Rattner’s reaction to Obama’s tough Bain ad shows why Democrats have had a hard time capitalizing on anti-Wall Street sentiment among worried, screwed-over American voters: because for the last 20 years, at least, they’ve too often done Wall Street’s bidding almost as reliably as the GOP.

But Obama is to be praised for his aggressive rollout of RomneyEconomics.com, which features the new ads. The president is going to have a problem with voters who are not seeing signs of the economic recovery, particularly working-class whites who didn’t go to college. He probably can’t win a majority, but he has to defend his margin in 2008, when he did better with that group than John Kerry or Al Gore before him. He may not be able to do much before the election to make those voters feel less economic pain, but he can make clear that Romney would only make their pain worse. Because that’s what he’s done his whole career.

Obama’s new ad released Monday, which will run in the swing states of Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Colorado, features laid-off workers from GST Steel in Kansas City describing how Romney’s Bain Capital acquired their employer and gutted it. GST went into bankruptcy in 2001, throwing 750 employees out of work with no health benefits and reduced pensions. Ultimately the federal government had to spend $44 million to bail out its pension fund. But Bain made $12 million on its original $8 million investment, along with another $4.5 million in “consulting fees.” This wasn’t an unusual situation for Bain: 22 percent of the company’s investments ultimately wound up in bankruptcy, but the company made healthy profits and consulting fees nonetheless.

“Bain Capital walked away with a lot of money that they made off this plant,” steel worker John Wiseman says. “We view Mitt Romney as a job destroyer.”

If that sounds familiar, that’s because Republican primary opponents Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry made similar charges against Romney. Obama’s ad accuses him of “vampire capitalism”; Perry accused him of “vulture capitalism.” Either one works for me. But the class warfare appeal didn’t seem to work in the GOP primary, where party leaders were more concerned about protecting business than trying to fake populism, and smacked down Gingrich and Perry for emulating Obama’s rhetoric. Will it work in November?

I think it will, as long as Obama combines it with practical proposals to ease the unemployment and underemployment crisis. One Wall Street Journal story that didn’t get enough attention last week found that if it wasn’t for public sector layoffs, the nation’s unemployment rate would be at roughly 7 percent. And those layoffs have been concentrated in red states, particularly Texas, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and Florida, where high-profile GOP governors have been spreading the pain on a state level that Paul Ryan would like to extend nationally. The nation’s unemployment crisis is at least partly a Republican production.

The economy is all Romney has against Obama. Just Monday morning, Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul falsely but energetically claimed that “Mitt Romney helped create more jobs in his private sector experience and more jobs as Governor of Massachusetts than President Obama has for the entire nation.” They’re brazen; they’ll keep repeating that without evidence. The most recent Gallup poll shows that 61 percent of voters say Romney would do a “good or very good job” with the economy if elected president. The CBS/New York Times poll released Monday showed Romney up over Obama by 3 points, with voters saying the economy was the most important issue to them. (The poll needs an asterisk because it’s following up with an earlier group of voters previously sampled, and only got in touch with two-thirds of them, which some analysts say could skew the results.)

But most voters haven’t tuned in to the presidential campaign yet. It’s important that Obama help those voters understand that Romney’s touted “experience” with the economy has more to do with job destruction than creation. The Obama ad features Romney saying, “I know why jobs come and why they go.” That last part is true. He certainly knows “why jobs go”: because guys like him make a fortune eliminating them.

I talked about the president’s new Bain Capital ad focus with Rep. Chaka Fattah on MSNBC’s “Politics Nation” with Rev. Al Sharpton:

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Much is being made of Toobin’s revelations about the dramatic internal political divisions and infighting within the court triggered by the CU decision (more on that later). But what I think is most politically significant in Toobin’s piece is that it shows the dramatic rightward – and backward — march of Republicanism over the last 30 years. In January 1982, Ronald Reagan famously wrote in his diary, “The press is trying to paint me as trying to undo the New Deal … I’m trying to undo the Great Society.” Reagan was anxious to unravel the anti-poverty programs Lyndon Johnson pushed into place (though not Medicare), but he collaborated with House Speaker Tip O’Neill to pass payroll tax increases to stabilize Social Security for the next 50 to 60 years.

Today’s Tea Party, of course, is going after what’s left of the Great Society and the New Deal too, trying to privatize Medicare and Social Security and undo the labor protections passed by Congress and many states in the wake of the Great Depression. But the Roberts court wants to go back even further, to the Progressive Era, when some politicians in both parties recognized that the omnipotence of Gilded Age robber barons had to be curbed – and that campaign finance regulation was a good place to start.

