But as James Hohmann of Politico points out, the sit-down could have much broader, longer-term significance: If Romney ends up winning this year, Rand Paul will immediately become his most obvious threat for a 2016 primary challenge.

With 77-year-old Ron Paul heading off into retirement at the end of this year, Rand Paul is set to become the national face of the libertarian message associated with his family’s name. The assumption is that he’ll ultimately run for president, but the question is when. Unlike his father, Rand seems willing to modulate his message and rhetoric in a way that could expand his appeal within the Republican Party and make him a genuine threat to actually win state primaries and caucuses, something Ron still has never done.

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The good news for the Obama team is that they’re well on their way to achieving this goal. Further data from an ABC News/Washington Post poll released this morning finds that voters by a 65 to 24 percent margin believe Romney would do more to advance the interests of wealthy Americans. Romney also wins by a big spread on the question of who would do more for financial institutions, 56 to 32 percent. At the same time, Obama enjoys a healthy 9-point advantage, 51 to 42 percent, on who will do more to help the middle class.

The problem for Obama: This isn’t translating into much of an overall lead. In the ABC/WaPo poll, he’s clinging to a 3-point edge, 49 to 46 percent, while the Real Clear Politics average of all polls puts his lead at just under 2 points. There are a lot of voters, in other words, who see Romney pretty much as the Obama campaign wants them to see him but who are still willing to support him anyway.

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But a new PPP poll provides evidence that Obama’s announcement will play a major role in killing one of the most persistent talking points for opponents of gay marriage.

Maryland legalized same-sex marriage back in March, when Gov. Martin O’Malley signed a bill passed by a Democratic Legislature. Opponents immediately mobilized to put a repeal referendum on this November’s ballot, and initial polling showed only a slight majority of voters favored upholding the law. But in the new survey, the margin has exploded to 20 points, 57 to 37 percent, a shift that PPP explains this way:

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This comes after weeks of intense controversy over whether Warren had advanced her academic career by claiming Native American ancestry based on being 1/32 Cherokee. As the story dragged on, members of her own party groaned at her handling of it, critics charged that she was being evasive, and the press speculated whether Democrats were about to endure a repeat of the Martha Coakley debacle.

The Cherokee story, according to the survey, has definitely dented the public’s consciousness; 72 percent of voters say they’re aware of it. But by a 49 to 28 percent margin, they also say that Warren is telling the truth about it, and by a 45 to 41 percent margin they say she didn’t benefit professionally from listing herself as Native American back in the 1990s.

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The ad is an effort to portray Hatch as an entrenched and arrogant incumbent and to encourage whatever popular sentiment there is that he’s too old (78) and been in Washington too long (36 years). That Liljenquist is playing up debates and not, say, recent Hatch votes and quotes speaks to the aggressive image makeover that Hatch put himself through in response to then-Sen. Bob Bennett’s defeat at the 2010 GOP state convention in Utah. When Bennett went down, Hatch immediately recognized how hungry the Obama-era GOP base is for compromise-resistant partisan warfare and positioned himself to head off a 2012 challenge.

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Tom Massie, who enjoys strong support from the Ron/Rand Paul crowd, rolled to a 15-point victory in the race for the Republican congressional nomination in Kentucky’s 4th District. The result speaks to a few factors, including divided opposition (one of Massie’s opponents enjoyed establishment support, and the other catered to religious conservatives), the particular strength of the Paul movement in Kentucky, and some help from a pair of familiar outside groups, FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth. But then then there’s this:

He also got more than $500,000 worth of backing from a super PAC called Liberty for All, which was funded almost entirely by a 21-year-old Texas college student with an inheritance. The group ran ads supporting Massie and criticizing Webb-Edgington and Moore.

Marc Wilson, a supporter of Webb-Edgington, criticized the group after the ballots were counted.

“It’s a shame that a Texas libertarian super PAC could come in and invade the Republican Party to buy a congressional seat,” he said.

