Gingrich hasn’t really figured out this whole surrogate thing for Romney, calling him a liar — twice — even after endorsing the candidate. Still, Gingrich has shown some real sycophancy at moments, perhaps because he may be relying on the victor to pay off his campaign debt.

Meanwhile, while Gingrich has tried to paint himself as a campaign finance reformer, even slamming super PACs for tipping elections, the former Speaker relied on a super PAC and a single donor to keep him afloat for months after he otherwise would have been forced out of the race.

Of the 16 Republican candidates most likely to win Senate elections this year, 15 of them totally ignore Afghanistan in the issues section of their campaign web pages. Not one word.

That’s significantly different than what Democratic candidates are up to on the issue. Most of the 13 Democratic candidates who are most likely to win had at least some mention of Afghanistan, with views ranging from moderate support for staying and finishing to the job to mild support for the current scheduled withdrawal to three who simply want to get out now.

But the Republicans? Only one, Arizona member of Congress Jeff Flake, mentioned the place, at least as far as I could see. Even he didn’t exactly have a clear position — he’s more or less in favor of staying, but doesn’t quite say that. But at least he acknowledges that it’s going on.

And it’s not as if Republicans are substituting other foreign policy or national security issues. Here’s a typical position statement, this one from Nebraska’s Deb Fischer:

The most important job of the federal government is to keep us safe and secure. Our brave men and women in uniform perform their duty to protect all of us admirably and effectively. In the Senate, I will not play politics with our security and our troops. I will give our military the tools they need to keep America safe and free, and I will ensure our troops and their families are supported and that their needs are met.

America cannot allow nuclear arms to get in the hands of terrorist states or allow rogue nations to threaten or bully others with nuclear threats. That is why we must fight – and win – the war on terrorism. To succeed in this mission, fighting terrorism needs to be the top priority of the federal government, not an afterthought. As your Senator, I will be a strong voice for ensuring that our government never loses focus on its most vital purpose.

Well, there you go: As United States Senator, she’ll totally work to ensure that we defeat all foreign enemies by carefully deploying clichés and meaningless verbiage. And, again, it’s not just her; at least half of the Republican candidates have no more than that on their web pages (compare, for example, North Dakota’s Rick Berg or Todd Akin in Missouri). Once again, it’s not as if the Democrats typically have extensive, well-reasoned positions on everything from China to Yemen, but many of them at least mention one other current issue in addition to Afghanistan. There’s plenty of empty rhetoric, of course – but it’s not all empty rhetoric.

Why have Republicans gone all fraidy cat when it comes to talking about foreign policy and national security?

I think there are a couple of reasons. One is that Barack Obama is generally perceived as successful in that issue area, making criticism relatively difficult. After all, it’s not as if anyone is going to criticize the death of Osama bin Laden (although he was only mentioned by a few Democrats and at least one Republican). Still, even things that national Republicans regularly mention, such as Israel, don’t show up here. (I count one mention of Israel, and Iran is almost completely ignored.)

A second possibility is that Republican candidates are far more hawkish than they believe their constituents are. If Republicans, in fact, support staying in Afghanistan or leaving slowly but also think that swing voters want to get out, then they might avoid the issue. For what it’s worth, candidates currently running in contested primaries (including Flake) seem to be slightly more likely to have something substantive to say on foreign policy, suggesting that perhaps it’s the swing voters in November that they’re worried about.

Or perhaps it’s division within the party. It’s possible that candidates seeking to win Tea Party votes might be scared of both the neocons — who can’t wait to go to war in Iran, Syria, and probably Iraq all over again – and the Ron Paul faction that wants out of everything.

And there’s one other possibility: Maybe some of these candidates and their staffs just don’t know anything about foreign policy. After all, it’s not hard to think of a few reasonably safe issues that Republicans usually run on; I mentioned Israel, but there’s also UN-bashing or building missile defense systems, and hardly anyone has a position on those, either. I have no idea whether Deb Fischer or Indiana’s Richard Mourdock or Ted Cruz in Texas know anything about the world beyond the U.S. For all I know, they have plenty of foreign policy in their stump speeches, but you certainly wouldn’t know it from their web sites.

Whatever the reason, it’s really a sad statement about a party which once considered itself a leader on foreign policy and national security.

- In case there was any doubt that Romney’s embrace of Donald Trump was a nod to birthers: The candidate released his birth certificate just minutes before a joint appearance with the reality TV star in Las Vegas last night. “Birther queen” Orly Taitz will be pleased, as she told me yesterday that Romney should disclose the document.