Back then a conservative Supreme Court majority also disagreed with that Progressive reform push. In an 1886 tax case it first held that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection laws applied to corporations. In its 1905 Lochner ruling, striking down a New York law limiting bakery workers to a six-day 60-hour week, it declared such regulations a breach of contract rights, an “unreasonable, unnecessary and arbitrary interference with the right of the individual to his personal liberty or to enter into those contracts in relation to labor which may seem to him appropriate or necessary for the support of himself and his family.” As Toobin observes, “In simple terms, the majority in Lochner turned the Fourteenth Amendment, which was enacted to protect the rights of newly freed slaves, into a mechanism to advance the interest of business owners.”

Progressive era reform also included campaign finance regulation, starting with the 1907 Tillman Act, which prevented corporations from directly contributing to campaigns. The Court let the act stand, but over the years a series of rulings by conservative majorities have managed to establish that money is “speech,” and though contributions could be regulated, expenditures – speech – could not.

Toobin shows decisively that the court could have kept its decision on Citizens United quite narrow. Attorney Theodore Olson wasn’t seeking to strike down McCain-Feingold, but to clarify that it applied to television commercials, not to 90-minute political “documentaries” such as “Hillary: The Movie” (a shriekingly negative “documentary” on the woman who was expected to be the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee). But in oral arguments the conservative justices sought to broaden their purview, and Roberts helped them along. “As the Chief Justice chose how broadly to change the law in this area, the real question for him, it seems, was how much he wanted to help the Republican Party,” Toobin writes. “Roberts’s choice was: a lot.”

After taking a shot at drafting the CU ruling himself, he later assigned it to “swing vote” Anthony Kennedy, whose views on campaign finance regulation reliably put him with the conservative majority. Assigned to write the dissent, outgoing Justice David Souter accused Roberts “of violating the Court’s own procedures to engineer the result he wanted,” Toobin says. That’s when Roberts took the extraordinary step of asking that CU be re-argued – though with five justices already committed to a sweeping attack on McCain-Feingold, the outcome of those re-arguments were never really in doubt.

And indeed, Kennedy again wound up writing the majority opinion, which found that “The Court has recognized that First Amendment protection extends to corporations” since 1886, and that in McCain-Feingold “the Government has muffled the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.” It’s unclear from the context whether Kennedy is saying what he seems to be – that corporations “best represent the most significant segments of the economy.”

Justice John Paul Stevens, a moderate Republican once on the court’s more conservative end, wrote in his dissenting opinion, “Five Justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.” Stevens’s dissent continued for a record 90 pages.

At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

Toobin’s conclusion is no less scathing: “The Roberts Court, it appears, will guarantee moneyed interests the freedom to raise and spend any amount, from any source, at any time, in order to win elections.”

It’s worth noting that the most spirited opposition to Citizens United is coming from Montana, where the ties between Gilded Age corporate abuse and campaign finance regulation are perhaps the most explicit. Copper mining interests essentially owned the state in the late 19th and early 20th century, but Montana Progressives pushed a tough campaign finance law as a way of clawing back control of their state from the “copper kings,” who Mark Twain wrote “bought judges and legislatures as other men buy food and raiment.” Montana’s state Supreme Court upheld that 1912 “Corrupt Practices Act” in January, putting the state on a collision course with SCOTUS. Gov. Brian Schweitzer has been one of the most articulate voices against Citizens United, and supports a state ballot initiative that would ban corporate money in politics and make it state policy that corporations are not people.

“Montana’s going first, but we have before,” Schweitzer told the Huffington Post earlier this month. “It was Montana in 1912 that banned corporate money from our elections. We don’t mind leading and we believe it has to start somewhere. This business of allowing corporations to bribe their way into government has got to stop.”

But in a world where the Citizens United decision is precedent, it’s hard to imagine that ballot measure surviving a legal challenge. Toobin’s piece makes clear the stakes in the 2012 presidential race as vividly as anything else does: American democracy can’t survive the appointment of more justices like Roberts, Sam Alito and Antonin Scalia, who mainly serve the interests of corporate America. Mitt “Corporations are people, too, my friend” Romney can be expected to give them company in the years to come if he wins the White House.

The right wing is now trying to accuse Washington Post reporter Jason Horowitz of an oppo-research operation, but his meticulously reported and well-sourced story of Romney’s prep-school bullying, including two cases involving gay classmates, won’t be destroyed by the noise machine.

