History > 2012 > USA > Politics (II)

Mr. Romney Stumps in Israel

July 30, 2012

The New York Times

Mitt Romney made a point of insisting that he would adhere to an unwritten rule and often violated rule about candidates not criticizing each other or contradicting American foreign policy on foreign soil. About the only effort he made to keep that promise during his stop in Israel was to avoid mentioning President Obama by name.

Beyond that, with some of the biggest investors in Republican politics in tow, Mr. Romney made no effort to disguise the target and intent of rhetoric that was certainly inflammatory but largely free of any sense of how we would carry out policies he was championing.

The message — on Iran, Jerusalem, the Palestinians — was all anti-Obama: Mr. Romney would be a much better friend to Israel than Mr. Obama ever could be. He would be much tougher on Iran. He would recognize Jerusalem as the capital. For good measure, he insulted the Palestinians by declaring that cultural differences — not decades under Israeli occupation — are the reason Israelis are more successful economically. It’s hard to say how this could affect policy if he were president, but it is not encouraging.

The real audience for Mr. Romney’s tough talk was American Jews and evangelical Christians, some of whom accompanied him on his trip. He is courting votes and making an aggressive pitch to donors, including Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate with the hard-line pro-Israel views who is spending more money than any other American — $100 million — to defeat Mr. Obama.

Despite what Mr. Romney says, all American presidents have been pro-Israel, including Mr. Obama. But that doesn’t mean subcontracting American policy to Israeli leaders or donors. Mr. Romney hit an applause line by calling Jerusalem Israel’s capital and agreeing to consider moving the United States Embassy there from Tel Aviv. But those policies would complicate America’s ability to act as a broker in Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.

Mr. Romney did American interests no favors when he praised Israeli economic growth while ignoring the challenges Palestinians face living under Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza. He showed troubling ignorance by understating the income disparity between Israel and those areas. Israel, in 2009, had a per capita gross domestic product of roughly $29,800, while, in 2008, the West Bank and Gaza had a per capita gross domestic product of $2,900, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.

On Iran’s nuclear weapons program, both Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney support trying to halt it with sanctions and negotiations but say military action is an option. It is unclear if Mr. Romney, as president, might structure sanctions differently and how committed he is to negotiations.

Already, one of his advisers is contending that Mr. Obama’s strategies have “failed.” On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel seemed to agree. Meanwhile, Mr. Romney ruled out any outcome that would contain rather than eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, and he strongly defended Israel’s right to strike Iran in self-defense. Mr. Obama also recognizes this right, but he has urged Israel to hold back, at least while negotiations are under way.

The tough talk raises concerns that Mr. Romney and his hard-line advisers may be more eager to take military action. Iran’s nuclear ambitions are a threat to Israel, the United States, its Arab neighbors and its own people. But there should be no illusions about the steep costs and limited returns of any attack on Iran’s nuclear complex.

Presidents often say things on the campaign trail that they don’t mean or regret and reverse once in office, but voters can only judge a candidate on his words. The more Mr. Romney digs in on a particular position, the harder it will be to dig out, especially if the people egging you on in the first place have just donated $100 million toward your campaign.

    Mr. Romney Stumps in Israel, NYT, 30.7.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/opinion/mitt-romney-stumps-in-israel.html

Romney Courts Campaign Donors in Israel

July 30, 2012
The New York Times
By ASHLEY PARKER

JERUSALEM — Mitt Romney came to Jerusalem to publicly lock arms with Israel. But privately, he also used the opportunity to raise money and offer top donors an unofficial mini-retreat abroad.

At a breakfast fund-raiser on Monday expected to raise more than $1 million, nearly four dozen donors who had raised between $25,000 and $50,000 were treated to a lavish spread of salads, cheese and smoked fish — and the opportunity to hear Mr. Romney hold forth on the place he referred to as “a holy city.”

“I am overwhelmingly impressed with the hand of providence, whenever it chooses to apply itself, and also the greatness of the human spirit, and how individuals who reach for greatness and have purpose above themselves are able to build and accomplish things that could only be done by a species created in the image of God,” Mr. Romney said. “I come to this place, therefore, with a sense of profound humility, as I look around here at great people who’ve accomplished a great thing, and also a sense of spiritual connection, acknowledging the hand of providence in establishing this place and making it a holy city.”

But if Mr. Romney was the official guest of honor, speaking for nearly 20 minutes in a conference room at the King David Hotel here, the unofficial man of the hour was sitting just to Mr. Romney’s left: Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate who has donated tens of millions of dollars to Republican causes.

Though Mr. Romney did not acknowledge Mr. Adelson by name in front of reporters, his presence added a level of intrigue to the event, which the Romney campaign had originally closed to journalists, in a breach of campaign protocol. However, less than 24 hours later, the Mr. Romney’s team reversed course and agreed to let in a small group of reporters.

The breakfast fund-raiser was Mr. Romney’s last event in Israel; he now leaves for the final leg of his weeklong overseas tour — a two-day stop in Poland. But many of the donors enjoyed a full weekend of events in Israel.

Some of the donors — who received a gift bucket that included white skullcaps, an Israeli chocolate bar that contained Pop Rocks, and a Romney pin inscribed in Hebrew — set out on a tour of Jerusalem’s Old City on Sunday morning. They visited the Mount of Olives and the Western Wall, and returned to the wall again in the afternoon when Mr. Romney made an unannounced visit there.

Though Mr. Romney’s visit to the Western Wall came on the solemn holiday of Tisha B’av, which commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Jewish Temples of Jerusalem, it had the feel of a campaign rally.

Later that evening, when Mr. Romney delivered a speech overlooking the Old City, about 25 percent of the crowd was filled with donors, who sat in reserved front row seats and gave Mr. Romney a standing ovation when he took the microphone. After his speech, he again worked the crowd of donors, offering smiles, hugs and handshakes.

At the fund-raiser on Monday, Mr. Romney talked favorably about Israel’s economy and gross domestic product.

“Do you realize what health care spending is as a percentage of the G.D.P. in Israel? Eight percent,” he said. “You spend eight percent of G.D.P. on health care. You’re a pretty healthy nation. We spend 18 percent of our G.D.P. on health care, 10 percentage points more. That gap, that 10 percent cost, compare that with the size of our military — our military which is 4 percent, 4 percent. Our gap with Israel is 10 points of G.D.P. We have to find ways — not just to provide health care to more people, but to find ways to fund and manage our health care costs.”

Though Mr. Romney had promised to refrain from attacking President Obama on foreign soil, his remarks at the fund-raiser included some lines from his standard stump speech, which cast an implicit negative contrast with the president.

“The news that our economy grew at 1.5 percent last quarter was really quite troubling,” he said. “We’re now four years past the big downturn that occurred in 2008, and four years down the road and still seeing tepid numbers bouncing along the bottom is troubling, and those numbers translate into real human beings that are really suffering.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 30, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a stop

on a donors’ tour of Jerusalem’s Old City. It is the Mount of Olives, not Mount Olive.

    Romney Courts Campaign Donors in Israel, NYT, 30.7.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/us/politics/mitt-romney-courts-campaign-donors-in-israel.html

Romney Backs Israeli Stance on Threat of Nuclear Iran

July 29, 2012
The New York Times
By JODI RUDOREN and ASHLEY PARKER

JERUSALEM — Mitt Romney said Sunday that preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear capability should be America’s “highest national security priority,” stressing that “no option should be excluded” in the effort.

“We have a solemn duty and a moral imperative to deny Iran’s leaders the means to follow through on their malevolent intentions,” Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, told an audience of about 300, including a large contingent of American donors who flew here to accompany him. “We must not delude ourselves into thinking that containment is an option.”

The speech, delivered at dusk overlooking the Old City, was short on policy prescriptions, as Mr. Romney tried to adhere to an unwritten code suggesting that candidates not criticize each other on foreign soil. But there were subtle differences between what he said — and how he said it — and the positions of his opponent.

While the Obama administration typically talks about stopping Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, Mr. Romney adopted the language of Israel’s leaders, who say Tehran must be prevented from even having the capability to develop one.

And while President Obama and his aides always acknowledge Israel’s right to defend itself, they put an emphasis on sanctions and diplomacy; Dan Senor, Mr. Romney’s senior foreign policy aide, went further on Sunday, suggesting that Mr. Romney was ready to support a unilateral military strike by Israel.

“If Israel has to take action on its own,” Mr. Senor said in a briefing before the speech, “the governor would respect that decision.”

The visit to Jerusalem, in the middle of a seven-day overseas tour that began in London and continues on Monday in Poland, was largely a series of photo opportunities intended to shore up support among evangelical Christians who have been wary of Mr. Romney’s candidacy, and to peel off some votes from American Jews dissatisfied with Mr. Obama’s handling of Israel. It went smoother than the London stop, in which Mr. Romney appeared to be insulting his hosts by questioning their preparations and enthusiasm for the Olympic Games, but the campaign struggled somewhat with the delicate diplomacy of being a candidate abroad.

After reports of Mr. Senor’s comments were published, he issued a new statement that did not mention unilateral action, and later he said he was not necessarily referring to a military strike. In an interview with CBS News, Mr. Romney stuck with the softer stance, saying only, “we respect the right of a nation to defend itself,” and also hinted at the strained choreography of the day.

“Because I’m on foreign soil,” he said, “I don’t want to be creating new foreign policy for my country or in any way to distance myself from the foreign policy of our nation.”

A few hours later, his 15-minute speech did include one vague shot at Democrats.

“We cannot stand silent as those who seek to undermine Israel voice their criticisms,” he said. “And we certainly should not join in that criticism. Diplomatic distance in public between our nations emboldens Israel’s adversaries.”

He also referred pointedly to Jerusalem as “the capital of Israel,” something Obama administration officials are loath to do, because Palestinians also imagine the city as the future capital of their hoped-for state. The line drew a standing ovation from some in the crowd and, later, an echo from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who underscored, “Jerusalem will always be the capital of Israel.”

Mr. Netanyahu, whose relationship with Mr. Obama has been rocky, was generous in his praise of Mr. Romney. “Mitt, I couldn’t agree with you more, and I think it’s important to do everything in our power to prevent the ayatollahs from possessing the capability” to develop a nuclear weapon, the prime minister said earlier in the day. “We have to be honest and say that all the sanctions and diplomacy so far have not set back the Iranian program by one iota.”

The visit, Mr. Romney’s fourth to Israel, coincided with the solemn fast day of Tisha B’av, which commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Jewish Temples of Jerusalem. Between meetings with Mr. Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad of the Palestinian Authority, Mr. Romney and his wife, along with several of the donors, made a pilgrimage to the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism and a central symbol of the holiday.

Standing with the chief rabbi of the wall, Mr. Romney, in a black velvety skullcap, was handed Psalm 121 — “He who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep” — and later inserted a note into a crack between the stones, as is traditional (campaign aides declined to reveal its contents).

The scene was more like a campaign rally than a solemn place of prayer. Women stood on chairs to peer over the fence that divides them from the men, many of whom clapped and waved as the candidate and his entourage snaked through; people actually praying were pushed to the back as security officers cordoned off a space for the candidate.

“Jerusalem, the capital of Israel,” one man called out. “Beat Obama, Governor!” said another.

Shepherding Mr. Romney at the wall was J. Philip Rosen, a Manhattan lawyer who owns a home in Jerusalem and helped organize a $50,000-per-couple fund-raiser scheduled for Monday morning. Mr. Rosen said Sunday he expected up to 80 people for the breakfast, up from his estimate on Friday of 20 to 30, because of the influx of Americans.

Among those who flew here for the event were the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who has vowed to spend $100 million this political season to defeat Mr. Obama and wore a pin that said “Romney” in Hebrew letters; Cheryl Halpern, a New Jersey Republican and advocate for Israel; Woody Johnson, owner of the New York Jets; John Miller, chief executive of the National Beef Packing Company; John Rakolta, a Detroit real estate developer who led the finance committee for Mr. Romney’s 2008 presidential bid; L. E. Simmons, the owner of a private-equity firm in Texas with ties to the oil industry; Paul Singer, founder of a $20 billion hedge fund; and Eric Tanenblatt, a Romney fund-raiser in Atlanta who had never visited Israel. Scott Romney, the governor’s brother, and Spencer Zwick, his national finance chairman, also were on hand.

They were greeted at the King David Hotel here on Saturday night with gift baskets that included white skullcaps, which many wore to the Western Wall, and Israeli chocolate bars made with Pop Rocks. Some spent Sunday touring Jerusalem, while others observed the fast; after the speech, Sander Gerber, a hedge fund financier, and Mr. Rosen were among those who made a makeshift minyan for the evening service, standing between lines of alternating American and Israeli flags and overlooking the Old City.