Most pundits assume Trump, acting as Romney’s surrogate and fundraiser, is “off message,” but the timing of the birth certificate release seems to add further evidence to the alertnate theory that the candidate is quietly trying to appeal to Republican voters who are still not convinced that Obama was born in the United States, without having to actually say a word about Obama’s birth certificate himself. Why else would Romney unexpectedly release the document last night when no one had been demanding to see it?

Still, budding Romney birthers may point out that it’s not actually a birth certificate but a “certificate of live birth.” Someone call Sheriff Joe Arpaio!

- Donald Trump went on his third televised birther rant in 24 hours last night: After taking his message to CNBC in the morning and CNN in the afternoon, he stopped by Fox News to tell host Greta Van Susteren that he wants “good solid proof” that Obama was born in the U.S. Asked what kind of proof might satisfy him, Trump replied, “Let’s get back to jobs.” And while many speculate the Obama campaign is liking all this birther talk, Trump insisted, “I actually semi-know for a fact that they hate this subject.” At least “semi-know” is closer to a fact than Trump usually gets.

But the Christian Science Monitor’s Liz Marlantes argues the focus on Trump has obscured the “most important meeting” Romney had in Vegas yesterday — with casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who single-handedly kept Newt Gingrich’s campaign afloat for several months in the GOP primary and could send big money Romney’s way.

- The $1 billion plan: Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei are out with a big story today about the “loose network of prominent conservatives” who plan to spend about $1 billion attacking Obama and congressional Democrats this year. The network includes the usual suspects — Karl Rove’s groups, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Koch brothers, among others:

That total includes previously undisclosed plans for newly aggressive spending by the Koch brothers, who are steering funding to build sophisticated, county-by-county operations in key states. POLITICO has learned that Koch-related organizations plan to spend about $400 million ahead of the 2012 elections – twice what they had been expected to commit.

Restore Our Future, the super PAC backing Romney, plans to spend another $100 million, while Rove’s American Crossroads and its dark-money sister group Crossroads GPS will spend a combined $300 billion. Thank you Citizens United.

Last week, Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickenson profiled of some of the biggest donors to the Romney campaign proper.

- What would Mitt Romney’s foreign policy look like? Foreign Policy magazine’s Daniel Drezner sketches out the first year of a Romney administration if the candidate “had to implement every foreign policy campaign promise he’s ever made in every foreign-policy white paper, op-ed, campaign statement, or random utterance that came from his campaign.”

Meanwhile, ThinkProgress’s Ali Gharib points out that while Romney is slamming Barack Obama’s approach to Syria, the Republican has adopted one based on … Barack Obama’s foreign policy approach to Syria.

- Mitt Romney loves “A-M-E-R-C-I-A”: The Romney campaign rolled out a nifty little iPhone app last night with one big embarrassing glitch: It doesn’t know how to spell America. “Here’s how the free app works: You take a photo, then are able to lay one of 14 ‘I’m With Mitt’ banners over the image … The problem? One of the 14 options reads, in fact, ‘A Better Amercia.’ Yes, Amercia,” Mashable reports.

“I’m just a kid that wants to make a difference for America,” Romney weirdly told Fox News in an interview to be aired later this week. I think he means “Amercia.”

- Tea Party victory in Texas: Tea Party-favorite Ted Cruz was able to force a runoff in last night’s Texas GOP Senate primary against lieutenant governor David Dewhurst. Experts who spoke with Salon think the July runoff will favor Cruz, who has more dedicated supporters willing to go to the polls on a hot Texas summer day when turnout will likely be extremely low.

Noting that Dewhurst is no moderate, Steve Kornacki explains the new Tea Party modus operandi:

The Tea Party movement isn’t about purging moderates; that happened a long time ago. It’s about forcing the entire GOP to embrace a partisan warfare style of governance. When it comes to the Senate and House, that means electing candidates who will shun compromise with Democrats and exploit every possible legislative tool to advance their own agenda and stall the other party’s. It is about absolutism.

- Dirty tricks in Wisconsin recall: Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett’s (D) gubernatorial campaign was inundated with calls that clogged phone lines and caused headaches yesterday after a mysterious text message went out to thousands of Wisconsinites calling Barrett a “union puppet” and urging people to call his office. The campaign blamed allies of Republican Governor Scott Walker, whom Barrett will face in a recall election next week.

