Elsewhere: Stabilizers, Romney

At PostPartisan today, I'm fighting the good fight on behalf of automatic countercyclical stabilizers for state and local government spending, following up on a very good Paul Krugman column this morning. I thought maybe calling it the "ultimate wonky policy issue" might get some attention. We'll see.

Meanwhile, at Greg's place I'm warning of the upcoming GOP spin that Mitt Romney's nomination means that Republicans are really moderates after all, and that everyone should ignore all that social issues stuff.

Just to add to that last one: I'm saying that Romney will run on...what shall we call it...a severely conservative platform, and that he will, should he win, govern as a movement conservative. What I didn't discuss in the Plum Line piece is whether his spin will be successful. My guess is that he'll pay less of a penalty than, say, Santorum would -- but that any Republican will pay a bit of a penalty at this point for the general unpopularity of the GOP with swing voters, which presumably has at least something to do with social/cultural issues. As usual, with this kind of stuff we're really only talking about movement on the margins, but of course that might turn out to be very important anyway.