As they have for months, Mr. Romney and his aides played up the relationship between the candidate and Mr. Netanyahu, who worked together in the 1970s at Boston Consulting Group. During the morning meeting, according to someone who was there, Mr. Netanyahu at one point showed Mr. Romney a PowerPoint slide show with detailed information about Iran, and joked about how it was reminiscent of their consulting days. Later, the two men and their families shared a post-fast dinner at Mr. Netanyahu’s home, which Mr. Romney pointed out he had visited before.

Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, said in an interview that any closeness between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Romney — or distance between the prime minister and the American president — was irrelevant.

“Netanyahu and Romney may be of the same cut ideologically, but this is beside the point when it comes to leading countries,” said Mr. Ayalon, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States. “For us it shouldn’t and it does not matter at all who will be the next president. We should not get involved, and I am happy to see that we are not involved, even though there are those who are trying to look microscopically to see if there is any favoritism. It is folklore more than anything else.”

David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Dallas.

    Romney Backs Israeli Stance on Threat of Nuclear Iran, NYT, 29.7.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/us/politics/romney-in-israel-hints-at-harder-line-toward-iran.html

Candidates Cower on Gun Control

July 26, 2012
The New York Times

At a moment when the country needs resolve and fearlessness to reduce the affliction of gun violence that kills more than 80 people a day, both presidential candidates have kicked away the opportunity for leadership. On Wednesday, reacting to the mass murder in Colorado last week, Mitt Romney and President Obama paid lip service to the problem but ducked when the chance arose to stand up for their former principles.

That’s not terribly surprising in the case of Mitt Romney, who has built an entire campaign around an avoidance of specifics and a refusal to take unpopular positions. The governor who once showed mettle by banning assault weapons in Massachusetts told Brian Williams of NBC News that he now believes the country needs no new gun laws and no government action at all.

“Changing the heart of the American people may well be what’s essential,” Mr. Romney said, though he provided not a clue on how he plans to reach that heart and help reduce the nation’s tolerance of violence. He didn’t even seem to understand the gun laws that are in place, saying the Colorado shooter “shouldn’t have had any kind of weapons.” In fact, all of the shooter’s purchases, including an assault rifle, were perfectly legal in the state.

Though Mr. Romney expressed faith in the federal requirement for background checks before buying a gun, he didn’t acknowledge how porous the federal system is — largely by allowing unchecked sales at gun shows — and how much more effective tighter state regulations have been in restricting trafficking in places like California.

States with strict gun-control laws have significantly fewer firearms deaths, according to studies of federal data. Policies like banning assault weapons and requiring trigger locks and safe storage actually work, though few politicians can be heard advocating them.

In a way, President Obama’s remarks were even more disappointing because he fell far short of offering a solution even though he clearly demonstrated an understanding of the problem.

“For every Columbine or Virginia Tech, there are dozens gunned down on the streets of Chicago and Atlanta, and here in New Orleans,” he told the National Urban League convention. “For every Tucson or Aurora, there is daily heartbreak over young Americans shot in Milwaukee or Cleveland.”

But his plan to address the problem appeared to consist of summer jobs for young people and crime reduction programs in cities — perfectly fine ideas but much too weak to reduce the tools of urban bloodshed. He talked about enhanced background checks to weed out criminals and the mentally ill but said nothing about closing the gun-show loophole or the ease with which the mentally ill can get their gun rights restored. (The National Rifle Association insisted on making it easy, a position that the president could fight against without fear of significant opposition.)

The N.R.A. has even blocked federal studies on how to improve background checks, or the effect of high-capacity ammunition clips, as The Times found last year. At a minimum, the president could demand better research and solid data to help make the case for strengthened legislation.

Instead, Mr. Obama spoke largely in platitudes. AK-47s should be in the hands of soldiers, not criminals, he said. Well, yes. Automatic military weapons like the AK-47 have been banned since 1934, making any civilian who possesses one a criminal. The more pressing issue is semiautomatic rifles like the extremely popular AR-15 in combination with high-capacity clips, used by the gunman in Aurora to fire multiple high-powered rounds at moviegoers.

Both candidates once favored banning these kinds of assault weapons. What happened to their courage?

    Candidates Cower on Gun Control, NYT, 26.7.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/opinion/candidates-cower-on-gun-control.html

Obama Delivers Defense of His Policy Efforts

July 25, 2012
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

NEW ORLEANS — President Obama wrapped up a three-day fund-raising swing with an emotional appearance here at the National Urban League conference, issuing a robust defense of his efforts to make higher education more affordable, to increase training programs for young people and to expand access to health care.

“From the highest court in the land, health care reform is here to stay,” the president said in a no-holds-barred presentation of what he considers the accomplishments of his term.

Announcing an education initiative for African-Americans, the president challenged his mostly black audience to take advantage of the government programs he has fought to put in place.

“I want all these young people to be getting a higher education, and I don’t want them loaded with thousands of dollars of debt,” Mr. Obama said, to a standing ovation.

Then he paused: “Of course that means all of y’all got to hit the books. Don’t cheer and then don’t do your homework.”

The president also spoke of the need to do more to keep guns out of the hands of troubled people, in the wake of the shootings last week at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. Besides saying that federal and local efforts should be redoubled, he called on families to step in, as well.

“We have no greater mission as a country than to keep our young people safe,” Mr. Obama said. “But we have to understand that when a child opens fire on another child, there’s a hole in that child’s heart that government can’t fill.”

Before Mr. Obama spoke, many members of the audience in the convention center here were moved to tears by a video that showed the highlights of the civil rights movement. Set to words and music of the black spiritual anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the video montage included the visages of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks and Thurgood Marshall.

It ended, as everyone knew it would, with the Obama family and America’s first black president, but that foregone conclusion did not seem to affect the emotional punch.

By the time Mr. Obama walked onto the stage, the audience had been on its feet cheering for five minutes straight.

Mr. Obama spoke about his early days as a community organizer in Chicago, and cast his efforts to retain the presidency in historical terms, talking about “the belief that in America, change is always possible.”

“Our union may not be perfect, but it is perfectible,” he said, adding that “we can strive through effort, through blood and sweat and tears until it is the place we imagined.”

In response to the speech, an aide to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign said that Mr. Romney would be a better choice for black voters because of his experience in business and as governor of Massachusetts.

Tara Wall, a senior communications adviser for the campaign, said in a statement: “As black Americans, we all take pride in Barack Obama’s historic election — but unfortunately his performance as president has not matched that enthusiasm. He’s disappointed black small business owners, failed to address rising black unemployment — which now stands at over 14 percent, and is double that among our youth — and failed to address the widening economic disparity gap.”

Mr. Obama’s appearance Wednesday before the National Urban League came at the end of the day when the issue of race flared up in the campaign.

Earlier Wednesday Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. sharply criticized what he called a “feeble attempt by the Romney campaign to score political points” overseas.

He was referring to an article in London’s Daily Telegraph — in which an unidentified Romney adviser suggests that because Mr. Romney is white he has more in common with Britain than Mr. Obama does.

“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser is quoted as telling the newspaper. “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”

Mr. Biden, in a statement that the Obama camp e-mailed to reporters, said the comments were “a disturbing start to a trip designed to demonstrate Governor Romney’s readiness to represent the United States on the world’s stage.”

He called it “just another feeble attempt by the Romney campaign to score political points at the expense of this critical partnership.”

Furious Romney campaign aides lashed back.

“Today, the race for the highest office in our land was diminished to a sad level when the vice president of the United States used an anonymous and false quote from a foreign newspaper to prop up their flailing campaign,” a Romney spokesman, Ryan Williams, said in a statement. “The president’s own press secretary has repeatedly discredited anonymous sources, yet his political advisers saw fit to advance a falsehood.”

Obama aides were not backing down.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to New Orleans, Jennifer Psaki, a campaign spokeswoman, declined to characterize the remark as race-baiting, but said, “There are countless examples, which I’m happy to provide, of occasions where Mitt Romney and his surrogates have questioned whether the president understood America or freedom, and that really goes over a line that we think they shouldn’t.”

Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, called the remark “gratuitously ignorant of the facts.”

    Obama Delivers Defense of His Policy Efforts, NYT, 25.7.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/us/politics/obama-camp-hits-back-at-romney-criticism.html

Negative Ads Hit at Identity to Shape Race for Presidency

July 25, 2012
The New York Times
By JEREMY W. PETERS

RICHMOND, Va. — The man looks incredulous, his voice rising in exasperation as he tells President Obama to stop demonizing small-business owners. “We need somebody who believes in America,” he says, right before viewers hear, “I’m Mitt Romney, and I approved this message.”

Minutes earlier on the same local NBC station here, anyone watching commercials between rounds of “American Ninja Challenge” would have seen Mr. Obama’s latest attack. As Mr. Romney sings a monotone rendition of “America the Beautiful” at a campaign rally, headlines flash on the screen describing how he put his fortune in foreign bank accounts and shipped jobs to China and Mexico.

As the presidential campaign has become a clash over a host of issues — from tax cuts to foreign diplomacy to claims of words taken out of context — Mr. Romney, Mr. Obama and their allies have started trading accusations over a much more delicate and personal question: Are you an American like me?

Their choice of words and imagery is a reminder of how powerful undercurrents of identity, wealth, race and religion are shaping this election. These surface in subtle and not-so-subtle ways as two candidates who can have trouble connecting with voters on a personal level try to define each other as detached from mainstream American life.

By Mr. Romney’s telling, the president has a “strange” and “foreign” political philosophy.

Mr. Obama has suggested that Mr. Romney’s vision of the American dream involves Indian call centers and Caribbean tax havens. “What is Mitt Romney hiding?” asks one recent ad.

For two men with unconventional biographies — one is the son of a Kenyan immigrant and the other a descendant of Mormon pioneers — this is risky but potentially fertile territory.

“It’s the ‘Mars attacks’ approach,” said Ken Goldstein, president of Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. “And it often works because nothing brings the people of Earth together like an invasion from Mars.”

Using attack ads in heavy rotation across battleground states like Virginia, along with carefully worded campaign speeches and barbed sound bites on cable television, Mr. Obama, Mr. Romney and their supporters are pushing these competing story lines as polls show negative views of both men are on the rise.

Neither candidate is accusing the other of sending subliminal signals over race or religion. And the language on the campaign trail is a far cry from the overt efforts to make religion a wedge issue — like the campaign by Representative Michele Bachmann and other Republican members of Congress to ferret out what they say is an Islamic extremist influence in government.

Rather, the Obama and Romney campaigns seem conscious of the dangers of going too far.

“These two campaigns have gone to pretty considerable lengths to keep away from that kind of attack that relates either to Obama’s race or Romney’s religion,” said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California and a former Republican consultant. “What we’re seeing is more like, He’s really rich so he can’t understand what your life is like,” Mr. Schnur said of attacks on Mr. Romney.

Against Mr. Obama, he added, the tack is, “He’s never had a real job, so he can’t understand how you built your business.”

Attack strategies against Mr. Obama have always been tricky to execute, not just because of possible racial tripwires but because a solid majority of voters say they like the president personally, whatever they may think of his politics.

The approach Mr. Romney has taken in recent weeks with increasing zeal seeks to avoid those sensitivities while planting doubts in voters’ minds about Mr. Obama’s fealty to America and its allies. Just this week, he accused the president of betraying “the national interest” by leaking national security secrets, and said in a CNBC interview that the president’s ideology is “very strange and in some respects foreign to the American experience type of philosophy.”

He was referring to the president’s recent statement that government investment has helped small businesses thrive, a comment that conservatives have pounced on as evidence that Mr. Obama is sympathetic to European-style social democracy

Last week, a top supporter of Mr. Romney’s, John H. Sununu, the former New Hampshire governor and White House chief of staff in the first Bush administration, said in remarks he was later forced to clarify, “I wish this president would learn how to be an American.”

Mr. Obama, himself the subject of frequent attacks concerning his background, has tried to turn the tables somewhat, casting his opponent’s business experience as hostile to American ideals: Sure, Mr. Romney sings about how much he loves America. But he gave American jobs to foreigners and hides his money in Swiss banks.

A new ad from the Obama “super PAC” Priorities USA Action uses crafty editing to show Mr. Romney at the opening ceremony of the Salt Lake City Olympics, waving to the teams from China, India, Bermuda and Switzerland. “China,” the announcer scoffs. “Thousands owe their jobs to Mitt Romney’s companies.”

Often, the Obama campaign stresses the president’s middle-class upbringing and Midwestern roots to draw a contrast with Mr. Romney. Mr. Obama grew up without privilege or prestige, his ads say. Raised by his grandparents, he had to borrow money to pay for college.