What’s giving the story legs isn’t merely the homophobic hair-cutting episode, which a lawyer friend of Romney’s termed “assault and battery,” not “hijinks.” It’s Romney’s callous reaction. His campaign first tried to shrug off the story with an insincere non-apology, but when the details of Horowitz’s tale got people’s attention – the “terrified” classmate John Lauber “with tears in his eyes” as Romney chopped off his hair with a scissor; the callow preppie leading a sight-impaired teacher into a set of closed doors – the candidate made his own statement. And what a statement it was.

After Fox’s Brian Kilmeade shared the Lauber story, Romney actually chuckled, and said:

You know, I don’t, I don’t remember that incident. I’ll tell you, I certainly don’t believe that I or – I can’t speak for others – thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds in the 1960s.

You really have to listen to it to hear that the callow preppie hasn’t changed much in 50 years. As I noted yesterday, it’s rather brazen to say he doesn’t “remember that incident,” but to immediately volunteer that he didn’t think “the fellow was homosexual.” How could Lauber’s being gay have anything to do with an incident he says he doesn’t remember?

The other way his answer hurts him is that it seems to have riled up the friends who told Horowitz the story. After 50 years, they all confessed that the incident made them feel guilty, but Romney says he doesn’t remember it?

The pro-Obama PAC American Bridge is using the incident in a campaign video it called “Mitt Gets Worse,” a play on the moving series of famous folks reassuring gay teens “It Gets Better.” I don’t think we should judge Romney’s actions of 50 years ago with the exact same values society has evolved to hold today. But I do think we should judge his reaction to the story with those values. At a time when we know bullying of any kind, but particularly homophobic bullying, can leave lasting scars and even lead to suicide, Romney’s non-apology shows he has an empathy problem, plain and simple.

I’ll be debating the issue on “Hardball” with former RNC chairman Michael Steele. In the meantime, here’s the “Mitt Gets Worse” video.

That said, it was the right and necessary thing for the president to do. Future generations will look back and wonder what took him so long. The president believes in the saying attributed Martin Luther King Jr., that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Despite his too-slow “evolution” on gay marriage, Obama knows the arc bends faster when we pull on it, and today he gave it a good tug.

Like Vice President Joe Biden, who clearly deserves credit for accelerating this public “evolution,” Obama cast his decision in personal terms, telling ABC’s Robin Roberts:

I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.

Cynics are already saying that Obama’s decision is pegged to big fundraisers in Hollywood and New York over the next few days. I honestly think the risk is higher than the reward, and the president made a personal decision. “I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married” isn’t the most stirring call to justice, but it sounds honest to me.

I remember thinking Mayor Gavin Newsom was doing a politically dangerous thing when he began marrying couples at San Francisco City Hall in 2003. Then I went and watched the weddings – and I was converted to the notion that there can be no compromise on marriage rights. Fellow Democrats blamed Newsom for costing John Kerry the election the next November, and no one can say for certain that he didn’t. Karl Rove surely used gay marriage as a wedge issue in 2004, pushing ballot initiatives in swing states to beef up the GOP’s Christian right turnout. And yet once I saw real individuals joyous at their weddings – and later crushed when the wedding spree was ended by the courts – it became impossible for me to suggest they have to wait because the country isn’t ready to give them equal rights. After he signed the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson famously told Bill Moyers “we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”

But no person of conscience would today suggest Johnson did the wrong thing. “I had assumed that civil unions might have been enough,” Obama told Roberts. He did not say how long ago he realized he was wrong; it’s enough that he realized it today.

By all accounts Joe Biden did bend the arc of justice a little, with what are being called spontaneous and unplanned remarks on “Meet the Press” Sunday supporting gay marriage. The Catholic Biden, like Obama, put his evolution in very personal terms. “The good news is that as more and more Americans come to understand what this is all about is a simple proposition. Who do you love?” he told David Gregory. “Who do you love and will you be loyal to the person you love? And that’s what people are finding out what all marriages at their root are about.”

Whether they are marriages of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals. Jay Carney faced 50 gay-marriage questions in Monday’s briefing, after Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined Biden in supporting gay marriage on “Morning Joe.” The White House’s brief effort to deny the importance of Biden’s statement was futile and they wisely dropped it. Then they did more than that – they endorsed it.

