The campaign has also organized a press conference with Massachusetts lawmakers that will take place on the steps of the statehouse in Boston later today. Obama political svengali David Axelrod will be on hand.

- Scott Walker pours in more cash to legal defense fund: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and his staff have been under a “John Doe” investigation for three years looking into his time as county executive in Milwaukee. And just ahead of next week’s recall election, the governor transferred $100,000 to his legal defense fund from his campaign account. The two transactions of $70,000 and $30,000 are a major escalation from Walker’s camp, which has so far tried to pretend the probe does not exist.

- Walker and Democrat Tom Barrett face off in final debate: With the recall election Tuesday, tonight’s debate will be one of the last chances for the candidates to sway undecided voters — if there are any left in the state.

Democratic Governors Association (DGA) chairman Martin O’Malley, the governor of Maryland and an early favorite for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination (seriously), will campaign for Barrett today, according to the DGA. But the race is not looking great for Democrats, as a new poll shows Barrett down 7 points. The RNC says it is “very confident” about the race.

- Chamber pulls trick to hide donors to campaign ads: Faced with a court ruling that would make them disclose the funders behind their political ads, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — which plans to spend more than $50 million during the 2012 election cycle — has announced they will merely tweak their ads’ content to get around the disclosure order. “By changing the focus of its ads to specifically support or oppose candidates, it will not have to disclose any of its donors,” the Washington Post’s Dan Eggen reports.

While the move will prevent the Chamber from disclosing, some watchdog groups think it may help Americans understand just how political the Chamber has become. Unlike local chambers of commerce, the U.S. Chamber is essentially is an independent GOP electioneering outfit, not unlike Karl Rove’s Crossroads groups.

- Is Mitt Romney too hawkish for Henry Kissinger?: The former secretary of state has failed to endorse Romney, like other top Republican foreign policy figures. The New York Times reports: “As Republican leaders fell in behind Mr. Romney this spring, many members of the party’s foreign policy establishment have been more muted. Reluctance by this group to come forward for Mr. Romney more quickly reflects an unease over some of his positions, including his hard line on Russia and opposition to a new missile treaty….[and] Mr. Romney’s aggressive statements on trade policy toward China.”

- Mitch McConnell has made his picks: The Senate minority leader has selected which Senate races he thinks will help him become the Senate majority leader, telling Roll Call:

The Senator said he sees three different levels of competitiveness in 2012 races where his party could add seats. The races that represent the best chance for GOP pickups are the open seat in North Dakota, Sen. Jon Tester’s (D) very competitive race in Montana, the open seat in Nebraska, Sen. Claire McCaskill’s (D) uphill re-election bid in Missouri and the marquee matchup between former Govs. Tim Kaine (D) and George Allen (R) in Virginia.

McConnell’s “tier two” races include Sen. Sherrod Brown’s re-election effort in Ohio and the open seats in Wisconsin, New Mexico and Hawaii.

Then there are states less likely to lead to GOP pickups this cycle. “Maine, Pennsylvania, Florida are examples of ones you take a look at later,” said McConnell, who was chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the 1998 and 2000 cycles. “Sorta see what develops.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that Senate Democrats are being outspent three-to-one by super PACs on TV ads.

- Senate candidate defends call for national “birther office”: Former congressman Pete Hoekstra, who is now challenging Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., defended yesterday his recent comments that the U.S. should create a national office to verify the birth certificates and other citizenship materials of candidates for federal office. Earlier this month, he criticized Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) for not making a bigger issue of President Obama’s birth certificate in 2008.

Yesterday, CNN’s Brooke Baldwin took the Senate hopeful to task for the comments, but Hoekstra stood by them, calling the bither office a “simple,” common-sense solution. He insisted his proposal had nothing to do with Obama, though acknowledged that “For someone else it might be about President Obama. So be it for them. For me, it’s not.”

Unlike lots of other birther candidates, Hoekstra should really know better. He served nine terms in the House and was even the ranking member on the Intelligence Committee (though Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is also on that committee, so…). Hoekstra the Senate candidate is perhaps most well known for running an ad during the Super Bowl that featured a stereotypical representation of an Asian Woman thanking Stabenow for sending jobs to China. The ad was produced by Fred Davis, the man behind the recently exposed proposal to run ads hitting Obama on his connection to Reverend Wright.