Or as the songwriter Carole King says in a new Web video: “Rural America is part of his DNA. His mom and his grandparents were from Kansas.”

Mr. Romney? One recent Obama ad says that when he was governor he raised fees on the backbone of the middle class: nurses, electricians and fishermen.

The squabbles over who can lay claim to being a better American are the latest fodder for what has been a relentlessly negative television campaign. Kantar Media, which tracks television advertising nationwide, analyzed all the commercials related to the presidential race that ran from last Friday through Monday — 22 different ones in all. Only three had a positive message, and they were all Spanish-language commercials.

In Richmond, a battleground state media market that is seeing some of the heaviest advertising, not a single positive presidential campaign message ran on television from June 9 through June 22, according to Kantar. But attack ads ran 4,504 times.

With time running out to break through to the few voters who remain undecided — just 8 percent of the electorate by the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll — it is all the more important that the campaigns find resonance with their appeals to Americans’ patriotism.

“Voters are already turning off their televisions,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster who cautioned that the torrent of negative messages is starting to overwhelm people. “It’s getting harder and harder to find a message that cuts through.”

    Negative Ads Hit at Identity to Shape Race for Presidency, NYT, 25.7.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/us/politics/negative-ads-hit-at-identity-to-shape-race.html

Obama and Romney

Do Not Change Course Over Outcry on Gun Violence

July 23, 2012
The New York Times
By TRIP GABRIEL

President Obama and his challenger, Mitt Romney, echoed each other in embracing the role of national grief counselor in the wake of the deadly rampage in Colorado last week, offering stirring words of condolence and comfort.

But neither has responded to calls for a renewed debate over how to prevent gun violence. Asked on Sunday whether Mr. Obama favored new gun control initiatives, his spokesman, Jay Carney, twice said the main focus of the president — who four years ago called for an assault-weapons ban — was to “protect Second Amendment rights.”

“He believes we need to take steps that protect Second Amendment rights of the American people but that ensure that we are not allowing weapons into the hands of individuals who should not, by existing law, obtain those weapons,” Mr. Carney said on Air Force One as the president flew to Colorado to meet with survivors of the mass shooting.

“If he had said almost anything else it would be used in a fund-raising appeal by the N.R.A.,” said Representative Earl Blumenauer, Democrat of Oregon. “There are very few political leaders that think there is any opportunity in a constructive way to do something in this political climate.”

For his part, Mr. Romney reiterated Monday that he saw no need to renew the federal ban on assault weapons that expired in 2004.

“I still believe that the Second Amendment is the right course to preserve and defend and don’t believe that new laws are going to make a difference in this type of tragedy,” Mr. Romney told CNBC.

Both candidates have supported gun control in the past, but their views shifted as Americans have backed away from stricter gun laws, and both men have felt a political sting from earlier positions.

Mr. Obama’s remark in 2008 that rural voters “cling to guns or religion” wreaked political damage on him four years ago, exposing him to charges of elitism.

Mr. Romney, as governor of Massachusetts, signed a ban on assault weapons and quadrupled the fee for gun licenses — positions used to attack him in the primary race and pry away support by the Republican base.

Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican who favors a federal ban on the type of assault weapon used in the shooting in Aurora, Colo., in which 12 people died and 58 were wounded, said even lesser gun control measures had no future in Congress.

“The political reality is at this point the American people have made the decision that gun control is ineffective, that people have the right to have weapons, and the government can’t be trusted and they’d rather trust themselves with a gun,” Mr. King said.

Surveys show support for gun control has never been lower. An annual Gallup poll of the issue in October last year found that for the first time, a majority, 53 percent, opposed a ban on semiautomatic guns, or assault rifles, and a record low 26 percent favored banning handguns. Support for stricter laws were down in all subgroups, with 64 percent of Democrats favoring stricter laws, 37 percent of independents and 31 percent of Republicans.

The reason gun control is seen as a political loser in both parties, said Adam Winkler, a Second Amendment expert at the University of California, Los Angeles law school, is that while few advocates of restrictions are single-issue voters, many opponents will vote and donate money based on the issue.

“Romney doesn’t want to offend the base he needs to turn out,” said Mr. Winkler, who wrote a book last year, “Gunfight,” about the political battle over gun rights. “Obama doesn’t want to offend the swing voters who might base their vote on the right to bear arms.”

Calls for a renewed debate over gun violence arise regularly after horrific shootings, including those at an Army post in Fort Hood, Tex., and at a political event held last year by Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona.

But in the last few years, bills have been introduced — to restrict sales of 100-bullet magazines or to tighten background checks — that do not go anywhere.

Supporters of gun control regularly point to the power of the National Rifle Association, whose 4.3 million members make it one of the most effective advocacy groups in Washington.

“Politicians go to the N.R.A., Democrats and Republicans, and they basically read a script, which is not much different from a hostage video,” said Steve Schmidt, an experienced Republican strategist.

At this year’s N.R.A. convention in April, Mr. Romney raised the prospect of Mr. Obama, in a second term, appointing another Supreme Court justice less favorable to the Second Amendment, and he pledged support of controversial “stand your ground” laws.

But Mr. King said that the gun-rights lobby was not the primary impediment to tighter gun laws. There has been a cultural shift in the country, he said, since traumatic gun violence in the 1960s, including political assassinations, led to gun restrictions. “It’s taken me a while to figure this out,” Mr. King said. “The majority of American people are very attached to their guns. They look on any attempt to regulate or control them as an infringement.

“It’s almost something not debated,” he said. “It is just accepted.”

    Obama and Romney Do Not Change Course Over Outcry on Gun Violence, NYT, 23.7.2012,   
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/us/politics/obama-and-romney-dont-heed-new-call-for-gun-laws.html

‘Super PACs’ Let Strategists Off the Leash

May 20, 2012
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

The intensifying flood of uncapped donations to outside political groups is transforming not just campaigns but the entire business of politics.

Once seasonal affairs, campaigns from the presidential race down to House contests are becoming longer and more intense, driven by deep-pocketed donors eager to see incumbents pummeled throughout the political cycle. Decisions about attack ads and negative campaigning that once weighed on candidates are now made by consultants and donors with little or no accountability to the public.

And for a growing number of strategists and operatives in both parties, the very nature of what it means to work in politics has shifted. Once wedded to the careers and aims of individual candidates, they are now driven by the agendas of the big donors who finance outside spending.

Amid the first presidential campaign since the Supreme Court opened the door for “super PACs” and unlimited campaign spending, it is still unclear how voters will respond. But the political professionals who make a living from the billions of dollars spent each cycle on campaigns are quickly embracing the shift.

“I think at the end of the day it has to do with money,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Republican consultant who works with Let Freedom Ring, a group set to spend $20 million on political advertising this year. “If you’re a top consultant today, you’d much rather have a presidential super PAC than a presidential campaign.”

In the insular but fast-growing world of super PACs and other independent outfits, there are no cranky candidates, no scheduling conflicts, no bitter strategy debates with rival advisers. There are only wealthy donors and the consultants vying to oblige them.

The transformation drew new attention last week with the revelation that Fred Davis, a prominent Republican advertising strategist, had sought financing from a conservative billionaire for a $10 million campaign linking President Obama with the fiery, race-infused sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Mr. Obama’s former pastor. The proposal was condemned by, among others, Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, which has been trying to keep the focus on the economy.

Mr. Davis’s plan quickly collapsed, but not before highlighting how a single donor matched with an aggressive consultant could have an almost instant impact on an election — and with far greater ease than from inside a rival campaign, with its bureaucracy, constant travel and potentially cautious candidate.

“You don’t have to go anywhere,” Mr. Davis said in an interview this month, before details of his proposed campaign against Mr. Obama became public. “You don’t have to get on a small prop plane to New Hampshire. You don’t have to stay at the Holiday Inn Express. You can stay home and manage everything during normal office hours.”

Unlike political parties and candidates, super PACs and other outside groups can accept unlimited contributions, thanks in part to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling. They have no field offices and few paid staff members and spend virtually all of their money on political advertising, traditionally the best-paying political work. For brand-name political operatives, super PACs offer much of the impact of campaign work with few of the headaches.

“You don’t have kitchen cabinets made up of well-intentioned friends and neighbors who don’t know what they’re doing but eat up a lot of your time,” said Bob Schuman, who ran a super PAC called Americans for Rick Perry during the Republican presidential primaries. “Super PACs don’t have spouses.”

While many Republican and Democratic candidates are forcing consultants to accept flat fees and smaller advertising commissions, independent spending also offers a rapidly expanding market. Through mid-May, outside groups had spent more than $124 million in this election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, double the rate four years earlier.

There are signs that the influence of outside groups will continue to grow this year and extend into Congressional races and other political battles, often through pop-up organizations created by consultants hoping to match donor and candidate.

More than 500 super PACs are registered with the Federal Election Commission, though with the fall campaign months away, most have yet to start spending on the election. In April, spending by outside groups in Congressional races surged, in part because of millions of dollars dumped into the Republican primary battle between Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana and the state’s treasurer, Richard E. Mourdock, who prevailed on May 8.

Outside groups are also spending heavily in Senate primaries in Texas and Utah.

But the biggest super PAC spending this year has been in the Republican presidential primary, for which outside groups drew much of the field’s top political talent.

Instead of working on Mr. Romney’s campaign, several top aides and fund-raisers from his 2008 presidential bid formed Restore Our Future, a super PAC that seeks to spend more than $100 million this cycle. Two of the aides, the political strategist Carl Forti and the advertising consultant Larry McCarthy, are also involved with American Crossroads, a Republican super PAC that expects to spend up to $300 million this year.

Mr. Davis decamped from Jon S. Huntsman Jr.’s campaign in July to start Our Destiny PAC, financed largely by contributions from Mr. Huntsman’s family.

Most of the money spent on advertising by campaigns and outside groups eventually goes to the television stations airing the ads; the consultants who produce and place the ads earn a commission on that amount. Some of the major super PACs, including Crossroads, say their consultants, expecting the groups to do enormous volume, have agreed to accept a lower percentage for commissions than is typical.

Through the middle of May, Restore Our Future had spent more than $44.5 million on advertising, direct mail and other advertising, roughly double what Mr. Romney’s campaign had spent during the same period. Similarly, while Mr. Huntsman’s campaign spent just a few thousand dollars on ads, Our Destiny spent $2.8 million.

“It’s not just easier to raise super PAC money — it’s dramatically easier,” Mr. Davis said. “We raised more money than the Huntsman campaign, but we only had 20 or 30 donors.”

With the primaries winding down, many consultants are turning to “boutique” super PACs, smaller outfits set up on behalf of a few donors — sometimes only one — to influence a few House and Senate races and other lower-profile campaigns. And some of the presidential super PACs are refashioning themselves as platforms for their vanquished candidates or as vehicles for general election spending. Mr. Schuman converted Americans for Rick Perry into the Restoring Prosperity Fund, with some of the same donors. The group will focus on Latino turnout and on efforts to help Mr. Romney in what Mr. Schuman called “second-tier” battleground states like Nevada and Colorado.

Super PACs offer advantages to the donors as well. Because they can give unlimited amounts to outside groups, they can have substantial influence without the hard work of raising money for a candidate, $2,500 check by $2,500 check, from other donors.

And super PACs allow them to spend on specific races or strategies, a development that could leave some candidates less dependent on party committees to decide whether they get the support they feel they need.

“You can’t roll into the National Republican Senatorial Committee and say: ‘Here is my check. I want it to go to these races,’ ” said one consultant who works with outside groups. “And you can with the super PAC.”

Jo Craven McGinty and Derek Willis contributed reporting.

    ‘Super PACs’ Let Strategists Off the Leash, NYT, 20.5.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/us/politics/super-pacs-changing-how-political-operatives-operate.html

Romney’s Faith, Silent but Deep

May 19, 2012
The New York Times
By JODI KANTOR

BELMONT, Mass. — When Mitt Romney embarked on his first political race in 1994, he also slipped into a humble new role in the Mormon congregation he once led. On Sunday mornings, he stood in the sunlit chapel here teaching Bible classes for adults.

Leading students through stories about Jesus and the Nephite and Lamanite tribes, who Mormons believe once populated the Americas, and tossing out peanut butter cups as rewards, Mr. Romney always returned to the same question: how could students apply the lessons of Mormon scripture in their daily lives?

Now, as the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Mr. Romney speaks so sparingly about his faith — he and his aides frequently stipulate that he does not impose his beliefs on others — that its influence on him can be difficult to detect.