Some people (communists) have noted that the timing of this big voter roll purge is a bit suspect and that it’s also weird that the vast majority of people on the list are Hispanics who are registered Democrats or independents. But as hero-senator Marco Rubio said recently of voter ID laws, “What’s the big deal?” Hundreds of the 1,638 people flagged as ineligible in Miami-Dade County have already offered proof of citizenship, so the system works. Let’s assume the 1,200 people who haven’t responded to the letter are all definitely not qualified.

(If I were an illegal immigrant, do you know what I would definitely not ever try to do? Vote! When you’re evading detection by the government, registering to vote and then casting a ballot — and in the process committing a felony — seems like asking for trouble.)

As must always be pointed out when writing about these sorts of things, there is no voter fraud epidemic. At all. Where there is genuinely illegal voting, it tends to be accidental or so small-scale as to present no challenge to the legitimacy of an election. The liberal position on election security is something like, “Better to let a couple of isolated instances of fraudulent or improper voting happen than to preemptively disenfranchise hundreds or even thousands of perfectly legal voters.” The conservative position tends to be, “We mustn’t let the Mexicans steal the election for the nanny state socialists ACORN ACORN BILL AYERS ACORN.”

Here’s the Tampa Bay Times with more on Florida’s war on (certain people) voting:

This is part of a pattern. Republicans actively gin up voter fraud claims to justify turning voting into an obstacle course to dissuade Democratic-leaning constituencies. It’s what happened in Florida last year when the Legislature used voter fraud as an excuse to cut early voting days and make it harder for renters and college students to vote a regular ballot. The most disgraceful part of the law imposes steep penalties and fines on groups conducting voter registration drives that fail to meet burdensome bureaucratic rules and turn forms in within 48 hours, causing the League of Women Voters to cancel its drive.

But if we let renters vote, why would anyone buy a house? Then how would we save the economy?

Don’t worry, though, it will still be very easy for… certain other kinds of people to cast votes:

Meanwhile, there was no attempt by the Florida Legislature to tighten rules for absentee voting, which is probably the easiest way to produce a fraudulent ballot since there is no way of knowing who fills it out. Maybe this lack of interest stemmed from the fact that absentee voters tend to lean Republican, while early voters typically lean Democrat.

Well. Now that I know how easy it is to absentee vote in Florida, I am off to commit some voter fraud with my illegal immigrant friends. Next stop, Sharia!

He continued, “The only time I’m unhappy is if I’ve done something that hurt the prospects for the success of our effort.”

Democrats appear eager to jump on the comment. “For President Obama, the desire to serve the American people certainly outweighs the thrill of sport,” DNC spokesperson Melanie Roussel told Salon in an email. “It’s the same competitive spirit that drives Romney economics — doing whatever it takes for him and his investors to profit, regardless of the cost to workers, companies and communities. In Romney’s game, there are two sets of rules – one for himself and others at the top, and another for everyone else.”

Former Romney opponent Ted Kennedy’s own presidential ambitions hit an early stumbling block that he never fully recovered from in 1979 when he badly fumbled the seemingly simple question, “Why do you want to be president?” His rambling answer was so damaging and iconic that it later became the basis of a “West Wing” episode. Romney may have to work on his own answer a bit.

His comment seems telling, coming from someone who has struggled to articulate a real desire to be president. As Alex Pareene writes in his new e-book: “This is the essential problem with Mitt Romney, politician: Where others seek office to gain power or improve people’s lives, Romney has no perceptible interest in either goal.”

Pundits have long puzzled over what’s behind Romney’s political ambitions, often concluding that his serial runs for Senate, governor and then president are a product of living in the shadow of his governor and presidential candidate father. One of the key data points in the Oedipal theory of Romney’s ambition is his supposed fear of gaffes stemming from the fact that George Romney’s comment that military leaders “brainwashed” him on the Vietnam War effectively killed his presidential candidacy. “Mitt Romney’s tendency to make verbal slips is a subconscious repetition of his father’s mistakes, or so the theory goes,” Mike Allen and Evan Thomas write in Politico’s second e-book on the campaign. But when Noonan asked Romney about the “brainwashed” comment, the younger Romney replied, “I don’t think my father’s comment figures into my thinking at all.”

The compulsion to look at politics as a game or sport is one of the most loathed aspects of today’s political media, but journalists have the excuse of needing to remain independent, and the sports paradigm is an easy way to avoid getting into messy policy issues that could be construed as “bias.”

But it’s another matter entirely coming from a presidential candidate himself. And it may not help a candidate already struggling with a perception of being out of touch that he’s only sad when he does something that hurts his chances of winning the election, because he likes winning the “sport for old guys” so much.