- Romneys collect cash poolside with CEO laying off thousands of workers: Romney is on a West Coast fundraising jaunt, including a stop at the home of Meg Whitman, the former California gubernatorial candidate who, as CEO of HP, announced recently that she was preparing to lay off as many as 30,000 workers. Whitman co-hosted a “poolside ‘ladies lunch’ Wednesday honoring his [Romney’s] wife at the Palo Alto home of Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers and his wife, Elaine.”

- VoteForEddie.com gets a website: An independent congressinal candidate in Florida legally changed his name to his campaign website so his URL could appear on the ballot. Eddie Gonzalez, who says he has an innovative plan to lower energy prices, went before a Miami-Dade judge in January to rename himself “VoteforEddie.com.” But in that case, shouldn’t his website instead be VoteForVoteForEddie.com?

Broadcast in New Hampshire, the swing state that also leads the nation in per capita student debt, the ad highlighted “the fact that the president has not been able to help students deal with this crushing debt,” according to Romney spokesman Ryan Williams. Unfortunately, the ad used footage of New Hampshire students complaining about their loan burden without their permission, and one of them happens to plan to vote for Obama. “Considering I am not a supporter of Mitt Romney, this is not exactly sitting well with me,” said Southern New Hampshire University sophomore Matt Raso. The campaign pulled the footage when a local television station objected, but Ryan Williams told the Associated Press that the campaign plans to run ads blaming the student loan crisis on Obama in other swing states.

That takes a kind of chutzpah Romney rarely exhibits. He won’t stand up to birther bully Donald Trump or the misogynist Rush Limbaugh, but he apparently has the cojones to blame student debt on Obama. We’ll see how it goes. In fact, American student debt is a scandal in which state and national lawmakers in both parties share some blame. But by far the lion’s share of responsibility for the debacle belongs to Republicans. The roots of the crisis go back to California Gov. Ronald Reagan, who imposed the first “fees” on the formerly free University of California system in 1968, declaring “the state should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.” As president, Reagan helped nationalize that disdain for well-funded public higher education in the 1980s.

But it took a long roster of Republican governors to turn the problem into a crisis, and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney led the way a decade ago, dramatically slashing public higher-education funding and hiking fees during his one term. According to the Boston Globe, from 2003 to 2007, fees and tuition jumped 63 percent at Massachusetts’s once-stellar system of public higher education as Romney slashed state funding year after year, for a total of $140 million, or 14 percent, in four years. Not surprisingly, average student debt in Massachusetts jumped 25 percent while Romney was governor. Between 2001 and 2011, tuition and fees have more than doubled at the state’s community college, state university and UMass campuses, but the bulk of the added burden piled up under Romney.

Romney also wanted to spin off the flagship UMass-Amherst and privatize three other colleges, including the medical school, a harbinger of what he says he’ll do as president. That agenda failed in Massachusetts, but it would be a shame to give him a second chance as president.

It’s tragic that Republicans have become the dismantlers of public universities, since it was Abraham Lincoln who signed the Morrill Act in 1862, creating the system of land-grant colleges that made the U.S. a country of unusually broad opportunity. (Of course, today’s GOP has betrayed Lincoln in many other ways.) “Abraham Lincoln is weeping today,” university president Graham Spanier told reporters when Pennsylvania’s Republican Gov. Tom Corbett slashed Penn State funding by $182 million last year. It was the aggressive expansion of college education access after World War II that helped create the vast American middle class. In 1946, only one in eight college-aged student got higher education; by 1970, one in three did. And the balance of enrollment shifted to public institutions: In the 1940s, most students attended private colleges; by 1970 three-quarters were enrolled in public ones.

Presidents from Truman through Eisenhower and Nixon to Carter continued to endorse and enable broad college access, but the tide began to turn in the 1960s as universities became hotbeds of political protest and the new educated generation began to use its college smarts to question society rather than become cogs in the corporate machine. But we can make too much of Reagan’s resentment of Berkeley radicals as a factor in his push to end free UC tuition. He and his backers were anxious to dismantle the public sector and the tax structure that made it possible as well as to privatize all sorts of formerly public institutions, creating lucrative new money-making opportunities for their wealthy friends.