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A majority of Kentucky’s 120 counties voted against Obama in the state’s Democratic presidential primary, opting instead for “uncommitted.” Big margins in Louisville and Lexington saved the president from the supreme embarrassment of actually losing the state, not that his overall 57.9 to 42.1 percent victory is anything to write home about.

In Arkansas, the other state to hold its primary yesterday, the results were only slightly less humbling to Obama, who defeated an actual human-being candidate -- a Tennessee lawyer named John Wolfe -- by a 58.4 to 41.6 percent spread, with more than a third of the state’s 75 counties siding with the challenger. Wolfe, if anyone asked him, was running against Obama from the left, on a progressive economic message. But to the average Arkansas voter, his name might just as well have been “not Obama”; he had no money, no campaign organization, and no name recognition, and he received scant media coverage.

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This often results in maddeningly deceptive messaging from Romney and his allies, something that the newest ad from the Karl Rove-affiliated Crossroads GPS illustrates perfectly:

There’s nothing very complicated going on here, just an attempt to connect an everywoman’s despair about what a weak economy has done to her family with a bunch of scary-seeming statistics about spending and debt under Obama.

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But, as Jamelle Bouie argued yesterday, even if this strategy does lead voters to dislike Romney and conclude that he’s a heartless capitalist, that hardly guarantees that they’ll follow through and vote against him because of it. There may be some evidence of this in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, which finds Romney and Obama running dead even (47 percent each) on the question of who would do a better job handling the economy. But on the question of which candidate better understands people’s economic problems, Obama enjoys a healthy 8-point edge.

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After refusing requests all day, the Newark mayor agreed late in the day to a live interview on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show. By this point, Republicans had launched an online petition urging their supporters to “stand with Cory” against the Obama campaign’s “attacks on the free market.”

“It wasn’t until the GOP went across that line that I said, ‘Forget it. I’ve heard all I can stand and I can’t stand no more,’” Booker told Maddow when the interview started.

If you only watched Booker’s 12-minute performance last night, you’d probably be tempted to believe his claim of near-total innocence and even victimhood in an episode that overtook the presidential campaign Monday. This only makes sense; Booker can talk with the best of them. But in all of his earnest pleadings and verbose answers, he never actually confronted what landed him in hot water in the first place.

On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Booker seemed to call the Obama campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s private equity record “nauseating” and to liken them to efforts by some on the right to make Jeremiah Wright an issue in the race. On Maddow’s show, he played off the “nauseating” line as a reference to super PAC-era negative campaigning in general and copped only to some sloppy phrasing.

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“He’s someone who’s been courting big money ever since he first ran for office,” Codey told Salon today. “It is what it is – not that there’s anything wrong with doing that if you want to. But what Mr. Romney and his fellow millionaires did at Bain Capital is fair game, no question about it.”

Money from Wall Street and the investor class has played a big role in Booker’s rise, helping him level the playing field in his 2002 mayoral bid against incumbent Sharpe James and to ward off serious competition in his follow-up campaigns in 2006 and 2010. His cultivation of and sympathy for Wall Street, though, may come as news to many of Booker’s rank-and-file Democratic admirers.

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The current House minority leader and former Speaker made one of her periodic Sunday show appearances yesterday, issuing a confident assessment of her party’s November prospects on ABC’s “This Week.” Noting that Speaker John Boehner recently said there’s a one-in-three chance Republicans will lose their House majority, Pelosi said, “I think it’s bigger than that. But what he did say that’s correct was that there are about 50 Republican seats in play. I would say 75. I feel pretty good about where we are.”

Take this with a grain of salt. It’s basically the same thing Pelosi says every election year around this time. That’s just her job. But while her public posture remains as steady and focused as ever, there’s reason to suspect that this year’s midterms could be a win-or-go-home proposition for the 72-year-old California Democrat.

