My latest column, in today’s issue of The Daily, is on fixing the financial system.

And my Tuesday column was on Mitt Romney. It covers some of the same ground as David Brooks’s Tuesday column on the same broad subject.

Brooks understands the significance of Romney’s Medicare reform effort, which is still being fleshed out. It’s been interesting to read venomous attacks on the proposal. Some criticize it for not laying out exactly how much the “vouchers” will cost. Well, the “vouchers” are pegged to the cost of providing the defined benefit, my friends, and we won’t know that until we ask a variety of players, including Medicare FFS and private insurers, to bid on the defined benefit. The “voucher” will grow at the same rate as the cost of offering a given benefit, which is not the kind of thing we can know in advance. And of course the Romney proposal might change these parameters.

Regardless of whether or not Romney offers substantive policy proposals, the knives are out. And Romney’s polling against Obama is going to get much worse as labor-aligned groups, groups funded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, etc., continue to hammer home the notion that Romney, who by all accounts is a temperamental moderate and instinctive problem-solver (for good or ill), is in fact a “right-wing extremist.” This will be a hard campaign to watch.