Michelle Cottle hopes the news about John Edwards linked to a prostitution ring isn’t proven.

“I want to believe this latest Edwards monkey business isn’t true — not because I harbor a shred of fondness or respect for him, but because I find it unnerving that a man this reckless, this self-indulgent, this irretrievably stupid came within a thousand miles of occupying the White House.”

“Imagine if Ohio had gone blue in 2004. If being a failed VP candidate turned Edwards into a narcissistic fool, what would winning have done to him?”

Howard Kurtz: “At the cable news networks, including CNN, the only one to provide continuous primary coverage on Tuesday, the word is out that the presidential campaign is sending the ratings south. Television, in short, has pretty much decided the race is over, Mitt Romney has won, the thing is boring everyone to death, and it’s time, at least for now, to move on. The campaign is occupying less front-page real estate in the major papers as well.”

Vice President Joe Biden is poised to attack the Republican presidential candidates over entitlement programs through a speech in Florida, CNN reports.

Biden will say, “Make no mistake, if Republicans in Congress and their amen corner of Romney, Santorum and Gingrich get their hands on the White House, they will end Medicare as we know it.”

“I’m going to wait to see which Romney it is.”

— Former Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA), in an interview with The Hill, saying he’s considering voting for Mitt Romney this November.

A new Public Policy Polling survey finds Rick Santorum is headed for a commanding win in Louisiana on
Saturday. He leads Mitt Romney, 42% to 28%, followed by Newt
Gingrich at 18%, Ron Paul at 8% and Buddy Roemer at 2%.

Key findings: “It’s interesting to look at these numbers in the context of last week’s
results in Alabama and Mississippi. Mitt Romney averaged 30% in those
two contests, and that’s about where he is here. Rick Santorum and Newt
Gingrich combined for 64% in those two contests, and they combine for a
relatively similar 60% here. The big difference though is that
conservative voters appears to be abandoning Gingrich for Santorum now,
and that’s why Louisiana is likely to be much more lopsided than either
of last week’s contests were.”

A new American Research Group survey shows Santorum leading Romney, 43% to 27%, followed by Gingrich at 20% and Paul at 6%.

“You win by giving people the opportunity to see a different vision for
our country, not someone who’s just going to be a little different than
the person in there. If you’re going to be a little
different, we might as well stay with what we have instead of taking a
risk with what may be the Etch A Sketch candidate of the future.”

— Rick Santorum, quoted by NBC News, suggesting Republicans may be better off with President Obama than Mitt Romney.

Alex Koppelman: “In the modern, post-machine-politics era, individual endorsements simply don’t matter as much as we sometimes pretend they do. The exceptions are, typically, the endorsements from those politicians who still do have a machine — or at least a robust activist and fundraising operation — that can be employed on the endorsee’s behalf.”

Huffington Post: “In 1994, as he was making his first successful run for the U.S. Senate, Rick Santorum was followed by a trackers, who were hired by the state Democratic party and equipped with video cameras. The trackers trailed Santorum into public events at municipal buildings, on factory floors and inside community centers across Pennsylvania. They recorded how many people were in the room, whether or not media was on hand and Santorum’s every word.”

“After every event, a tracker wrote up a memo for the campaign staff of Santorum’s opponent, Harris Wofford… The memos are documents of an era long before politicians operated in social media, reporter embeds live-tweeted what songs the campaign blasts before each speech and gaffes became instant YouTube memes.”

The DNC released another Etch-A-Sketch video designed to ensure Mitt Romney cannot “shake” the conservative positions he took in the GOP primary.

[Read more…]

“I think their assessment is that Romney is much less a threat to them as events are a threat to them, and I agree with that. Romney cannot beat Obama, only events can beat Obama.”

— James Carville, quoted by BuzzFeed, on whether the Obama campaign is worried about facing Mitt Romney in the general election.

Joe Klein thinks the Etch-A-Sketch gaffe “may go well beyond a momentary embarrassment and become a campaign-defining disaster, much as John Kerry’s ‘I voted for it before I voted against it’ gaffe — which came at almost exactly the same point in that campaign.

The key reason: “Most obviously, this was a classic Kinsleyan gaffe — an inadvertent blurting of the truth — that goes to the very heart of the character problems that have bedeviled Romney throughout this campaign.”

But more important: “It makes it much harder, perhaps impossible, for Romney to begin to tack back to the center to appeal to the centrist voters, an absolute necessity for the fall campaign after the free-range extremism of the Republican primary. Every time Romney makes a move, or even a head-fake, it becomes an Etch-a-Sketch moment.

“Even if Rick Santorum wallops Mitt Romney in Pennsylvania next month by winning every Republican vote on primary day, he’s unlikely to gain the crucial support of all the delegates he could get,” the Allentown Morning Call reports.

“The lack of an early organization has haunted Santorum all year. In state after state, whether he would have won or lost the popular vote, he hasn’t qualified for all the delegates available… But it’s particularly embarrassing for Santorum that in Pennsylvania, a state he represented in Congress for 16 years, he failed to utilize his connections to flush the ballots with old friends and supporters.”

A new Rasmussen survey in Louisiana shows Rick Santorum way ahead of Mitt Romney, 43% to 31%, followed by Newt Gingrich at 16% and Ron Paul at 5%.

The Louisiana primary is on Saturday.

The latest Economist/YouGov poll finds President Obama leading Mitt Romney among women by a whopping 17 points, 55% to 38%.

In contrast, Romney edges Obama among men by 45% to 43%.