Obama’s move may be less risky than it feels right now: Public Policy Polling has found that folks who oppose gay marriage already think the president supports it, anyway. African-Americans are less likely to support gay marriage than other groups, yet it’s hard to imagine Obama’s stance depressing black support for him given everything else that’s at stake in 2012.

I also want to say a word on behalf of the advocacy community that pushed the president to take this step – even as fervent Obama supporters insisted they were dooming the president’s reelection bid with their demands. Activists and agitators make history. Leaders rarely move to claim risky but necessary territory on their own. Congratulations to all the voices who made this happen – and to the president, who must be relieved to be able to say publicly what we’ve known he’s believed privately for a long time.

As a matter of fact, the Institute of Politics youth-vote study actually contained mostly good news for Democrats. (This is typical in the media, in which “Bad news for Dems” stories can be found everywhere, even in data that aren’t bad news for Dems.) “Over the last several months, we have seen more of the Millennial vote begin to solidify around President Obama and Democrats in Congress,” Harvard Institute of Politics director Trey Grayson observed in the press release announcing the survey results. In fact, Obama’s lead over Romney increased to a 17-point margin, up from an 11-point lead in an IOP poll last November. It’s true that young-voter enthusiasm is down somewhat, and Obama doesn’t enjoy the 2-1 lead he built over Sen. John McCain in 2008 – but there’s still time.

Of course, Republicans will insist that’s time for them to make a move on the youth vote. On the campaign trail, Romney himself has taken to insisting “young people are questioning the support they gave to President Obama three and a half years ago.” On Tuesday he’s visiting Lansing Community College in Michigan to make his pitch. In a recent speech he said:

When you look at fifty percent of the kids coming out of college today can’t find a job or can’t find a job which is consistent with their skills, how in the world can you be supporting a president that’s led to that kind of an economy? […] He promised a future with good jobs and good opportunity; that hasn’t happened. And the pathway that he pursued is one which has not worked. Young people recognize that and I think that’s why they’re going to increasingly look for a different approach.

Joe Scarborough isn’t the first conservative to suggest generational warfare might trump class warfare as an electoral strategy for the GOP in 2012: Last year New York Times columnist Ross Douthat suggested “entitlement” reform is particularly crucial because the future “brown and beige” youth majority won’t be happy paying to support Social Security and Medicare for mostly white seniors. (To his credit, Scarborough didn’t throw in the additional dramatic distraction of race.)

The toxic but illogical politics of pitting young against old was on dizzying display in Esquire’s deeply messed up “The War Against Youth” feature last month, which argued that the last 30 years have witnessed a massive income transfer from young to old, courtesy of greedy baby boomers and both parties.  ”The old are eating the young at the dinner table,” author Stephen Marche memorably wrote. Ick. His piece started out with an economic blooper so egregious that the rest of its reporting is suspect – confusing “wealth” with “income” when comparing young vs. old, then and now. But some of the points he made were valid.  We are spending far more on seniors than we are on young people – and it’s going to get worse as the boomers age.

I’m one of those late boomers who could be hung out to dry by “entitlement reform.” Even the “zombie-eyed granny starver” Paul Ryan (I love Charles Pierce) says he won’t touch Medicare for the over-55 set, but everyone born after 1957 gets only “premium support,” casting us into the rapacious private market (but capping that premium support to make sure we can’t afford decent insurance).  Hey, in a bleak, zero-sum world, maybe that’s fair. I grew up at what turned out to be the dreamiest moment of the American dream; I was part of the last generation of young people to whom the nation kept its promises. Maybe it’s fitting that it will break its promises to me when I’m old.

But if we screw the (soon to be) old, we screw the young too, just in a different way. And I think young people know that.

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Some of the numbers that make me angriest on behalf of the younger generation have to do with college education. That’s because they’re so concrete to me. I graduated in 1980; from 1980 on, the inflation-adjusted price of attending a four-year college has risen by 128 percent, and according to the New York Times, the cost of public universities has tripled. When I left the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980, I was paying around $800 a year in tuition; now undergrads there pay $10,800. “The increase in the tuition burden is largely caused by declining state support for higher education in the past three decades,” says a Times editorial on paying higher ed costs.

That’s why I’m glad Obama is fighting to keep subsidized Stafford loan interest rates at 3.4 percent – but I don’t think that’s nearly enough. From the local to the federal level, we need a massive new commitment to higher-education affordability. When I was a kid, New York’s city universities used to be free; so was the University of California before Ronald Reagan (there were fees, but no tuition). Public universities are part of the way we built the American middle class (unionized jobs were another key way). Why are we surprised the middle class is shrinking?