But dozens of the candidate’s friends, fellow church members and relatives describe a man whose faith is his design for living. The church is by no means his only influence, and its impact cannot be fully untangled from that of his family, which is also steeped in Mormonism.

But being a Latter-day Saint is “at the center of who he really is, if you scrape everything else off,” said Randy Sorensen, who worshiped with Mr. Romney in church.

As a young consultant who arrived at the office before anyone else, Mr. Romney was being “deseret,” a term from the Book of Mormon meaning industrious as a honeybee, and he recruited colleagues and clients with the zeal of the missionary he once was. Mitt and Ann Romney’s marriage is strong because they believe they will live together in an eternal afterlife, relatives and friends say, which motivates them to iron out conflicts.

Mr. Romney’s penchant for rules mirrors that of his church, where he once excommunicated adulterers and sometimes discouraged mothers from working outside the home. He may have many reasons for abhorring debt, wanting to limit federal power, promoting self-reliance and stressing the unique destiny of the United States, but those are all traditionally Mormon traits as well.

Outside the spotlight, Mr. Romney can be demonstrative about his faith: belting out hymns (“What a Friend We Have in Jesus”) while horseback riding, fasting on designated days and finding a Mormon congregation to slip into on Sundays, no matter where he is.

He prays for divine guidance on business decisions and political races, say those who have joined him. Sometimes on the campaign trail, Mr. and Mrs. Romney retreat to a quiet corner, bow their heads, clasp hands and share a brief prayer, said Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican who has traveled with them.

Clayton M. Christensen, a business professor at Harvard and a friend from church, said the question that drove the Sunday school classes — how to apply Mormon gospel in the wider world — also drives Mr. Romney’s life. “He just needs to know what God wants him to do and how he can get it done,” Mr. Christensen said.

 

Sacred Tenets, Secular Realm

When Mr. Romney’s former Sunday school students listen to him campaign, they sometimes hear echoes of messages he delivered to them years before: beliefs that stem at least in part from his faith, in a way that casual observers may miss. He is not proselytizing but translating, they say — taking powerful ideas and lessons from the church and applying them in another realm.

Just as Ronald Reagan deployed acting skills on the trail and Barack Obama relied on the language of community organizing, Mitt Romney bears the marks of the theology and culture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (Mr. Romney declined to be interviewed.)

Mormons have a long tradition of achieving success by sharing secular versions of their tenets, said Matthew Bowman, author of “The Mormon People,” citing Stephen R. Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” which he called Latter-day Saint theology repackaged as career advice.

While Mr. Romney has expressed some views at odds with his church’s teachings — in Massachusetts, he supported measures related to alcohol and gambling, both frowned upon by the church — other positions flow directly from his faith, including his objections to abortion and same-sex marriage and his notion of self-sufficiency tempered with generosity. The church, which often requests recipients of charity to perform some sort of labor in return, taught Mr. Romney to believe that “there’s a dignity in work and a dignity in helping those who are in need of help,” his eldest son, Tagg, said in an interview.

Or take Mr. Romney’s frequent tributes to American exceptionalism. “I refuse to believe that America is just another place on the map with a flag,” he said in announcing his bid for the presidency last June. Every presidential candidate highlights patriotism, but Mr. Romney’s is backed by the Mormon belief that the United States was chosen by God to play a special role in history, its Constitution divinely inspired.

“He is an unabashed, unapologetic believer that America is the Promised Land,” said Douglas D. Anderson, dean of the business school at Utah State University and a friend, and that leading it is “an obligation and responsibility to God.”

In Mr. Romney’s upbeat promises that he can rouse the economy from its long slump, fellow Mormons hear their faith’s emphasis on resilience and can-do optimism. He believes that people “can learn to be happy and prosperous,” said Philip Barlow, a professor of Mormon history at Utah State who served with him in church. “There is some depth and long tradition behind what can come across in sound bites as thin cheerleading.”

Similarly, he said, Mr. Romney’s squeaky-clean persona — only recently did he stop using words like “golly” in public — can make him seem “too plastic, the Ken side of a Ken and Barbie doll,” Mr. Barlow said.

He and others say that wholesomeness is deeply authentic to Mr. Romney, whose spiritual life revolves around personal rectitude. In Mormonism, salvation depends in part on constantly making oneself purer and therefore more godlike.

In the temple Mr. Romney helped build in Belmont, as in every other, members change from street clothes into all-white garb when they arrive, to emphasize their elevated state. As a church leader, he enforced standards, evaluating members for a “temple recommend,” a gold-and-white pass permitting only the virtuous to enter.

 

A Man of Rules

Mr. Romney is quick to uphold rules great and small. During primary debates, when his rivals spoke out of turn or exceeded their allotted time, he would sometimes lecture them. When supporters ask Mr. Romney to sign dollar bills or American flags, he refuses and often gives them a little lesson about why doing so is against the law.

Doing things by the book has been a hallmark of his career in public life. When Mr. Romney took over the Salt Lake City Olympics, which were dogged by ethical problems, he cast himself as a heroic reformer. As governor of Massachusetts, he depicted himself as a voice of integrity amid what he called the back-scratchers and ethically dubious lifers of state government.

In church, Mr. Romney frequently spoke about obeying authority, the danger of rationalizing misbehavior and God’s fixed standards. “Most people, if they don’t want to do what God wants them to do, they move what God wants them to do about four feet over,” he once told his congregation, holding out his arms to indicate the distance, Mr. Christensen remembered.

He often urged adherence even to rules that could seem overly harsh. One fellow worshiper, Justin Brown, recalled in an interview that when he was a young man leaving for his mission abroad, Mr. Romney warned him that some parameters would make no sense, but to follow them anyway and trust that they had unseen value.

Church officials say Mr. Romney tried to be sensitive and merciful; when a college student faced serious penalties for having premarital sex, Mr. Romney put him on a kind of probation instead. But he carried out excommunications faithfully. “Mitt was very much by the rules,” said Tony Kimball, who later served as his executive secretary in the church.

Nearly two decades ago, Randy and Janna Sorensen approached Mr. Romney, then a church official, for help: unable to have a baby on their own, they wanted to adopt but could not do so through the church, which did not facilitate adoptions for mothers who worked outside the home.

Devastated, they told Mr. Romney that the rule was unjust and that they needed two incomes to live in Boston. Mr. Romney helped, but not by challenging church authorities. He took a calculator to the Sorensen household budget and showed how with a few sacrifices, Ms. Sorensen could quit her job. Their children are now grown, and Mr. Sorensen said they were so grateful that they had considered naming a child Mitt. (The church has since relaxed its prohibition on adoption for women who work outside the home.)

Among the Belmont Mormons, stories abound of Mr. Romney acting out the values he professed in church. The Romneys left their son Tagg’s wedding reception early to take some of the food to a neighbor being treated for breast cancer.

But many also see a gap between his religious ideals — in Sunday school, he urged his students to act with the highest standards of kindness and integrity — and his political tactics. The chasm has been hard to reconcile, even though people close to him say he is serious about trying to do so.

Mormonism teaches respect for secular authorities as well as religious ones, but “politics has required him to go against form,” said Richard Bushman, a leading historian of the church who knows Mr. Romney from church.

For example, Mr. Romney had ruled out running personal attack ads against political rivals, those close to him said. When Senator Edward M. Kennedy attacked him as an uncaring capitalist in 1994, using ads that exaggerated Mr. Romney’s role in Bain-related layoffs, Mr. Romney refused to punch back and exploit Mr. Kennedy’s history of womanizing. “Winning is not important enough to put aside my ideals and principles,” Mr. Romney told aides.

But when he ran for governor in 2002, his campaign targeted the husband of his general election opponent, Shannon O’Brien (he had formerly worked as a lobbyist for Enron; the ads linked him to problems at the company that he had nothing to do with.)

Last week, Mr. Romney repudiated efforts to attack President Obama based on his past relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. But earlier this year, he suggested that Mr. Obama wanted to make the United States “a less Christian nation.”

“I have absolutely no idea how he rationalizes it,” Mr. Kimball said of Mr. Romney’s harshest statements and attacks. “It almost seems to be the ends justifying the means.”

 

Relying on Prayer

Though Mr. Romney almost never discusses it or performs it in public, prayer is a regular and important part of his life, say friends who have joined him. They describe him closing his eyes and addressing God with thees and thous, composing his message to suit the occasion, whether at a church meeting, at a hospital bedside or in a solemn moment with family and friends.

“Prayer is not a rote thing with him,” said Ann N. Madsen, a Bible scholar and a friend. Rather than requesting a specific outcome, he more often asks for strength, wisdom and courage, according to several people who have prayed with him. “Help us see how to navigate this particular problem,” he often asks, according to Dr. Lewis Hassell, who served with Mr. Romney in church.

Former colleagues say they do not recall Mr. Romney praying in the workplace — some say they barely heard the word “God” come from his lips — but he did pray about work from his home.

“I remember literally kneeling down with Mitt at his home and praying about our firm,” Bob Gay, a former Bain colleague and current church official, told Jeff Benedict, author of “The Mormon Way of Doing Business.” “We did that in times of crisis, and we prayed that we’d do right by our people and our investors.”

Mr. Romney also prays before taking action on decisions he has already made, asking for divine reassurance, a feeling that he is “united with the powers above,” Dr. Hassell said. Sometimes Mr. Romney would report that even though he had made a decision on the merits, prayer had changed his mind. “Even though rationally this looks like the thing to do, I just have a feeling we shouldn’t do it,” he would say, according to Grant Bennett, another friend and church leader.

Mr. Romney has also asked for divine sustenance during his political runs. The night before he declared his candidacy for governor, he and his family prayed at home with Gloria White-Hammond and Ray Hammond, friends and pastors of a Boston-area African Methodist Episcopal church.

His earlier failed run for United States Senate had all been part of God’s plan, Mrs. Romney told Ms. White-Hammond around that time. Mr. Romney had lost, but “just because God says for you to do something doesn’t mean the outcome is going to be what you want it to be,” Ms. White-Hammond remembered Mrs. Romney saying.

Having a higher purpose is part of what motivates Mr. Romney, many of those close to him say, and gives him the wherewithal to suffer the slings and arrows of political life. Mormons have a “history of persistence and tenacity, a sense of living out a destiny that is connected to earlier generations,” said Mr. Anderson, the business school dean. Mr. Romney is driven by “responsibility to his father and his father’s fathers to use his time and talent and energy and whatever gifts he’s been given by the Lord to try to make a contribution.”

And while voters tend to see Mr. Romney as immensely fortunate, those close to him say that he never forgets he is a member of an oft-derided religious minority. The chapel where Mr. Romney taught Sunday school burned in a case of suspected arson in the 1980s, a still-unsolved crime that church members attribute to prejudice.

As a candidate for governor, Mr. Romney endured crude jokes, made to his face, including about having more than one wife. After his failed 2008 presidential bid, Mr. Romney told Richard Eyre, a friend, that he wished the church could rebrand itself, replacing the name “Mormon” with “Latter-day Christian” to emphasize its belief in Jesus and the New Testament.

His response to prejudice, friends say, has always been to soldier on and to present the best possible example, knowing that others will draw conclusions about the faith based on his behavior. “In his generation, George Romney was the world’s most famous Mormon, and now Mitt is more famous than his dad,” Mr. Anderson said.

Mr. Romney told fellow Mormons at Bain & Company that they had to work harder and perform better because they had a reputation to defend. With a similar motive, Mr. Romney sent volunteer cleaning crews each week to the churches that lent space to the Belmont Mormons after the chapel fire. Confronted with the nasty joke about Mormons during the race for governor, Mr. Romney brushed it off even as his face tensed, recalled Jonathan Spampinato, his former political director.

“Romneys were made to swim upstream,” he has told friends many times.

About a year ago, Mrs. Romney told Ms. White-Hammond that her husband was probably going to run for president again, and that they were both already praying about the race.

Mr. Romney was still a bit reluctant to re-enter the fray, according to Ms. White-Hammond. But she recalled the soon-to-be candidate’s wife saying that the Romneys both “felt it was what God wanted them to do.”

Ashley Parker contributed reporting.

    Romney’s Faith, Silent but Deep, NYT, 19.5.2012?
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/us/politics/how-the-mormon-church-shaped-mitt-romney.html

President Obama’s Moment

May 9, 2012
The New York Times

It has always taken strong national leadership to expand equal rights in this country, and it has long been obvious that marriage rights are no exception. President Obama offered some of that leadership on Wednesday. “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with ABC News that the White House arranged for the purpose of giving Mr. Obama a forum to say just that.