The result: University tuition is up 128 percent nationwide since 1980, the year Reagan became president (and coincidentally, the year I graduated from the University of Wisconsin, when I paid less than $400 a semester). Public university tuition has tripled since then. In that same period, the middle class has shrunk, the poor have gotten poorer and the rich have gotten richer. Is it all connected to our breaking our promises to our kids about higher education? Not entirely, but it’s not a random coincidence, either.

The Romney-Reagan approach to higher education has a lot in common with their overall approach to the economy. Let’s take jobs as an example. Under Reagan, median wages for the working and middle classes began to stagnate and fall – but household debt began to rise. It was as if the GOP-unleashed private sector figured out how to make money lending families the money that they were no longer making in income. Republicans have the same approach to higher education: They slashed public funding and then let their banker friends “help” students afford higher tuition by lending them the cash to pay for it. Now, of course, the nation’s student loan debt is larger than its credit card debt, and graduates leave college carrying about $25,000 in loans. It’s like a mortgage, but without the house.

Andrew Leonard wrote a great piece Tuesday about Romney’s ties to the for-profit education industry and his commitment to relax Obama administration regulations on that high-profit, low-student-success sector. That’s the other key to Romney’s higher education agenda: slash public funding, increase the student loan burden and privatize the whole system as much as possible. Leonard explains what’s wrong with Romney’s priorities more succinctly than I could:

The biggest for-profit schools generate 80 to 90 percent of their revenue from federally guaranteed student loans. Only one out of every ten American college students attends a for-profit institution, but these students account for a quarter of all student debt and almost half of all student loan dollars in default. There’s no sugar-coating it: The booming for-profit industry is one of the worst possible examples of the “free market” in action that one can find in the entire U.S. educational sector. For-profits charge higher tuition rates than their public school competitors, graduation rates are lower, and the entire business would not exist without massive government subsidization in the form of cheap student loans.

Romney is also pledging to undo one of Obama’s most progressive reforms: his overhaul of the student loan system, taking banks (and their gouging) out of the middle of the government-guaranteed loan relationship.

It’s against that backdrop that Romney is trying to blame Obama for the student loan crisis. It won’t work. Democrats need to pay much more attention to Romney’s higher education record in Massachusetts. It’s no wonder he doesn’t like to talk about those years.

But he did say, when asked directly during a debate last September, that he would not reappoint Bernanke as chairman of the Fed. As Romney clunkily explained it back then, Bernanke’s monetary stimulus “has over-inflated the amount of currency that he’s created” and “did not get Americans back to work.”

With those words in mind, how should we interpret a report from the Wall Street Journal indicating that, as far as Romney’s top economic advisor, Glenn Hubbard, is concerned, “if there’s a hero in this story, it’s the Fed and Chairman [Ben] Bernanke.”

The “story” being the great narrative of financial crisis, recession and recovery. Hubbard is someone whom we should probably take seriously on the topic of Bernanke. Both men served as chair of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors. Presumably, Hubbard is one of the people whose opinion on whether to reappoint Bernanke or pick someone else would be important. (Hubbard is also a prime candidate for the job himself.) But if Hubbard is publicly labeling Bernanke a hero, why wouldn’t Romney reappoint him?

Hubbard’s comments provoked some unkind tweets from financial journalists about Romney’s new Etch-a-Sketch drawing of Bernanke. And not without merit. The truth is, the real reason Romney turned against Bernanke had nothing to do with his policies. Bernanke is much more vulnerable to criticism from the left for not doing enough to address unemployment than he is from the right for stoking nonexistent inflation. As recently as January 2010, Romney was complimenting Bernanke on the great job he was doing.

But the GOP base hates Bernanke. The Tea Party sees him as an unelected tyrant, busily bailing out the banks while creating oodles of “fiat” currency that will ultimately destroy the nation. The audience at a CNN debate in which Michele Bachmann was asked if she supported Rick Perry’s accusation of treasonous behavior cheered wildly at the mere raising of the topic. During the primary campaign, Romney tailored his Federal Reserve policy points to appeal to the crowd that sees central banking as just one step to the right of the antichrist.

