Rosie Gray, BuzzFeed: “Quietly, from the remnants of two failed presidential campaigns and the formidable online Paul organizations, a political machine is being born. The Paul agenda of extremely limited government, suspicion of economic elites, and their true outsider street cred have broad appeal in their party’s politics that go well beyond the sometimes-eccentric standard-bearer. The Republican Senate nominees in Wisconsin and Minnesota this cycle owe their nomination in part to the Paul influence. A Paul acolyte, Ted Cruz, is on the cusp of an upset victory over the establishment favorite in Texas Republican Senate primary. And Paul’s son Rand, the junior senator from Kentucky, is now mentioned seriously as a prospect for the 2016 Republican nomination should Mitt Romney fall short in November.”

Jo Becker and Scott Shane, New York Times: “In interviews with The New York Times, three dozen of his current and former advisers described Mr. Obama’s evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda. They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.””

Carl Cannon, RealClearPolitics: “Mitt Romney promised last week, and not for the first time, that the U.S. job market would improve significantly if he is elected president. In interviews with FOX News and Time magazine, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee went further than usual in providing a precise figure: If he is elected president he’ll bring the nation’s unemployment rate down to 6 percent by the end of his first term in the White House. If Romney were to be elected — and managed to deliver on such a promise — he’d more than likely be rewarded with a second term. But his pledge, offered with few specifics, raises significant questions.” 

Philip Rucker, Washington Post: “For so long, he was the putative front-runner, the nominal front-runner, the weak front-runner. Then he became the all-but-certain nominee. And by Tuesday night, he’ll be able to ditch those modifiers. Willard Mitt Romney is about to do what his father didn’t and no one in his church ever has. With Tuesday’s Texas primary, he is poised to secure the 1,144 delegates required to clinch the Republican presidential nomination at the party’s August convention.”

Marc Fisher, Washington Post: “Attack ads featuring spinning weather vanes and double-talking candidates have become a staple of American campaigns, but consultants who make those ads say the flip-flopper charge doesn’t always stick — and no one has a formula to predict exactly when it will. But there are reasons why some politicians’ changes of heart strike voters as evidence of duplicity and others are accepted as the result of reasoned reconsideration — and America’s cultural divide on social issues might explain why certain flip-flopper charges hit home.”