With those 10 words, Mr. Obama finally stopped temporizing and “evolving” his position on same-sex marriage and took the moral high ground on what may be the great civil rights struggle of our time. His words will not end the bitter fight over marriage rights, which we fear will continue for years to come. But they were of great symbolic value, and perhaps more. As Mayor Michael Bloomberg noted, no expansion of rights embraced by a president has failed to become the law of the land.

This is a president and a White House that has not always been unwavering in taking positions of principle, including on this issue. Mr. Obama’s statement followed days of unseemly equivocation by the White House after Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. announced his support for same-sex marriage on Sunday. It also came one day after North Carolina voters approved a constitutional amendment forbidding same-sex marriage and civil unions, which threatens all unmarried couples, health coverage for their children and domestic violence laws.

Still, the contrast was sharp between Mr. Obama and Mitt Romney, who took a hard-line position on Wednesday against same-sex marriage and civil unions with similar rights. He has said he favors a national constitutional amendment enshrining this particular bigotry.

Mr. Obama consciously presented his change of position (he used to favor so-called civil unions but not marriage) as a personal journey. He said he thought about “members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together,” and about “those soldiers or airmen or Marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage.”

That process will seem familiar to Americans of his and older generations who have reached the same place, or are still getting there. Polling shows that younger Americans have firmly supported same-sex marriage for some time. Mr. Obama said denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples “doesn’t make sense” to his daughters. “Frankly, that’s the kind of thing that prompts a change in perspective,” he said. But there remains strong opposition among some older Americans, particularly Christian evangelicals and African-Americans. The White House is hoping Mr. Obama can help soften opposition among black voters over time.

We have one major point of disagreement with Mr. Obama: his support for the concept of states deciding this issue on their own. That position effectively restricts the right to marry to the 20 states that have not adopted the kind of constitutional prohibitions North Carolina voters approved on Tuesday.

Mr. Obama should remember that, in 1967, the Supreme Court said no state could prohibit mixed-race marriages because “marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man.’ ” Those rights are too precious and too fragile to be left up to the whim of states and the tearing winds of modern partisan politics.

A federal judge in California, supported by an appellate court panel, has ruled that a ban on same-sex marriage violates the 14th Amendment right to equal protection. That decision will probably reach the Supreme Court, and, when it does, we expect Mr. Obama, if he is still president, will take the final step in his evolutionary process and direct the Justice Department to support that ruling and urge the court to uphold equality in every state.

    President Obama’s Moment, NYT, 9.5.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/opinion/president-obamas-moment.html

Obama Says Same-Sex Marriage Should Be Legal

May 9, 2012
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES and PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — Before President Obama left the White House on Tuesday morning to fly to an event in Albany, several aides intercepted him in the Oval Office. Within minutes it was decided: the president would endorse same-sex marriage on Wednesday, completing a wrenching personal transformation on the issue.

As described by several aides, that quick decision and his subsequent announcement in a hastily scheduled network television interview were thrust on the White House by 48 hours of frenzied will-he-or-won’t-he speculation after Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. all but forced the president’s hand by embracing the idea of same-sex unions in a Sunday talk show interview.

Advisers say now that Mr. Obama had intended since early this year to define his position sometime before Democrats nominate him for re-election in September. Yet many of the president’s allies believed he would not do so, trusting instead in his strong support from gay voters for having ended a ban on openly gay people in the military and disavowing a federal law defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

Such caution was understandable, the allies said, given the unpredictable fallout the president would face by taking a clear stand on one of the most contentious and politically charged social issues of the day, before what is likely to be a close election. Mr. Obama’s closest advisers say only the timing was in question. Mr. Biden’s unexpected remarks undoubtedly accelerated the timetable.

Initially Mr. Obama and his aides expected that the moment would be Monday, when the president was scheduled to be on “The View,” the ABC daytime talk show, which is popular with women. Certainly, they thought, he would be asked his position on same-sex marriage by one of the show’s hosts, who include Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg.

Yet the pressure had become too great to wait until then, his aides told him; on Monday, the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, was pummeled with questions from skeptical reporters about Mr. Obama’s stance. After the Tuesday morning meeting, Dan Pfeiffer, the president’s communications director, contacted ABC and offered a wide-ranging interview with the president for the following day.

And so it was that Mr. Obama on Wednesday afternoon sat down in the White House with ABC’s Robin Roberts and made news, after nearly two years of saying that his views on same-sex marriage were “evolving.”

“At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” Mr. Obama said.

Long a proponent of civil unions, Mr. Obama said his views had changed in part because of prodding by friends who are gay and by conversations with his wife and daughters.

“I had hesitated on gay marriage in part because I thought that civil unions would be sufficient,” Mr. Obama said. “I was sensitive to the fact that for a lot of people, the word marriage was something that invokes very powerful traditions and religious beliefs.”

Mr. Obama also invoked his Christian faith in explaining his decision.

“The thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the golden rule — you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated,” he said. “And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids, and that’s what motivates me as president.”

Reaction to Mr. Obama’s announcement was largely predictable — including immediate opposition from his presumptive Republican rival, Mitt Romney — yet people on both sides of the issue pointed to the historical significance of a president endorsing marriage between people of the same sex. It was a Democrat, Bill Clinton, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act, defining marriage as between a man and a woman, which the Obama administration last year decided not to enforce in the courts.

While Mr. Obama’s announcement was significant from a symbolic standpoint, more important as a practical matter were Mr. Obama’s decision not to enforce the marriage act and his successful push in 2010 to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law that prohibited openly gay men and lesbians from serving in the military. For that reason, gay rights groups had been largely enthusiastic about his re-election campaign while being pragmatically resigned to his not publicly supporting same-sex marriage before the election.

Mr. Obama’s announcement has little substantive impact — as an aide said, “It’s not like we’re trying to pass legislation.”

But the political impact is a wild card, even Obama advisers acknowledged, and it came one day after voters in North Carolina — the site of the Democratic Party’s nominating convention — supported a ban on same-sex marriage. But while the president has now injected a volatile social issue into the campaign debate, both sides say the election still is all but certain to turn on the economy.

Public support for same-sex marriage is growing at a pace that surprises even pollsters as older generations of voters who tend to be strongly opposed are supplanted by younger ones who are just as strongly in favor. Same-sex couples are featured in some of the most popular shows on television.

Yet opponents include white working-class voters, among whom Mr. Obama has long had weak support, and many African-Americans, led by influential ministers in their churches, whose support is critical to Mr. Obama in swing states like Virginia and North Carolina. Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, one of the first openly gay members of Congress, said he told the White House months ago that it should not worry about the politics.

“This country is moving, and what’s interesting is every time somebody does something that’s supportive of our rights, it turns out to be (a) popular and (b) not very controversial,” he said in a telephone interview.

Many Americans already assumed Mr. Obama supported same-sex marriage, Mr. Frank said, adding, “Politically, it’s kind of a nonevent.”

Obama strategists had rejected the idea of announcing the president’s support during a fund-raiser or at a speech to a gay rights group, because, as one Democrat close to the White House put it, that would “look like pandering.”

Then last Friday, Mr. Biden taped his interview for NBC’s “Meet the Press,” shown on Sunday morning. Afterward, Mr. Biden’s aides circulated a transcript around the West Wing, with the gay marriage remarks highlighted in yellow. A flurry of e-mails ensued about how Mr. Biden’s office should explain it once the interview was broadcast.

The news media attention escalated on Monday when Mr. Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, acknowledged in a television interview that he also supported same-sex marriage. Editorialists, columnists and bloggers criticized Mr. Obama as appearing calculating by his continued ambivalence.

An administration official, who like others did not want to be named discussing internal White House deliberations, said that until this week, the one certainty was for Mr. Obama to take his stand before September to avoid a convention fight. “It’s not helpful to go down there and have a big conflagration about including this in the platform,” the official said.

But several events loomed that would also force attention on the issue, leaving Mr. Obama vulnerable to continued criticism.

On Thursday, Mr. Obama is to visit the Los Angeles home of the actor George Clooney for a campaign fund-raiser expected to raise about $12 million, much of it from Hollywood people active in the gay rights cause.

Mr. Obama is scheduled to give the commencement address next week at Barnard College in New York City, where he will receive a medal along with Evan Wolfson, the founder and president of Freedom to Marry, a leading advocate for same-sex unions. Mr. Wolfson, who had written that he would “whisper in the president’s ear” to support same-sex marriage, said in an interview on Wednesday, “I’m going to shout, ‘Thank you!’ ”

Also on Monday, Mr. Obama is to speak at a campaign fund-raiser for gay rights supporters. And on June 6, he is to return to Los Angeles to speak at a gala benefiting the gay, bisexual and transgender community.

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 10, 2012

An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported

that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s office did not flag his comments

about gay marriage in a transcript of his “Meet the Press” remarks

that was circulated in the West Wing on Friday.

The comments were highlighted in yellow.

    Obama Says Same-Sex Marriage Should Be Legal, NYT, 9.5.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/us/politics/obama-says-same-sex-marriage-should-be-legal.html

Campaigning Beyond Inspiration

May 8, 2012
The New York Times

President Obama could not single-handedly transform American politics. Many of his young 2008 supporters learned that to their disillusionment, and as he begins his re-election campaign, the president himself seems a more somber candidate who learned by trial the limits to inspirational change. In his first formal campaign speech, delivered on Saturday, Mr. Obama’s view of what might happen with a robust use of government power was intertwined with the shadow of a Republican Party that has fought every attempt to use that power.

“The last few years, the Republicans who run this Congress have insisted that we go right back to the policies that created this mess,” he said, speaking in Columbus, Ohio. “Now their agenda is on steroids.”

There was a tiny echo of 2008 at the conclusion of his remarks when he said he “still believes” the country is not as divided as its politics, that people were Americans before they were Democrats or Republicans. But as Mr. Obama has reason to know, the country is more divided than it was four years ago, the parties and their supporters more polarized, and he will have to be far more persuasive if he hopes to win and then to govern effectively.

The president riffled through his considerable accomplishments, and was withering in his assessment of Mitt Romney’s plans to let prosperity sprinkle slowly from the hands of the rich onto the heads of everyone else. It is vital for Mr. Obama to make this contrast, to remind voters how far backward Mr. Romney and his party would take the country.

And Mr. Obama’s general goals are the right ones: more college degrees, better teachers, growth in manufacturing, investments in clean energy and preservation of gains in health care and women’s rights. But it’s not enough to simply tick through dreams that will die in a divided Congress. The public has seen plenty of that. Mr. Obama needs to spend more time persuading dubious and disillusioned voters that he can achieve these goals.

It’s true that he has repeatedly been burned seeking elusive “grand bargains” with Republican leaders who proved unwilling or unable to compromise. But even Democrats say the president has been too aloof in his first term, not bothering to make his case in the Capitol, not interested in the L.B.J.-style flesh-pressing or arm-twisting that can rescue a law out of the mortuary of bills.

The president can let loose a great speech, but without follow-through Congress can be counted on to muck up the details, as he should have learned from the fight over the health care reform law of 2010. He never made the sale with the public on the law, and the two or three sentences he devoted to it in his speech were insufficient. If not struck down by the Supreme Court, the core of the law will be fully felt in his second term; rather than shy away, it is time to explain to the public in detail what that would mean and why it is important that he be there to fight for it.

Similarly, the speech lacked any detail of his plans to shore up Medicare while reducing its untenable cost growth. If he is going to counter the Republican plans to end Medicare’s guarantee to older Americans, he will have to do better than a quick promise to reduce wasteful spending.

Voters already know that Mr. Obama can lift their hopes with a powerful speech. This time around, they will be seeking far more than inspiration.

    Campaigning Beyond Inspiration, NYT, 8.5.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/opinion/campaigning-beyond-inspiration.html

An Idea Worth Saving

May 5, 2012
The New York Times

Public financing of presidential elections, the greatest reform to come out of the post-Watergate era, died this year after a long illness. It was 36 years old, and was drowned by big money and starved by the disdain of politicians who should have known better.

From 1976 until 2008, every major-party presidential candidate took public money for the general election, adhering to spending limits that significantly reduced the influence of money on American elections. Candidates began dropping out of public financing for primaries in 2000, and then in 2008, Barack Obama abandoned the system entirely, preferring to raise more money from small donations, and promising to fix the public program. He has made almost no attempt to fulfill that promise.

This year will be the first since Richard Nixon’s day that neither major candidate will accept public financing. Both Mitt Romney and President Obama plan to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, far more than they could get from the public system.

Public financing could still be resuscitated, but first, someone in power has to care about it. The Republican-led House has voted to kill the system outright. A few House Democrats have proposed a good bill to fix it, but no one in the Senate has picked up the bill. And the two major candidates are too busy grubbing for the unlimited donations that now dominate politics.

The era of “super PACs” and secret donors has made public financing more urgent. A system that greatly magnified small donations with high matches would give ordinary citizens a shot at competing with corporations, unions and wealthy donors. It would allow candidates to campaign more instead of constantly begging among the rich. And it would give a challenger a chance to be competitive without the help of a super PAC.

Ronald Reagan could not have challenged President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976 without accepting public dollars. The system also made campaigns possible for such diverse candidates as Jimmy Carter (1976), George H. W. Bush (1980), Jesse Jackson (1988) and Pat Buchanan (1992), all of whom had essentially run out of cash against opponents with much more money.

There is nothing conservative or liberal about public financing, which allows any kind of political voice to be heard above a roar of cash — if lawmakers are willing to spend more. Here are several ways that Congress could revive the system:

Raise the grant The biggest reason candidates are dropping out of the system is that they can raise much more money outside of it. This year, Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama could get $91.2 million each from the Treasury if they participated in the system for the general election, and that is all they could spend. In 2008, Mr. Obama and his party raised about $750 million. He and Mr. Romney both expect to do better than that this year, and that does not include the $200 million or so to be spent by super PACs and other independent groups.

The grant needs to be doubled or tripled. A House bill proposed by two Democrats, David Price and Chris Van Hollen, would give general-election candidates $50 million, plus up to $150 million more based on a 4-to-1 match of donations of $200 or less. There would be no spending limit, but individual donations would be limited to $500. (Currently, for candidates not participating in the system, donations can go up to $2,500 in the primaries and $2,500 in the general election.)

The $200 million in the bill may not be attractive enough to candidates. While it would never equal private fund-raising, a grant of $300 million for each party could allow very competitive campaigns, and might appeal to candidates eager to spend less time raising money.

Increase the primary match Primary candidates now receive a government match of up to $250 for each donation, not nearly enough. None of the candidates this year applied for matching money except for Buddy Roemer, the former Louisiana governor, because they would have had to adhere to strict spending limits in return. The Democratic bill would eliminate the spending limits and provide a 4-to-1 match for donations of $200 or less, up to $100 million instead of the current $45 million. It would also start matching money six months before the first primary or caucus, instead of making candidates wait for Jan. 1 as they do now.

Mr. Obama’s campaign is justly proud of its many small donations, but so far this year, a third of the $350 million he and the party have raised has been collected by bundlers, usually wealthy friends who collect cash from their friends to raise their influence. Higher matches for small donors mean less influence for bundlers.

Eliminate the checkoff Around 7 percent of taxpayers now check the box on their tax returns allowing money to be used for the presidential system, even though polls show far more people support it. That limits the amount the government can spend to make the system more robust. The checkoff was part of the political compromise that created the system, but taxpayers are not asked if they support wars or farm subsidies, and a program this vital should be no different.

Asking people to support a program like this every April 15, when they are most annoyed at the government, was never a good idea. With the economy still struggling and deficits still high, giving even more money to politicians may be a hard sell to taxpayers. But it is actually a small price to pay to preserve a democracy in which ordinary citizens are not shouted down by those who have bigger bank accounts.

    An Idea Worth Saving, NYT, 5.5.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/opinion/sunday/an-idea-worth-saving.html

Bernard Rapoport, Deep-Pocketed Texas Liberal, Dies at 94

April 22, 2012
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Bernard Rapoport, the founder of an insurance company who became a linchpin of the beleaguered community of Texas liberals, died on April 5 in Waco, Tex. He was 94.

His death was confirmed by his granddaughter Abby Rapoport.

A major donor to Democratic candidates, progressive causes, Israel and the University of Texas, Mr. Rapoport called himself a “capitalist with a conscience,” using the phrase in the title of a 2002 memoir.

“I have never known anyone who liked to make money as much as he did, and liked to give it away as much as he did,” said William Cunningham, a former University of Texas chancellor.

As Texas swung from a Democratic stronghold to an increasingly Republican and conservative state, Mr. Rapoport continued to support liberal Democrats and their causes, both with his money and his extensive national political connections. He was an ally of Ann W. Richards, the state’s last Democratic governor, who appointed him to the University of Texas Board of Regents in 1991.

His contributions to George S. McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign put Mr. Rapoport on one of President Richard M. Nixon’s enemies lists; contributions to the presidential campaigns of both Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton helped nourish a 40-year friendship. Mr. Clinton is scheduled to deliver a eulogy at a memorial service next month in Washington.

Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate, called Mr. Rapoport one of the most progressive corporate executives in the country, adding that Mr. Rapoport often expressed concern about the growth of companies so large that their failure could threaten the nation’s economy.

“I can’t tell you how many times he started a conversation with, ‘What are we going to do about bigness?’ ” Mr. Nader said.

Bernard Rapoport was born in San Antonio on July 17, 1917, the son of Russian immigrants; his father had been sent to Siberia in 1905 for taking part in a demonstration in St. Petersburg. He would say: “My father taught me Marxism and hard work. My mother taught me to love learning.”

At the University of Texas, he was inspired by left-leaning professors of economics, and his thinking would later evolve into New Deal capitalism.

After graduating, Mr. Rapoport met Audre Newman; they celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary in February.

In 1951, he borrowed $25,000 and founded the American Income Life Insurance Company, which marketed itself to labor unions and their members.

He gave millions to the University of Texas for scholarships, and endowed chairs and professorships that focused on human rights and ethics. He gave to causes in Israel that sought accommodation with the Palestinians.

Mr. Rapoport also supported liberal publications like The Nation and The Texas Observer.

Ronnie Dugger, the founding editor of The Observer, recalled visiting Mr. Rapoport in Waco in 1955 to discuss his buying advertising for his insurance company. Mr. Dugger opened their conversation, he said, by stating that since life insurance is based largely on actuarial tables, there was no need for commercial competition, and “it ought to be nationalized.”

Mr. Rapoport startled him by saying, “I agree with you.” He went on to buy ads for decades.

Mr. Rapoport was just as interested in the people working at El Conquistador, his favorite restaurant in Waco, as he was in presidents and power brokers, said Ms. Rapoport, his granddaughter. “Every waitress got a lecture on why they should be in school,” she said.

One evening last year at El Conquistador, Mr. Rapoport asked a young family over to his table to chat. Before leaving, he invited Michael Aguilar, then 8, to visit his office. Michael did, showing up in his Cub Scout uniform and bearing a notepad to interview Mr. Rapoport for a scout project.

Mr. Rapoport told him that “no one’s better than him,” recalled his mother, Maria Aguilar. He also told Michael to read five books a month and report back to him, but Mr. Rapoport died before the follow-up visit could be arranged.

Mr. Rapoport provided financial support to Democratic officeholders in trouble, including Webster L. Hubbell, a Justice Department official in the Clinton administration who left under a cloud over billing irregularities at his law firm. Mr. Hubbell would later plead guilty to fraud charges and spend time in prison.

Mr. Rapoport was called to testify before a grand jury about $18,000 in payments his company had made to Mr. Hubbell. While critics of Mr. Clinton characterized such payments from Mr. Rapoport and others as hush money, Mr. Rapoport said it had been for legal and consulting services. The grand jury took no action against him.

Besides his granddaughter Abby, Mr. Rapoport is survived by his wife; his son, Ronald; and another granddaughter, Emily Rapoport.

Hundreds of people showed up for a memorial service on April 11 in Waco: business executives, politicians and educators. And Michael Aguilar, who wore his Cub Scout uniform.

    Bernard Rapoport, Deep-Pocketed Texas Liberal, Dies at 94, NYT, 22.4.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/us/politics/bernard-rapoport-liberal-donor-in-texas-dies-at-94.html

Down With Everything

April 21, 2012
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

DOES America need an Arab Spring? That was the question on my mind when I called Frank Fukuyama, the Stanford professor and author of “The End of History and the Last Man.” Fukuyama has been working on a two-volume opus called “The Origins of Political Order,” and I could detect from his recent writings that his research was leading him to ask a very radical question about America’s political order today, namely: has American gone from a democracy to a “vetocracy” — from a system designed to prevent anyone in government from amassing too much power to a system in which no one can aggregate enough power to make any important decisions at all?

“There is a crisis of authority, and we’re not prepared to think about it in these terms,” said Fukuyama. “When Americans think about the problem of government, it is always about constraining the government and limiting its scope.” That dates back to our founding political culture. The rule of law, regular democratic rotations in power and human rights protections were all put in place to create obstacles to overbearing, overly centralized government. “But we forget,” Fukuyama added, “that government was also created to act and make decisions.”

That is being lost at the federal level. A system with as many checks and balances built into it as ours assumes — indeed requires — a certain minimum level of cooperation on major issues between the two parties, despite ideological differences. Unfortunately, since the end of the cold war, which was a hugely powerful force compelling compromise between the parties, several factors are combining to paralyze our whole system.

For starters, we’ve added more checks and balances to make decision-making even more difficult — such as senatorial holds now being used to block any appointments by the executive branch or the Senate filibuster rule, effectively requiring a 60-vote majority to pass any major piece of legislation, rather than 51 votes. Also, our political divisions have become more venomous than ever. As Russ Feingold, the former Democratic senator, once remarked to me: At the rate that polarization is proceeding, partisans will soon be demanding that consumer products reflect their politics: “We’re going to have Republican and Democrat toothpaste.”

In addition, the Internet, the blogosphere and C-Span’s coverage of the workings of the House and Senate have made every lawmaker more transparent — making back-room deals by lawmakers less possible and public posturing the 24/7 norm. And, finally, the huge expansion of the federal government, and the increasing importance of money in politics, have hugely expanded the number of special-interest lobbies and their ability to influence and clog decision-making.

Indeed, America today increasingly looks like the society that the political scientist Mancur Olson wrote about in his 1982 classic “The Rise and Decline of Nations.” He warned that when a country amasses too many highly focused special-interest lobbies — which have an inherent advantage over the broad majority, which is fixated on the well-being of the country as a whole — they can, like a multilimbed octopus, choke the life out of a political system, unless the majority truly mobilizes against them.

To put it another way, says Fukuyama, America’s collection of minority special-interest groups is now bigger, more mobilized and richer than ever, while all the mechanisms to enforce the will of the majority are weaker than ever. The effect of this is either legislative paralysis or suboptimal, Rube Goldberg-esque, patched-together-compromises, often made in response to crises with no due diligence. That is our vetocracy.

The Financial Times columnist Ed Luce, the author of the new book “Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent,” notes that if you believe the fantasy that America’s economic success derives from having had a government that stayed out of the way, then gridlock and vetocracy are just fine with you. But if you have a proper understanding of American history — so you know that government played a vital role in generating growth by maintaining the rule of law, promulgating regulations that incentivize risk-taking and prevent recklessness, educating the work force, building infrastructure and funding scientific research — then a vetocracy becomes a very dangerous thing.

It undermines the secret of our success: a balanced public-private partnership.

“If we are to get out of our present paralysis, we need not only strong leadership, but changes in institutional rules,” argues Fukuyama. These would include eliminating senatorial holds and the filibuster for routine legislation and having budgets drawn up by a much smaller supercommittee of legislators — like those that handle military base closings — with “heavy technocratic input from a nonpartisan agency like the Congressional Budget Office,” insulated from interest-group pressures and put before Congress in a single, unamendable, up-or-down vote.

I know what you’re thinking: “That will never happen.” And do you know what I’m thinking? “Then we will never be a great a country again, no matter who is elected.” We can’t be great as long as we remain a vetocracy rather than a democracy. Our deformed political system — with a Congress that’s become a forum for legalized bribery — is now truly holding us back.

    Down With Everything, NYT, 21.4.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/friedman-down-with-everything.html

Obama Sees Steep Dropoff in Cash From Major Donors

April 20, 2012
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and DEREK WILLIS

President Obama’s re-election campaign is straining to raise the huge sums it is counting on to run against Mitt Romney, with sharp dropoffs in donations from nearly every major industry forcing it to rely more than ever on small contributions and a relative handful of major donors.

From Wall Street to Hollywood, from doctors and lawyers, the traditional big sources of campaign cash are not delivering for the Obama campaign as they did four years ago. The falloff has left his fund-raising totals running behind where they were at the same point in 2008 — though well ahead of Mr. Romney’s — and has induced growing concern among aides and supporters as they confront the prospect that Republicans and their “super PAC” allies will hold a substantial advantage this fall.

With big checks no longer flowing as quickly into his campaign, Mr. Obama is leaning harder on his grass-roots supporters, whose small contributions make up well over half of the money he raised through the end of March, according to reports filed Friday with the Federal Election Commission. And Mr. Obama is asking far more of those large donors still giving, exploiting his joint fund-raising arrangement with the Democratic National Committee to collect five-figure checks from individuals who have already given the maximum $5,000 contribution to his re-election campaign.

“They clearly are feeling the pressure,” said one major Obama fund-raiser, who asked for anonymity to characterize his conversations with campaign officials. “They’re behind where they expected to be. You have to factor in $500 million-plus in Republican super PAC money.”

With no primary to excite his base, the economy struggling to rebound, and four years of political battles with Wall Street and other industries taking their toll, Mr. Obama’s campaign raised about $196 million through March, compared with $235 million at the same point in 2008. It has lagged behind its own internal quotas in some cities, according to people involved with the fund-raising efforts. But that has been offset by a highly successful joint fund-raising program with the national committee, which raised about $150 million, twice as much as in 2008.

Mr. Obama has held more than a hundred joint fund-raisers since last spring, far more than President George W. Bush during his 2004 re-election, and has tucked fund-raising stops into many of his official presidential trips.

The result: The national committee’s fund-raising from the technology industry, entrepreneurs, Wall Street and the entertainment industry have all risen sharply compared with 2008, even as the Obama campaign’s performance in those areas has tailed off, according to data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics. And with no primary to fight, Mr. Obama is spending much less than he was at this stage in 2008: He had about twice as much money in the bank at the end of March than he did four years ago.

All told, Mr. Obama and the Democratic committee ended March with about $130 million in cash on hand, a sizable war chest and far more than Mr. Romney and the Republican National Committee. Candidates typically raise more as the election nears, and Mr. Obama’s fund-raising accelerated sharply in the summer of 2008.

But Mr. Obama faces a major challenge in the months ahead. To raise as much money for his campaign as he did four years ago, the president would have to raise about $70 million a month through the end of the election cycle, more than triple the rate he has been bringing in cash so far.

Jim Messina, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, has publicly set a more modest goal, saying the campaign expects to exceed Mr. Obama’s 2008 fund-raising of about $750 million only by counting money he is raising for the national committee as well. That would require the campaign and the committee to raise about $51 million a month through November. Mr. Messina has also warned the party’s two Congressional campaign committees not to expect their traditional allotments of Democratic National Committee cash this year, money Mr. Obama is husbanding for his own efforts.

Mr. Romney, the likely Republican nominee, ended March with just $10 million in cash on hand, according to campaign reports filed Friday with the Federal Election Commission, and has raised about $87 million during the Republican primary season. His aides are hoping to raise a total of $800 million for the fall elections in combination with the Republican National Committee, which last week finalized a joint fund-raising agreement with Mr. Romney. The committee ended March with $23.4 million in cash on hand.

But Mr. Romney is also expecting significant support from Republican super PACs and other outside groups. On Friday, officials at American Crossroads, the leading conservative super PAC, reported that they had raised close to $100 million so far this year for the group and an affiliated organization, Crossroads GPS. Crossroads alone is aiming to raise as much as $300 million this year, while other conservative groups, like Americans for Prosperity, have aimed at raising close to $200 million.

The super PAC backing Mr. Romney in the Republican primary, Restore Our Future, has raised $51.9 million, and plans to raise twice that by November.

By contrast, the network of Democratic super PACs has raised far less. Democratic groups with close ties to the party’s Congressional leaders have raised about $18 million so far during the 2012 cycle. Priorities USA Action, founded by former Obama aides as a counterweight to Crossroads, raised about $9 million through the end of March.

To remain competitive, the Obama campaign has spent millions of dollars on high-tech, small-dollar prospecting. They have used sophisticated data mining techniques and low-dollar promotions — like $3-a-head raffles for dinner with the president — to reassemble the network of millions of supporters whose contributions helped propel him into the White House.

All told, about 58 percent of Mr. Obama’s total fund-raising during the election has come in checks of less than $200, compared with about 38 percent in 2008. In March alone, Mr. Obama took in $14.2 million worth of checks under $200 — more than all the money his campaign raised in February.

    Obama Sees Steep Dropoff in Cash From Major Donors, NYT, 20.4.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/us/politics/obama-campaign-faces-dropoff-in-big-donations.html

Martin Death Spurs Group to Readjust Policy Focus

April 17, 2012
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — An influential conservative policy group that came under attack after the Trayvon Martin shooting for pushing Stand Your Ground gun laws nationwide said Tuesday that it was getting out of the law enforcement and social policy arenas and returning to its economic roots.

The group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, had suffered an exodus of big-name corporate supporters like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Kraft Foods after recent attacks by liberal organizations.

While the group had already been discussing a narrowing of its work, the controversy generated by the Martin shooting “may have sped up the process,” Chip Rogers, a Georgia state senator who is the group’s treasurer, said in a telephone interview.

The group’s legislative board voted unanimously to disband its committee that developed policies on public safety, elections and other noneconomic issues.

ALEC, which is made up of more than 2,000 state legislators, develops model bills and policy positions on hundreds of issues.

Critics of the group were galvanized by the Feb. 26 shooting of Mr. Martin, a 17-year-old, unarmed student, and the debate over Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, said David Halperin, a senior fellow for United Republic, a liberal nonprofit group.

“The issue of a young man being killed and linked to this organization made it much harder for companies to say, ‘Gee, this is a great organization that we want to support,’ ”Mr. Halperin said.

Since then, corporate supporters and philanthropic organizations, like the Gates Foundation, have withdrawn contributions to the organization that are believed to total hundreds of thousands of dollars. (It does not publicly list the amounts contributed by its members and donors.)

“We hate to see any members leave,” said Kaitlyn Buss, a spokeswoman for the group, “and we hope to work with these companies that have had problems again in the future.”

    Martin Death Spurs Group to Readjust Policy Focus, NYT, 17.4.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/us/trayvon-martin-death-spurs-group-to-readjust-policy-focus.html

How to Expand the Voter Rolls

April 6, 2012
The New York Times

A country that should be encouraging more people to vote is still using an archaic voter registration system that creates barriers to getting a ballot. In 2008, 75 million eligible people did not vote in the presidential election, and 80 percent of them were not registered.

The vast majority of states rely on a 19th-century registration method: requiring people to fill out a paper form when they become eligible to vote, often at a government office, and to repeat the process every time they move. This is a significant reason why the United States has a low voter participation rate.

The persistence of the paper system is all the more frustrating because a growing number of states have shown that technology can get more people on voter rolls. There’s no reason why every state cannot automatically register eligible voters when they have contact with a government agency. The most common method, now used in 17 states, electronically sends data from motor vehicle departments to election offices.

Ten states allow people to register online, and others, including California, are preparing to do so. In Washington State, for example, anyone with a driver’s license or state ID can register over the Internet. The paperless systems are much cheaper than the old forms and far more accurate. A recent study by the Pew Center on the States found that 24 million voter registrations (about 12 percent) are significantly inaccurate because they had not been updated or were erroneous to start with.

The Brennan Center for Justice reports that paperless systems have doubled the number of registrations through motor vehicle departments in Kansas and Washington State. In South Dakota, seven times as many people registered to vote at motor vehicle offices after an automated system began in 2006. Online registration is particularly appealing to young voters; in Arizona, a new system has increased the registration of voters ages 18 to 24 from 29 percent in 2000 to 53 percent in 2008.

The obsolete paper system has resulted in an overall registration rate of only 68 percent in the United States. Canada, by contrast, registers 93 percent of its population, using a computerized system that automatically gathers records from tax forms, the military and vital statistics agencies, as well as motor vehicle offices.

This country has a long and terrible tradition of erecting barriers to participation. In earlier eras, the obstacles were overt, like literacy tests to keep minorities and poor people off the rolls. Recent methods are subtler but still harmful. In 2004, Ohio briefly banned registration forms not printed on 80-pound paper to make it easier to invalidate minority voter drives without access to the forms. Even now, many Republican lawmakers are doing everything they can to maintain intimidating requirements.

Florida, for example, has put stringent restrictions on voter registration drives, imposing fines and even criminal penalties for the slightest infraction of complex rules. Groups like the League of Women Voters and Rock the Vote say they won’t participate in such a system. Election officials say the rules limiting these drives are a significant reason that new registrations are lower than they were four years ago.

Since President Obama was elected with help from a surge of support from new voters, similar laws have been passed or introduced in South Carolina, Michigan, Illinois, and several other states as part of a Republican effort to restrict voting by groups that tend to vote Democratic.

It should be self-evident that the country benefits when more citizens are engaged in the electoral process, but too many lawmakers are trying to reduce participation for short-term political gain. Given the progress some states have achieved with new registration methods, it’s time for Congress to step in and require that all states bring their systems into the digital age.

    How to Expand the Voter Rolls, NYT, 6.4.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/07/opinion/how-to-expand-the-voter-rolls.html

Calling Radicalism by Its Name

April 3, 2012
The New York Times

President Obama’s fruitless three-year search for compromise with the Republicans ended in a thunderclap of a speech on Tuesday, as he denounced the party and its presidential candidates for cruelty and extremism. He accused his opponents of imposing on the country a “radical vision” that “is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity.”

Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential front-runner, has embraced a House budget plan that is little more than “thinly veiled social Darwinism,” the president said, a “Trojan horse” disguised as deficit reduction that would hurt middle- and lower-income Americans.

“By gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last — education and training, research and development, our infrastructure — it is a prescription for decline,” he said, speaking to a group of Associated Press editors and reporters in Washington.

Mr. Obama has, in recent months, urged Republicans to put aside their destructive agenda. But, in this speech, he finally conceded that the party has demonstrated no interest in the values of compromise and realism. Even Ronald Reagan, who raised taxes in multiple budget deals, “could not get through a Republican primary today,” Mr. Obama said. While Democrats have repeatedly shown a willingness to cut entitlements and have agreed to trillions in domestic spending cuts, he said, Republicans won’t agree to any tax increases and, in fact, want to shower the rich with even more tax cuts.

The speech was the first time that Mr. Obama linked Mr. Romney, by name, to his party’s dishonest budget and discredited trickle-down policies. As Mr. Obama pointed out, Mr. Romney described as “marvelous” a budget that would drastically cut student financial aid, medical research, Head Start classrooms and environmental protections. Mr. Obama further ridiculed the budget’s deficit-cutting goal as “laughable” because it refuses to acknowledge the need for new revenues.

The speech was immediately attacked by the House speaker, John Boehner, for failing to deal with the debt crisis, but Mr. Obama pointed out how hollow that charge has become. “That argument might have a shred of credibility were it not for their proposal to also spend $4.6 trillion over the next decade on lower tax rates,” he said. The math is, in fact, quite simple: cutting both taxes and the deficit can mean only more sacrifice from the middle class and the poor, ending the promise of Medicare and Medicaid. Over the long term, the deficit can be brought down through a combination of cuts and new revenues; doing so immediately, as Mr. Romney and his party want to do, would reverse the fragile recovery.

Mr. Obama provided a powerful signal on Tuesday that he intends to make this election about the Republican Party’s failure to confront, what he called, “the defining issue of our time”: restoring a sense of economic security while giving everyone a fair shot, rather than enabling only a shrinking number of people to do exceedingly well. His remarks promise a tough-minded campaign that will call extremism and dishonesty by name.

    Calling Radicalism by Its Name, NYT, 3.4.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/opinion/calling-radicalism-by-its-name.html

Romney Adds 3 Victories and Clashes With Obama

April 3, 2012
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG and JEFF ZELENY

MILWAUKEE — Mitt Romney tightened his grip on the Republican nomination on Tuesday with a sweep of the primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland and the District of Columbia, and found himself in his first direct engagement with President Obama, an unmistakable signal that the general election would not wait for internal Republican politics.

Mr. Romney emerged from the evening with substantial gains in delegates and a growing perception that he was winning over previously reluctant elements of the party. In winning the main battleground of Wisconsin, Mr. Romney led among strong Tea Party supporters and ran closely with Rick Santorum among those who consider themselves to be very conservative and among evangelical Christians, according to exit polls.

Mr. Santorum, who at one point led in polls here, said he would continue to compete for voters who “have yet to be heard” in the coming primaries, starting with his home state, Pennsylvania, on April 24.

But the day was in some respects the start of the general election. Mr. Obama for the first time singled Mr. Romney out by name, during a major address dedicated to the budget championed by Mr. Romney’s marquee endorser in Wisconsin — Representative Paul D. Ryan — which the president called “social Darwinism.”

“He said that he’s ‘very supportive’ of this new budget,” Mr. Obama said of Mr. Romney while speaking at a meeting of editors and reporters in Washington. Using a mocking tone, and referring obliquely to perceptions of his potential opponent’s elite pedigree, Mr. Obama added, “And he even called it ‘marvelous,’ which is a word you don’t often hear when it comes to describing a budget; it’s a word you don’t hear generally.”

Taking the stage to declare victory in downtown Milwaukee, Mr. Romney took his turn to strike general election themes. “President Obama thinks he’s doing a good job — I’m not kidding,” Mr. Romney said, speaking with a huge American flag behind him and an excited hall of supporters in front of him. “It’s enough to make you think that years of flying around on Air Force One, surrounded by an adoring staff of true believers telling you that you’re great and you’re doing a great job, it’s enough to make you think that you might become a little out of touch.”

Even as he assailed Mr. Obama as presiding over a “government-centered society,” Mr. Romney spoke in upbeat, elevated and optimistic tones that were steeped in themes of patriotism fashioned for a general election.

“The dreamers can dream a little bigger, the help wanted signs can be dusted off, and we can start again,” Mr. Romney said. “And this time we’ll get it right.”

Mr. Obama’s new focus on Mr. Romney represents a sudden but much-thought-out shift.

The White House had been content until now to watch the Republican race unfold on its own, and let Mr. Santorum and Mr. Romney batter each other without its help.

But as Mr. Romney has started to solidify his delegate lead, unify his party and repair the damage to his favorability ratings from these past few months of hard campaigning, Mr. Obama’s aides decided to take their engagement to a new level on Tuesday.

The president will not directly confront Mr. Romney every day, aides said. That responsibility will largely be left to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the re-election campaign.

But the frequency of the television advertising is increasing, an intentional strategy of the Obama campaign to deny Mr. Romney a moment to rebuild from his long and bruising primary fight.

The Democrats have conducted extensive research on Mr. Romney, his positions and the early perceptions that voters may have of him. A key finding of polling and other surveys, advisers say, is that Mr. Romney remains undefined to a wide universe of people, a void that the Obama campaign is eager to fill while Mr. Romney is still trying to secure the nomination.

The president’s re-election team was initially planning to start directly confronting the likely Republican nominee in February — the week after Mr. Romney won the Florida primary — but the rapid rise of Mr. Santorum delayed the need for that effort.

Now, advisers to Mr. Obama say they are intent on keeping the arguments from the Republican race fresh in the minds of voters, including those who were not closely following the primary.

Mr. Obama, as he spoke about income disparity in America on Tuesday, outlined what his campaign hopes to make a central question of the presidential race: Should voters trust Mr. Romney, one of the wealthiest candidates in modern times, to be fair to them?

The Romney campaign and party leaders said the president’s new engagement proves that Republicans have no time to waste in uniting the party behind him, raising money and fending off such attempts before they can take root in the minds of voters.

Mr. Obama’s direct engagement with Mr. Romney may have raised his stature as the most likely Republican nominee. But Mr. Romney must also keep an eye on Mr. Santorum, who still retains some potential, however slim, to block him from reaching the 1,144 mark in the 19 Republican contests ahead.

And with the presidential race now operating on two distinct fronts, Mr. Romney has the dual task of seeking to dispense with Mr. Santorum even as he begins to directly confront the more impressive arsenal of an incumbent president.

Mr. Santorum was already turning his attention to Pennsylvania, where he hopes to revive his candidacy, and also predicted a win in the delegate-rich state of Texas late next month. Portraying this as the halfway point in the Republican race, Mr. Santorum, speaking in Mars, Pa., said, “Who’s ready to charge out of the locker room in Pennsylvania for a strong second half?”

Though Mr. Santorum leads in some polls in Pennsylvania, the surveys of voters leaving polls here in Wisconsin showed new signs that Mr. Romney was perhaps making critical final strides with the sorts of voters who have so far kept Mr. Santorum in the race — the strong Tea Party supporters and those calling themselves “very conservative.” Some of that seemed to be a reflection of Mr. Romney’s margin of victory here.

Whatever the final vote tallies, the results of Mr. Romney’s wins Tuesday were certain to put him that much farther ahead in the hunt for the 1,144 delegates needed to clinch the nomination before the Republican convention in August. He won the majority of the 100 delegates in play in the three contests Tuesday night. According to The Associated Press’s delegate tally, Mr. Romney had 646 delegates, Mr. Santorum had 272, Newt Gingrich had 135 and Representative Ron Paul had 51.

Mr. Romney’s campaign is hoping to rob Mr. Santorum of a victory in his home state, and, in the process, steal away his hopes of, at the very least, forcing an open convention where he would have a new shot at the nomination.

But during his speech in Milwaukee, Mr. Romney looked beyond the Republican primary fight and focused his anger exclusively on Mr. Obama, bringing the likely contours of a general election into fuller view while assuring Americans that he would restore the nation’s economic might.

“Those days are coming back. That’s our destiny. Join me,” Mr. Romney said. “Take another step every day until November 6th.”

Ashley Parker contributed reporting from Milwaukee,

and Mark Landler from Washington.

    Romney Adds 3 Victories and Clashes With Obama, NYT, 3.4.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/us/politics/maryland-wisconsin-washington-primaries.html

The Muslim Swing Vote

April 2, 2012
10:04 pm
The New York Times
Campaign Stops
By FARID SENZAI

As the 2012 presidential election picks up steam, Republican candidates find it tempting and beneficial to bash Muslims as a way to attract voters. In the wake of the 2010 midterm elections, “Americans are learning what Europeans have known for years: Islam-bashing wins votes,” the journalist Michael Scott Moore wrote that November. At the time, many of the 85 new Republican House members buoyed by the surging Tea Party movement found the political virtues of anti-Muslim rhetoric an easy way to prove their mettle to the surging conservative base.

Since then, the animosity against Muslims has only intensified. Republican presidential hopefuls Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich frequently warned that Muslims were attempting to take over the government and impose Shariah law, using “stealth Jihad,” as Gingrich put it in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute late last year.

The problem for the United States, the former speaker of the house argued, is not primarily terrorism; it is Shariah — “the heart of the enemy movement from which the terrorists spring forth.” Rick Santorum, not one to shy away from the subject, continues to conflate Muslims with radical Islamists. He has often warned audiences of the dangers of losing the war to “radical Islam,” even suggesting in a 2007 speech at the National Academic Freedom Conference that the American response to the threat should be to “educate, engage, evangelize and eradicate.”

This type of anti-Muslim rhetoric is deployed by some candidates in an apparent attempt to tap into hostility among the voters who make up the base of the party. In a sense, this approach is validated by recent polls suggesting that Republicans are more likely to have anti-Muslim sentiments. The political scientists Michael Tesler and David Sears wrote in their 2010 book, “Obama’s Race,” that feelings about Muslims are a strong predictor about feelings about Obama. They found that “general election vote choice in 2008 was more heavily influenced by feelings about Muslims than it was in either 2004 voting or in McCain-Clinton trial heats.” As we get closer to the November election, the most likely Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, will have to balance between pandering to voters on the far right of his party, some of whom are already wary of him, and more moderate voters.

While an anti-Muslim strategy may have worked in the past, it is risky because many agree that the outcome of the 2012 presidential election will probably be determined in no more than twelve states. These are the same states where minority groups, including American Muslims, are likely to play a decisive role. A report released this week by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, where I am the director of research, suggests that this community is becoming an increasingly important player in electoral politics and might well play a surprisingly important role in this year’s election.

Although it is true that American Muslims constitute a small percentage of the national population, they are concentrated in key swing states such as Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Florida. Despite being very diverse and far from monolithic, this constituency is growing faster than any other religious community and has become increasingly visible and sophisticated in its political engagement. Republicans who found the Muslim community an easy target in the primaries may find themselves in trouble in the states that may determine the winner of the election.

Our report examined a decade’s worth of data on American Muslim political attitudes and includes a case study of Florida, which remains a perennial tossup. In addition to the razor-thin margin in 2000, the state’s 2004 and 2008 elections were settled by less than 2% of the vote. In 2000, a few hundred votes decided the election; an estimated 60,000 Muslims in Florida voted for Bush. Florida’s Muslim population, which has been growing since the 1980s, is now estimated by some to include 124,000 registered voters. No campaigner can afford to disregard them.

The rhetorical animosity from Republican presidential candidates, coupled with the rise of Islamophobia since 9/11, has mobilized the Muslim community to engage politically. An Emerge USA poll taken during the 2010 midterm elections found that more than 60% of registered Muslim voters in Florida were likely to vote. Polls also suggest that two out of three Muslims have a strong desire for political unity and feel that they should vote as a bloc for a presidential candidate.

It seems unlikely now, but Republicans long did a good job of courting Muslim voters, including in the 2000 election when George W. Bush reached out to the community. Al Gore, on the other hand, took Muslims for granted, to his detriment. Even in the immediate aftermath of September 11th, President Bush reached out to the community and condemned attacks against Muslims, making it clear that the terrorist attacks did not represent Islam or the views of American Muslim citizens. Yet specific policies, including the passing of the Patriot Act and the decision to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, caused many Muslims to shift away from the Republican Party.

Arab-American and South Asian-American Muslims, who initially supported Bush in 2000, switched overwhelmingly to the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, in 2004. Democrats further capitalized on this support with Obama’s candidacy in 2008. President Obama, for his part, has not managed to do much better in engaging the Muslim community, never finding it politically convenient to do so and consistently distancing himself.

The growing rhetorical invocation of Islam as a scare tactic to gain votes may work in some parts of the country, but candidates could pay dearly in critical battleground states. As a first step, politicians from both parties should reach out to the American Muslim community instead of ignoring, dismissing or maligning its members. Fueling animosity against Muslims as a tactic to court votes is a risky venture. The strategy is short sighted; it could easily backfire; and in a pluralistic society that prides itself on tolerance and religious freedom, encouraging this type of animosity towards a particular group is un-American.

Farid Senzai is assistant professor of political science at Santa Clara University

and director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding.

    The Muslim Swing Vote, NYT, 2.4.2012,
    http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/02/the-muslim-swing-vote/

A Judge Turns on the Light

April 2, 2012
The New York Times

A federal judge took an important step toward ending secret donations to big-spending political groups, striking down regulations that permitted some groups to hide their donors. Unfortunately, the ruling probably came too late to flush this corrupting practice from this year’s elections — though there is still time for Congress to do so.

The secret-donor problem began in 2007 when the Supreme Court, in the Wisconsin Right to Life case, ended restrictions on corporate and union political spending by advocacy groups in the weeks prior to an election. A few weeks later, the Federal Election Commission, naïvely suggesting that some corporate donors to those groups might not have intended to give for political purposes, said that only those donations explicitly earmarked for political purposes had to be disclosed. The loophole was obvious: Just don’t declare any donation to be political, and they can all be secret.

The rule does not apply to modern “super PACs,” which exist for political purposes and must disclose their donors. But it allowed groups that accept money for other purposes, like the United States Chamber of Commerce, to collect millions of undisclosed dollars to buy ads that criticize candidates who differ with their pro-business agenda.

During the 2010 Congressional elections, political operatives like Karl Rove helped set up a variety of purported charities or educational groups to provide a shield to anonymous political donors. Along with the chamber, these groups took in more than $138 million in undisclosed money that year, 80 percent of which was spent supporting Republican candidates. Many of the same secretive groups have already begun running ads in this year’s campaign, and the flood will shortly begin in earnest.

A year ago, Representative Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, filed suit against the F.E.C., saying its 2007 regulation violated the intention of Congress when it passed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act in 2002. That law makes it clear that donations greater than $1,000 to advocacy groups have to be disclosed.

On Friday, District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington agreed. She ruled that the F.E.C. overstepped its boundaries in requiring disclosure only of explicit political donations. “Congress spoke plainly” in requiring full disclosure, she wrote, and even the Citizens United decision called for disclosure of the unlimited corporate and union donations it permitted.

Judge Jackson’s clearsighted opinion is a win for clean elections. But it will probably be appealed, which could delay a final decision by months or years. If it were a functioning body, the F.E.C. would change its regulations to comply with the court ruling, but its three Republican commissioners have repeatedly blocked attempts to require disclosure.

Congress could quickly resolve the issue if it were truly interested in cleaning up campaign finance. Mr. Van Hollen has introduced a new version of the Disclose Act that would go even further than the court decision in making donations transparent, requiring the names of top donors to appear in ads, and imposing stronger reporting requirements for super PACs. Republicans filibustered a similar bill last year in the Senate, and no Republicans have stepped up to support this version. In the meantime, the grim tide of secret money keeps rising.

    A Judge Turns on the Light, NYT, 2.4.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/opinion/a-judge-turns-on-the-light-on-campaign-finance.html