But that’s all over now. As of Tuesday night, Romney has officially acquired sufficient delegates to clinch the Republican nomination for president. He no longer is under any requirement to pander to the Republican base and is now free to act like the moderate Republican that he’s always been.

And make no mistake, if there’s one thing that Romney will dedicate himself to as president, it will be keeping Wall Street and investors in financial markets happy. That will mean continuing, without change, to support a Federal Reserve that is eager and willing to flood the monetary system with cheap cash every time it looks like the stock market is about to crash. Bernanke is the perfect guy for that, or, failing that, someone who can be depended on to do exactly what Bernanke would do.

“Mr. Trump, thank you for letting us come to this beautiful hotel and being with so many friends. Thank you for twisting the arms that it takes to bring a fundraiser together,” Romney told the approximately 200 people who paid thousands to attend the event at the Trump International Hotel. “I appreciate your help.”

The Trump event and surrounding controversy overshadowed the Texas primary win that officially handed Romney the nomination, a triumph of endurance for a candidate who came up short four years ago and had to fight hard this year as voters flirted with a carousel of GOP rivals. According to the Associated Press count, Romney surpassed the 1,144 delegates needed to win the nomination by winning at least 97 delegates in the Texas primary.

The former Massachusetts governor reached the nomination milestone with a steady message of concern about the U.S. economy, a campaign organization that dwarfed those of his GOP foes and a fundraising operation second only to that of Obama, his Democratic general election opponent. He outlasted a half-dozen Republican opponents to clinch the nomination later in the calendar than any recent GOP nominee.

Romney must now fire up conservatives who still doubt him while persuading swing voters that he can do a better job fixing the nation’s struggling economy than Obama. In Obama, he faces a well-funded candidate with a proven campaign team in an election that will be heavily influenced by the economy.

Romney will continue his push to raise money with fundraisers this week in wealthy California enclaves like Hillsborough, near San Francisco, and Beverly Hills. He has at least one major fundraising event every day for the rest of the week, as well as a series of smaller events.

But the focus Tuesday was on Trump, who once led polls of GOP primary voters. He endorsed the former Massachusetts governor just before the February Nevada caucuses, offering his support at a morning endorsement event in ballroom in the hotel that bears his name. In the same room Tuesday night for the fundraiser, Trump introduced Romney. He steered clear of the “birther” issue as he spoke to donors, though just hours earlier he had repeated his doubts about the authenticity of the birth certificate that shows Obama was born in Hawaii.

“A lot of people do not think it was an authentic certificate,” Trump told CNN of Obama’s birth certificate. Such allegations have been repeatedly proven false. The state of Hawaii recently re-affirmed that Obama was born there.

Trump’s comments, repeated in several media interviews Tuesday, overshadowed Romney’s attempts to focus on failed stimulus projects and federal money given to companies like Solyndra, the green energy company that received millions from the government only to go bankrupt.

Romney hasn’t condemned Trump’s assertions. On Monday night, he told reporters aboard his campaign plane that Trump is entitled to his opinion. Even as Trump-related criticism from Democrats and Republicans intensified in recent days, Romney showed no sign of distancing himself from the polarizing figure.

“I don’t agree with all the people who support me. And my guess is they don’t all agree with everything I believe in,” Romney said. “But I need to get 50.1 percent or more.”

Trump remains popular among the conservative base and boasts ties to deep-pocketed donors. He has recorded automated phone calls for Romney, hosted a fundraiser with Romney’s wife, Ann, in New York, and pressed the candidate’s case as a television surrogate.

The Obama campaign released a video Tuesday criticizing what it considers Romney’s unwillingness to stand up to Trump and the more extreme elements in his party.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, once a rival for the GOP nomination and now a Romney supporter, suggested that the Trump issue will not derail Romney’s campaign.

“Gov. Romney’s not distracted. The Republican Party’s not distracted,” said Gingrich, who attended the Trump fundraiser. “We believe that this is an American-born job-killing president. Other people may believe that he was born somewhere else and still kills jobs.”

Gingrich was one in a series of rivals who challenged Romney during the prolonged primary fight.

- 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.