Weigel

Delta Airlines, in their infinite wisdom, are transporting me to Michigan for today's Republican presidential debate. I'll be in the state through Thursday for some reporting, and have been advised to use my downtime at Slow's in Detroit and Beirut Palace in Troy.

Any Michigan-centric advice? Any pre-pre-game thoughts about what the candidates must do? Leave 'em in the section marked "comments."

Going back over articles about Mississippi's now-failed "personhood" amendment, I notice a pattern. The Christian Science Monitor:

Opponents charge that the change – which both sides say is likely to pass – is a backdoor way to outlaw abortion that could put the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision in jeopardy.

The Orlando Sentinel:

Colorado voters twice considered and rejected personhood amendments, but Mississippi's version is expected to pass.

The Week:

The amendment is expected to pass, and would presumably outlaw all abortion in the state.

CNN:

The initiative has been gaining support across many demographics, according to polls suggesting that it will probably pass.

What polls? CNN doesn't say, because there weren't any polls showing personhood "gaining support." There was a final PPP poll that showed the amendment at 45 percent support, which I ranked as pretty good, given that the last big test of personhood in Colorado got only 29 percent of the vote. I posed this question -- why did people expect personhood to pass? -- on Twitter, and got two smart-sounding answers.

Michelle Goldberg writes that "both gubernatorial candidates supported it, so local dems expected it to pass, too." Yes, that definitely put the fear into people. But why? Johnny DuPree, the Democratic candidate, was never going to beat popular Lieutenant Gov. Phil Bryant. When he endorsed personhood, he neutralized it as a partisan-identifying issue in an election that Republicans were going to dominate.

The DuPree endorsement wasn't all about party, though. He was the first black candidate for governor in Mississippi. Social conservatives went after black voters, hard, building on years of agitprop about how abortion should really be considered black genocide. The public face of the personhood campaign was a black, female doctor.

This didn't work at all. Look at the county vote breakdown. Hinds County, which is 69 percent black, registered a 74 percent "no" vote. Haley Barbour's own Yazoo County, 57 percent black, voted 65 percent "no." And so on. It turned out that social conservatives can't just expect black voters to abandon liberalism and vote with them.

So: What did the personhood movement win? Salon's Irin Carmon, who did early, in-person reporting on the fight, said that "they would have won if they'd succeeded in making it all about abortion, but the pill, IVF etc were bridge too far." My colleague Amanda Marcotte is arguing that by forcing any discussion of this, they moved the ball forward on discussions of when life begins. We'll just see, but in the short term, the discussion of "personhood" ended up foundering on the silliness of defining a fertilized egg as a "person."

Let's concede Fred Thompson's argument. Let's say that sexual harassment doesn't matter; that even if it does, you can't trust claims that come up during a presidential race; even if you trust them, it's unfair for Herman Cain to get rougher treatment than [Insert Name of Democrat].

Okay: Allowing all that, what does it say about Cain's management skills that he keeps Mark Block in charge of his campaign, and keeps letting him go on TV to make things up? Our latest example comes from last night, when Block told Sean Hannity something that wasn't true -- that one of the named accusers in the Cain affair sired a Politico reporter.

BLOCK: Karen Kraushaar had come out as one of the women. And we’ve come to find out her son works at Politico, the organization that originally out the story out.

HANNITY: Have you confirmed that? I've been hearing that all day, rumors about that. You've confirmed that.

BLOCK: We've confirmed it that he does indeed work at Politico, and that's his mother, yes.

There is literally no portion of this that's true.

1) Josh Kraushaar, a reporter, is not the son of Karen Kraushaar.

2) Josh Kraushaar, formerly of Politico, has worked at National Journal since 2010.

3) Block didn't "confirm" anything. I asked Kraushaar last night if the Cain campaign had asked him about this.

"Nope," said Kraushaar, "not at all. And I emailed Mark Block ASAP requesting correction around 9:20." At the time we emailed, around midnight, Block hadn't responded.

