Nominee

There's an old joke about two hikers in the woods encountering an angry bear. When one turns to run, the other warns that he's not fast enough to outrun their ferocious adversary. "I only have to outrun you," the quicker-thinking hiker responds. And so it is with the candidacy of Mitt Romney, whose acceptance speech Thursday at the Republican National Convention may not have been the touchdown the pundits claimed he needed but was surely what his handlers wanted, playing up both the candidate's strength (management experience)

Last Friday, Paul Ryan, the presumptive Republican vice presidential nominee, made the most populist speech of this campaign season. "It's the people who are politically connected, it's the people who have access to Washington that get the breaks," he told an enthusiastic crowd of more than 2,000 at a high school gym in Virginia. "Well, no more. We don't want to pick winners and losers in Washington. ... Hardworking taxpayers should be treated fairly, and it should be based on whether they're good, whether they work hard and not who they know in Washington.

To call Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid a "mad dog," as Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank did, is an affront to the canine community and those suffering from legitimate mental illness. Mr. Reid was completely sane when he spread hearsay about an anonymous Bain Capital investor who allegedly told him Mitt Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. Doesn't Mr. Reid, a Mormon like Mr. Romney, subscribe to the prohibition in the Ninth Commandment: "Thou shall not bear false witness"? He appears to pay no political price because he's a Democrat, and unlike Joe McCarthy, to whom some are comparing him, no prominent fellow Democrat or top media figure has asked Mr. Reid the question put to the commie-hunting McCarthy by attorney Joseph Welch in 1953: "Have you no sense of decency, sir?"

In the expanding political universe of anonymous allegations and nonresponsive responses, the latest exchange between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and prospective Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney takes the cake. At issue is Mr. Romney's refusal to release more than two years of past income tax returns. Democrats have chided him by noting that his father, the late Michigan Gov. George Romney, made 12 years of his returns public in his failed bid for the 1968 Republican nomination.

China should be at the center of the 2012 Republican campaign for the White House. Unless Mitt Romney emphasizes specific solutions for creating jobs by ending unnecessary outsourcing to the Middle Kingdom, he won't win. President Barack Obama's economy is a disaster - since the recovery began in June 2009, economic growth has averaged a paltry 2.4 percent, and unemployment hangs stubbornly above 8 percent. Ronald Reagan, like President Obama, inherited a deeply troubled economy.

Mitt Romney's income tax returns may contain some surprises that he does not want the world to know about, but they are hardly his only secrets. His biggest secret, the question he has not answered through the entire campaign, the one that bothers conservatives even more than it irks liberals, is this: Does he believe in anything besides Mormonism and money? He won in the Republican primaries because he did not hesitate to do whatever it took to destroy his opponents. Now, his campaign aides are saying, off the record, there is no limit to what they will do to beat Barack Obama.

Hundreds of Green Party members arrived Thursday in Baltimore to pick a candidate for president, even as the party has been forced to scramble for a spot on Maryland's ballot this fall. The national convention, which is taking place at the University of Baltimore before moving to a downtown hotel, doesn't have the glitz Democrats and Republicans will bring when they nominate Barack Obama and Mitt Romney later this year. But getting away from the money pervasive in national politics, Green Party leaders said, is at least partly the point.

Republicans seem befuddled by President Obama's decision to halt deportation of young people brought into the United States illegally by their undocumented parents. Mitt Romney is gobsmacked, Speaker of the House John Boehner is exasperated, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is totally bummed out. They say their quarrel is with the way the president made an end run around Congress. Senator Rubio claims Mr. Obama's move has forced him to drop his own bill that proposed granting work visas to those who illegally entered the country as little kids, grew up in the USA and now know no other home.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently said aloud what many Americans must be thinking these days - that at least some Republicans in Congress would like to see the U.S. economy worsen in order to boost their chances of success in the November election. The evidence? The GOP's continued resistance to approving a multiyear transportation authorization bill. Senator Reid told The Hill that he's heard House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is leading the charge to delay the Senate bill - and the tens of thousands of jobs it would create.

That pop you may or may not have heard the other day was the bursting pipedream of a centrist presidential candidate outside the establishment parties. The organizers of a group calling itself Americans Elect decided to close shop after failing to find anyone who would qualify to be its standard-bearer in November. No one who met the group's eligibility requirements to become its presidential nominee was able to corral the threshold 10,000 endorsements needed from "delegates" in an online nationwide convention.