Electoral epigrams, 2015-2016 (GOP edition)

One per candidate:

Walker faced down a recall crisis
which voters declined to equate with ISIS.

Bush was judged dull, to his mishap:
He needed a bigger dose of clap.

Look what the GOP can get for $300 billion

In July 2011, Obama was reportedly ready to sign off on a grand bargain for deficit reduction that would include $800 billion in new revenue and somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 trillion in spending cuts over ten years. David Brooks said that Republicans would be crazy not take such a deal.  And that decision may pay off for them.

If Republicans can stomach the sequester and withstand pressure from defense contractors and other constituent groups, they can close the books on ten-year deficit reduction with some $2.7 trillion in spending cuts and the measly $600 billion in new revenue that Obama unaccountably settled for on Jan. 1 (plus additional interest savings).

The double catch is that even Republicans profess to dislike the sequester's indiscriminate swing of the meat ax, and Republicans also purportedly want to cut and "reform" entitlements -- though they would prefer to induce Obama to do the dirty work on that front.  And the funny thing is that he will -- if Republicans would only give ever so little on revenue. My educated guess is that if they would agree to say $200 billion worth of tax loophole closures or tightenings, Obama will go quite far in altering the structure of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

There's one other catch. Republicans would have stop doing their utmost to strangle Obamacare in the crib. That's their ticket to privatizing Medicaid and Medicare.

Consider the Rubicon on Medicaid that's been stealthily crossed in the last month. Sarah Kliff explains:

Playing for Reagan Democrats

Looking at the Democrats' decision to hold the 2012 party convention in Charleston, NC, William Galston frets that Team Obama may be focusing on the arugula vote at the expense of Reagan Democrats:

Taken together, these clues [the convention decision and Axelrod remarks holding up Colorado as a bellwether] suggest that the Obama’s 2012 campaign will focus more on the Democratic periphery—territory newly won in 2008—than on the heartland, where elections have been won and lost for the past half-century. This could turn out to be a mistake of epic proportions. Why? Because the United States looks a lot more like Ohio than like Colorado.

That is, less educated, more dependent on manufacturing, more culturally conservative than voters in Colorado.

Made to order, then, the labor crisis ginned up by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who seeks to strip those Wisconsin public sector unions that didn't support him of their collective bargaining rights? Some think so:

On ABC’s “Top Line” today, former Rep. Martin Frost, D-Texas, told us that the battles in states including Wisconsin, Ohio, and Iowa could wind up benefiting President Obama politically, particularly since the battles are being waged in critical presidential battleground states.