlenty’s Bruckheimeresque campaign videos, everybody needs a debut video with some action. Looks like Huntsman does all of his own bike stunts.

Actually, the video was sent to me (and probably quite a few others) by Mary Kaye Huntsman, in an e-mail declaring, “Six days away — from an incredible journey with someone completely different.I’d love for you to watch it streamed live online, a front row seat to history. Will you click here and RSVP for the big event? In less than a week, a new generation of conservative leadership will emerge. No loud voices or drama, instead a vision for America that reverses the course we’re on.”

This bit of news from Gallup isn’t exactly surprising, but it does remind us that absent dramatic stories like the OBL kill, Obama’s underwater or almost underwater on his approval rating – a lousy spot for an incumbent to be:

President Obama’s job approval rating averaged 46% for the week ending June 12, a significant decline from his weekly averages for most of May and nearly back to the level before Osama bin Laden’s death on May 1.Thus, it appears the sustained rally in support for the president after the death of the Sept. 11 terror mastermind is largely over. The drop in Obama’s approval rating coincides with an increase in Americans’ pessimism about the economy. Economic confidence also increased after bin Laden’s death but began to decline early this month, perhaps due to reports of anemic job growth and concerns about the slow pace of economic recovery.

Among partisan groups, independents’ approval rating of Obama dropped the most in the past week, from 47% to 42%, with a smaller decline among Democrats. Republicans’ approval of Obama spiked to 21% during the first week after bin Laden’s death from 10% in late April, before falling back to the 15% range, where it has held since.

Later this morning, I’m scheduled to appear on Chuck Todd’s “Daily Rundown” (around 9:40 or so) talking campaign 2012.

New DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz almost makes the RNC’s job too easy:

A slogan we’re likely to see a lot of between now and 2012: “They’ll say anything to save their own jobs… but what have they done to save yours?”

Er… what?

“President Obama explained to NBC News that the reason companies aren’t hiring is not because of his policies, it’s because the economy is so automated. … “There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.’”

Jonah already noted that there’s a kernel of truth to Obama’s broader point about automation influencing the jobs picture. But by picking an example of a technology that’s been around since the early 1990s while discussing high unemployment rates that have been around since the end of 2008, Obama looks absurd. And airport kiosks predate the current unemployment surge as well, having been invented in 1977.

(In light of Obama’s belief that ATMs eliminate jobs at banks, you would think he would be more wary of using the autopen.)

So why is Obama lashing out at ATMs?

Rush observed, “He actually said this. How many of you are familiar with the term “Luddite”? You know what a Luddite is? L-u-d-d-i-t-e. A “Luddite” is basically used to describe somebody backwards, old-fashioned, out of it, worthless, and so forth and so on. Now, the Luddites were the people who, in the early 1800s, attacked the textile looms in England at the start of the Industrial Revolution. They wanted to destroy the looms because they said that they would take away jobs from the peoples. It’s a term of derision today, because they were so absurdly wrong. The loom added all kinds of work and productivity. It changed the textile business, as we all know. But Obama is now a Luddite! He is taking up the cause of the Luddites. The ATM machine, that’s why there’s high unemployment?”

But perhaps there is something more sinister about ATMs perching themselves at every bank and many street corners across the country.

Thank goodness for Twitter, even though it has eliminated many courier jobs; you can find many of their crimes under the hashtag, #atmfacts.

No less a credible source than the great Adam Baldwin has confirmed, “A confederacy of ATMs canceled Firefly.”

From the midweek edition of the Morning Jolt:

Walker, Walking Tall Yet Again

The endless fight in America’ Dairyland reaches another chapter – dare we hope it’s the final one? “Acting with unusual speed, the state Supreme Court on Tuesday reinstated Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to all but end collective bargaining for tens of thousands of public workers. The court found a committee of lawmakers was not subject to the state’s open meetings law, and so did not violate that law when they hastily approved the measure and made it possible for the Senate to take it up. In doing so, the Supreme Court overruled a Dane County judge who had struck down the legislation, ending one challenge to the law even as new challenges are likely to emerge. The majority opinion was by Justices Michael Gableman, David Prosser, Patience Roggensack and Annette Ziegler. The other three justices – Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson and Justices Ann Walsh Bradley and N. Patrick Crooks – concurred in part and dissented in part. The opinion voided all orders in the case from the lower court. It came just before 5 p.m., sparing Republicans who control the Legislature from taking up the contentious issue of collective bargaining again.”

John Hinderacker at Powerline concludes, “This much was, I believe, a foregone conclusion. But the Supreme Court went further, holding on the merits that the legislature did not violate Wisconsin’s open meetings law when it enacted the collective bargaining law. This puts the Democrats’ substantive arguments to rest… It was, in short, a good day not just for fiscal sanity in Wisconsin, but for the rule of law.”

Ann Althouse: “So Judge Sumi, asserting that the legislature had violated the law, herself violated the state constitution. Seeking to check the excesses of the legislature, she fell into judicial excess.”

William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection cheers, “This is a sweeping victory for Republicans and Gov. Scott Walker.  (And for my prior legal anaylsis, but that’s another matter.  I’ll be spiking the football, for sure.) This also is a vindication for the legal strategy of not backing down to the unjust, unwise, uncalled-for, unlawful rulings of Judge Sumi, who engaged in clearly unsound legal reasoning which — whether intended or not — took on the appearance of political posturing.”

Don Surber notices, “The Associated Press story began: “The Wisconsin Supreme Court handed Republican Gov. Scott Walker a major victory on Tuesday, ruling that a polarizing union law that strips most public employees of their collective bargaining rights could take effect.” Why, yes, AP is unionized. Why do you ask? Its union is the News Media Guild/Communications Workers of America. It is just a coincidence that the CWA is opposed to this polarizing union law.”

Somehow I suspect President Obama provided his opponents with more video fodder with this comment at Cree Inc., in Durham, North Carolina. Remembering when he stopped at the plant during his campaign in 2008,

I also remember something else that David [Jones] said that day.  He talked about how, even with a good job at a great company, it was getting tougher for working people to provide for their families without having to cut corners.  

What he said was, “Where am I squeezing that balloon to make sure that my family has a life; that we’re moving forward; that we’re progressing?”  Now, that was in 2008, before the financial crisis, before the bottom fell out of the economy, before a vicious recession that made things that much tougher for working families.

So the world has changed since the first time David and I met.  And for a lot of our friends and neighbors, that change has been painful.

“For a lot of our friends and neighbors, that change has been painful”, coming from the man who ran on change, is a gift from the Gods of Politics to GOP ad writers.

Michelle Obama, at a Democrat party fundraiser in California last night:

“He reads every word, every memo, so he is better prepared than the people briefing him,” she said. “This man doesn’t take a day off.”

1) It’s a good thing that the Central Intelligence Agency is full of classy, dignified, professional people; otherwise, tomorrow’s President’s Daily Brief might consist of, “well, since you’re so well prepared, figure it out yourself, smarty-pants. After all, we already know you have as much courage as the Navy SEALs.”

2) The man doesn’t take a day off. No, but he has found time for golf for eleven straight weekends.

Beyond that, the president never has to worry with the mundane details of life that make up large portions of the average American’s day – how am I going to pay the mortgage, what’s for dinner tonight, what time is soccer practice for the kids, how bad is traffic going to be, what if I’m suddenly laid off (Obama’s job security circumstance is a bit more binary and about 18 months away), are we going to be able to afford taking the kids on vacation this year, is my children’s school teaching them what they need to know, what do I do if the car needs repairs…

So at a time when unemployment is 9.1 percent and filling up your car with gas almost requires a black market organ donation, I think the First Lady can spare us the details on how hard he’s working.

Over on the home page, I step a bit outside my usual beats to argue that while there are many Department of Education programs that have outlived their usefulness, House Republicans will make a major mistake if they eliminate the Foreign Language Assistance Program, the only federal program designed to help promote and assist language education in public schools. (If the program is eliminated, schools could theoretically use grant money for other programs for language programs, but the likelihood is that extremely few or no schools would end up using other grants for this purpose.)

While many language educators would sing the joys of learning a foreign tongue, I’d focus on two conservative arguments for keeping the programs. First, the federal government spends a fortune each year – perhaps a billion dollars (hard to say precisely, since amount in the intelligence budget allocated for this purpose is secret) to teach foreign languages to federal employees in the Departments of Defense, State, Justice, etc.; in this light, the current $27 million to teach Americans earlier, when languages tend to be easier to learn, seems much more cost-effective.

Secondly, we on the Right revere our Founding Fathers, the majority of whom learned Greek and Latin as part of their primary school studies (often as early as third grade!) and many of whom spoke several languages. If they are indeed our role models, why would we not try to emulate the rigor of their educations? As we try to rectify the expensive, wasteful, and all-too-often ineffective leviathan that our public education system has become, I’d argue we’ll get better results by expecting more of schoolchildren than less.

It’s been called to my attention that Thomas Jefferson’s use of the phrase “All men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence is largely credited to Jefferson’s Italian friend, Philip Mazzei, who wrote, “All men are by nature equally free and independent. Such equality is necessary in order to create a free government. All men must be equal to each other in natural law.” The ability to know a bit beyond one’s native language played a key role in making our nation the free republic it is today; scrapping it as an education priority would taint an otherwise worthwhile package of education reforms.