This would be funny if it happened once, but we're talking about Mark Block, who said just six days ago that Rick Perry's campaign leaked the story, and never backed that up. We're talking about a guy so inept at managing a campaign that he has an independent counsel looking at whether he broke campaign finance law. There's got to be a breaking point for the conservative base's dislike of the media. How about we start with outright lies?

First, the good news for the party of the center-right.

- If the results hold up, the party will have won control of the Virginia Senate by less than 100 votes in one crucial district.

- Mississippi Republicans got voters to approve a strict law demanding ID proof from voters.

That's the good news. The bad news:

- In Mississippi, the "personhood amendment" that would have defined life as starting at conception failed, and failed handily, losing by more than 100,000 votes.

- In Ohio, the anti-collective bargaining bill SB5 was repealed by a roughly 3-2 vote.

- In Iowa, Democrats won a special election for an open state Senate seat, letting them keep control of that body.

- In Kentucky, Democrays managed to win all but one statewide office. Jack Conway, the attorney general felled by Rand Paul in 2010, has returned with a victory over Sarah Palin-backed Todd P'Pool. That all complicates the storyline.

- In Arizona, Sen. Russell Pearce lost a recall election, robbing him of his role leading the majority GOP in the upper house, and robbing the immigration restriction movement of a champion.

Shove it all together, and you've got the weakest off-year election for Republicans since 2007.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Personhood amendment's "inevitable" victory at the polls. First, the only public survey before the election showed that the initiative to define life in Mississippi as starting at conception came out: It was a dead heat. Then voters got a crack at the initiative, and as of 11:30, after the AP had called the election, the initiative is going down by 14 points. The "no' vote on the initative is running roughly 100,000 votes ahead of votes for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Johnny DuPree -- who'd endorsed the initiative.

There's no Encore post today, because the news stops for no man. It's election night in (several parts of) America! Here's what to watch and how, as assembled by Slate's Sonia Tsuruoka.

6:30 p.m.: Kentucky

The question isn't whether Gov. Steve Beshear will survive. The question is whether Democrats can once again sweep statewide elections, and rescue people like Attorney General Jack Conway -- his opponent was endorsed by Palin! -- on Beshear's mojo. The results: Here.

7 p.m.: Virginia

There are three state legislatures up for election tonight. The closest-watched, and the most important for 2012: Virginia's Senate, currently governed by Democrats by a slim four-seat margin. If Republicans seize it, they win the whip hand for redistricting. Bottled-up social conservative legislation will finally be able to make it to Gov. Bob McDonnell's desk. I'm agnostic on whether that helps McDonnell's national ambitions, but it's what's at stake.

Follow the Senate results here, and follow the House of Delegates results here. Read more about McDonnell's awkward rise to national prominence here, and about the social conservative goals here.

7:30 p.m.: Ohio

It's the dream of every progressive whose hopes were crushed in Wisconsin: They may be able to overturn S.B. 5, Ohio's version of the anti-collective bargaining union reform law. That's on the ballot as Issue 2, and the results will be here. Read about how tricky the politics have been for Mitt Romney here.

8:00 p.m.: New Jersey

It's been a great year for Chris Christie. After he turned down a presidential bid, despite Ken Langone basically promising to buy a block of Pennsylvania Avenue for him, Christie's approval ratings in New Jersey edged higher. And yet, and yet -- he didn't spend all of his time campaigning for the state legislature. He jumped into other states, to offer his help. Follow the link above to see whether, against expectations, Christie's GOP can win control of either house of the legislature.

8:00 p.m.: Mississippi results for all statewide elections

The thing to watch here is not the governor's race, which Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant will take easily, but the Personhood amendment, issue 26 -- if it passes, life in Mississippi officially starts at conception.

9 p.m. Arizona

Oh, it probably won't happen, but just for fun you can watch the recall attempt against Sen. Russell Pearce, one of the most influential immigration hawks in the country, and the Lancelot of the Tea Party's agenda in the state.

I'll livetweet some of this at my account, @daveweigel, with most of the activity coming after 8:30 or so.

Lori Montgomery gets it, via the details of the newest Republican supercommittee float.

