8%

Of Americans said they’d be more likely to vote for a Donald Trump-backed presidential candidate while 26% said less they’d be less likely to do so, according to a recent Pew Research survey.

Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.

— Vice President Joe Biden, quoted by Maureen Dowd, repeating a line he’d heard to sum up what his party should campaign on.

I know he walked away with the hard drives in Massachusetts. But the video from the primary campaign is going to be hard to erase.

— David Axelrod, quoted by the Washington Post, noting that Mitt Romney is going to have a hard time tacking back to the center for the general election.

I’m going to just keep on plodding away, very persistent. And you know what? One of the things about being president is you get better as time goes on.

— President Obama, in a pre-Super Bowl interview with Matt Lauer.

Before Mitt speaks he should stop,
Before the next gaffe starts to drop.
But you can be sure
What he said of the poor
Was true, and not some kind of flip-flop.

I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it.

— Mitt Romney, quoted by CNN.

It may not be true that, at a personal level, Romney doesn’t care about the poor. He probably does. But his platform doesn’t. In that sense, his slip-up was a gaffe in the classic sense of admitting what he actually thinks.

— Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine.

408

Number of times President Obama has been interviewed in his first three years as president, according to The New York Times. In comparison, President George W. Bush had given 136 interviews at the same time in his presidency, and President Bill Clinton had given 166.

Can you find a single significant point on which Romney, Gingrich, or Santorum differ substantially from George W. Bush? It’s amazing. If Bush were considered a successful president, they would be bringing him up all the time. That they do not, even as they have an incumbent Democrat they deride as a failure, tells you that they know Bush and his legacy are poison. And yet, they may not believe in Bush, but they sure believe in what he stood for. And so does the GOP base, evidently.

— Rod Dreher, writing in the American Conservative.