There’s a ton of debate coverage in this Morning’s Jolt, but this was perhaps the most important point:

Jen Rubin noticed that, one hour into the debate, there were no questions on national security. We went one hour and forty-five minutes before any serious question on foreign policy.

Before then, CNN asked about abortion on two questions, including the particularly morally thorny circumstances of cases of rape or incest, gays in the military, gay marriage, and the separation of church and state. Oh, and whether Herman Cain prefers deep dish pizza or thin crust.  

My instinct is to mock the Democrats when they refuse to appear on debates hosted by Fox News Channel, but debacles like tonight make the concept of a GOP reciprocal strategy hard to dispute. The social issues listed above are probably big topics in the newsrooms of CNN, the Manchester Union Leader, and the local television affiliate that sponsored last night’s debate, or more specifically, to non-conservative journalists, these social issues are the ones that make Republicans weird. So these are the sorts of questions that these reporters want to know about, even though every poll of every state of every demographic indicates that voters are concerned about jobs, jobs, jobs. You could have done a half hour on creating jobs, a half hour on entitlement reform, a half hour on what should be done post-Obamacare, and a half-hour on balancing the budget. There really is enough ground to cover there.

And just think, CNN is supposed to be better than MSNBC. If large swaths of the debate time is going to be consumed by issues that the media is more interested in, or idiotic frivolities like which reality shows they prefer, perhaps Republican candidates will be justified in rethinking participation in debates on some networks.

Of course, I’d hate to live in a political culture where Republicans only pitched themselves to viewers of Fox News Channel. So I suppose the best way to combat egregious question selection is to question or mock the moderator. Fred Thompson rejected the “show of hands” on climate change, when the editor of the Des Moines Register demanded a simple hand gesture in response to the question, “do you believe that global climate change is a serious threat and caused by human activity?” (Notice she wants one gesture for two separate questions.)

Because if members of the media keep expecting Republicans to lay out their views by moving their hands, they may get a completely different hand gesture than they expected.

Internet and cable problems meant my plans to live-blog the debate were kaput this evening. (Thanks, Comcast!) Tomorrow’s Morning Jolt will have a ton, though, bringing you the best observations, jokes, and analysis from more than a dozen conservative bloggers, writers, and Tweeters.

Tonight is the first major Republican debate of the 2012 cycle. (One was held in May, but most of the participants were relative longshots: Herman Cain, Gary Johnson, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, and Rick Santorum. Tonight all of those, minus Johnson, will return and be joined by Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, and Newt Gingrich.)

Remember the first Republican debate of the 2008 cycle?

…

…

… Yeah, I didn’t think so. It was moderated by Chris Matthews and John Harris of Politico at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California on May 3, 2007. You can find the transcript here.

In retrospect, it’s kind of amazing that the entire GOP field agreed to have Matthews moderate their first debate. That was one of my gripes in my wrap-up, found here.

Last time around, there was a near-consensus that Romney was, if not the winner, among the top performers; one other instant poll suggested Rudy Giulani was the other big winner. Of course, once voters started casting ballots in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, etcetera, that early win didn’t really matter much.

Ironically, one of the few semi-memorable lines came from the eventual nominee, John McCain, and it is probably remembered because he reused it several times during the 2008 campaign, pledging to pursue Osama bin Laden to “the gates of Hell.”

Tonight, if any of the competitors is lucky, they will emerge with one memorable line or particularly compelling argument. But otherwise, barring some major implosion, we will not recall much of tonight’s debate in a few months’ time.

Easily-overlooked points in the latest CNN poll:

• The survey finds 26 percent of registered Democrats “extremely enthusiastic” about voting in the 2012 presidential election; 38 percent of registered Republicans describe themselves that way.
• The survey finds that in a sample of 472 registered Democrats, 18 percent would like to see their party nominate someone besides Barack Obama to run for president in 2012. That number has varied between 16 and 23 percent since March 2010. (Having said that, right after the 1994 midterms, 32 percent of Democrats wanted to nominate someone besides Bill Clinton as their candidate in 1996.)
• The country remains pretty evenly split in its views of Barack Obama. Asked, “Thinking ahead to the presidential election next November, if Barack Obama is re-elected would that make you feel excited, pleased but not excited, displeased but not angry, or angry?” the survey finds 19 percent would describe themselves as “exited,” 33 percent pleased, 32 percenr displeased and 16 percent angry – which comes out to 52 percent positive response, 48 percent negative response.