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Booker had seemed to pronounce the Obama effort to highlight unflattering aspects of Romney’s private equity background “nauseating,” but in the video, he suggested he was making a broader statement about negative campaigning.

“I used the word ‘nauseating’ on ‘Meet the Press’ because that’s really how I feel when I see people in my city struggling with real issues and still feeling the challenges of this economy, and still looking for hope and opportunity and real specific plans,” Booker said. “I get very upset when I see such a level of dialogue and calls to our lowest common denominator.”

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More likely, Booker went on the show to help himself and to advance his own long-term political prospects. And on that score, his appearance was a success.

You’ve probably seen or are now seeing the headlines Booker generated by calling the Obama campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s private equity background “nauseating” and likening them to efforts by some on the right to inject Rev. Jeremiah Wright into the campaign.

“Enough is enough,” Booker said. “Stop attacking private equity. Stop attacking Jeremiah Wright.”

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In a way, this isn’t at all surprising. The Americans Elect idea was a complicated one that relied on tens of thousands of Americans registering as delegates and participating in a multi-phase online process that would produce a bipartisan national ticket. It also required prospective candidates to go public with their interest and submit themselves to this process with no guarantee of success. In the end, not enough delegates signed up, and only one real candidate – former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer, who was treated as a non-entity during his bid for this year’s GOP nomination – stepped forward.

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The political necessity of this was obvious: “Obamacare” itself doesn’t tend to poll that well, but some of its individual components do, and when voters are asked which party they trust more on healthcare, Democrats enjoy a clear advantage. So if the court does away with the law, it will be hard for Republicans to hit the campaign trail this fall without having some sort of plan that they can point to for dealing with the issue.

Of course, calling what GOP leaders leaked a “plan” is really stretching the term. As stories in the New York Times and Politico made clear, the intent seemed more to shield the party from Democratic attacks that it helped kill off provisions of the law that are actually popular:

If the law is partially or fully overturned they’ll draw up bills to keep the popular, consumer-friendly portions in place — like allowing adult children to remain on parents’ health care plans until age 26, and forcing insurance companies to provide coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Ripping these provisions from law is too politically risky, Republicans say.

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Well, things have changed a bit since then. A new Gallup poll shows Romney’s favorable score recovering from its nadir and pulling roughly even with President Obama. Romney, according to Gallup, is now seen positively by 50 percent of voters, with 41 percent viewing him unfavorably. Obama’s favorable number is 52. Just a few months ago, Romney’s scores were stuck in the mid-30s. The one silver lining for Romney back then was that Bill Clinton had been in a similar spot when he emerged from the 1992 Democratic primaries only to bounce back and win easily in the fall.

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But unlike Obama, who was a student and young community organizer during Reagan’s presidency, Romney was a public figure when Clinton was in office, running for the U.S. Senate in the 1994 midterm elections. Which means he actually took positions in real time on some of the key actions that formed the basis for Clinton’s presidential legacy – the legacy he’s now holding up as an example of responsible governance.

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This is the mind-set that, according to a New York Times story from Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg, has a billionaire super PAC overseer mulling a $10 million anti-Obama ad blitz that’s designed to “do exactly what John McCain would not let us do.”

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Deb Fischer’s late charge to victory wasn’t really rooted in ideology. As Hotline’s Reid Wilson points out, she’s actually racked up a (somewhat) moderate record in the Nebraska legislature, and has some personal connections to the state’s leading GOP establishment figures.

But most GOP primary voters probably didn’t know this. Fischer came to the race with little money or name recognition and spent virtually all of the campaign toiling the shadows of her two better-known opponents. The Palin endorsement came just a week before the primary, giving Fischer a sudden jolt at just the right time. It may be that all Republican voters really knew about her was that she was a rancher and a conservative (per the ads she ran), that she had Palin’s support, and that she wasn’t her rivals. And that was enough to pull out a victory that no one saw coming.

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