Opinions

My daughter, my first child, was born May 1, 1979. It was the same year, the same month that Etan Patz went missing. At the time, I was living in Buffalo, N.Y., and his story dominated the news. How could it not?

A 6-year-old boy vanishes in broad daylight while doing something so routine as walking to his school bus stop. Pictures of this smiling, angelic child reinforced the horror. As a new mother, I tried to imagine what his mother and his father were feeling. I thought about how I would be bargaining with God and how, despite my best efforts, I would be going through the “what ifs.” I hoped for the happy ending that became more unlikely with each day and week. And eventually years.

This was the week of the poll. Battleground states are tilting in favor of President Obama. Disquiet over the economy have voters tilting in favor of Mitt Romney nationally. And African Americans are tilting in favor of same-sex marriage as a result of the president’s public stand two weeks ago. There was also a lot of ‘nauseating’ discussion about Bain Capital and how it relates to job creation. Oh, and the Facebook IPO had investors screaming SOS.

A lot more happened this week, but the p-Op quiz can only handle so much. So, sharpen your pixels and get crackin’.

Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate in Massachusetts for the U.S. Senate, claimed at some points in her professional life to be a very small part Cherokee. The claim, apparently based on family lore, seems to be of dubious authenticity — or, at least, is not yet convincingly authenticated.

George F. Will writes in his column today that this matters a lot for the upcoming election, in which Warren challenges the Republican incumbent, Sen. Scott Brown. It makes Warren look hypocritical, Will argues — but worse, it is a revealing part and parcel of what he calls a lamentable liberal “identity politics,” in which a candidate’s character and experience are viewed with less importance than his or her ethnic background and other bona fides in the “diversity industry.” Will ascribes this to Warren’s background in elite academia (she was a Harvard professor), a place where one’s barely remembered nonwhite great-great-great-grandparent can be political capital -- something to brag about. Both her schools, Harvard and Penn, did, indeed, brag. It helped them seem more diverse.

Will says this is all germane in a candidate who is famously running as a Teller of Truth to Power. He says it’s important. Is he right?

Today’s must-read is by Heather Hurlburt, who writes about a potential growing rift between the current radicalized Republican Party and the Pentagon. She identifies five issues — Law of the Sea, energy (see here for more), military trials/detention, Iran, and budget issues — on which Republican positions cause headaches for the military. I wonder whether she would consider missile defense a sixth; there’s also the issue of torture, on which GOP orthodoxy is at odds with national security professionals from the military and other portions of the government.

Hurlburt:

“I think the president’s statement today is probably the most significant advancing of our cause since the bill-signing,” Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley told me during a meeting in Baltimore, two hours after President Obama announced his public support for same-sex marriage. A poll out just this morning quantifies how significant. If the vote to uphold Maryland’s marriage-equality law were held today, it would pass with 57 percent of the vote. Even more compelling, 55 percent of African Americans said same-sex marriages should have the same rights as other marriages.

The poll comes from Public Policy Polling (PPP), was commissioned by Marylanders for Marriage Equality and includes an oversample of black voters (398 of 852 likely voters). And it is the first survey since Obama’s May 9 pronouncement. The PPP poll conducted a few days after O’Malley signed the bill into law in March showed 52 percent of Maryland voters would uphold it. A Post-ABC News poll from January put public support at 50 percent.