The offer envisions a tax code rewrite that would lower rates for everyone while raising overall tax collections by $250 billion, mainly by limiting the value of itemized deductions such as write-offs for home mortgage interest, state and local taxes and other expenses. In addition, Republicans are offering to use a less generous measure of inflation to adjust formulas government-wide, a proposal that would push people more rapidly into higher tax brackets.

The rub: They would base new, lower rates not on the returning Clinton tax rates, but on the expiring Bush tax cuts. The new idealized top tax bracket would fall to 28 percent. Contrast that with, say, Wyden-Coats, which removes loopholes but yanks in revenue by keeping the top rate at 35 percent. You start to see why this is a probable non-starter.

I'm reading Bill Clinton's new book Back to Work for a story, and I come across this admission about the former president's economic judgment.

I made some mistakes, too, though not the ones I've been most widely critized for: aggressively enforcing the Community Reinvestment Act and signing the bill repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era law requiring commercial and investment banking to be done by separate institutions.

Right after I read this, I watch Newt Gingrich talk to Jake Tapper about financial reform. Isn't there anything, asks Tapper, that Gingrich would do to control the banks?

"Repealing Glass Steagall was probably a mistake," says Gingrich.

There we have it, 13 years after it could have mattered: Bipartisanship. But it's a little more complicated, because these are, in Clinton's view, overrated decisions. The CRA enforcement? "Making mortgages available to people in the community didn't cause the meltdown." The Glass Steagall decision? He gives himself one lash for that, but "by the time Glass Steagall was repealed, Federal Reserve rulings, beginning in the late 1980s, had already eliminated restraints on big banks' ability to engage in both commercial and investment banking activities." That didn't make the repeal a good idea; basically, Clinton says his hands were tied.

This is an odd piece of data to find in a story titled "Merkel will cruise to 2013 win: pollster."

Merkel's conservatives (CDU/CSU) are polling about 31 percent in Forsa surveys while the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) are at 27 percent. The SPD hope to form a coalition with the Greens, polling 16 percent.

Merkel's current partners, the Free Democrats (FDP), are on 3 percent -- below the 5 percent threshold needed for seats in parliament -- after winning 14.6 percent in 2009.

The case for Merkelian invicibility is that she has charisma and the possible SDP leader doesn't. Fair enough. But Merkel's party is down 3 points from the last federal election, the SDP is up 4, the Greens are up 5, and the FDP is down 12. Merkel can survive, but only as the head of a left-right coalition government. There's a similar situation in the UK right now (as similar as you can get when comparing PR and first-past-the-post systems), where the Labour Party has taken advantage of falling support for the Conservatives and collapsing support for the Liberal Democrats, but Labour leader Ed Miliband comes off as just too feeble to win the general election.

Meanwhile, in the first good Euro news since -- I don't know, it's been a while -- Berlusconi is out.

That's got to be the upshot from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals' decision on one of the less compelling anti-Obamacare lawsuits. The judge uploading the law: Laurence Silberman, a Reagan appointee, a man who played a role in picking Ken Starr as independent counsel.

DC Aca Opinion

The problem for Obamacare foes: Silberman is really merciless in arguing that they don't have a Constitutional case against the health care mandate. "Appellants cannot find real support for their proposed rule in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent," he argues. That's hard to dig out from under. Contrast that with how he writes about the government's case.

We acknowledge some discomfort with the Government’s failure to advance any clear doctrinal principles limiting congressional mandates that any American purchase any product or service in interstate commerce.  But to tell the truth, those limits are not apparent to us, either because the power to require the entry into commerce is symmetrical with the power to prohibit or condition commercial behavior, or because we have not yet perceived a qualitative limitation.

The ball game for the PPACA lawsuits is going to be, probably, a decision on the strong lawsuit filed by a team of attorneys general; the whole thing is supposed to hinge on Anthony Kennedy. But if the libertarian-minded members of the court go along with the Silberman reasoning, it's possible this thing won't even be 5-4. My colleague Dahlia Lithwick speculates a possible 7-2 decision -- 6 votes clearly for the mandate, with Roberts coming in to write the opinion for the majority.