Tom Jensen: “You want to know the biggest reason Mitt Romney hasn’t surged at any point in the Republican Presidential race this year? It’s because the more GOP primary voters across the country have been exposed to him, the less they’ve liked him. There are 13 places PPP has polled the Republican race in October or November where it also did a poll sometime between January and March. In those places Romney’s net favorability has dropped by an average of 15 points over the course of the year.”

GQ gives the honor to former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R).

“Every election season produces a number of hilariously pointless candidates who have no chance of winning. Some of them have value as novelty items. Look! It’s Alan Keyes, the token black Republican! And over there! It’s David Duke! He’s a racist! These are the fun, fringy candidates. The Sharpton Sector, if you will. Then there are folks like Pawlenty, who fail to register even as novelties. T-Paw (as he calls himself) spent much of 2011 as a six-foot-tall paperweight, an aggressively forgettable fellow perfectly suited to the role of debate filler. The $1 million he spent to lose the Iowa straw poll might as well have been burned in front of a group of orphans.”

Herman Cain told senior members of his campaign “that he is reassessing whether or not to remain in the Republican presidential race on a conference call this morning,” the Washington Post reports.

“Cain’s rethinking of his candidacy comes less than 24 hours after an Atlanta woman named Ginger White alleged that she and the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO had carried on a 13-year extramarital affair. Cain denied the allegation but a statement from his lawyer simply stated that personal matters were not relevant to the candidate’s presidential campaign.”

Interestingly, National Review has a transcript of the phone call.

According to Bloomberg, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson told a group of hedge fund managers in 2008 that he was considering a plan “for placing Fannie and Freddie into conservatorship — a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets.”

At the same time, he was telling Congress and the New York Times a very different story: that the firms must remain shareholder owned.

Felix Salmon: “What on earth did Hank Paulson think his job was in the summer of 2008? As far as most of us were concerned, he was secretary of the US Treasury, answerable to the US people and to the president. But at the same time, in secret meetings, Paulson was hanging out with his old Goldman Sachs buddies, giving them invaluable information about what he was thinking in his new job… And the crazy thing is that we have no idea how many of these meetings there were, or how long they went on for.”

Media training guru Brad Phillips has a detailed analysis of ten Republican debates held between May and November 2011 and concludes Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are the best debaters in the Republican field, while Jon Huntsman and Rick Perry rank among the worst.

Karl Rove tells Newsmax that he doubts a third-party candidate will emerge in the 2012 presidential race.

Said Rove: “I think there will be talk about it. But at the end of the day you have to have people who are willing to get behind that particular candidate, and I think there are too many people who feel so passionately about the necessity of removing President Obama from office that while in normal times they might be infatuated with a third party candidacy, this time around they’ll be very reluctant to do it.”

A new Insider Advantage poll in Iowa shows Newt Gingrich leading the Republican presidential race with 28%, followed by Ron Paul at 13%,  Mitt Romney at 12%, Herman Cain at 10%, Michele Bachmann at 10% and Rick Perry at 7%.

A new We Ask America poll finds Gingrich leading with 29%, followed by Romney at 13%, Bachmann at 13%, Paul at 11%, Cain at 7% and Perry at 5%.

A new Insider Advantage poll in New Hampshire shows Mitt Romney just ahead of Newt Gingrich in the first presidential primary state, 31% to 27%.

A new Rasmussen survey has Romney 10 points ahead of Gingrich, 34% to 24%, with Paul at 14% and Huntsman at 11%.

A new Insider Advantage poll in South Carolina shows Newt Gingrich running away from the GOP presidential field with 38%, followed by Mitt Romney at 15%, Herman Cain at 13%, Ron Paul at 7%, Rick Perry at 4%, Michele Bachmann at 3% and Rick Santorum at 2%.

A new American Research Group poll finds Gingrich leading with 33%, followed by Romney at 22% and Cain at 10%.

First Read: “The multiple sexual-harassment allegations against Cain may not have ruined his candidacy, though they certainly knocked him off message. His pregnant pause when talking about Libya might not have killed his chances, but it did bring into question his lack of experience and knowledge about world affairs. And this new allegation of an affair might not be the final nail in his political coffin, but we aren’t seeing the same conservatives rallying around Cain that we saw after the sexual-harassment allegations first surfaced. But when you take them all together, it’s pretty clear we’re watching a replay of the Sixth Sense: Everyone knows this candidacy is dead, except the campaign. Cain and the allegations have become a sideshow, bordering on a distraction to the rest of the field.”

The Note: “The issue isn’t will this sink Cain’s candidacy — it had been slowly
sinking already — the question now is: how fast will he fall and who
benefits from it? Cain is still commanding significant support national
and in the early primary states and those voters have to go somewhere.”

Rep. Barney Frank’s (D-MA) decision yesterday to retire from the House
of Representatives marks the 17th Democrat this cycle to opt not to run
for reelection, compared to just seven Republicans, dimming the
prospects that Democrats can win the 26 seats necessary to retake
control of the chamber in 2012, reports The Hill.

“All
[seven] GOP members are departing to run for another office, while only
eight of the 17 Democrats have their eyes focused
upward… Anticipating the blowback it would receive following two
high-profile retirements in less than a week, the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) released a memo Monday showing
that a number of Democratic retirements are in left-leaning districts
where the party is likely to retain control even without an incumbent.”

Politico:
“It’s a familiar trend: When parties lose the majority, the path back
to power appears too steep for many members to stick it out. After
Democrats lost the majority in 1994, 29 Democrats did not seek
reelection — eight more than the number of Republicans who retired.
After Republicans lost the majority in 2006, 27 Republicans did not seek
reelection — 21 more than the number of retiring Democrats.”

“What the hell are we paying you for?”

— New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), quoted by Politico, calling President Obama “a bystander in the Oval Office” for not getting involved in supercommittee debt talks.

Organizers seeking to oust Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) say they “already have gathered more than half of the signatures they would need to force the new Republican governor into a recall election,” the Green Bay Gazette reports.

More than than 300,000 signatures “have been gathered during the first 12 days of the recall effort, which was officially launched on Nov. 15. Organizers would need to gather 540,208 valid signatures by Jan. 17 to get the recall on the ballot next year.”

Herman Cain told CNN that another woman will come forward to accuse him of having an extramarital affair over 13 years.

Said Cain: “I wanted to get out in front of it. I have nothing to hide, I have done nothing wrong.”

However, Cain’s lawyer issued a statement to Fox 5 Atlanta that was less-than-helpful:

“This is not an accusation of harassment in the workplace — this is not an accusation of an assault — which are subject matters of legitimate inquiry to a political candidate. Rather, this appears to be an accusation of private, alleged consensual conduct between adults — a subject matter which is not a proper subject of inquiry by the media or the public. No individual, whether a private citizen, a candidate for public office or a public official, should be questioned about his or her private sexual life.”

A new Public Policy Polling survey in Pennsylvania find Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) leading all of his possible GOP rivals by double-digits, though he doesn’t match his 17 point margin of victory against Rick Santorum in 2006.

Sam Rohrer (R) comes closest but still trails Casey by 11 points, 47% to 36%.