Mitt Romney

WASHINGTON - Three weeks after the election, Mitt Romney made it to the White House. For about 90 minutes. After an odd arrival in which a man rushed his SUV and ended up getting arrested by the Secret Service. It wasn't the start of a term as Romney had envisioned. But it was, at least, all on good terms with the man who defeated him, President Obama. Over a private lunch Thursday, Obama and Romney had white turkey chili, Southwestern grilled chicken salad, and - from the reports of it - the kind of conversation that never happens during a campaign.

WASHINGTON - Mitt Romney will have lunch Thursday at the White House with President Obama in the private dining room, a show of bipartisanship three weeks after the conclusion of a tough, sometimes nasty, election season. The meeting, their first since the final presidential debate Oct. 22 in Florida, comes amid the increasingly antagonistic negotiations between the White House and Congress to avert the looming fiscal cliff. Media will not be allowed at the private lunch, press secretary Jay Carney said in a brief statement Wednesday morning.

By Michael Kinsley Bill Clinton was elected on a platform of "change. " Not change in any particular way; just change in the abstract. Like characters in a Chekhov play, Americans found daily life unbearable in some unspecified way and dreamed of escape. But they didn't have the energy to achieve escape velocity. Then along came this fast-talking charmer. Modifying Clinton's formula only slightly, Barack Obama's campaign mantra in 2008 was "change you can believe in. " This year, a major part of Mitt Romney's challenge to President Obama was to throw this formula back in his face: Where was the change Obama talked about?

Rich won't pay The media have been reporting, incessantly, on the president's determination to raise taxes on the wealthy. Well, OK, I'm not rich, so go ahead. But not by raising tax rates will this happen. Why? Because the wealthy have tax attorneys, CPAs, and financial advisers who know how to mine the arcane tax code to avoid payment no matter what the rate is. If the president slaps a 100 percent tax rate on the rich, they will wind up paying 15 percent. Instead, get rid of the weird deductions so they cannot hide income, defer income, deduct oddball expenses, and stick it to the rest of us. It's the deductions, not the rate, that are inequitable.

SO LORA NEAL believes that Barack Obama was the perfect man for the job as president (letter, Nov. 14). If she believes that, then she believes that a serial arsonist is the perfect person for the job as fire commissioner. Due to President Obama's policies, more people are out of work, incomes are falling, and more and more people are forced to use food stamps and depend upon other forms of government assistance. People are paying higher gas prices because the president won't approve permits for drilling.

RE: "JUDICIAL Money Alert" ("Baer Growls" blog, philly.com, Nov. 19). With the 2013 judicial elections fast approaching, it's time for Pennsylvanians to get real about the impact of exploding judicial- election spending on our courts. As John Baer's blog illustrates, the most recent judicial elections across the country broke spending records left and right. There's no reason to believe that next year's judicial elections won't follow the trend. Runaway judicial campaign spending gives the impression that justice can be bought.

Much is still being analyzed regarding the voting demographics for the presidential election. Some seem easily explained. For example, the monolithic vote for Barack Obama among African Americans. His 93 percent support among blacks is no doubt attributable, in part, to his own race, and would explain why Mitt Romney received not a single vote in 59 Philadelphia divisions. And, given the GOP primary climate, it's not hard to understand why 71 percent of Hispanics voted against Romney, who ran as a severely conservative candidate on immigration.

If you watch a lot of TV - and, hey, who doesn't? - you may have noticed that your life has suddenly improved. You're no longer facing a ceaseless barrage of political ads sponsored by groups with innocuous-sounding names like Restore Our Future, American Crossroads, and Priorities USA Action. They're blessedly gone, as are the fat cats who helped bankroll the priciest election season in history. There's more good news: Most of them wasted their money on losers. To update Winston Churchill, never have so many expended so much for so little.

As news spread that Mitt Romney received no votes in about 3 percent of Philadelphia voting divisions, many Republicans expressed surprise, outrage and disbelief. Michael Meehan, the city's GOP party leader, wasn't one of them. "It's not something that is new," he said. He has seen such patterns before, most noticeably in 1999, when Sam Katz, who ran as a Republican but has since returned to the Democratic party, lost to Democrat John Street in an election divided along racial lines.