But pitting the old against the young is specious, for so many reasons. For one thing, if the over-55 set can’t afford to retire, they’re taking jobs that could go to young people. If they can’t afford to retire but they also can’t get jobs, they’re going to be supported by their kids. Young people are smart enough to figure that out.

More than 53 percent of people under 25 with bachelor’s degrees were either unemployed or underemployed; in 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent. Meanwhile, as the ranks of  ”discouraged” workers grows every month, the share of working people over 55 is at a 42-year high. But the employed share of folks 25-54 has dropped 5.5 percentage points since 2001, to 75.8 percent.

Do we think that over-55 share is growing because old folks are greedy (the over-70 share is growing particularly fast)? Or is it at least partly because 401Ks replaced pensions and then lost much of their value in the 2008 crash? Anyway, blaming the boomers, particularly the late-boomers, ignores the way the rules of the economy changed while they were in mid-adulthood. “Only 58 percent of boomers have more than $25,000 put aside for retirement, so the rest will either starve or the government will have to pay for them,” Marche fulminates, as he calls Social Security “the biggest boondoggle of all.” Marche assumes the selfish boomers squandered their earnings, rather than that their wages stopped rising while costs did not.

Marche’s piece is a particularly vivid attempt to turn the class war into a generational war. Just take this passage:

This bleeding up of the national wealth is no accounting glitch, no anomalous negative bounce from the recent unemployment and mortgage crises, but rather the predictable outcome of thirty years of economic and social policy that has been rigged to serve the comfort and largesse of the old at the expense of the young.

Substitute “wealthy” for “old” and “middle and working classes” for young, and you’ve got what really happened. Republicans have a huge incentive for people to get it wrong. The funniest rebuttal to Marche’s dumb piece came from Connor Fitzpatrick writing in The eXiled — funniest because Fitzpatrick actually wrote a similar anti-boomer diatribe but from the left.

I hate to say it because after all Boomer-hatin’ really is fun and slightly cheerier than regular down-in-the-mouth anti-capitalism, but Marche’s “The War Against Youth” validates every hostility the no-bullshit Left holds towards anything that smacks of generational politics. And it shows you just why you gotta be careful before you take aim at the gray-hairs…

As much fun as it is to kick around the Boomers, we gotta move past it. Generational politics is a dead-end. Fuck it, someone slap the shit out of me if I ever say the word “Millennial’ after this. Because once we’ve set up this economic collapse as nothing more than generational warfare, we’re already lost–we’ve created a narrative which the wealthy can easily co-opt and spin for their own fiendish ends.

– – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – –

I’m thinking about the old-young dynamic a lot at least partly because my daughter graduates from college this month – and she’s part of the lucky minority who has a job, a modestly paid, socially important, true-to-her-values job that makes me prouder of her than of anything I’ve done myself, to be honest. I talk it; she walks it. But I think most people are like me – they have kids or nieces or nephews or grandchildren that mean more to them than anything else, and they are not interested in supporting social policy that beggars the younger generation to keep themselves comfortable. I think most “kids” are like my daughter – they don’t support efforts to make life worse for their parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles.  Ross Douthat’s assertion that “brown and beige” kids won’t want to support majority-white seniors ignored the fact that their own “brown and beige” parents will likewise rely on Social Security and Medicare. Plus, there’s evidence that the younger generation, of every race, is less susceptible to racial-resentment appeals than their elders, anyway.

Of course, the party that’s determined to cut Social Security and Medicare is even more determined to slash programs for young people.  To avoid the automatic defense cuts promised by the debt-ceiling deal last August, the House budget cuts Pell Grants and child nutrition programs, even the refundable child tax credit, for God’s sake. Mitt  (“borrow college tuition from your parents”) Romney is probably not the best standard-bearer for a Republican Party that wants to win the youth vote, anyway.

So Obama is likely to win this false battle. The young become old; the old for the most part have young people they love; the tribalism that’s divided us racially and ethnically probably can’t work this way; we’re genetically programmed to reject it.

But the Democrats have to do more to earn the youth vote than keep the interest rate on one category of student loan from doubling.  Social Security and Medicare will be strained by retiring boomers, but they’re going to be even more threatened by a labor market that’s producing too many low-wage jobs and leaving out young people.  I trust young people to realize we’re all in this together; I’m hoping more of the “keep the government out of my Medicare” crowd wakes up to that reality, before it’s too late for all of us.

*Lucy McKeon and Katie Ryder helped with research for this article.