Blog Posts by Chris Wilson

In what may be the final face-off in the Ticket's Romney tepid endorsement playoffs, we're pitting former President George W. Bush against three-time champion Mitch Daniels for the title. Bush, asked for his position on the election by ABC News after a speech in Washington, D.C. Tuesday, merely stated that "I'm for Mitt Romney." In a poetic touch, he said so just as the door of the elevator he was riding closed.

The former president has been conspicuously absent from the GOP nomination process, and his brother Jeb was less than effusive in his statement of support for Romney two months ago. (Jeb Bush, a former Florida governor, lost in the first round of the original tepid endorsement bracket to Tex. Rep. Lamar Smith.) While his statement today was not as backhanded as original champion George Pataki's or current titlist Mitch Daniels, we're counting his overall lack of praise for Romney to date as its own sort of tepidity.

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Bush v. Daniels

AP/Jae C. Hong (Romney) and AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais (Obama)

The motivation behind Mitt Romney and Barack Obama's dueling commencement addresses over the weekend and on Monday could not have been more clear. Romney sought to buttress his standing with religious conservatives, and took the stage at Liberty University, a private Christian school. Obama focused on the achievements and challenges facing women, and thus chose to speak at Barnard College, an all-female school.

The following tool offers a guided tour of the similarities and differences in these two addresses by showcasing the most common words they share. Clicking on any given word will highlight its presence in the transcripts and allows you to skip from one instance to the next to see the context in which it was spoken. This is particularly interesting for words like "man," which the former Massachusetts governor used in both the generic sense, meaning "human," and to specify his belief that marriage is the province of a man and a woman, a comment that drew extended cheers. Obama, addressing female graduates, emphasized the progress women have made in achieving equal footing with men in the workplace.

Rick Santorum emailed his supporters late Monday evening to announce his formal support for Republican presidential-nominee-in-waiting Mitt Romney. In a statement posted on his campaign website, Santorum said he was ambivalent as to whether to endorse his former rival, but chose to do so after the two men met on Santorum's turf in Pittsburgh.

The Ticket has kept close tabs on the emergent art form of the Tepid Romney Endorsement, pioneered by the likes of Marco Rubio and George Pataki and refined by Newt Gingrich and Mitch Daniels. Daniels is currently the two-time champion in our ongoing reader contest to determine the most lackluster endorser. Now that Santorum has thrown down the gauntlet, we invite readers to vote below on whether he deserves to be our champion. Results will be announced Tuesday.

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Daniels beats Santorum

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When Newt Gingrich concluded his moribund presidential campaign Wednesday, he did not exactly throw the full weight of his support behind Mitt Romney. “This is not a choice between Mitt Romney and Ronald Reagan. This is a choice between Mitt Romney and the most radical leftist president in history,” Gingrich said. In other words: Romney is preferable to the worst possible option for Republicans.

The Ticket keeps close tabs on the genre of “tepid Romney endorsements.” Former New York Governor George Pataki won our original reader contest to determine the least enthusiastic endorsement, but was unseated shortly thereafter by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels.

Now we’re pitting Gingrich against Daniels for the crown. Vote below on whose voice of support for Romney sounds less genuine. Results will be announced Friday.

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Several hours after endorsing Mitt Romney for president recently, outgoing Indiana governor Mitch Daniels told the Indianapolis Star he disapproved of Romney's "slash-and-burn"-style of campaigning and said the former governor needed to make his campaign more constructive.

"You have to campaign to govern, not just to win," he said.

So many politicians have offered Romney this sort of backhanded endorsement that Yahoo News had them face off in an NCAA-style bracket. Former New York Gov. George Pataki won that tourney with his litany of Romney's shortcomings.

Now Daniels has issued a clear challenge for the crown.

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Click image to view more photos (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)Right now, Washington is roiled by two budget conflicts of vastly different scale. The first is the ongoing fallout from revelations that the General Services Administration has spent lavishly on perks for its employees, including a conference in Las Vegas that cost taxpayers $823,000. The scrutiny of travel by federal employees this episode inspired has turned a small spotlight on Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's frequent trips home to California, which have cost the Pentagon $860,000 in the last year. (The defense secretary is not allowed to fly commercial.)

The second budget conflict is the fight over President Obama's proposed surtax on rich Americans, known as the "Buffett Rule," which the Senate rejected Monday. The proposal, which would ensure that millionaires pay a marginal tax rate of at least 30 percent, is estimated to raise $46.7 billion over 10 years, according to a government agency that keeps score on these things.

Any discussion of federal budgets is doomed to the obfuscation of scale: We can vaguely imagine what we'd do on an $800,000 trip to Vegas. It's harder to fathom what we could do with $1 billion, especially on the scale of huge governmental deficits and debts. To help paint that picture, the opponents of the Buffett Rule were quick to point out how the new revenues would be less than 1 percent of the projected debt under Obama's 2013 budget proposal.

To put this all in perspective, here is a simple infographic. On top, you see the travel costs of the GSA's Vegas conference and Panetta's California trips compared to the estimated revenue from the Buffett rule for fiscal year 2012--$1.1 billion. Below, on a scale one thousand times larger, you see that same $1.1 to the total Pentagon budget--$645.7 billion--and the anticipated federal deficit for 2012 under Obama's budget--$1.25 trillion. In other words, the biggest square on the top is equal to the smallest square on the bottom.

Click image to see more photos. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

According to a campaign strategist for Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney doesn't have anywhere near the number of delegates that both his campaign and most media outlets report.

A memo by strategist John Yob, made public Friday morning, claims that the figures from the Associated Press used by both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, are highly inaccurate. Those totals give Romney 658 delegates to Santorum's 281. Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul trail with 135 and 51, respectively.

Those numbers put Romney well over the halfway mark to the 1,144 delegates he needs to secure the nomination. But the Santorum memo projects that under certain contingencies, Romney can only count on 571 delegates to Santorum's 342, making the race considerably tighter.

[Related: Poll shows Romney leading in Santorum’s home state]

Yahoo News independently gamed out Yob's scenario and came to the following conclusion: If Santorum can win big in his home state of Pennsylvania, do well in Texas, and win back some delegates from past races due to RNC rule revisions, he only has to hold Romney to about 50 percent of the remaining delegates to force a contested convention. But that is a very optimistic view, and arguably an unrealistic one.

Yob's calculations are very optimistic and assume the candidate could muster significant support from party bigwigs at the convention. His back-of-the-envelope math makes a few assumptions. Here are the three biggest ones: