November
22, 2012
The New York Times
By FERNANDA SANTOS
PHOENIX —
It took until 15 days after the election, but all valid votes in Arizona have
now been counted, including a record number of provisional ballots that fueled
suspicions of voter suppression among Latino voters and raised questions about
the integrity of the electoral process in the state.
The tallies ended on Wednesday after officials gave the state’s most populous
counties — Maricopa, which encompasses Phoenix, and Pima, which includes Tucson
— permission to extend their counts past last Friday’s deadline so that they
could get through the tens of thousands of provisional ballots cast in both
places.
Results announced on or just after election night remained unchanged, though it
took days for three Congressional races to be decided. All of them were won by
Democrats, who will replace Republicans as a majority in the state’s
Congressional delegation come January. It was only on Wednesday afternoon that
one of the winners, Kyrsten Sinema, was able to find out the number of votes
that put her ahead of her opponent, Vernon Parker, a Republican, in the race for
Arizona’s Ninth Congressional District — “10,251,” she announced on Twitter.
“Thank you.”
In an interview, the secretary of state, Ken Bennett, insisted “the system is
not broken,” saying it took just as many days to count the votes four years ago
as it did this time. Still, he acknowledged that the state could do better,
joining a growing chorus of elected officials, civil rights advocates and
community organizers calling for a faster way to tally the ballots.
“Speed is not our No. 1 goal. Accuracy is our No. 1 goal. But that doesn’t mean
we can’t think of a way to speed up the process,” Mr. Bennett said.
Ideas and plenty of criticism have been floating around in meetings, e-mail and
letters since the exact number of ballots left to be counted after the polls
closed — 631,274 — came to be known. This week, Democrats called for a
bipartisan investigation to scrutinize some of the issues raised by voters and
campaigns, like the fragmentation of the election process — run independently by
each of the state’s 15 counties — and the difficulties some voters who signed up
to vote by mail seemed to have had in differentiating sample ballots from real
ones.
“We need the process to be better explained to voters, especially because we had
so many new voters registered ahead of the election,” said Luis Heredia, the
executive director of the state’s Democratic Party.
In Maricopa County, which has roughly 60 percent of all registered voters in the
state, 115,000 votes were cast through provisional ballots, a 15 percent
increase from 2008, based on state records. Some 59,000 people who requested
early ballots also went to the polls on Nov. 6, accounting for almost half of
all provisional ballots cast. According to complaints logged by grass-roots
groups working to mobilize Latino voters, many were first-time voters who signed
up to get their ballots by mail and claimed not to have received them.
The county’s recorder, Helen Purcell, said it was possible that some voters
tossed their ballots, not knowing what they were. Advocates countered that the
state should have run a more comprehensive voter-education campaign.
Instead, there was confusion, they said, particularly with outreach to
Spanish-speaking voters in Maricopa County, where leaflets listed the wrong date
for the election. Petra Falcón, executive director of Promise Arizona, part of a
coalition that says it has registered almost 35,000 voters this year, said that
based on the complaints, language barriers also kept many Spanish-speaking
voters in heavily Hispanic neighborhoods from understanding poll workers.
“We need certain skill sets to address the changing electorate, and one of them
is language,” Ms. Falcón said.
She and her counterparts are nonetheless celebrating small victories. They
supported Paul Penzone, a Democrat, who came closer than anyone to defeating
Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a Republican elected to a sixth term. (Mr. Arpaio won by
80,639 votes.) Also, in a state where registered Republicans hold a plurality,
Latino voters helped Richard H. Carmona, a Latino and a Democrat, stay
competitive against his Republican opponent, Jeff Flake, in the race for the
Senate seat held by Jon Kyl, a Republican who is retiring. (Mr. Carmona lost by
fewer than 68,000 votes.)
One of the questions that remains is whether provisional ballots were cast
disproportionately by Latino and black voters. Though an analysis of where the
provisional ballots came from could take some time, Ms. Falcón said, “Behind
every provisional ballot was a determined voter who knew their vote needed to
count that day.”
While
President Obama was delivering his victory speech in the early hours of
Wednesday, Nov. 7, people were still standing in line in Florida to vote.
Thousands had waited hours to vote in New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, some in
the cold, some giving up wages to do so. In a spontaneous aside — “by the way,
we have to fix that” — the president acknowledged the unnecessary hardship of
casting a vote in the United States and established a goal that he now has an
obligation to address.
The long lines can be shortened with commitments from Washington, as well as
state and local governments, but they are just the most glaring symptom of a
deeply broken democratic process. In too many states, it’s also needlessly
difficult to register to vote. States controlled by Republicans continue to
erect partisan impediments to participation. And the process for choosing a
candidate remains bound to unlimited and often secret campaign donations that
are bound to lead to corruption.
“Fixing that” can start with the following actions:
MAKE IT EASIER TO VOTE Voting in the United States is controlled by a widely
varying patchwork of state, county and local laws. Many election boards are
poorly financed or run by dysfunctional partisans, unable to quickly fix broken
scanners or touch screens. Some state lawmakers have no interest in making the
process easier, believing that too few polling places or other impediments make
it harder for minorities or poor people to participate.
This is where Congress can play a role. It has the power to establish a
nonpartisan federal elections board to maintain a national registration
database, mandate the choice of voting machines and set standards for counting
provisional ballots. A federal law, such as those proposed by Representatives
George Miller of California and John Lewis of Georgia, could require a clear
early-voting period, removing the issue as a political football in states like
Florida and Ohio, and standards for absentee voting.
Congress also can provide financial incentives to the states to do the job
right. A bill introduced recently by Senator Christopher Coons, a Democrat of
Delaware, would give grants to states that make registration easy, including
allowing same-day registration; allow early voting; require no excuses for
voting absentee; properly train poll workers; and provide sufficient polling
places.
But states don’t have to wait for a resolution to the inevitable partisan
struggles over these bills. Seventeen states already send electronic
registration data from motor vehicle departments to election agencies, and 10
allow people to register online. These paperless systems have the potential to
enroll significantly more people.
REMOVE THE BARRIERS The Republican drive to keep Democratic-leaning groups from
voting, through methods like voter ID requirements, failed miserably this year
and may have produced a backlash among minority voters, who turned out in large
numbers. It’s time for Republicans to give up this misguided and offensive
effort. And, if they don’t, Mr. Obama should make a national effort to pressure
them now that he has no personal stake in it.
DILUTE THE POWER OF MONEY Unlimited contributions aren’t going away, even though
many outside Republican groups lost this year. A bill introduced by House
Democrats would sever the informal relationships between “super PACs” and the
candidates they support, and use federal matching money to encourage small
contributions to presidential and Congressional candidates. It also remains
vital for Congress to pass the Disclose Act and eliminate the use of secret
campaign donations.
Ultimately, only a constitutional amendment can counter the misbegotten Supreme
Court assertion that money is speech and thus can play an unlimited role in
American politics.
This year’s
round of state judicial elections broke previous records for the amounts spent
on judicial campaigns around the country. The dominant role played by
special-interest money — including money from super PACs financed by undisclosed
donors — has severely weakened the principle of fair and impartial courts.
In Florida, for example, three respected State Supreme Court justices won their
retention election battles, but only after they were forced to raise more than
$1.5 million in total. They had put on expensive campaigns because they were
targeted for defeat by moneyed conservatives who wanted to drive them off the
bench for their supposed liberal views. The justices were absolutely right to
fight back. Still, the bitter campaigns leave impressions of judicial
partisanship and indebtedness to campaign donors.
Nationally, spending on television advertisements in state supreme court races
reached nearly $28 million by Election Day, exceeding the $24.4 million in 2004,
the previous record for a presidential election year, according to the Brennan
Center for Justice and Justice at Stake, nonpartisan groups working for fair
courts. Groups not connected to candidate campaigns paid for more than half of
the TV ads run, compared with about 30 percent in 2010, making it much harder
for candidates to control their own message.
In Michigan, where three of seven seats on the State Supreme Court were up for
election, records were set for both spending and lack of accountability. The
$3.2 million raised by candidates and reported to the Michigan Bureau of
Elections was dwarfed by unreported spending by the political parties and
outside groups interested in tilting the balance on the court. One ad run by an
independent group against Bridget McCormack, a Democratic candidate for a seat
on the court, featured the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan and
suggested that Ms. McCormack’s legal work for a detainee released from
Guantánamo Bay in 2007 showed support for terrorism. Ms. McCormack won the race.
Of the $15 million or so spent for TV ads in Michigan, 75 percent cannot be
attributed to identifiable donors, notes Rich Robinson, executive director of
the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, which advocates changing Michigan law to
bar undisclosed independent spending. That exceeds even the 2010 record, when
half the total spending on Michigan Supreme Court races came from secret
sources.
Regrettably, states that elect their top judges show no inclination to address
these distressing trends by replacing judicial elections with systems of merit
appointment that avoid retention votes. This year’s experience should at least
hasten state efforts to revise rules for judicial recusal to take campaign
contributions into account. Mandatory disclosure of all donations to a judicial
race is also essential. Litigants cannot know when they should request that a
judge step aside if they cannot tell whether their case involves a party that
supported the judge’s campaign.
From the
late-1960s through the ’80s, Republicans were convinced that they had a
permanent lock on the Electoral College. The Sun Belt was rising, traditionally
Democratic states were losing population, and Republicans won five of six
presidential elections beginning in 1968. Democrats complained that this archaic
system was a terrible and undemocratic way to choose the country’s executive.
They were right, but they were ignored.
Now the demographic pendulum is swinging toward the Democrats. Young voters,
Hispanics and a more active African-American electorate added states like
Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and Virginia to President Obama’s winning coalition
in the past two elections, and suddenly Republicans are the ones complaining
about a broken system.
They’re right, too, just as the Democrats were a generation ago. The Electoral
College remains a deeply defective political mechanism no matter whom it
benefits, and it needs to be abolished.
We say that in full knowledge that the college may be tilting toward the kinds
of candidates we tend to support and provided a far more decisive margin for Mr.
Obama earlier this month than his showing in the popular vote. The idea that a
voting method might convey benefits to one side or another, in fact, is one of
the strongest arguments against it.
There should be no structural bias in the presidential election system, even if
population swings might oscillate over a long period of decades. If Democrats
win a string of elections, it should be because their policies and their
candidates appeal to a majority of the country’s voters, not because supporters
are clustered in enough states to get to 270 electoral votes. Republicans should
broaden their base beyond a shrinking proportion of white voters not simply to
win back Colorado, but because a more centrist outlook would be good for the
country.
The problems with the Electoral College — born in appeasement to slave states —
have been on display for two centuries; this page called it a “cumbrous and
useless piece of old governmental machinery” in 1936, when Alf Landon won 36
percent of the popular vote against Franklin Roosevelt but received only 8 of
the 538 electoral votes.
But 76 years later, the system continues to calcify American politics. As Adam
Liptak of The Times recently wrote, this year’s candidates campaigned in only 10
states after the conventions, ignoring the Democratic states on the West Coast
and Northeast and the Republican ones in the South and the Plains. The number of
battleground states is shrinking, and turnout in the other states is lower. The
undemocratic prospect of a president who loses the popular vote is always
present (it’s happened three times), as is the potential horror show of a tie
vote that is decided in Congress.
The last serious consideration of a constitutional amendment to abolish the
college, in 1970, was filibustered by senators from small states who feared
losing their disproportionate clout. The same thing would probably happen today,
even though Republicans (who tend to dominate those states) are increasingly
skeptical of the college.
The best method of moving toward direct democracy remains the National Popular
Vote plan, under which states agree to grant their electoral votes to the ticket
that gets the most popular votes around the country. Legislators in eight states
and the District of Columbia (representing 132 electoral votes) have agreed to
do so; the plan would go into effect when states totaling 270 electoral votes
sign up.
Until then, new generations of voters will continue to find themselves appalled
by the system left to them by their populist-fearing ancestors. An 18-year-old
voter in California and one in Oklahoma will have much in common when they
realize they are each being ignored, and when they realize there is something
their lawmakers can do about it.
November 8,
2012
8:52 pm
The New York Times
By TALI MENDELBERG
and CHRISTOPHER F. KARPOWITZ
THE
Congress that convenes in January will include a record number of women: 20
senators and at least 81 representatives. Female candidates broke other barriers
on Tuesday. New Hampshire will be the first state to send an all-female
delegation to Congress. A woman was elected to the South Carolina Senate,
currently the only all-male state legislative chamber.
Does this mean the next Congress will be more attentive to the needs of
children, single mothers and Americans who are vulnerable because of low income,
poor health and other disadvantages? Sadly, no. Our research shows that female
lawmakers significantly reshape policies only when they have true parity with
men. In other words, while Tuesday's electoral gains should be celebrated, we've
got a very long way to go.
We recently conducted a study of women's participation in political
decision-making groups. It is in these settings - committees, caucuses and
delegate meetings - that women's presence matters, often profoundly.
Our experiment assembled 94 five-person groups and asked them to decide whether
and how much to tax the more fortunate so as to provide for those with less
means. We ran the study in two states: conservative Utah and liberal New Jersey.
Surveys have demonstrated that women of both parties are more likely than men to
mention the needs of vulnerable populations when asked about the nation's
problems. Women more frequently choose "caring" occupations and, within
households, shift resources toward children more than fathers do. The most
commonly accepted explanation is that women are more socialized than men to care
for others.
To observe how and when women voice this "caring" - and when their voice matters
- we randomly assigned 470 individuals to groups in which women made up zero,
20, 40, 60, 80 or 100 percent of participants. We assessed each member's views
before and after the meetings, and recorded who said what.
On average, women make up about 20 percent of lawmakers in the United States and
abroad. We found that when women constituted 20 percent of a decision-making
body that operates by majority rule, the average woman took up only about 60
percent of the floor time used by the average man. Women were perceived - by
themselves and their peers - as more quiescent and less effective. They were
more likely to be rudely interrupted; they were less likely to strongly advocate
their policy preferences; and they seldom mentioned the vulnerable. These gender
dynamics held even when adjusting for political ideology (beliefs about
liberalism and egalitarianism) and income.
In contrast, the men in our experiment did not speak up less or appear to lose
influence when they were in the minority.
In our experiment, groups with few women set a minimum income of about $21,600
per year for a family of four - which is close to the federal poverty level for
a family of four. But once women made up 60 to 80 percent or more of a group,
they spoke as much as men, raised the needs of the vulnerable and argued for
redistribution (and influenced the rhetoric of their male counterparts). They
also encountered fewer hostile interruptions.
Significantly, they elevated the safety net to as much as $31,000. The most
talkative participants in these majority-female groups advocated for even more
government generosity: $36,000, enough to catapult many poor families into the
ranks of the lower middle class.
In another study, we pored through a sample of minutes from more than 14,000
local school boards and found that the pronounced gender gap in participation
shrank sharply when women's numbers reached parity - a real-world confirmation
of our experimental findings.
When legislators vote, parties and constituencies matter most - but gender
ratios matter too. For example, analyzing the 1990 confirmation hearings of the
Supreme Court justiceDavid H. Souter, the political scientist Laura R. Winsky
Mattei found that the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee, regardless of party,
was twice as aggressive in questioning female witnesses as male ones.
Some scholars, like Mona Lena Krook and Beth Reingold, have argued that
increasing female legislative representation does not consistently lead to
better policies for women and the vulnerable. But they did not examine, as we
did, the potential effects when women are half or more of the decision makers.
It's hard to know when, if ever, Congress will be half-female. But Professors
Krook and Reingold and others have found that institutional reforms, like female
caucuses, can help integrate women into decision making. We also found that
committees that vote by consensus give female minorities a greater voice.
We haven't examined the impact of female executives on foreign policy and
national security. As leaders likeIndira Gandhi, Golda Meir andMargaret Thatcher
have shown, women in the vanguard sometimes act even more "masculine" than their
male counterparts.
But when there are more women in legislatures, city councils and school boards,
they speak more and voice the needs of the poor, the vulnerable, children and
families - and men listen. At a time of soaring inequality, electing vastly more
women might be the best hope for addressing the needs of the 99 percent.
Tali
Mendelberg, an associate professor of politics at Princeton University,
is the author
of "The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages,
and the Norm
of Equality."
Christopher F.
Karpowitz is an assistant professor of political science
November 8,
2012
The New York Times
By ROGER COHEN
NEW YORK —
Get out of our bedrooms.
If there was one unequivocal message delivered as the Republican candidate Mitt
Romney was rejected and President Barack Obama re-elected, it was that Americans
do not want politicians meddling with their sexual orientation, the right of
gays to marry, or women’s choices over reproduction.
They particularly do not want white male Republicans invoking religious faith to
theorize about the nature of rape or whether pregnancy following such violation
might be God’s will. The country-club crowd, almost all white, who gathered
around Romney at the last needs to learn a basic lesson of this vote: The United
States has moved into the 21st century when it comes to sexual mores.
The shift has been rapid. In 2004, the Democratic candidate John Kerry lost as
Republicans managed to fire up the evangelical turnout by using gay marriage
ballot initiatives. Any candidate’s approval of gay marriage looked like
political suicide. Eight years later Obama endorsed gay marriage in an election
year and, despite a faltering economy, he won.
In the Facebook age, there was often no quicker way to get “unfriended,” than
declaring support for Romney, even if that support was over economic rather than
social issues. The choice, whatever its motive, could easily appear as a
personal attack on the gay and lesbian community, as well as all the Generation
Xers and Millennials for whom targeting someone’s sexual orientation just seems
so 20th-century — an unacceptable holdover from another age.
But of course, Romney was more concerned about guns for the navy than the impact
on the world of social media.
If, after this defeat, the Republicans cling to the extreme social conservatism
of its loony right, they will be gazing at the White House with longing eyes for
many years. The demographic trends are clear. Obama was backed by 6 in 10
Americans under 30, while Romney won a majority of voters 65 or older. Like the
Democrats before the arrival of Bill Clinton, Republicans have lost touch with
the dominant pulse of the country.
Romney, who lives near the city of Harvard and M.I.T and scientific innovation,
threw away an election that was eminently winnable for the G.O.P. by hitching
himself to social ideas from another age, ideas that often dress up intolerance
in religious garb.
He had to do so to secure his base, or so the conventional thinking goes. But
that base got him nowhere. The worst part is I am not sure Romney even believes
those ideas himself. In any event, the repudiation from the American people was
vehement.
It is absurd that anyone who is socially liberal and fiscally conservative has
to look hard for a political home in the United States. The Republican Party has
vacated that large terrain. Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, stands
about there, but appears to have given up national political ambitions.
Social liberalism is ascendant and there is now no reason to believe the trend
will stop. In Maine and Maryland, voters approved same-sex marriage. (Maine in
2009 had repealed a law allowing same-sex marriage.)
In Wisconsin, Tammy Baldwin became the first openly lesbian senator. In
Minnesota, voters rejected a bid to ban gay marriage in the state’s
constitution.
In Indiana, which veered sharply toward Romney in the presidential vote,
Representative Joe Donnelly took a Senate seat for the Democrats weeks after his
opponent, State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, said pregnancy resulting from rape
was “something that God intended to happen” and life was always a “gift from
God.”
In Ohio, Josh Mandel, the hawkish young Republican candidate for the Senate,
crashed to defeat to the Democrat incumbent Sherrod Brown. Mandel had thought
fit to call Mourdock a “class act” after the rape comment.
In Missouri, Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat who had seemed vulnerable,
defeated Representative Todd Akin, whose particular theory was that women who
are victims of “legitimate rape” would somehow not get pregnant.
The white Republican males speculating in these ways about women’s bodies appear
to have a problem — and the problem is not merely political.
In Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, recaptured the Senate seat long
held by Edward Kennedy, after a campaign in which she made a strong appeal to
women. “To all the women across Massachusetts who are working your tails off,”
she declared, “you better believe we’re going to fight for equal pay for equal
work.”
The message to the Republican Party was clear: Come to terms with equal rights
and freedom of choice for women, and with the different sexual orientations of
Americans, or go on losing.
Another message to the G.O.P. was delivered by the vast majority of Latinos
voting for Obama: Shift from a negative to a positive message about immigration.
A third, to the Sheldon Adelsons of this world, was that money cannot buy
everything.
The social tableau behind the Obamas in their moment of victory was an image of
America today, an America that holds love to be personal. This declaration — our
bedrooms are our own business — was one of the great national triumphs of the
night.
November 8,
2012
The New York Times
By MICHAEL BARBARO
BOSTON —
They predict he will write a book, convinced that the daily diary he kept on the
campaign trail would make for a compelling read.
They speculate that he will return to the corridors of finance, where his
reputation as a savvy chief executive and investor remains unblemished.
They suspect that he could take on a major role in the Mormon Church, picking up
where he left off two decades ago.
In conversations over the past 24 hours, friends, aides and advisers to Mitt
Romney have begun turning their attention to an issue that until now they have
never had to consider: his next move.
After three decades of remarkably seamless career hopping — from Bain Capital to
the Olympic Games, from governor of Massachusetts to constant candidate for
president — Mr. Romney is now a restless chief executive with no organization to
run.
During a meeting at his campaign headquarters in the North End of Boston a few
hours after conceding to President Obama, Mr. Romney told his staff members that
they had just witnessed his last political campaign.
But he vowed, in the words of two people in the room, that “I will not fall off
the map.”
For now Mr. Romney, 65, seems profoundly absorbed by the present, turning over
in his head a public rejection whose depth caught him by surprise.
At a breakfast on Wednesday for top advisers and donors, Mr. Romney marveled at
the Obama campaign’s ability to turn out such a large volume of voters on
Election Day, though at times by using strategies that he said had unfairly
maligned him.
He did little to hide his frustration and pique: he bemoaned attempts by the
president and his allies to characterize him as an enemy of women, singling out
advertisements that claimed he opposed contraception and abortion in all cases.
That, Mr. Romney said, is simply untrue, according to those at the breakfast.
He even took a gentle swipe at the news media, mocking what he said were
inaccurate articles suggesting that his oldest son, Tagg, had staged an
intervention to fix a tottering campaign and was playing a heavy role in shaping
political strategy.
“He will be sifting through this for quite a while,” said Kirk Jowers, a Romney
friend. “The question is when the sifting takes a couple of hours a day instead
of being all consuming.”
Even his own aides said it was hard to know precisely how Mr. Romney, an
unsparing self-critic, would respond to a loss that had such a personal
dimension. It was his second run for the White House and he had believed, until
the very end, that he was ever so close to fulfilling the dream of his father,
George, whose own presidential aspirations fell short in 1968.
Few of them can imagine him following the path of, say, Bob Dole, who traded in
the title of Republican nominee to become a lobbyist and a pitchman for Viagra.
Or Al Gore, who graciously accepted loss in public, then descended into a
private slump, growing a beard and putting on weight before slowly finding his
passion in environmental advocacy that won him a Nobel Peace Prize.
“The only door that is closed to Mitt Romney for the remainder of his life is
being president of the United States,” said Steve Schmidt, a campaign adviser to
Senator John McCain in 2008. “He can do whatever else he wants to do.”
He had a warning, though: “Losing a presidential campaign is something you never
get over. The question is whether you can move forward without bitterness or
rancor.”
Bitterness, of course, may be inevitable. Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain made some
halfhearted efforts at postelection comity four years ago, with phone calls and
meetings, but have subsequently kept a chilly distance. It is unclear whether
the president’s election-night promise to sit down with Mr. Romney was anything
more than a polite gesture.
Mr. Romney’s eagerness to work with the president is equally uncertain. Just
after conceding, Mr. Romney told those close to him that he was anxious about
the nation’s financial health under Mr. Obama.
There will probably be no shortage of lucrative job offers for Mr. Romney, who
has not taken a steady paycheck since 1999, when he left Bain Capital to run the
Salt Lake City Olympics, friends and colleagues said.
“He’s a hot commodity to me,” Julian H. Robertson, a hedge fund titan, said in
an interview not long ago.
Just how hot became evident in 2008, shortly after Mr. Romney quit his first bid
for the White House, when Mr. Robertson offered him $30 million a year to run
his firm, Tiger Management, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Mr. Romney, who had his eye on a second run, politely declined.
Friends and family members said he had turned down equally eye-popping pay
packages from the heads of private equity firms.
Back then, several of Mr. Romney’s aides held an improvised career counseling
session with Mr. Romney in his campaign office. They figured he would run for
president again, but threw out a series of suggestions anyway.
Why not run an auto company like Ford or General Motors, they asked. Or start a
research group devoted to energy independence, an issue about which he is
obsessed.
Today, the car company option seems unlikely, given Mr. Romney’s opposition to
the federal bailout of American car companies. But aides said that he would be
receptive to a high-profile job in the private sector, the advocacy world or
academia.
“I know he will do something,” said Eric Fehrnstrom, a longtime Romney political
adviser. “I just don’t know what it will be.”
Not on his list of likely jobs: punditry. Friends said Mr. Romney could not
imagine following the well-worn path of defeated Republican candidates to Fox
News.
But his friends can envision him pecking away at opinion articles for major
newspapers, a passion for Mr. Romney, who is known to tap them out on his
BlackBerry on the beach or on a plane whenever inspiration strikes.
Turning out a book has become a familiar ritual for Mr. Romney, a former English
major who prides himself on his writing. He produced “Turnaround,” a look at his
role turning around the Olympics, in 2004, and “No Apology,” a political
manifesto, in 2010.
There will be a few vacations. During the brunch with donors and aides on
Wednesday, Mr. Romney told an old friend, Fraser Bullock, that he was looking
forward to skiing in Utah this winter.
For now, Mr. Romney has shown up at his campaign headquarters every day since
the election, where he seems preoccupied with the futures of members of his
campaign staff. He arranged for them to receive severance pay through the end of
November.
His No. 1 priority, so far: establishing a system to organize the 400 résumés of
those staff members whose paychecks will run out in 21 days.
November 8,
2012
2:27 pm
DealBook
A Financial News Service of The New York Times
The New York Times
By PETER EAVIS
A
second-term president may be just the person to tackle America's housing
problems.
When President Obama first came into office, home prices were crashing,
foreclosures were soaring and the previous Bush administration had just
initiated the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-backed
entities that agree to repay mortgages if the original borrower defaults.
With the market in shambles in 2009, the Obama administration pursued a
tentative housing policy, for the most part avoiding big moves that might have
further weakened the housing market or banks. Eventually, there were some bolder
initiatives, like the national mortgage settlement with big banks as well as the
Treasury Department's aid programs for homeowners.
But as President Obama's first administration comes to an end, the government is
still deeply embedded in the mortgage market. In the third quarter, various
government entities backstopped 92 percent of all new residential mortgages,
according to Inside Mortgage Finance, a publication that focuses on the home
loan industry.
Mr. Obama's economic team has consistently said it wants the housing market to
work without significant government support. But it has taken few actual steps
to advance that idea.
"I think Obama is absolutely committed to reducing the government's role," said
Thomas Lawler, a former chief economist at Fannie Mae and founder of Lawler
Economic and Housing Consulting, an industry analysis firm. "But no one's yet
found a format to do that."
Housing policy is hard to tackle because so many people have benefited from the
status quo. The entire real estate system - the banks, the agents, the home
buyers - all depend on a market that provides fixed-rate, 30-year mortgages that
can be easily refinanced when interest rates drop. That sort of loan is rare
outside of the United States. And any effort to overhaul housing and the
mortgage market could eventually reduce the amount of such mortgages in the
country, angering many and creating a political firestorm.
In other words, the best person to fundamentally change how housing works may be
a president who won't be running for office again.
Most immediately, the housing market has to be strong enough to deal with a
government pullback. Some analysts think it's ready. "I think the housing
recovery is far enough along that they can start winding down Fannie and
Freddie," said Phillip L. Swagel at the University of Maryland's School of
Public Policy, who served as assistant secretary for economic policy under
Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.
The administration can take smaller steps first. Mr. Lawler, the housing
economist, thinks the government could start to reduce the maximum amount that
it will guarantee for Fannie and Freddie loans. In some areas, like parts of the
Northeast and California, it is as high as $625,000. Before the financial
crisis, it was essentially capped at $417,000.
The big question is whether the private sector - banks and investors that buy
bonds backed with mortgages - will pick up the slack when the government eases
out of the market. If they don't, the supply of mortgages could fall and house
prices could weaken.
Banks say their appetite depends on how new rules for mortgages turn out. In
setting such regulations, some tough choices have to be made.
The new rules will effectively map the riskiness of various types of mortgages.
In determining that, regulators will look at the features of the loans and the
borrowers' income. Banks say they are unlikely to hold loans deemed risky, and
their lobbyists are pressing for legal protection on the safer ones, called
qualified mortgages.
The temptation will be to make the definition of what constitutes a qualified
mortgage as broad as possible, to ensure that the banks lend to a wide range of
borrowers. But regulators concerned with the health of the banks won't want a
system that incentivizes institutions to make potentially risky loans.
One set of qualified mortgage regulations, being written by the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau, could be completed as early as January. Other
regulators, like the Federal Reserve, are expected to take longer in finishing
their mortgage rules.
Resolving the conflict between mortgage availability and bank strength may
depend on the person who replaces Timothy F. Geithner as Treasury secretary. Mr.
Geithner is stepping down at the end of Mr. Obama's first term.
The Obama administration faces other daunting decisions.
One is how to deal with the considerable number of troubled mortgages still in
the financial system. Banks might be reluctant to make new loans until they have
a better idea of the losses on the old loans. "If you don't ever deal with these
problems, you may never get to where you want to go," said Mr. Lawler, the
housing economist.
To help tackle that issue, the new administration might decide to make its
mortgage relief programs more aggressive. It might even aim for more loan
modifications, writing down the value of the mortgages to make them easier to
pay. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, the regulator that oversees Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac, has effectively blocked such write-downs on the vast amount of
loans those entities have guaranteed.
A new Obama administration may move to change the agency's stance on
write-downs, perhaps by replacing its acting director, Edward DeMarco. If that
happened, it would be a sign that the White House had a taste for more radical
housing actions. The agency declined to comment.
Then there's what to do with the Federal Housing Administration, another
government entity that has backstopped a huge amount of mortgages since the
financial crisis. The housing administration was set up to focus on lower-income
borrowers, and it backs loans that have very low down payments. Its share of the
market has grown since the crisis. The F.H.A. accounted for 13 percent of the
market in the third quarter, according to Inside Mortgage Finance.
The new administration has to decide whether it wants the F.H.A. to continue
doing as much business. The risk is that a big pullback by the F.H.A. could
reduce the availability of mortgages to lower-income borrowers. Banks almost
certainly won't want to write loans with minuscule down payments since they are
considered riskier.
Ultimately, housing policy comes down to one question: Which borrowers should
get the most subsidies?
Right now, the government largess encompasses a wide swath of borrowers. But
most analysts believe government support should be focused on lower-income
borrowers.
"We will know that the Obama administration is serious about housing finance
reform when it comes up with a proposal for affordable housing," said Mr.
Swagel, the University of Maryland professor.
November 8,
2012
The New York Times
By DAVID BROOKS
The
American colonies were first settled by Protestant dissenters. These were people
who refused to submit to the established religious authorities. They sought
personal relationships with God. They moved to the frontier when life got too
confining. They created an American creed, built, as the sociologist Seymour
Martin Lipset put it, around liberty, individualism, equal opportunity, populism
and laissez-faire.
This creed shaped America and evolved with the decades. Starting in the mid-20th
century, there was a Southern and Western version of it, formed by ranching
Republicans like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Their
version drew on the traditional tenets: ordinary people are capable of
greatness; individuals have the power to shape their destinies; they should be
given maximum freedom to do so.
This is not an Ayn Randian, radically individualistic belief system. Republicans
in this mold place tremendous importance on churches, charities and families —
on the sort of pastoral work Mitt Romney does and the sort of community groups
Representative Paul Ryan celebrated in a speech at Cleveland State University
last month.
But this worldview is innately suspicious of government. Its adherents generally
believe in the equation that more government equals less individual and civic
vitality. Growing beyond proper limits, government saps initiative, sucks
resources, breeds a sense of entitlement and imposes a stifling uniformity on
the diverse webs of local activity.
During the 2012 campaign, Republicans kept circling back to the spot where
government expansion threatens personal initiative: you didn’t build that;
makers versus takers; the supposed dependency of the 47 percent. Again and
again, Republicans argued that the vital essence of the country is threatened by
overweening government.
These economic values played well in places with a lot of Protestant dissenters
and their cultural heirs. They struck chords with people whose imaginations are
inspired by the frontier experience.
But, each year, there are more Americans whose cultural roots lie elsewhere.
Each year, there are more people from different cultures, with different
attitudes toward authority, different attitudes about individualism, different
ideas about what makes people enterprising.
More important, people in these groups are facing problems not captured by the
fundamental Republican equation: more government = less vitality.
The Pew Research Center does excellent research on Asian-American and Hispanic
values. Two findings jump out. First, people in these groups have an awesome
commitment to work. By most measures, members of these groups value
industriousness more than whites.
Second, they are also tremendously appreciative of government. In survey after
survey, they embrace the idea that some government programs can incite hard
work, not undermine it; enhance opportunity, not crush it.
Moreover, when they look at the things that undermine the work ethic and
threaten their chances to succeed, it’s often not government. It’s a modern
economy in which you can work more productively, but your wages still don’t
rise. It’s a bloated financial sector that just sent the world into turmoil.
It’s a university system that is indispensable but unaffordable. It’s chaotic
neighborhoods that can’t be cured by withdrawing government programs.
For these people, the Republican equation is irrelevant. When they hear Romney
talk abstractly about Big Government vs. Small Government, they think: He
doesn’t get me or people like me.
Let’s just look at one segment, Asian-Americans. Many of these people are
leading the lives Republicans celebrate. They are, disproportionately,
entrepreneurial, industrious and family-oriented. Yet, on Tuesday,
Asian-Americans rejected the Republican Party by 3 to 1. They don’t relate to
the Republican equation that more government = less work.
Over all, Republicans have lost the popular vote in five out of the six
post-cold-war elections because large parts of the country have moved on. The
basic Republican framing no longer resonates.
Some Republicans argue that they can win over these rising groups with a better
immigration policy. That’s necessary but insufficient. The real problem is
economic values.
If I were given a few minutes with the Republican billionaires, I’d say: spend
less money on marketing and more on product development. Spend less on “super
PACs” and more on research. Find people who can shift the debate away from the
abstract frameworks — like Big Government vs. Small Government. Find people who
can go out with notebooks and study specific, grounded everyday problems: what
exactly does it take these days to rise? What exactly happens to the ambitious
kid in Akron at each stage of life in this new economy? What are the best ways
to rouse ambition and open fields of opportunity?
Don’t get hung up on whether the federal government is 20 percent or 22 percent
of G.D.P. Let Democrats be the party of security, defending the 20th-century
welfare state. Be the party that celebrates work and inflames enterprise. Use
any tool, public or private, to help people transform their lives.
November 8,
2012
The New York Times
By PAUL KRUGMAN
To say the
obvious: Democrats won an amazing victory. Not only did they hold the White
House despite a still-troubled economy, in a year when their Senate majority was
supposed to be doomed, they actually added seats.
Nor was that all: They scored major gains in the states. Most notably,
California — long a poster child for the political dysfunction that comes when
nothing can get done without a legislative supermajority — not only voted for
much-needed tax increases, but elected, you guessed it, a Democratic
supermajority.
But one goal eluded the victors. Even though preliminary estimates suggest that
Democrats received somewhat more votes than Republicans in Congressional
elections, the G.O.P. retains solid control of the House thanks to extreme
gerrymandering by courts and Republican-controlled state governments. And
Representative John Boehner, the speaker of the House, wasted no time in
declaring that his party remains as intransigent as ever, utterly opposed to any
rise in tax rates even as it whines about the size of the deficit.
So President Obama has to make a decision, almost immediately, about how to deal
with continuing Republican obstruction. How far should he go in accommodating
the G.O.P.’s demands?
My answer is, not far at all. Mr. Obama should hang tough, declaring himself
willing, if necessary, to hold his ground even at the cost of letting his
opponents inflict damage on a still-shaky economy. And this is definitely no
time to negotiate a “grand bargain” on the budget that snatches defeat from the
jaws of victory.
In saying this, I don’t mean to minimize the very real economic dangers posed by
the so-called fiscal cliff that is looming at the end of this year if the two
parties can’t reach a deal. Both the Bush-era tax cuts and the Obama
administration’s payroll tax cut are set to expire, even as automatic spending
cuts in defense and elsewhere kick in thanks to the deal struck after the 2011
confrontation over the debt ceiling. And the looming combination of tax
increases and spending cuts looks easily large enough to push America back into
recession.
Nobody wants to see that happen. Yet it may happen all the same, and Mr. Obama
has to be willing to let it happen if necessary.
Why? Because Republicans are trying, for the third time since he took office, to
use economic blackmail to achieve a goal they lack the votes to achieve through
the normal legislative process. In particular, they want to extend the Bush tax
cuts for the wealthy, even though the nation can’t afford to make those tax cuts
permanent and the public believes that taxes on the rich should go up — and
they’re threatening to block any deal on anything else unless they get their
way. So they are, in effect, threatening to tank the economy unless their
demands are met.
Mr. Obama essentially surrendered in the face of similar tactics at the end of
2010, extending low taxes on the rich for two more years. He made significant
concessions again in 2011, when Republicans threatened to create financial chaos
by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. And the current potential crisis is the
legacy of those past concessions.
Well, this has to stop — unless we want hostage-taking, the threat of making the
nation ungovernable, to become a standard part of our political process.
So what should he do? Just say no, and go over the cliff if necessary.
It’s worth pointing out that the fiscal cliff isn’t really a cliff. It’s not
like the debt-ceiling confrontation, where terrible things might well have
happened right away if the deadline had been missed. This time, nothing very bad
will happen to the economy if agreement isn’t reached until a few weeks or even
a few months into 2013. So there’s time to bargain.
More important, however, is the point that a stalemate would hurt Republican
backers, corporate donors in particular, every bit as much as it hurt the rest
of the country. As the risk of severe economic damage grew, Republicans would
face intense pressure to cut a deal after all.
Meanwhile, the president is in a far stronger position than in previous
confrontations. I don’t place much stock in talk of “mandates,” but Mr. Obama
did win re-election with a populist campaign, so he can plausibly claim that
Republicans are defying the will of the American people. And he just won his big
election and is, therefore, far better placed than before to weather any
political blowback from economic troubles — especially when it would be so
obvious that these troubles were being deliberately inflicted by the G.O.P. in a
last-ditch attempt to defend the privileges of the 1 percent.
Most of all, standing up to hostage-taking is the right thing to do for the
health of America’s political system.
So stand your ground, Mr. President, and don’t give in to threats. No deal is
better than a bad deal.
WASHINGTON | Thu Nov 8, 2012
1:21pm EST
Reuters
By Susan Heavey
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tuesday's decisive win by Barack Obama
in the U.S. presidential election highlighted how population shifts - ethnic and
generational - have buoyed Democrats while forcing Republicans to rethink their
message.
Without recasting their core message and actively trying to expand their base
beyond older mostly white Americans, conservatives could struggle even more in
future elections as the nation's population incorporates more Latinos, Asians
and other minorities as well as young voters, analysts said.
First-time voters, including many young people and immigrants, favored the
president by large margins, while older voters leaned to Republican Mitt Romney,
Reuters/Ipsos Election Day polling showed.
Obama won an estimated 66 percent of the Hispanic vote, according to
Reuters/Ipsos election day polling, at a time when the Latino population is
growing rapidly in states such as Florida, one of eight or so politically
divided states that were crucial in the presidential race. Other estimates put
Obama's share of the Hispanic vote above 70 percent.
"The nonwhite vote has been growing - tick, tick, tick - slowly, steadily. Every
four-year cycle the electorate gets a little bit more diverse. And it's going to
continue," said Paul Taylor of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.
"This is a very powerful demographic that's changing our politics and our
destiny," Taylor said, adding that the number of white voters is expected to
continue to decline a few points in each future election cycle.
Data has shown for years that the United States is poised to become a "majority
minority" nation - with whites a minority of the country - over the next several
decades. But Tuesday's results highlighted the political impact.(See
link.reuters.com/hyd83t for a graphic.)
About 80 percent of blacks, Latinos and other nonwhite voters cast their ballots
for Obama on Tuesday compared with less than 17 percent for Romney, according to
Reuters/Ipsos polling. Obama also won about 63 percent of total voters age 18 to
34.
Overall, Romney won nearly 57 percent of the white vote compared with 41 percent
for Obama, the polling data showed. The vast majority of votes cast for Romney
came from white voters.
Demographer William Frey said that division is troubling.
The United States has long history of racial divide stemming from its roots in
slavery and including the civil rights battles of the 1960s.
"We still are a country that's kind of divided, and a lot of that fissure in the
population tends to be based in race and age and ethnicity," said Frey, a senior
fellow at the Brookings Institute. "There's kind of a dangerous result in this
election when we see older whites moving in one direction and younger minorities
moving in another direction."
Frey said he sees the gap less as racism and more as a cultural generation gap.
"It's a little bit of a warning sign that we need to pay attention to," he said.
A GROWING PRESENCE FOR MINORITIES
U.S. data released earlier this year showed the number of ethnic minority births
topping 50 percent of the nation's total births for the first time..
It will be years before those newest Americans will be old enough to vote, but
the demographic shift is clear. Most analysts project whites to be the racial
U.S. minority sometime between 2040 and 2050.
Latinos, the fastest-growing demographic in the United States, are a huge
factor.
More than 70 percent voted for Obama compared with about 28 percent for Romney,
according to Reuters/Ipsos data.
"We are a much more diverse country than we were" just a generation or two ago,
said Pew's Taylor, who also oversees the center's Social and Demographic Trends
project and the Pew Hispanic Center. The rising number of multiracial children
are also likely to become more of a factor, he added.
Obama, whose historic win in 2008 made him the first ethnic minority U.S.
president, had a black father and a white mother.
Aging baby boomers also are a key factor in the demographic transition, as older
voters "leave the electorate," as Taylor delicately put it, and young voters
more accepting of diversity and an active government are added to the rolls.
That could help drive certain civil rights ballot initiatives, like votes in
Maryland and Maine on Tuesday to approve same-sex marriage. In each instance,
support from younger voters helped put the measures over the top.
"It was an election in which the future won over the past," said Marshall Ganz,
a Harvard University lecturer on public policy, said of Tuesday's various
contests.
'A RECIPE FOR EXTINCTION'?
Tuesday's outcome poses big questions for Republicans as they seek new national
leaders and prepare for the next congressional election in 2014 and beyond.
Conservatives' stance against immigration reform and gay marriage is "a recipe
for extinction," said analyst Mike Murphy, a one-time adviser to prominent
Republicans including Arizona Senator John McCain, former Florida Governor Jeb
Bush, former New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman and Romney, a former
Massachusetts governor.
"The question is whether or not we're going to have an adult conversation inside
the party about our need to attract more people than grumpy old white guys,"
Murphy told MSNBC. "Demographically, our time is running out."
Ted Cruz, a Latino Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from Texas, said on CBS
that his party had to recruit candidates who connect with that community in a
"real and genuine way."
Not all Republicans were willing to concede to demographics. Some highlighted
tactical and strategic issues in their lost bid for the White House and their
failed efforts to take control of the U.S. Senate.
And analysts said Democrats, too, have lessons to learn.
"It is a very powerful wake-up call to both political parties," said Pew's
Taylor.
Brookings' Frey said Democrats still must keep the white vote in mind for at
least the next couple of election cycles.
"Whites are not dead," he said. "They're still a big part of this population."
(Additional reporting by Ros Krasny and Gabriel Debenedetti in
Washington;
and David Adams in Miami; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
September 20, 2012
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
For generations of Americans, it was a given that children
would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that
this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites,
an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years
since 1990.
Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making
the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that
life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting.
Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that
looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly
sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in
the new research said its findings were persuasive.
The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible
explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young
whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity,
and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack
health insurance.
The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who
lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public
health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead
investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life
expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of
white women of the same education level, the study found.
White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life
expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level rose, the
data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as whites, while Hispanics
live longer than both whites and blacks.
“We’re used to looking at groups and complaining that their mortality rates
haven’t improved fast enough, but to actually go backward is deeply troubling,”
said John G. Haaga, head of the Population and Social Processes Branch of the
National Institute on Aging, who was not involved in the new study.
The five-year decline for white women rivals the catastrophic seven-year drop
for Russian men in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, said
Michael Marmot, director of the Institute of Health Equity in London.
The decline among the least educated non-Hispanic whites, who make up a
shrinking share of the population, widened an already troubling gap. The latest
estimate shows life expectancy for white women without a high school diploma was
73.5 years, compared with 83.9 years for white women with a college degree or
more. For white men, the gap was even bigger: 67.5 years for the least educated
white men compared with 80.4 for those with a college degree or better.
The dropping life expectancies have helped weigh down the United States in
international life expectancy rankings, particularly for women. In 2010,
American women fell to 41st place, down from 14th place in 1985, in the United
Nations rankings. Among developed countries, American women sank from the middle
of the pack in 1970 to last place in 2010, according to the Human Mortality
Database.
The slump is so vexing that it became the subject of an inquiry by the National
Academy of Sciences, which published a report on it last year.
“There’s this enormous issue of why,” said David Cutler, an economics professor
at Harvard who was an author of a 2008 paper that found modest declines in life
expectancy for less educated white women from 1981 to 2000. “It’s very puzzling
and we don’t have a great explanation.”
And it is yet another sign of distress in one of the country’s most vulnerable
groups during a period when major social changes are transforming life for less
educated whites. Childbirth outside marriage has soared, increasing pressures on
women who are more likely to be single parents. Those who do marry tend to
choose mates with similar education levels, concentrating the disadvantage.
Inklings of this decline have been accumulating since 2008. Professor Cutler’s
paper, published in Health Affairs, found a decline in life expectancy of about
a year for less educated white women from 1990 to 2000. Three other studies, by
Ahmedin Jemal, a researcher at the American Cancer Society; Jennifer Karas
Montez, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Harvard;
and Richard Miech, a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, found
increases in mortality rates (the ratio of deaths to a population) for the least
educated Americans.
Professor Olshansky’s study, financed by the MacArthur Foundation Research
Network on an Aging Society, found by far the biggest decline in life expectancy
for the least educated non-Hispanic whites, in large part because he isolated
those without a high school diploma, a group usually combined with high school
graduates. Non-Hispanic whites currently make up 63 percent of the population of
the United States.
Researchers said they were baffled by the magnitude of the drop. Some cautioned
that the results could be overstated because Americans without a high school
diploma — about 12 percent of the population, down from about 22 percent in
1990, according to the Census Bureau — were a shrinking group that was now more
likely to be disadvantaged in ways besides education, compared with past
generations.
Professor Olshansky agreed that the group was now smaller, but said the
magnitude of the drop in life expectancy was still a measure of deterioration.
“The good news is that there are fewer people in this group,” he said. “The bad
news is that those who are in it are dying more quickly.”
Researchers, including some involved in the earlier studies that found more
modest declines in life expectancy, said that Professor Olshansky’s methodology
was sound and that the findings reinforced evidence of a troubling pattern that
has emerged for those at the bottom of the education ladder, particularly white
women.
“Something is going on in the lives of disadvantaged white women that is leading
to some really alarming trends in life expectancy,” said Ms. Montez of Harvard.
Researchers offered theories for the drop in life expectancy, but cautioned that
none could fully explain it.
James Jackson, director of the Institute of Social Research at the University of
Michigan and an author of the new study, said white women with low levels of
education may exhibit more risky behavior than that of previous generations.
Overdoses from prescription drugs have spiked since 1990, disproportionately
affecting whites, particularly women. Professor Miech, of the University of
Colorado, noted the rise in a 2011 paper in the American Sociological Review,
arguing that it was among the biggest changes for whites in recent decades and
that it appeared to have offset gains for less educated people in the rate of
heart attacks.
Ms. Montez, who studies women’s health, said that smoking was a big part of
declines in life expectancy for less educated women. Smoking rates have
increased among women without a high school diploma, both white and black, she
said. But for men of the same education level, they have declined.
This group also has less access to health care than before. The share of
working-age adults with less than a high school diploma who did not have health
insurance rose to 43 percent in 2006, up from 35 percent in 1993, according to
Mr. Jemal at the American Cancer Society. Just 10 percent of those with a
college degree were uninsured last year, the Census Bureau reported.
The shift should be seen against the backdrop of sweeping changes in the
American economy and in women’s lives, said Lisa Berkman, director of the
Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. The overwhelming majority
of women now work, while fertility has remained higher than in European
countries. For women in low-wage jobs, which are often less flexible, this could
take a toll on health, a topic that Professor Berkman has a grant from the
National Institute on Aging to study.
November 7,
2012
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON
and FERNANDA SANTOS
Defying
predictions that their participation would be lackluster, Latinos turned out in
record numbers on Tuesday and voted for President Obama by broad margins,
tipping the balance in at least three swing states and securing their position
as an organized force in American politics with the power to move national
elections.
Over all, according to exit polls not yet finalized by Edison Research, Mr.
Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote while Mitt Romney won 27 percent. The
gap of 44 percentage points was even greater than Mr. Obama’s 36-point advantage
over John McCain in 2008.
After waiting in long lines in countless places — more than four hours at some
South Florida polls — Latinos had such a strong turnout that it lifted them to
10 percent of voters nationwide, an increase from 6 percent in 2000. Latino
leaders said their voters had cast ballots that ensured Mr. Obama’s relatively
narrow plurality — fewer than 2.8 million votes — in the popular count.
“Latino voters confirmed unequivocally that the road to the White House passes
through Latino neighborhoods,” said Clarissa Martinez De Castro, a top official
at NCLR, the Hispanic organization also known as the National Council of La
Raza, which joined in an extensive campaign this year to register and turn out
voters.
Latinos’ greatest impact was in several battleground states portrayed by polls
as close contests before Election Day. In Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, Mr.
Obama won the Hispanic vote by big percentages that well exceeded margins of
victory, exit polls showed. In each of those states, Latinos significantly
increased their share of total voters, gaining influence that could be decisive
in future elections.
In Florida, where Mr. Obama held a narrow lead on Wednesday in a race that had
not yet been called, the president won among Latinos by 60 percent to 39 percent
for Mr. Romney, among a group that now makes up 17 percent of the state’s
voters.
Mr. Romney’s weak showing prompted Latino leaders to warn that Republicans could
no longer afford to ignore or alienate Hispanics in national races. But they
also immediately laid out an ambitious agenda for Mr. Obama, saying they
expected to see jobs programs tailored to Latinos and quick action on
legislation to give legal status to millions of illegal immigrants.
“The sleeping Latino giant is wide-awake and it’s cranky,” said Eliseo Medina,
international secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union,
another group that played a central role in spurring Latinos to vote. “We expect
action and leadership on immigration reform in 2013. No more excuses. No more
obstruction or gridlock.”
In many states, Latinos did not wait for either the Democratic or the Republican
campaigns to come to them. Instead they mounted coordinated voter registration
and education efforts, giving them a degree of independence as a voting bloc and
creating popular networks that they said they planned to mobilize again to bring
pressure on the White House and Congress.
In Arizona, a conservative state known for tough immigration enforcement
policies that Mr. Romney won handily, Latinos saw setbacks. A bid to unseat Joe
Arpaio, the hard-line sheriff of Maricopa County, was declared to have failed. A
Hispanic Democrat, Richard Carmona, apparently was defeated in a Senate race by
Jeff Flake, a popular Republican who has served in the House of Representatives.
Records from the office of Secretary of State Ken Bennett showed Wednesday that
there were 600,000 votes yet to be counted statewide.
Luis Heredia, the executive director of the Arizona Democratic Party, said the
outcome of many close races could not be determined without the counting of
those ballots.
A crucial piece of Mr. Obama’s winning strategy among Latinos was an initiative
he announced in June to grant temporary reprieves from deportation to hundreds
of thousands of young immigrants here illegally. In a survey of 5,600 Latino
voters on the eve of the election by ImpreMedia and Latino Decisions, a polling
group, 58 percent said the reprieves had made them “more enthusiastic” about Mr.
Obama.
Last month, Mr. Romney said that he would end the reprieves if he became
president, a move that solidified the view among many Latinos that he was
hostile to a program they liked. It gives young immigrants protection from
deportation for two years and also work permits that allow them to be employed
legally in this country for the first time.
A campaign led by young immigrants eligible for the deferrals was one of the
most effective voter mobilization efforts.
“Even though we could not vote, we had many friends and family members who
could,” said Lorella Praeli, advocacy director of the United We Dream network, a
youth group that led a voter campaign.
In Arizona, a dozen groups teamed up to increase Latino voter registration and
to add more Latinos to the state’s early-voting list, which entitles voters to
receive ballots by mail at their homes. The number of Latinos on early-voting
lists rose substantially, to 225,000 this year from 96,000 in 2008, said Petra
Falcón, director of Promise Arizona, one of the groups in that effort.
On Tuesday, the groups dispatched monitors to poll sites where they knew many
Latino voters would be casting ballots for the first time.
By midmorning, it had become clear that a lot of them were being forced to cast
provisional ballots because officials could not find their names on the rolls.
In a precinct in Tolleson, 300 out of 342 votes cast by 4 p.m. were provisional
ballots, according to poll monitors assigned to the site. At Word of Abundant
Life Christian Center in West Phoenix, 68 out of 123 voters had used provisional
ballots by that hour.
Adilene Montesinos, a poll worker at Progressive Baptist Church in Mesa, said
the problem had affected Latinos and also blacks. “There were so many, we almost
ran out of provisional ballots,” Ms. Montesinos said.
Officials in Maricopa County, which accounts for more than half of the state’s
voters, said the count of provisional ballots was not likely to begin until
Monday. The officials said Wednesday that 344,000 ballots remained to be
counted, among them 115,000 provisional ballots.
November 7,
2012
The New York Times
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
A couple of
decades ago, Prince William County was one of the mostly white, somewhat rural,
far-flung suburbs where Republican candidates went to accumulate the votes to
win elections in Virginia.
Since then, Prince William has been transformed. Open tracts have given way to
town houses and gated developments, as the county — about a half-hour south of
Washington — has risen to have the seventh-highest household income in the
country and has become the first county in Virginia where minorities make up
more than half the population.
If Prince William looks like the future of the country, Democrats have so far
developed a much more successful strategy of appealing to that future. On
Tuesday, President Obama beat Mitt Romney by almost 15 percentage points in
Prince William, nearly doubling George W. Bush’s margin over Al Gore in 2000,
helping Mr. Obama to a surprisingly large victory in Virginia.
He did it not only by winning Hispanic voters, but also by winning strong
majorities of the growing number of Asian-American voters and of voters under
age 40. A version of his coalition in Virginia — a combination of minorities,
women and younger adults — also helped Mr. Obama win Colorado, Nevada and
perhaps Florida, which remained too close to call. He came close in North
Carolina, a reliable state for Republican presidential nominees only a few years
ago that he narrowly won in 2008.
The demographic changes in the American electorate have come with striking speed
and have left many Republicans, who have not won as many electoral votes as Mr.
Obama did on Tuesday in 24 years, concerned about their future. The Republicans’
Southern strategy, of appealing mostly to white voters, appears to have run into
a demographic wall.
“Before, we thought it was an important issue, improving demographically,” said
Al Cardenas, the chairman of the American Conservative Union. “Now, we know it’s
an essential issue. You have to ignore reality not to deal with this issue.”
The central problem for Republicans is that the Democrats’ biggest
constituencies are growing. Asian-Americans, for example, made up 3 percent of
the electorate, up from 2 percent in 2008, and went for Mr. Obama by about 47
percentage points. Republicans increasingly rely on older white voters. And
contrary to much conventional wisdom, voters do not necessarily grow more
conservative as they age; until the last decade, a majority of both younger and
older voters both tended to go to the winner of the presidential election.
This year, Mr. Obama managed to win a second term despite winning only 39
percent of white voters and 44 percent of voters older than 65, according to
exit polls not yet finalized conducted by Edison Research. White men made up
only about one-quarter of Mr. Obama’s voters. In the House of Representatives
next year, for the first time, white men will make up less than half of the
Democratic caucus.
The Republican Party “needs messages and policies that appeal to a broader
audience,” said Mark McKinnon, a former strategist for George W. Bush. “This
election proved that trying to expand a shrinking base ain’t going to cut it.
It’s time to put some compassion back in conservatism. The party needs more
tolerance, more diversity and a deeper appreciation for the concerns of the
middle class.”
Nothing in politics is permanent, and Republicans may soon find ways to appeal
to minorities and younger voters. As Hispanic and Asian voters continue to move
up the income scale, for example, more of them may turn skeptical about
Democratic calls to raise taxes on the affluent.
And the Democrats may yet confront their own demographic challenges once they no
longer have Mr. Obama and his billion-dollar campaign machine at the top of the
ticket, guaranteeing record-breaking turnout among his new Democratic coalition.
If turnout among blacks, Hispanics and younger voters — groups that have
historically had comparatively low turnout rates — had declined slightly, Mr.
Obama might have lost.
But the immediate question for Republicans, people in the party say, is how to
improve their image with voters they are already losing in large numbers.
“You don’t have to sell out on the issues and suddenly take on the Democratic
position on taxes to win the black vote or the Latino vote or the women vote,”
said Corey Stewart, a Republican who is chairman of the Board of County
Supervisors in Prince William. “But you do have to modulate your tone.”
Mr. Stewart, who is running for lieutenant governor next year, drew some
criticism in 2007 by pushing for local crackdowns by the police on illegal
immigrants. That has cost him support among many Hispanic voters in the county,
but he says it helped him politically among blacks who felt threatened
economically by the surge of newcomers.
“The changes are stark,” he said. “The minority population is increasing, and
the white population is stagnant.”
Mr. Stewart said he had spent much time in the county’s minority areas and
contrasted his political success with the failure of Mr. Romney, whose only
planned visit to Prince William was in the western town of Haymarket, a wealthy,
white part of the county.
“He did not go into the minority areas,” Mr. Stewart said. “They didn’t go into
the areas where they didn’t feel comfortable. They tended to go to areas where
they already had their votes, in heavily white areas.”
In Prince William, as elsewhere, the biggest challenge for Republicans may be
among Hispanic voters, given their numbers. Mr. Obama’s victories in Colorado,
Nevada and Virginia came in part because Hispanics turned out in droves and
voted Democratic. In Colorado, 14 percent of the voters were Hispanic, and Mr.
Obama won three-fourths of them. In Florida, Hispanic voters were almost
one-fifth of the electorate, and Mr. Obama won about three-fifths of them.
Mr. Cardenas, a former chairman of the Florida Republican Party and a loyal
supporter of Mr. Romney’s, says his party would never earn their support until
it found a new to address of illegal immigration.
“We need to check off that box; we need to get immigration reform done in 2013,”
he said. “We need to show that Republicans are willing to sit at the table and
reach a compromise that is in keeping with what the Hispanic community wants and
needs.”
Even that issue brings risks, though, because any immigration bill that passed
in 2013 would be signed by and associated with a Democratic president. The
harder challenge for Republicans will be developing proposals that minority and
younger voters associate with the party — and support.
In Prince William, the Hispanic population tripled from 2000 to 2010, much of it
along the Route 1 corridor in Dale City. But Tom Davis, who used to represent
Dale City as a Republican member of Congress, said that the problem for his
former colleagues goes beyond just Hispanic outreach.
The party’s coalition is contracting, not expanding, he says. It has to find a
way to broaden its reach, in part by finding more minority and female candidates
to run under the Republican banner, Mr. Davis argues. And he said the outreach
had to be real: “It’s not just putting them into the photo-ops at the
convention.”
Republicans like Mr. Davis — and some inside Mr. Romney’s campaign — are quick
to point out that the election this week was close, not a blowout. Mr. Davis
said that it was “not time to panic” for Republicans. But he said Republicans
must be honest with themselves about the future.
“It is time to sit down practically and say where are we going to add pieces to
our coalition,” he said. “There just are not enough middle-aged white guys that
we can scrape together to win. There’s just not enough of them.”
November 7,
2012
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
and JESS BIDGOOD
At the
private air terminal at Logan Airport in Boston early Wednesday, men in
unwrinkled suits sank into plush leather chairs as they waited to board
Gulfstream jets, trading consolations over Mitt Romney’s loss the day before.
“All I can say is the American people have spoken,” said Kenneth Langone, the
founder of Home Depot and one of Mr. Romney’s top fund-raisers, briskly plucking
off his hat and settling into a couch.
The biggest single donor in political history, the casino billionaire Sheldon
Adelson, mingled with other Romney backers at a postelection breakfast, fresh
off a large gamble gone bad. Of the eight candidates he supported with tens of
millions of dollars in contributions to “super PACs,” none were victorious on
Tuesday.
And as calls came in on Wednesday from some of the donors who had poured more
than $300 million into the pair of big-spending outside groups founded in part
by Karl Rove — perhaps the leading political entrepreneur of the super PAC era —
he offered them a grim upside: without us, the race would not have been as close
as it was.
The most expensive election in American history drew to a close this week with a
price tag estimated at more than $6 billion, propelled by legal and regulatory
decisions that allowed wealthy donors to pour record amounts of cash into races
around the country.
But while outside spending affected the election in innumerable ways — reshaping
the Republican presidential nominating contest, clogging the airwaves with
unprecedented amounts of negative advertising and shoring up embattled
Republican incumbents in the House — the prizes most sought by the emerging
class of megadonors remained outside their grasp. President Obama will return to
the White House in January, and the Democrats have strengthened their lock on
the Senate.
The election’s most lavishly self-financed candidate fared no better. Linda E.
McMahon, a Connecticut Republican who is a former professional wrestling
executive, spent close to $100 million — nearly all of it her own money — on two
races for the Senate, conceding defeat on Tuesday for the second time in three
years.
“Money is a necessary condition for electoral success,” said Bob Biersack, a
senior fellow at the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign
spending. “But it’s not sufficient, and it’s never been.”
Even by the flush standards of a campaign in which the two presidential
candidates raised $1 billion each, the scale of outside spending was staggering:
more than $1 billion all told, about triple the amount in 2010.
Mr. Obama faced at least $386 million in negative advertising from super PACs
and other outside spenders, more than double what the groups supporting him
spent on the airwaves. Outside groups spent more than $37 million in Virginia’s
Senate race and $30 million in Ohio’s, a majority to aid the Republican
candidates.
The bulk of that outside money came from a relatively small group of wealthy
donors, unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allowed
unlimited contributions to super PACs. Harold Simmons, a Texas industrialist,
gave $26.9 million to super PACs backing Mr. Romney and Republican candidates
for the Senate. Joe Ricketts, the owner of the Chicago Cubs, spent close to $13
million to bankroll a super PAC attacking Mr. Obama over federal spending.
Bob Perry, a Texas homebuilder, poured more than $21 million into super PACs
active in the presidential race and the Senate battles in Florida and Virginia,
where Democrats narrowly prevailed. A donor network marshaled by Charles and
David Koch, the billionaire industrialists and conservative philanthropists,
reportedly sought to raise $400 million for tax-exempt groups that are not
required to disclose their spending.
Mr. Adelson’s giving to super PACs and other outside groups came to more than
$60 million, though in public Mr. Adelson did not seem overly concerned about
the paltry returns on his investment.
“Paying bills,” Mr. Adelson said on Tuesday night when asked by a Norwegian
reporter how he thought his donations had been spent. “That’s how you spend
money. Either that or become a Jewish husband — you spend a lot of money.”
Flush with cash, Republican-leaning groups outspent Democratic ones by an even
greater margin than in 2010. But rather than produce a major partisan imbalance,
the money merely evened the playing field in many races.
In several competitive Senate races, high spending by outside groups was offset
to a large extent with stronger fund-raising by Democratic candidates, assisted
at the margins by Democratic super PACs. For much of the fall, Mr. Obama and
Democratic groups broadcast at least as many ads, and sometimes more, in swing
states than Mr. Romney and his allied groups, in part because Mr. Obama was able
to secure lower ad rates by paying for most of the advertising himself. Mr.
Romney relied far more on outside groups, which must pay higher rates.
Haley Barbour, a former Mississippi governor who helped Mr. Rove raise money for
American Crossroads and its sister group, Crossroads Grassroots Policy
Strategies, said that without a blitz of coordinated anti-Obama advertising in
the summer, the campaign would not have been as competitive.
“I believe that some of that money actually kept Romney from getting beat down
by the carpet-bombing he underwent from the Obama forces,” Mr. Barbour said. “I
did look at it more as us trying to keep our candidates from getting swamped,
like what happened to McCain.”
Some advocates for tighter campaign financing regulations argued that who won or
lost was beside the point. The danger, they argued, is that in the post-Citizens
United world, candidates and officeholders on both sides of the aisle are far
more beholden to the wealthy individuals who can finance large-scale independent
spending.
“Unlimited contributions and secret money in American politics have resulted in
the past in scandal and the corruption of government decisions,” said Fred
Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, a watchdog group. “This will happen
again in the future.”
But on Wednesday, at least, the nation’s megadonors returned home with lighter
wallets and few victories.
As the morning wore on at Logan Airport, more guests from Mr. Romney’s
election-night party at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center trickled in,
lugging garment bags and forming a small line at the security checkpoint.
“It’s going to be a long flight home, isn’t it?” said one person, who asked not
to be identified.
The investor Julian Robertson, who held fund-raisers for Mr. Romney and gave
more than $2 million to a pro-Romney super PAC, arrived with several companions.
Mr. Robertson spotted an acquaintance: Emil W. Henry Jr., an economic adviser
and a fund-raiser for Mr. Romney, to whom Mr. Robertson had offered a ride on
his charter.
Early Wednesday morning, as sleep-deprived supporters rallied for a final cheer,
President Obama concluded his re-election campaign with a promising glimpse at
what the fight was all about: a second-term agenda that can make real progress
on issues neglected in the first.
Without question, the president intends to build on and improve the significant
accomplishments of the last four years, particularly the full implementation of
health care reform and the use of government policy to keep the economy growing.
But the president went beyond that in his victory speech and added some less
familiar words to his policy vocabulary.
Children should live in a world that is not burdened by debt or weakened by
inequality, he said, but also one “that isn’t threatened by the destructive
power of a warming planet.” That suggests he knows he has an opportunity to
address climate change with more vigor, going beyond auto-mileage standards and
renewable-energy jobs to possibly advocating tougher carbon emissions standards.
The president also said he was looking forward to working with Republicans to
fix the immigration system, giving him a chance to do more than promote the
Dream Act for young immigrants. He could lead the way to comprehensive reform
that combines strong enforcement with a path to citizenship for immigrants
already here. He also hinted that combating poverty might move higher on his
priority list.
And he spoke of tax reform, an issue that will immediately begin to grow louder
with the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts at year’s end. Mr. Obama won
re-election on an unambiguous promise not to renew those cuts for incomes of
$250,000 or more, and his supporters expect him to stick to that vow. In coming
months, after he persuades Congress to keep taxes from rising on the middle
class, he should push to restore a fair estate tax and raise the low capital
gains rate to the level of ordinary income.
He even mentioned the need to fix a balloting system that left thousands of
people standing in long lines to vote this week, a tantalizing hint that
electoral reform might become a priority.
All these agenda items require the same ingredient: ending his standoffish
attitude toward Congress and working closely with any leader or lawmaker willing
to make real progress. That may be easier now that Senate Democrats (and their
independent allies) have expanded their majority by two seats to 55, many of
them filled with newcomers more liberal and feisty than their predecessors, most
notably Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
The new Democratic caucus’s first order of business should be a reform of the
filibuster that prevents its routine abuse by Republicans, and the majority
leader, Harry Reid, suggested Wednesday that he supported some modest changes.
The newcomers, along with the White House, should forcefully advocate that he go
as far as possible.
A newly energized Obama administration and Senate could have the effect of
isolating the supply-side dead-enders in the House. John Boehner, the House
speaker, announced Wednesday that nothing had changed; he and his caucus still
oppose higher tax rates for the rich and still want to pursue Mr. Romney’s
defeated goal of raising revenue by lowering rates and cutting unspecified
loopholes. Standing up to Republican recalcitrance on this and many other issues
will require bringing to bear political pressure from the coalition that gave
Mr. Obama a commanding victory in the Electoral College on Tuesday.
The president’s victory was decisive, and many who didn’t support him
nonetheless told pollsters that they agreed with his positions on taxes, health
care and immigration. He now needs to use the power that voters have given to
him to enhance and broaden his agenda.
November 7,
2012
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES
and PETER BAKER
Newly
re-elected, President Obama moved quickly on Wednesday to open negotiations with
Congressional Republican leaders over the main unfinished business of his term —
a major deficit-reduction deal to avert a looming fiscal crisis — as he began
preparing for a second term that will include significant cabinet changes.
Mr. Obama, while still at home in Chicago at midday, called Speaker John A.
Boehner in what was described as a brief and cordial exchange on the need to
reach some budget compromise in the lame-duck session of Congress starting next
week. Later at the Capitol, Mr. Boehner publicly responded before assembled
reporters with his most explicit and conciliatory offer to date on Republicans’
willingness to raise tax revenues, but not top rates, together with a spending
cut package.
“Mr. President, this is your moment,” said Mr. Boehner, a day after
Congressional Republicans suffered election losses but kept their House
majority. “We’re ready to be led — not as Democrats or Republicans, but as
Americans. We want you to lead, not as a liberal or a conservative, but as
president of the United States of America.”
His statement came a few hours after Senator Harry Reid, leader of a Democratic
Senate majority that made unexpected gains, extended his own olive branch to the
opposition. While saying that Democrats would not be pushed around, Mr. Reid, a
former boxer, added, “It’s better to dance than to fight.”
Both men’s remarks followed Mr. Obama’s own overture in his victory speech after
midnight on Wednesday. “In the coming weeks and months,” he said, “I am looking
forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the
challenges we can only solve together: reducing our deficit, reforming our tax
code, fixing our immigration system, freeing ourselves from foreign oil.”
After his speech, Mr. Obama tried to call both Mr. Boehner and the Senate
Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, but was told they were asleep. The efforts
from both sides, after a long and exhausting campaign, suggested the urgency of
acting in the few weeks before roughly $700 billion in automatic tax increases
and across-the-board spending cuts take effect at year’s end — the “fiscal
cliff.” A failure to reach agreement could arrest the economic recovery.
Corporate America and financial markets for months have been dreading the
prospect of a partisan impasse. Stocks fell on Wednesday, with the Standard &
Poor’s 500 Index closing down 2.4 percent. The reasons for the drop were
unclear, given that stock futures did not drop significantly on Tuesday night as
the election results became clear. Analysts cited fears about the economic
impact of such big federal spending cuts and tax increases, but also about new
economic troubles in Europe.
While Mr. Obama enters the next fray with heightened leverage, both sides agree,
the coming negotiations hold big risks for both parties and for the president’s
ability to pursue other priorities in a new term, like investments in education
and research, and an overhaul of immigration law.
The president flew back to Washington from Chicago late on Wednesday, his
post-election relief reflected in a playful race up the steps of Air Force One
with his younger daughter, Sasha. At the White House, he prepared to shake up
his staff to help him tackle daunting economic and international challenges. He
will study lists of candidates for various positions that a senior adviser, Pete
Rouse, assembled in recent weeks as Mr. Obama crisscrossed the country
campaigning.
The most prominent members of his cabinet will leave soon. Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner long ago said
they would depart after the first term, and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta,
previously the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, has signaled that he
wants to return to California in the coming year. Also expected to depart is
David Plouffe, one of the president’s closest confidants.
Mr. Obama is expected to reshuffle both his inner circle and his economic team
as he accommodates the changes. For example, Jacob J. Lew, Mr. Obama’s current
White House chief of staff and former budget director, is said to be a prime
candidate to become Treasury secretary. For the foreseeable future, the holder
of that job is likely to be at the center of budget negotiations, and Mr. Lew
has experience in such bargaining dating to his work as a senior adviser to
Congressional Democrats 30 years ago in bipartisan talks with President Ronald
Reagan.
“They’ve been thinking about this for some time and they’re going to have a lot
of positions to fill at the highest levels,” said former Senator Tom Daschle,
who has close ties to the White House.
Both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush ended up replacing about half of
their cabinet members between terms, and Mr. Obama could end up doing about the
same, especially since his team has served through wars and economic crisis.
John D. Podesta, a chief of staff for Mr. Clinton and Mr. Obama’s transition
adviser, said, “There’s a certain amount of new energy you want to inject into
any team.”
There is talk about bringing in Republicans and business executives to help
rebuild bridges to both camps. The one Republican in the cabinet now,
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, has said he will leave. One possible
candidate, advisers say, could be Senator Olympia J. Snowe, a Republican
moderate from Maine who is retiring.
A front-runner for secretary of state appears to be Senator John Kerry, Democrat
of Massachusetts, and Democrats said worries about losing his Senate seat to the
Republicans in a special election had diminished with Tuesday’s victories.
Another candidate has been Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations,
but she has been a target of Republicans since she provided the administration’s
initial accounts, which proved to be wrong, of the September terrorist attack on
the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya.
While no one in the White House blames her, “she’s crippled,” said one adviser
who asked not to be named discussing personnel matters. Another possible
candidate, Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser, has told Mr. Obama
he wants to stay in his current position, according to a White House official.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., once expected to leave, now seems more
likely to stay for a while. Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland
security, would like to be attorney general and is widely respected in the White
House.
Among other cabinet officers who may leave are Ron Kirk, the trade
representative; Steven Chu, the energy secretary; Ken Salazar, the interior
secretary; Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, and Lisa P. Jackson, the
Environmental Protection Agency chief. But Valerie Jarrett, the president’s
longtime friend and senior adviser, plans to stay, according to Democrats close
to her.
It may be weeks before Mr. Obama starts making personnel announcements. His
first priority is policy, and its politics — positioning for the budget showdown
in the lame-duck session, to try to avoid the fiscal cliff by agreeing with
Republicans to alternative deficit-reduction measures.
If Mr. Obama got a mandate for anything after a campaign in which he was vague
on second-term prescriptions, he can and will claim one for his argument that
wealthy Americans like himself and his vanquished Republican rival, Mitt Romney,
should pay higher income taxes. That stance was a staple of Mr. Obama’s campaign
stump speeches for more than a year. And most voters, in surveys of those
leaving the polls on Tuesday, agreed with him.
Specifically, Mr. Obama has called — over Republicans’ objections — for
extending the Bush-era income tax cuts, which expire Dec. 31, only for
households with taxable income below $250,000 a year.
“This election tells us a lot about the political wisdom of defending tax cuts
for the wealthy at the expense of everything else,” a senior administration
official said early on Wednesday.
But Mr. Boehner, in his public remarks on Wednesday, sought to avoid a White
House tax trap that would have Republicans boxed in as defenders of the wealthy
at the expense of everyone else.
Speaking for Republicans after a conference call with his Congressional
colleagues, Mr. Boehner said he was ready to accept a budget deal that raised
federal revenues, but not the top rates on high incomes. And the deal, he said,
also would have to overhaul both the tax code and programs like Medicare and
Medicaid, whose growth as the population ages is driving projections of
unsustainable future debt.
Instead of allowing the top rates to go up, which Republicans say would harm the
economy, Mr. Boehner said Washington should end some deductions and loopholes to
raise revenues. The economic growth that would result from a significant deficit
reduction compromise would bring in additional revenues as well, he said.
Mr. Boehner entered the ornate Capitol room with none of his usual bonhomie,
walked to a lectern and spoke in formal tones from two Teleprompters. He then
hastened out of the room, ignoring shouted questions.
November 7,
2012T
he New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY,
ASHLEY PARKER,
JIM RUTENBERG
and
JEFF ZELENY
Seven
minutes into the first presidential debate, the mood turned from tense to grim
inside the room at the University of Denver where Obama staff members were
following the encounter. Top aides monitoring focus groups — voters who
registered their minute-by-minute reactions with the turn of a dial — watched as
enthusiasm for Mitt Romney spiked. “We are getting bombed on Twitter,” announced
Stephanie Cutter, a deputy campaign manager, while tracking the early postings
by political analysts and journalists whom the Obama campaign viewed as critical
in setting debate perceptions.
By the time President Obama had waded through a convoluted answer about health
care — “He’s not mentioning voucher-care?” someone called out — a pall had
fallen over the room. When the president closed by declaring, “This was a
terrific debate,” his re-election team grimaced. There was the obligatory huddle
to discuss how to explain his performance to the nation, and then a moment of
paralysis: No one wanted to go to the spin room and speak with reporters.
Mr. Romney’s advisers monitored the debate up the hall from the Obama team, as
well as at campaign headquarters in Boston. Giddy smiles flashed across their
faces as their focus groups showed the same results.
“Boy, the president is off tonight,” said Stuart Stevens, the senior Romney
strategist, sounding mystified, according to aides in the room. Russ Schriefer,
a senior adviser, immediately began planning television spots based entirely on
clips from the debate. As it drew to a close, Gail Gitcho, Mr. Romney’s
communications director in Boston, warned surrogates heading out to television
studios: “No chest thumping.”
The Oct. 3 debate sharply exposed Mr. Obama’s vulnerabilities and forced the
president and his advisers to work to reclaim the campaign over a grueling 30
days, ending with his triumph on Tuesday. After a summer of growing confidence,
Mr. Obama suddenly confronted the possibility of a loss that would diminish his
legacy and threaten his signature achievement, the health care law. He emerged
newly combative, newly contrite and newly willing to recognize how his disdain
for Mr. Romney had blinded him to his opponent’s strengths and ability to
inflict damage.
After watching a videotape of his debate performance, Mr. Obama began calling
panicked donors and supporters to reassure them he would do better. “This is on
me,” the president said, again and again.
Mr. Obama, who had dismissed warnings about being caught off guard in the
debate, told his advisers that he would now accept and deploy the prewritten
attack lines that he had sniffed at earlier. “If I give up a couple of points of
likability and come across as snarky, so be it,” Mr. Obama told his staff.
As his campaign began an all-out assault on Mr. Romney’s credibility and
conservative views, the president soon was denouncing Mr. Romney’s budget
proposals as a “sketchy deal” and charging that the Republican nominee was not
telling Americans the truth.
Mr. Obama recognized that to a certain extent, he had walked into a trap that
Mr. Romney’s advisers had anticipated: His antipathy toward Mr. Romney — which
advisers described as deeper than what Mr. Obama had felt for John McCain in
2008 — led the incumbent to underestimate his opponent as he began moving to the
center before the debate audience of millions of television viewers.
But as concerned as the White House was during the last 30 days of the campaign,
its polls never showed Mr. Obama slipping behind Mr. Romney, aides said. The
president was helped in no small part by the tremendous amount of money the
campaign built up, which had permitted him to pound his Republican rival before
he had ever had a chance to fully introduce himself to the nation.
That was just one of several ways that Mr. Obama’s campaign operations, some
unnoticed by Mr. Romney’s aides in Boston, helped save the president’s
candidacy. In Chicago, the campaign recruited a team of behavioral scientists to
build an extraordinarily sophisticated database packed with names of millions of
undecided voters and potential supporters. The ever-expanding list let the
campaign find and register new voters who fit the demographic pattern of Obama
backers and methodically track their views through thousands of telephone calls
every night.
That allowed the Obama campaign not only to alter the very nature of the
electorate, making it younger and less white, but also to create a portrait of
shifting voter allegiances. The power of this operation stunned Mr. Romney’s
aides on election night, as they saw voters they never even knew existed turn
out in places like Osceola County, Fla. “It’s one thing to say you are going to
do it; it’s another thing to actually get out there and do it,” said Brian
Jones, a senior adviser.
In the last days of the campaign, Mr. Romney cast himself as the candidate that
he may have wanted to be all along: moderate in tone, an agent of change who
promised to bring bipartisan cooperation back to Washington, sounding very much
like Barack Obama in 2008.
But he could never overcome the harm that Mr. Obama’s advertising had done over
the summer or the weight of the ideological baggage he carried from the primary.
On Tuesday night, a crestfallen Mr. Romney and his family watched as the
television networks showed him losing all but one battleground state.
Even as the networks declared Mr. Obama the winner, Mr. Romney, who had earlier
told reporters he had written only a victory speech, paused before the walk
downstairs from his hotel room in Boston. It was 11:30 p.m., and Romney field
teams in Ohio, Virginia and Florida called in, saying the race was too close for
the candidate to give up. At least four planes were ready to go, and aides had
bags packed for recount battles in narrowly divided states. Bob White, a close
Romney friend and adviser, was prepared to tell the waiting crowd that Mr.
Romney would not yet concede.
But then, Mr. Romney quietly decided it was over. “It’s not going to happen,” he
said.
As Ann Romney cried softly, he headed down to deliver his speech, ending his
second, and presumably last, bid for the White House. Four decades earlier, his
father and inspiration, George Romney, a former Michigan governor failed in his
own such quest.
By the end of the 30 days, after Air Force One carried Mr. Obama on an almost
round-the-clock series of rallies, the president had reverted back to the agent
of change battling the forces of the status quo, drawing contrasts between
himself and Mr. Romney with an urgency that had been absent earlier in the race.
Mr. Obama had returned, if not to the candidate that he was in 2008, as a man
hungry for four more years to pursue his agenda in the White House.
A Difficult
September
As the summer came to a close, the Romney campaign was stuck in a tense debate
over how to rescue a struggling candidacy. On some nights, it did not even
bother with the daily tracking poll. Why waste money on more bad news? Mr.
Obama’s attack on Mr. Romney’s role at Bain Capital, the private equity firm he
founded, was in full swing, the Democratic convention had been an unequivocal
boost for the president, and a videotape had surfaced that caught Mr. Romney at
a private fund-raiser saying that 47 percent of the nation did not pay taxes, a
line that reinforced Democrats’ efforts to portray him as an out-of-touch
elitist.
“We had struggled pretty dramatically in September,” said Neil Newhouse, Mr.
Romney’s pollster. “The 47 percent remark came out, and that was on top of the
bounce that Obama got from his convention, so needless to say September was not
our best month. It showed in our data. It was grim.”
There was, advisers decided, one last opportunity on the horizon: the
presidential debate in Denver.
Mr. Stevens argued that Mr. Obama’s dislike of Mr. Romney would lead the
president to underestimate him. “They think there’s something intellectually
inferior there,” he said later. Mr. Romney’s advisers also believed that Mr.
Obama had demonized Mr. Romney to such an extent that their candidate would
benefit when judged against the caricature.
In August, Mr. Romney began testing out one-liners on friends flying with him on
his campaign plane. On issue after issue, Mr. Romney led discussions on how to
frame his answers, to move away from the conservative tone of his primary
contests in front of the largest audience he would have as a candidate.
Senator Rob Portman of Ohio was recruited to play Mr. Obama, and he embraced the
role, even anticipating how the president would open his first debate, which
fell on his wedding anniversary. “I’ve got to tell you, tonight’s a really
special night,” Mr. Portman said, playing Mr. Obama. “I see my sweetie out
there, boy, 20 years ago.”
(Mr. Romney’s advisers broke out in laughter when the real Mr. Obama opened with
a similar line, and nodded approvingly when a very prepared Mr. Romney countered
with a gracious response that even Democrats said put Mr. Obama off balance.)
Nothing had been left to chance: Mr. Romney put on full makeup and did his final
practice in a room set up to replicate, down to the lighting and temperature,
the hall where he would meet Mr. Obama.
On the Sunday before the debate, a group of top advisers and elected Republican
officials from across the country, calling themselves the War Council, gathered
in Boston to reassure Mr. Romney after his rough month — essentially saying
“this is a place in the race, but it isn’t a destiny” as Beth Myers, a senior
adviser, put it — and to boost his confidence. George W. Bush phoned Mr. Romney,
too. Pointing to his own history, he predicted that Mr. Obama would fumble,
according to aides.
Democrats advising Mr. Obama saw the same peril for the president in the first
debate that Mr. Romney’s aides did. Ronald A. Klain, a Democratic strategist who
has overseen debate preparation for presidential candidates for nearly 20 years,
warned Mr. Obama at his very first debate session, a PowerPoint presentation in
the Roosevelt Room on a sweltering day in mid-July, that incumbent presidents
almost invariably lose their first debate.
“It’s easier for a candidate to schedule the time to prepare; it’s easy for the
challenger to get away; the president has competing needs,” Mr. Klain told Mr.
Obama, according to aides who witnessed the exchange.
Ken Mehlman, who had managed Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004, ran into
one of Mr. Obama’s advisers at a party, and warned him that presidents are not
used to being challenged, and unlike candidates, are out of practice at verbal
jousting. Mr. Romney had gone through 20 debates over the past year.
Mr. Obama showed no interest in watching the Republican debates. But his aides
studied them closely, and concluded that Mr. Romney was a powerful debater, hard
to intimidate and fast to throw out assertions that would later prove wrong or
exaggerated. At one debate, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas criticized Mr. Romney for
having praised Arne Duncan, the education secretary, days earlier. Mr. Romney
flatly denied it, leaving Mr. Perry speechless.
At the White House, Mr. Obama’s communications director, Dan Pfeiffer, took note
of that moment, intending to mention it to Mr. Obama. He would later fault
himself for failing to fully understand “the magnitude of the challenge” Mr.
Romney’s debate style presented.
Mr. Obama displayed little concern. When he went to a resort outside Las Vegas
for several days of debate preparation in September, his impatience with the
exercise was evident when he escaped for an excursion to the Hoover Dam.
Mr. Klain and David Axelrod, a senior strategist, told Mr. Obama that he seemed
distracted, but he shrugged them off. “I’ll be there on game day,” he said. “I’m
a game day player.”
Shortly after the debate began, Mr. Obama’s aides realized they had made their
own mistakes in advising Mr. Obama to avoid combative exchanges that might
sacrifice the good will many Americans felt toward him. In Mr. Obama’s mock
debates with Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, Mr. Kerry drew Mr.
Obama into a series of intense exchanges, and Mr. Axelrod decided that they were
damaging to the president.
In 90 minutes, Mr. Obama crystallized what had been gnawing concerns among many
Americans about the president. He came across, as Mr. Obama’s advisers told him
over the next few days, as professorial, arrogant, entitled and detached from
the turmoil tearing the nation. He appeared to be disdainful not only of his
opponent but also of the political process itself. Mr. Obama showed no passion
for the job, and allowed Mr. Romney to explode the characterization of him as a
wealthy, job-destroying venture capitalist that the Obama campaign had spent
months creating.
The voter-analysis database back in Chicago noted a precipitous drop in
perceptions of Mr. Obama among independent voters, starting that night and
lasting for four days, long before the public polls picked it up. Voters who had
begun turning to Mr. Obama were newly willing to give Mr. Romney another look.
What was arguably the most dismal night of Mr. Obama’s political career could
hardly have come at a worse time: Early voting was already under way in some
states. Absentee ballots were on voters’ coffee tables that very night.
After the debate, Mr. Obama called Mr. Axelrod on his way back to the hotel
room. He had read the early reviews on his iPad.
“I guess the consensus is that we didn’t have a very good night,” Mr. Obama told
Mr. Axelrod.
“That is the consensus,” Mr. Axelrod said.
For the next 30 days, Mr. Romney and his advisers tried to capitalize on Mr.
Obama’s mistakes. And Mr. Romney continued his drift toward the center,
softening his language on abortion and immigration from the positions that had
defined him during the Republican primaries. It was something that the White
House had expected he would do. Perhaps most important, the debate gave him a
swagger, confidence and presidential bearing that had been absent.
Mr. Romney soon recognized the scope of his accomplishment. He flew from Denver
to Virginia for a rally the next day, and as the motorcade headed toward the
event, there was so much traffic that Mr. Romney and his top advisers thought
there must have been an accident. In fact, the roads were jammed with people on
their way to see him.
A Storm’s
Effect
It was clear that Hurricane Sandy was going to upend Mr. Obama’s final week of
campaigning, but aides in Chicago were determined to squeeze in one more visit
to Florida. It almost became a calamity.
To get ahead of the storm, the president flew to Orlando on Oct. 28, the evening
before a morning event. But overnight, the storm intensified and accelerated.
Well before dawn, the Air Force One crew told the president’s advisers that if
he was going to beat the storm back to Washington, he had to leave at once. His
aides blanched at the image of Mr. Obama stuck in sunny Florida as the storm
roared up the Eastern Seaboard.
The White House announced the change of plans at 6:45 a.m. The president
returned to the White House at 11:07 a.m. and went directly into the Situation
Room, canceling his political events. The decision was costly to a campaign so
dependent on organization: Mr. Obama used his rallies to collect supporters’
telephone numbers and e-mail addresses.
Once the storm struck, it was more of a problem for Mr. Romney. It put him in
the position of struggling to explain the skepticism he had expressed during the
Republican primaries about a federal role in disaster relief. Even worse, the
hurricane pushed him off the stage at a crucial time.
In Boston, Mr. Romney’s aides broke out in a chorus of groans as they watched on
television as Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey offered effusive praise of the
president’s handling of the disaster. They viewed it as a self-serving act of
disloyalty from a man whom they had expected to deploy that very weekend on Mr.
Romney’s behalf. The praise of Mr. Obama from a Republican governor came at the
same time Mr. Romney had been portraying Mr. Obama as partisan and polarizing.
The same week, the president’s campaign released an advertisement in which
another Republican, Colin Powell, a former secretary of state, endorsed Mr.
Obama. The ad, Mr. Obama’s aides said, produced a spike of support from
independent voters. (Mr. Obama’s aides grabbed the clip from a television
interview with Mr. Powell, deciding not to chance asking him for permission).
Mr. Romney was finding Ohio, a state central to his victory, a stubborn target,
as Mr. Obama benefited from the auto industry rescue he championed and that Mr.
Romney had opposed. The Romney campaign sought to undermine Mr. Obama with an
advertisement misleadingly implying that Jeep was moving jobs from Ohio to
China. By every measure, the ad backfired, drawing attacks by leaders of auto
companies that employed many of the blue-collar voters that Mr. Romney was
trying to reach.
The futility of that effort was apparent outside the sprawling Jeep assembly
plant in Toledo, which had just had a $500 million renovation for production of
a new line of vehicles, a project requiring 1,100 new workers.
“Everyone here knows someone who works at Jeep,” Jim Wessel, a supply
representative making a sales visit. He said no one would believe the ad.
Speaking of Mr. Obama’s efforts to rescue the auto industry, he said,“I can just
tell you I’m glad he did it.”
Mr. Romney was running out of states. He made an impulsive run on Pennsylvania,
chasing what his aides said were tightening polls there. Mr. Romney had spent
little time or money there before roaring in during the campaign’s final hours.
On the last weekend of the race, Mr. Romney scheduled a rally in Bucks County.
Supporters began arriving at 2 p.m. But his plane was delayed, and as the hours
rolled on — and the temperatures dropped — dozens of people were temporarily
blocked by the Secret Service as they sought to leave. Mr. Romney arrived to an
unpleasant scene: clusters of angry, cold supporters.
That Tuesday, Mr. Romney lost the state by 5 percentage points and watched Mr.
Obama hold a 50,000-vote lead in Florida — a state that he had once been
confident of winning.
Michael
Barbaro, Michael D. Shear and Peter Baker contributed reporting.
November 7,
2012
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK
(AP) — As Michelle Obama stepped on stage with her husband in Chicago early
Wednesday morning, she accepted her role not only as first lady but fashion
tastemaker for four more years — this time, wearing a Michael Kors magenta silk
chine pin-tucked dress.
As Mrs. Obama joined President Barack Obama, she sported a dress pulled in at
the waist, and she topped it with a black shrug that showed a peek of a vintage
pink brooch from House of Lavande. She was surrounded by her trend-right
daughters: Malia wore an electric-blue, A-line skirt with a pink studded belt
that looks like the teen version of the first lady's signature Azzedine Alaia
belt, and Sasha had on an abstract-print green skirt, gray bow-front top and
mimicked her mom's shrunken cardigan look.
Mrs. Obama has been a reinvigorating force for the fashion industry, from her
late-night online J. Crew purchases to her savvy courtship with up-and-coming
designers, including Prabal Gurung and Jason Wu. Kors has been a consistent
label in her wardrobe, with Mrs. Obama wearing a black, racer-back dress by the
designer in her official White House portrait, as well as a hot-pink gown for a
White House Correspondents' Dinner and a red halter gown at a Congressional
Black Caucus Foundation Phoenix Awards dinner.
"Mrs. Obama looked chic and elegant as always on Election Night," Kors said in
an email to the Associated Press. "My dress, with its strong color, clean lines
and feminine silhouette, has all the elements that have become a part of the
trademark style of our first lady."
The Council of Fashion Designers of America gave Mrs. Obama its Board of
Directors' Special Tribute award in 2009 for her influence in the industry.
Four years ago on Election Night, Mrs. Obama wore a straight-from-the-runway
black sheath dress with splashes of red by Narciso Rodriguez.
November 7,
2012
The New York Times
By ALAN COWELL
LONDON —
World leaders sought comfort from the familiar on Wednesday after President
Obama’s re-election but, with the global political landscape substantially
unchanged and crises on hold while the vote unfolded, many vied with new vigor
for his attention and favor as he embarks on a second term.
In marked contrast to a euphoric surge four years ago when many hailed Mr.
Obama’s victory as a herald of renewal, the mood was subdued, reflecting not
only the shadings of opinion between the American leader’s friends and foes but
also a generally lowered expectation of America’s power overseas.
Mr. Obama, one French analyst said, is “very far from the hopes that inflamed
his country four years ago.”
Even in Kenya, where Mr. Obama’s father was from, the energy surrounding this
election was just a shadow of what it had been in 2008, when it seemed like the
entire African continent was cheering him on. Many Kenyans have been
disappointed that Mr. Obama has yet to visit as president, part of a broader
feeling on the continent that Africa has not been a priority, certainly not
compared with the unfolding nuclear debate in Iran and the civil war in Syria.
Some were quick to list their conflicting requirements, signaling the diplomatic
shoals ahead.
Iranian officials hinted that talks were possible between Iran and the United
States. “If it benefits the system, we will negotiate with the U.S.A. even in
the depths of hell,” Mohammad Javad Larijani, one of several brothers with key
positions in the ruling elite, told the semiofficial Mehr news agency, saying
bilateral talks were “not taboo.”
Last month, some Obama administration officials said such talks had been agreed
to in principle, but that was later denied in Washington and Tehran.
Danny Danon, the deputy speaker of the Israeli Parliament who is regarded as a
staunch ally of the Republicans, evoked “the existential threat posed to Israel
and the West by the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran.”
“Now is the time for President Obama to return to the wise and time-honored
policy of ‘zero daylight’ between our respective nations,” Mr. Danon said.
Mr. Danon is a member of the conservative Likud Party led by Israel’s prime
minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has tense relations with Mr. Obama and who was
widely perceived in Israel and the United States as having supported the
Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, said in a brief
statement that he hoped Mr. Obama would press for peace in the Middle East.
That call seemed mirrored in Malaysia, where Prime Minister Najib Razak urged
Mr. Obama to “continue in his efforts to foster understanding and respect
between the United States and Muslims around the world.”
But, after the upheaval of the Arab Spring, such overtures now seem more
complex. In Cairo, where Mr. Obama committed himself three years ago to “a new
beginning” with the Arab world, Essam el-Erian, a senior leader of the Muslim
Brotherhood’s political party said in an online posting as the results became
clear: “We have to realize that, after the Arab revolutions, we can reduce
foreign interference in our domestic affairs and our foreign policy — with
American interference first on the list.”
Before the outcome was known, Chinese analysts had summed up what seemed to be a
widespread calculation that the Chinese leadership, itself scheduled to change
in two days’ time, favored Mr. Obama “because he’s familiar,” said Wu Xinbo,
deputy director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in
Shanghai. A victory for Mr. Romney would have made China “a little nervous
because he might bring new policies.”
President Hu Jintao of China, praised the “hard work of the Chinese and American
sides” over Mr. Obama’s first term in creating “positive developments” in their
relationship.
“With an eye toward the future, China is willing, together with the United
States, to continue to make efforts to promote the cooperative partnership
between China and the United States so as to achieve new and even greater
development, bringing better benefits to the people of the two countries and the
people of the world.”
China’s response was colored by a pre-election pledge from Mr. Romney to label
Beijing a currency manipulator. “With Obama continuing,” said Poon Tsang, a
street market vendor in Hong Kong, “there should be some stability in his
relationship with China.”
Across Europe, many greeted news of Mr. Obama’s re-election with a sense of mild
relief, though it was not immediately clear whether those feelings were
accompanied by any enhanced expectation that, armed with a new mandate, the
Obama administration would find solutions to the huge challenges still facing it
in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Syria and the Middle East.
Imran Khan, a prominent Pakistani politician, urged the re-elected Mr. Obama to
“give peace a chance” after a first term marked by “increased drone attacks, a
surge in Afghanistan, increased militancy in Pakistan as a result of that.”
Most Afghans appeared pleased by the election result, welcoming the continuity
it offered in a country buffeted violently by change and conflict over the past
few years, although many were worried that Mr. Obama could accelerate the
withdrawal of American troops from the country, due for 2014.
Mr. Obama is also under pressure to increase his involvement in ending the
Syrian war.
Speaking to reporters during a visit to Jordan, Prime Minister David Cameron of
Britain said early on Wednesday, “One of the first things I want to talk to
Barack about is how we must do more to try and solve this crisis.”
On the ground in Syria, rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad
seemed divided over the impact of a second term for Mr. Obama. A commander who
asked to be identified only by his first name, Maysara, said he expected
Washington to take a much clearer stance within 10 days. “If they don’t, Syria
will become like Somalia,” he said.
By contrast, Fawaz Tello, an opposition figure living in Germany, referred to a
Romney proposal to help the rebels while “Obama made no clear proposals.” A
second term for Mr. Obama, he said, was “not a good sign.”
Some of the favorable responses to Mr. Obama reflected campaign blunders by Mr.
Romney who drew barbs from both Britons and Spaniards for remarks about their
countries.
“We in Spain wanted Obama to win because he is more like us, we still see him as
a transformative leader,” said Manel Manchon, a political scientist. “Romney
insulted Spain, and you can’t just blame Spain for this crisis.”
Like most western Europeans, Britons are broadly more liberal than Americans;
even most British conservatives sympathize far more with Democrat than with
Republican views on social issues like abortion, the death penalty and health
care.
There is also a perception in Britain and elsewhere in Europe that a Romney
government would have been parochial, suspicious of foreigners and untested in
world affairs, while Mr. Obama’s victory, as the left-leaning Guardian newspaper
put it, “is good for Americans, good for America, and good for the world.”
Mr. Obama’s standing elsewhere seemed more ambiguous.
After his election in 2008, for instance, Mr. Obama promised a “reset” with
Moscow. But the United States and Russia took opposing positions on the Libyan
and Syrian crises and the Kremlin has depicted the American response to
antigovernment protests in Moscow as undermining the return to power of
President Vladimir V. Putin.
But after Mr. Obama’s victory became clear, Russian officials issued the most
optimistic comments to be heard in months about relations with the United
States.
Dmitri S. Peskov, spokesman for Mr. Putin, said that “in general, the Kremlin
took the news about Barack Obama’s victory in the elections quite positively.”
In Indonesia, where Mr. Obama spent some of his childhood, students at his
former elementary school cheered his victory, as did elite Indonesians gathered
at a party hosted by the American Embassy. On the streets, motorcycle taxi
drivers raised their fists, shouting “Obama, Obama.”
For some Europeans, the victory offered an object lesson in the politics of
economic hardship that has cost leaders in Britain, France, Spain and elsewhere
their jobs.
“Obama has succeeded where Sarkozy, Zapatero and Brown failed — to be re-elected
amid a major economic crisis,” deputy editor François Sergent wrote in a special
edition of the leftist newspaper Libération in France.
The sense that Mr. Obama’s second term would be less constrained by electoral
considerations offered analysts a rich theme. “For all the criticism of Obama,
he now has the tail wind and the independence of not having to seek
re-election,” said Claudia Schmucker, of the German Council on Foreign
Relations. “He can use that for foreign policy, too.”
But there was unease in Germany that Mr. Obama’s focus on Asian issues, in
particular the rise of China, had sapped transatlantic ties with Europe. “I hope
he will not only be the Pacific president, but also the trans-Atlantic
president,” Philipp Missfelder, a leading member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s
Christian Democrats, said in an interview.
In South Africa, whose prism is shaped by the decades of apartheid, Mathews
Phosa, a senior member of the ruling African National Congress, said the outcome
made Mr. Obama a potent symbol of the triumph of merit over race. “There is hope
for the future if we all transcend racial patterns and look at people as people
on their merits,” he said.
And Mr. Obama’s re-election brought relief and some economic concern in Brazil,
where he is broadly popular and seen as more cautious in foreign policy than his
Republican challengers.
“Everything that happens in the United States influences every other country, in
both positive and negative ways,” said Rogério Antonio, 31, a salesman in an
optical store in Rio de Janeiro. “It’s as though someone threw a pebble in the
water and you sit waiting for the ripples to come out your way.”
Reporting was contributed by Jane Perlez and Keith Bradsher from Beijing;
Hilda Wang from Hong Kong; Isabel Kershner and Jodi Rudoren from Jerusalem;
Ellen Barry and Andrew Roth from Moscow; Sara Schonhardt from Jakarta,
Indonesia; Scott Sayare from Paris; Dan Bilefsky from Barcelona, Spain; Tim
Arango and Hwaida Saad from Antakya, Turkey; Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul; Sarah
Lyall from London; Lydia Polgreen from Johannesburg; Nicholas Kulish and Chris
Cottrell from Berlin; Jeffrey Gettleman from Nairobi, Kenya; Graham Bowley from
Kabul, Afghanistan; Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan; Ramtin Rastin from
Tehran; Thomas Erdbrink from Amsterdam; Simon Romero and Taylor Barnes from Rio
de Janeiro; and David D. Kirkpatrick and Mayy El Sheikh from Cairo.
November 7,
2012
The New York Times
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
Business
leaders and investors on Wall Street reacted nervously to President Obama’s
re-election Wednesday, as the focus shifted quickly from electoral politics to
the looming fiscal uncertainty in Washington. A gloomy economic outlook in
Europe also prompted selling in markets worldwide.
Stocks were sharply lower in afternoon trading in New York, with both the
Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and the Dow Jones industrial average down 2.2
percent, as European shares sank and Asian stocks were mixed. While many
executives on Wall Street and in other industries favored Mitt Romney, many had
already factored in the likelihood of Mr. Obama winning a second term.
Still, continued divided government in Washington and little prospect for
compromise unnerved traders.
“The bottom line is that this looks like a status quo election,” said Dean Maki,
chief United States economist at Barclays. “The problem with that is that it
doesn’t resolve some of the main sources of uncertainty that are hanging over
the economy.”
Companies in some sectors, like hospitals and technology, could see a short-term
pop, said Tobias Levkovich, chief United States equity strategist with Citi.
Other areas, like financial services as well as coal and mining, could be hurt
as investors contemplate a tougher regulatory environment.
Shares of Alpha Natural Resources, a coal giant, were down 11.8 percent, while
Arch Coal was off 11 percent. But HCA Holdings, a hospital operator, was up 8
percent, to $33.39 a share. As a result of Mr. Obama’s victory, Goldman Sachs
said it upgraded its rating on HCA to buy from neutral, and raised its price
target to $39 from $31. It also raised price targets for Tenet Healthcare and
Community Health Systems, although both are still rated neutral.
Goldman downgraded shares of Humana, a leading managed care company, to sell,
and its shares fell 9.9 percent. Goldman warned that Humana and other managed
care providers could be hurt as health care reform moves forward, especially new
rules for health insurers that become effective in 2014.
Mr. Levkovich predicted that the market would remain volatile between now and
mid-January. If Congress and the president cannot come up with a plan to cut the
deficit, hundreds of billions in Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire at the
beginning of 2013 while automatic spending cuts will sharply cut the defense
budget and other programs.
Known as the fiscal cliff, this simultaneous combination of dramatic reductions
in government spending and tax increases could push the economy into recession
in 2013, economists fear.
But it was not just the election results driving shares lower — there was more
gloomy economic news out of Europe.
The European Union will experience only a very weak economic recovery during
2013 while unemployment will remain at “very high” levels, according to a set of
forecasts issued Wednesday by the European Commission.
This year, gross domestic product will shrink by 0.3 percent for the 27 members
of the union as a whole and by 0.4 percent for the 17 European Union countries
that use the euro, the commission predicted. Growth in 2013 will be a meager 0.4
percent across the union and only 0.1 percent in the euro area, it said.
Not only is that level of growth far slower than even the tepid pace of the
recovery in the United States, it also makes it more difficult for debt-burdened
European economies to get their financial house in order. As markets neared the
close in Europe, the Euro Stoxx 50 index, a barometer of euro zone blue chips,
fell 2.2 percent, while the FTSE 100 index in London was 1.5 percent lower.
The S.&P./ASX 200 in Australia closed up 0.7 percent, as did the Hang Seng Index
in Hong Kong. The Nikkei 225 stock average in Japan ended trading little
changed.
“There’s a huge question mark hanging over what happens in the next few weeks,”
said Aric Newhouse, senior vice-president of policy and government relations at
the National Association of Manufacturers. “The fiscal cliff is the 800-pound
gorilla out there.”
“We can’t wait,” he said. “We think the idea of going over the cliff has to be
taken off the table. We’ve got to get to the middle ground.”
For all the anticipation, some observers said the election still left plenty of
unanswered questions.
“While we have clarity on the players now, we don’t have any more clarity on
what will happen in terms of the fiscal cliff,” Mr. Maki said. “We still have a
divided government and they haven’t been able to agree on what to do.”
If the full package of tax increases and spending cuts go into effect, that
would equal a $650 billion blow to the economy, Mr. Maki said, equivalent to 4
percent of the gross domestic product.
Mr. Maki envisions a partial compromise, with $200 billion in tax increases and
spending cuts. Partly because of that, he estimates, the annual rate of economic
growth will dip to 1.5 percent in the first quarter of 2013 from 2.5 percent in
the fourth quarter. He predicted that if the full fiscal cliff were to hit, the
economy would contract in the first half of 2013.
November 7,
2012
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES
President
Obama tried to reach out to the Republican leaders in Congress by phone after
his post-midnight victory speech on Wednesday, an aide said, but they were
asleep. More failures to communicate likely lie ahead as the parties now turn to
seeking a budget deal that would keep the nation from hurtling over a so-called
fiscal cliff at year’s end.
Mr. Obama enters the next fray with heightened leverage, both sides agree,
especially on what he sees as the most immediate issue: Whether Republicans will
relent and extend the Bush-era income tax cuts, which expire Dec. 31, except for
households with taxable income above $250,000 a year. But even before the votes
were in, the Republican leaders — Speaker John A. Boehner and the Senate
minority leader, Mitch McConnell — had restated their opposition to raising any
taxes to reduce deficits.
An impasse could mean rates go up for everyone in 2013 and could also block
action to avoid several hundred billion dollars in additional tax increases and
across-the-board spending cuts that are scheduled to take effect in January
unless the White House and Congress reach an alternative deficit-reduction
agreement.
Yet if Mr. Obama received a mandate for nothing else after a campaign in which
he was vague on second-term prescriptions, he can and will claim one for the
proposition that the wealthiest Americans like himself and Mitt Romney should
pay higher income taxes. That stance was a staple of Mr. Obama’s campaign stump
speeches for more than a year. And in surveys of those leaving the polls on
Tuesday, voters overwhelmingly agreed with him.
“This election tells us a lot about the political wisdom of defending tax cuts
for the wealthy at the expense of everything else,” a senior administration
official said early on Wednesday.
In his victory speech, Mr. Obama offered what the White House intended as an
early olive branch. “In the coming weeks and months,” he said, “I am looking
forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the
challenges we can only solve together: reducing our deficit, reforming our tax
code, fixing our immigration system, freeing ourselves from foreign oil.”
Much pre-election speculation held that a result like what occurred —
essentially maintaining the status quo with Mr. Obama in the White House;
Democrats in control of the Senate, though now with an unexpectedly padded
majority; and Republicans still leading the House — would make for continued
gridlock and a fall off the fiscal cliff at some cost to the recovery.
Yet there are counter views. For one thing, had Mitt Romney won, the rough
consensus in both parties was that he and Congress would have delayed the
scheduled imposition of automatic tax increases and spending cuts for at least
six months and up to a year to give Mr. Romney time to staff his administration
and outline a plan. And that delay would have been compounded by an all but
certain standoff between a new president dedicated to cutting taxes deeply, not
raising them, and Democrats in Congress intent on getting tax increases on high
incomes in exchange for their assent to future reductions in Medicare and
Medicaid.
Also, as the administration and a few other optimists in both parties see it,
with the same division of power, the two sides can immediately take up where
they left off in 2011. That year, repeated efforts for a bipartisan budget deal
ultimately collapsed on the tax issue and on Democrats’ refusal to consider
reductions in the fast-growing entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid
unless Republicans compromised.
Each side said the voters would decide in November 2012. Now they have, and Mr.
Obama and the two parties in Congress can get back to the bargaining table,
where their differences, but also some tentative agreements, remain on spending
cuts. Had Mr. Romney won, the two sides would have faced months of
start-from-scratch, get-acquainted bargaining, farther apart than ever on the
matter of taxes and entitlement benefits.
The contrasting views of what lies ahead was reflected in a bipartisan panel at
the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., two months ago. Tom
Daschle, a former Senate Democratic majority leader and Obama adviser, reflected
the White House view that if Republicans failed in their goal of making Mr.
Obama a one-term president, as Mr. McConnell had vowed, Republicans’ anti-Obama
“fever” would break, making them more willing to accept a deal that raised taxes
on high incomes.
Another panelist, the former Republican congressman and party strategist Vin
Weber, disagreed. “I think Democrats have fooled themselves into believing
Republicans’ opposition is all personal to Obama,” he said in a later interview.
Instead, he told the audience, Republicans’ opposition to higher marginal tax
rates is ideological and they believe increasing them will harm the economy
Mr. McConnell, in his statement congratulating Mr. Obama early Wednesday, said,
“Now it’s time for the president to propose solutions that actually have a
chance of passing the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a
closely divided Senate.”
He added: “To the extent he wants to move to the political center, which is
where the work gets done in a divided government, we’ll be there to meet him
halfway. That begins by proposing a way for both parties to work together in
avoiding the ‘fiscal cliff’ without harming a weak and fragile economy, and when
that is behind us, work with us to reform the tax code and our broken
entitlement system.”
November 7,
2012
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER
After $4
billion, two dozen presidential primary election days, a pair of national
conventions, four general election debates, hundreds of Congressional contests
and more television advertisements than anyone would ever want to watch, the two
major political parties in America essentially fought to a standstill.
When all the shouting was done, the American people on Tuesday more or less
ratified the status quo that existed at the start of the day: They returned
President Obama to the White House for another four years, reaffirmed Republican
control of the House and kept the Senate in Democratic hands. As of Wednesday
morning, the margins in the House and Senate had each changed by just a seat or
two.
The tie in effect went to the Democrats, who had more to lose but did not. Not
only did they retain the presidency, they held off a concerted drive to take
over the Senate and instead added slightly to their majority. The Republicans
lost a signal opportunity to take Senate seats in states that by most measures
should be their territory — Indiana, Missouri and apparently North Dakota —
while losing seats they had held in Maine and Massachusetts.
For his part, Mr. Obama won a clear victory but less decisively than other
re-elected presidents. He garnered just 50 percent of the popular vote, three
percentage points lower than in 2008 and a sign of just how divided the country
remains over his leadership. His margin in the Electoral College was stronger,
but even if he wins Florida, which remained too close to call, he will be the
first president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a second term with fewer
electoral votes than his first election, suggesting the narrowing of his
coalition.
But the bottom-line scorecard left Washington as divided as ever, with no
resolution of most of the fundamental issues at stake. The profound debate that
has raged over the size and role of government, the balance between stimulus
spending and austerity and the proper level of taxation has not been settled in
the least. The next two years could easily duplicate the last two as the parties
battle it out.
In his victory speech around 1:30 a.m., Mr. Obama largely glossed over that
result and presented himself as ready for compromise with Republicans over the
so-called fiscal cliff looming at the end of the year, when a series of
automatic tax increases and spending cuts are slated to take effect unless the
president and Congress stop or amend them.
“Tonight, you voted for action, not politics as usual,” Mr. Obama told
supporters in Chicago. “You elected us to focus on your jobs, not ours. And in
the coming weeks and months, I am looking forward to reaching out and working
with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together:
reducing our deficit, reforming our tax code, fixing our immigration system,
freeing ourselves from foreign oil.”
Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, offered words of conciliation while
making it clear that he believed his party’s victory in keeping control of the
House meant he had every bit as much of a mandate as Mr. Obama.
“The American people reelected the president and reelected our majority in the
House,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement. “If there is a mandate, it is a mandate
for both parties to find common ground and take steps together to help our
economy grow and create jobs.”
Mr. Boehner scheduled a public appearance for 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday to address
the deficit issues
If nothing else, one issue does seem resolved by the election. The president’s
health care program, which Mitt Romney had vowed to begin dismantling on the
first day of his presidency, now seems certain to survive. While House
Republicans continue to oppose it and may find ways to attack it legislatively,
they now know that they do not have the ability to overturn it.
It also may be possible for the two sides to come together on another big issue:
immigration. In his victory speech, Mr. Obama specifically listed revamping the
system as one of four specific goals. While he made little mention of it during
campaign speeches, Democrats argue that Republicans may now be willing to find
compromise given the election results and the growing power of the Latino vote
in America. Some moderate Republicans agree, although it is not clear whether
the party as a whole has come to that conclusion.
But it will be the fiscal issues that will play out in the short term and both
sides quickly moved to define the election results as a validation of their
viewpoint.
Neera Tanden, president of the liberal research group Center for American
Progress, called the election “a decisive mandate for a fair tax system where
the wealthy contribute to address our deficit challenges.”
Chris Chocola, president of the conservative antitax group Club for Growth,
congratulated a series of House Republicans who had won and praised their
“record of fighting to limit government and pass pro-growth policies.”
For now, uncertainty will probably continue for at least a few weeks as the
newly re-elected president and re-elected Republicans circle warily and plot
their next moves. Whether the talk of cooperation translates into action remains
unclear, but many are already skeptical.
Dale Brown, president of the Financial Services Institute, cited the “closeness
of the election results” in urging Mr. Obama to tread lightly on any new
regulatory initiatives, a priority for his group. But looking at the enormous
fiscal issues confronting the country, Mr. Brown noted that “the next 13 months
are critical” because after then, “Congress will be back in re-election mode and
will not tackle anything that could put their own re-elects in jeopardy.”
November 7,
2012
The New York Times
By MICHAEL COOPER
It was the
morning of the Republican hangover.
After four years in which the jobless rate never dipped below 7.8 percent, with
millions of Americans still unemployed or underemployed and median household
income falling, Republicans still failed to unseat President Obama and, for the
second election in a row, fell short in their efforts to win control of a Senate
that seemed within reach. The Wednesday-morning quarterbacking began quickly.
Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial
Committee, captured the feelings of many Republicans when he said in a statement
that “we have a period of reflection and recalibration ahead for the Republican
Party.”
“While some will want to blame one wing of the party over the other,” Mr. Cornyn
said in a statement, “the reality is candidates from all corners of our G.O.P.
lost tonight. Clearly we have work to do in the weeks and months ahead.”
There was no shortage of theories — sometimes contradictory — from inside and
outside party in the first hours after the 2012 elections.
Some analysts and Republican strategists argued that the party could not win
while alienating the growing Hispanic vote with its tough stance on immigration,
could no longer afford to nominate candidates who fired up its conservative and
Tea Party wings but turned off the more moderate voters in general elections,
and that it had to find ways to win more support from women and young voters.
But some conservatives took the opposite view, arguing that Mitt Romney had been
essentially too moderate, a candidate who had won the minds if not the hearts of
the party’s base.
But a number of Republican strategists who have worked on recent presidential
campaigns argued that demography is destiny, and that the party was falling out
of step with a changing country.
John Weaver, a Republican strategist who worked on the presidential campaigns of
Senator John McCain and Jon M. Huntsman Jr., has long argued that the party’s
reliance on the votes of older white men was putting it on a demographically
unsustainable path.
“We have a choice: we can become a shrinking regional party of middle-aged and
older white men, or we can fight to become a national governing party,” Mr.
Weaver said in an interview. “And to do the latter we have to fix our Hispanic
problem as quickly as possible, we’ve got to accept science and start calling
out these false equivalencies when they occur within our party about things that
are just not true, and not tolerate the intolerant.”
Matthew Dowd, who was a top adviser in the re-election campaign of President
George W. Bush, said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that the Republican Party
had become a “'Mad Men’ party in a ‘Modern Family’ America.”
And Mark McKinnon, another former strategist for President Bush and Mr. McCain,
argued that the party “needs messages and policies that appeal to a broader
audience.”
“This election proved that trying to expand a shrinking base ain’t gonna cut
it,” Mr. McKinnon said in an e-mail. “It’s time to put some compassion back in
conservatism. The party needs more tolerance, more diversity and a deeper
appreciation for the concerns of the middle class.”
But not everyone was urging the party to run to the center. “No doubt the media
will insist that Republicans must change, must sprint to the center, must
embrace social liberalism, must accept that America is destined to play a less
dominant role in the world,” Fred Barnes wrote on the blog of The Weekly
Standard. “All that is hogwash, which is why Republicans are likely to reject
it. Their ideology is not a problem.”
“But there is also a hole in the Republican electorate,” he continued. “There
aren’t enough Hispanics. As long as two-thirds of the growing Hispanic voting
bloc lines up with Democrats, it will be increasingly difficult (though hardly
impossible) for Republicans to win national elections. When George W. Bush won a
narrow re-election in 2004, he got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote. If Romney
had managed that, he would have come closer to winning. He might even have won.”
And Erick Erickson made this plea at RedState.com: “Just please, G.O.P., PLEASE
— in four years let’s not go with the ‘he’s the most electable’ argument. The
most electable usually aren’t.”
But there were bright spots for the party. Aided by redistricting, Republicans
kept their hold on the House, and Speaker John A. Boehner announced that he
would be speaking Wednesday afternoon about the “fiscal cliff and the need for
both parties to find common ground.”
Republicans extended their dominance in state government, picking up at least
one governor’s seat Tuesday night and increasing the number of Republican
governors to 30, the most there have been in more than a decade. Gov. Bob
McDonnell of Virginia, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association,
said that the state-level gains Republicans made in “provides optimism for the
future.”
And of course, even two years in politics is a long time. Just after Mr. McCain
lost the 2008 elections there was similar hand-wringing in the party. Two years
later, Republicans made historic gains in the midterm elections.
November 7,
2012
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
Deep
disapproval of Congress and dissatisfaction with partisan division appeared no
match for Congressional incumbency on Tuesday, as Republicans seemed to have
retained a firm hold on the House of Representatives, assuring the continuation
of divided government for at least another two years.
Democrats began the year with deep pockets and a plan to focus on scores of
Republican freshmen, particularly those with a Tea Party imprimatur, in an
effort to retake the House after losing it in 2010. But in the first
Congressional election since decennial redistricting, Republicans — thanks to
their control of many state legislatures — managed to shore up many incumbents
by fashioning districts that Democrats had little chance of capturing.
Retirements by a large number of Democratic members, and a message on Medicare
that more or less fizzled, were additional impediments. Blue Dog Democrats, a
group of moderates whose numbers have been dwindling, were particularly
endangered as they struggled to defend districts they had long held.
In the end, the bravado of Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the
minority leader, who earlier this year suggested that fights over Medicare and
other issues would help deliver the House back to her party, was misplaced.
Republicans placed their greatest hopes on North Carolina, where their
redistricting efforts targeted vulnerable Democrats more than just about
anywhere else. In a seat left open by the retirement of one prominent Blue Dog,
Representative Brad Miller, a former federal prosecutor, George Holding, easily
defeated his Democratic opponent, Charles Malone. Another Democratic incumbent,
Representative Larry Kissell, long used to fending off Republicans, lost to
Richard Hudson, a former Republican staffer.
In Kentucky, Republicans got their wish and finally tossed Representative Ben
Chandler, one of the last remaining Blue Dogs, from his seat. Andy Barr, who
lost to Mr. Chandler by 647 votes in 2010, finally took out the incumbent, who
had served since 2004.
There were some bright spots for Democrats. Alan Grayson, who lost his Florida
seat in 2010 to Representative Daniel Webster, got a return ticket to Washington
when he defeated the Republican Todd Long in the new Ninth District. Lois
Frankel, another Democrat, prevailed in an open seat in that state, and the
Democrat Joe Garcia beat Representative David Rivera, who was under federal
investigation.
Illinois, where Democrats focused much of their effort, was a strong point for
the party. Tammy Duckworth, a veteran who lost her legs in the Iraq war, easily
defeated Representative Joe Walsh, a freshman and Tea Party favorite, and will
become the first combat-injured woman to serve in Congress. Representative Bobby
Schilling, a pizza parlor owner with no previous elected experience, joined a
sea of one-termers when he was defeated by Cheri Bustos, and a long-serving
Republican, Judy Biggert, fell to Bill Foster.
In New Hampshire, Ann Kuster defeated Representative Charles Bass, and in
Georgia, where Republicans thought they would pick off the last white Democrat
in the deep South, Representative John Barrow prevailed.
But Republicans began to count their wins Tuesday night as well. Representative
Tom Latham of Iowa defeated Representative Leonard Boswell in a battle of
incumbents, even though President Obama won the state. Also in Iowa,
Representative Steve King handily beat back Christie Vilsack, the wife of
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a former Iowa governor. Republicans also
picked up a seat in Pennsylvania,where Keith Rothfus picked off Mark Critz, a
Democrat with a strong labor union following.
Democrats had a far better day over all in the Senate, maintaining their control
there and ensuring that the two chambers would continue their contentious
relationship through 2014.
Most immediately, with no undisputed mandate on either side of the aisle to
manage fiscal policy, Congress will move to confront the so-called fiscal cliff,
and simultaneous expiration of myriad tax provisions and drastic budget cuts.
It remains to be seen whether the tone and content of the bruising fight over
the debt ceiling and other fiscal matters in the 112th Congress will continue
into the next session, or if both parties will conclude that the only mandate
lawmakers have is to finally work together and bridge the gap on those difficult
issues.
“For two years, our majority in the House has been the primary line of defense
for the American people against a government that spends too much, taxes too
much, and borrows too much when left unchecked,” House Speaker John A. Boehner
said Tuesday. “In the face of a staggering national debt that threatens our
children’s future, our majority passed a budget that begins to solve the
problem.”
He added “With this vote, the American people have also made clear that there is
no mandate for raising tax rates.”
Many Democrats started the cycle off in strong position, particularly after
high-profile fights in Congress over issues like the payroll tax extension and
student loan rates. But the environment changed significantly as time went on,
with voters divided over the disparate policy prescriptions offered by the two
parties on the economy, entitlements and taxes.
As the leaves began to change and the temperatures dropped, what once seemed
like a Democratic surge evaporated. There appeared to be no single issue that
Democrats could turn to their advantage, like the health care debate that so
dominated the 2010 Congressional elections and propelled Republicans back into
the majority. President Obama’s coattails had little effect in many states he
easily won.
The poor showing is likely to result in new questions about whether Ms. Pelosi
will remain her party’s leader in the House.
LITTLE
ROCK, Ark
Wed Nov 7, 2012
3:15am EST
Reuters
By Suzi Parker
LITTLE
ROCK, Ark (Reuters) - Arkansas Republicans on Tuesday night took control of at
least one chamber of the state legislature and captured all of the state's
congressional seats for the first time since Reconstruction.
Republicans took the majority in the state Senate and will either have a one
seat majority or be tied with Democrats in the state House of Representatives,
according to election returns.
For decades, Arkansas has been a rare dot of Democratic blue amid Republican red
across the legislatures of the South. Until Tuesday's elections, it was the only
state in the South where both chambers of the legislature were controlled by
Democrats.
"Obviously, this is historic for Arkansas and a real marker of the massive
political change that has taken place in the South as a whole over the last
several generations," Jay Barth, a political science professor at Hendrix
College in Conway, Arkansas said Tuesday night.
When the legislative session starts in January, Democratic Governor Mike Beebe
will have to work with a state Senate controlled for the first time since 1874
by Republicans. And the state House may have an even Republican-Democrat split
rather than a Democratic majority, though votes were still being tallied early
Wednesday.
It was not just the state legislature that made history. Republicans gained
control of all four of the state's congressional seats after Republican Tom
Cotton, an Iraq war veteran, defeated a Democrat on Tuesday to pick up a seat
that had been vacated by a retiring Democrat.
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney easily won Arkansas' six electoral
votes, likely helping down-ballot Republicans.
Former President Bill Clinton, an Arkansas native, cut radio ads against the
three Republicans running for the state legislature, all of whom lost on Tuesday
night.
While other Southern states moved to Republicans over the last two decades,
Clinton rise to the White House helped keep Arkansas a holdout state.
At the state level in 2010, Republicans picked up three statewide offices,
including lieutenant governor. That year - when Republicans were swept into
offices across the country - the number of Republican seats in the 100-member
Arkansas House of Representatives increased from 28 to 45. In 2011, a Democratic
representative switched parties, increasing that number to 46.
"I can only imagine what it would have been like to have had a majority in both
houses instead of having a legislature that was 89 percent Democrat when I
became governor," former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a Republican and
former presidential candidate, told Reuters on Tuesday.
PHOENIX |
Wed Nov 7, 2012
2:34am EST
Reuters
By Tim Gaynor
PHOENIX
(Reuters) - Controversial Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, known for targeting
illegal immigrants, fended off a strong challenge from a Phoenix police veteran
on Tuesday to win a sixth four-year term.
Republican Arpaio, the 80-year-old lawman who styles himself "America's Toughest
Sheriff," claimed victory over Democratic challenger Paul Penzone to hold on to
office as sheriff of Maricopa County. An unofficial county tally showed Arpaio
nearly 11 points ahead with 596 of 724 precincts reporting.
The battle for the sheriff's badge in Arizona's most populous county highlighted
bitter national divisions over illegal immigration.
"The president ... is going after me, but I will continue to enforce the laws,
including illegal immigration. Nothing changes," Arpaio told cheering supporters
late on Tuesday, vowing to continue his drive to lock up illegals.
The sheriff is the target of an ongoing Justice Department lawsuit alleging
civil rights abuses by his office, including accusations of widespread racial
profiling of Latinos in dozens of immigration "sweeps."
The sheriff won support from Phoenix area conservatives for tough measures,
including locking up county inmates in a Spartan "Tent City" jail and mounting a
probe of Democratic President Barack Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate.
Earlier this year, Arpaio dispatched a volunteer posse to Hawaii to investigate
the authenticity of Obama's birth certificate at the request of local Tea Party
activists - a key Arpaio constituency.
He ultimately declared the document a forgery even after most Republican critics
of Obama had given up pursuing discredited claims that the president was born
abroad.
Rival Penzone, who had a 21-year-career with the Phoenix police department, gave
Arpaio his toughest race yet, drawing on support from Latinos in the Phoenix
area angered by what they saw as the sheriff's relentless profiling of
brown-skinned Hispanics in this sprawling metropolis. Arpaio has denied racial
profiling.
There are also questions over what critics describe as the neglect of more than
400 sex-crime cases in a Phoenix suburb, some involving children.
Penzone told supporters that the scrutiny of Arpaio's actions will not stop with
the sheriff's victory.
"He needs to know most importantly that the people of this community are going
to be watching," Penzone said. "They're going to be holding him accountable."
(Reporting by
Tim Gaynor; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Ciro Scotti)
November 7,
2012
The new York Times
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
SAN
FRANCISCO — California voters decisively approved a ballot measure that will
raise taxes by $6 billion annually over seven years, according to election
results on Wednesday. Voters heeded the pleas of Gov. Jerry Brown, who said the
new revenues were necessary to save the state’s public schools and balance the
budget.
The vote — 54 percent to 46 percent, with 98 percent of precincts reporting
Wednesday morning — brought an end to an acrimonious, $123 million battle
between the governor and conservative opponents in and outside the state. It was
a victory for Mr. Brown, who had staked his personal prestige on the
initiative’s success and campaigned intensely for it.
Across the country, voters in 38 states considered more than 170 ballot measures
on fiscal, political and social issues that, in many cases, resonated
nationally.
Voters in Colorado and Washington made their states the first to legalize
marijuana for recreational use. In Oregon, a similar measure appeared headed for
defeat.
Supporters of Washington’s initiative said they hoped its passage would
ultimately change federal law, which regards any possession or sale of marijuana
as illegal.
“By sending this message, we can hopefully have a collaborative conversation
with the federal government, and that they can see that their policy can be done
differently and that prohibition is not working,” said Tonia S. Winchester,
outreach director for the campaign behind the measure, Yes on I-502.
In Maryland, voters endorsed a ballot measure allowing in-state tuition at
public colleges for illegal immigrants. Massachusetts was considering whether to
legalize physician-assisted suicide for people with terminal illnesses. Though
most of the votes were counted, the result was too close to call.
But nowhere was the fight over ballot measures fiercer than in California, where
spending on campaigning for and against 11 measures totaled nearly $370 million,
according to MapLight, an organization that tracks campaign spending.
Under Mr. Brown’s tax initiative, income tax rates for those earning more than
$250,000 annually would be raised for seven years, and a one-quarter-cent
increase in the state sales tax would be put in place for four years. Without
the new revenue, Mr. Brown said, California would need to cut $6 billion a year
in spending, mostly from the state’s already battered education system — a
threat that appeared to have persuaded some voters on Tuesday.
“We need more funding for the schools,” said Omega Jules, 31, who lives in
Oakland and works for United Parcel Service of America. “They keep taking money
out of education, and that is where we need it most.”
Supported by California teachers’ unions, Mr. Brown was tenacious in seeking
support for the initiative, but he encountered fierce and sometimes unexpected
opposition.
“I know a lot of people had some doubts, had some questions, about ‘Can you
really go to the people and ask them to vote for a tax?’ ” Mr. Brown, a
Democrat, said in thanking supporters at a Sacramento hotel, The Associated
Press reported.
“A core reason that brought people together in support of Proposition 30 was a
belief in our schools and our university and the capacity of the state
government to make an investment that benefits all of us,” he said.
Last month, an obscure Arizona group called Americans for Responsible Leadership
donated $11 million, in part to defeat Proposition 30. Also, Molly Munger, a
civil rights lawyer and the daughter of Warren E. Buffett’s partner at Berkshire
Hathaway, Charles Munger, spent more than $44 million on a rival tax measure,
Proposition 38, which was overwhelmingly defeated, with 72.4 percent.
About $135 million was spent in the battle over Proposition 32, which would have
outlawed political donations by labor unions. The measure was soundly defeated.
Also in California, voters considered an initiative to end the death penalty.
With about 98 percent of precincts partly reporting, the measure seemed headed
for defeat, with opposition of52.7 percent, the semiofficial state results
showed early on Wednesday.
Supporters, including law enforcement officials, argued that administering the
death penalty was inefficient and that eliminating it would save the state
money. And that argument appeared to have swayed some voters, even those who did
not oppose the practice on moral grounds.
“It would be one thing if they said they were going to kill a criminal and then
did it the next day,” said Lamarr Standberry, an Oakland resident who voted to
repeal the death penalty. “If you’re going to do it, then just do it already.
Instead it takes forever and costs a lot.”
Voters endorsed a measure that would make the state’s three-strikes law somewhat
more lenient by imposing a life sentence only for a third felony conviction
considered serious or violent, but they rebuffed another that would have made
mandatory the labeling of genetically modified food.
Two crucial education measures put charter schools on state ballots. By a wide
margin, Georgia voters approved an amendment to the State Constitution that will
allow for the creation of a commission to authorize new charter schools, which
are publicly financed but independently operated. The measure drew national
attention and campaign contributions from Alice Walton, the daughter of Sam
Walton, Walmart’s founder, and Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party
organization founded by the billionaire Koch brothers.
In Washington, voters were asked to allow charters into the state for the first
time. Similar measures had failed three times in the past 16 years.
Michigan voters rejected all six proposals on the ballot, including one that
would have expanded the powers of emergency administrators to take over
financially troubled local governments, and the ability of governors to appoint
them, as well as another proposal that would have made collective bargaining a
right for employees in the public and private sectors.
Motoko Rich,
Malia Wollan, Ian Lovett and Rebecca Raney contributed reporting.
DENVER |
Wed Nov 7, 2012
1:59am EST
Reuters
By Keith Coffman
DENVER
(Reuters) - Colorado became the first state to legalize the possession and sale
of marijuana for recreational use on Tuesday, setting up a possible showdown
with the federal government as backers of a similar measure in Washington state
declared victory.
A third measure to remove criminal penalties for personal possession and
cultivation of recreational cannabis was defeated in Oregon, where significantly
less money and campaign organization was devoted to the cause.
Supporters of a Colorado constitutional amendment legalizing marijuana declared
victory and opponents conceded defeat after returns showed the measure garnering
nearly 53 percent of the vote versus 47 percent against.
"Colorado will no longer have laws that steer people toward using alcohol, and
adults will be free to use marijuana instead if that is what they prefer. And we
will be better of as a society because of it," said Mason Tvert, co-director of
the Colorado pro-legalization campaign.
The legalization puts the state in direct conflict with the federal government,
which classifies cannabis as an illegal narcotic.
The U.S. Department of Justice reacted to the measure's passage in Colorado by
saying its enforcement policies remain unchanged, adding: "We are reviewing the
ballot initiative and have no additional comment at this time."
In Washington, cannabis legalization was passing by a handy margin, according to
state returns, and supporters gathered at a Seattle hotel declared victory after
local media, including the Seattle Times, declared the measure had been
approved.
MEDICAL MARIJUANA VICTORY
Separately, medical marijuana measures were on the ballot in three other states,
including Massachusetts, where CNN reported that voters approved an initiative
to allow cannabis for medicinal reasons.
Supporters there issued a statement declaring victory for what they described as
"the safest medical marijuana law in the country."
Seventeen other states, plus the District of Columbia, already have medical
marijuana laws on their books.
Under the recreational marijuana measures in Colorado and Washington, personal
possession of up to an ounce (28.5 grams) of marijuana would be legal for anyone
at least 21 years of age. Oregon's initiative would have legalized possession of
unlimited amounts of pot for recreational use.
All three proposals also would permit cannabis to be legally sold, and taxed, at
state-licensed stores in a system modeled after a regime many states have in
place for alcohol sales.
The Colorado measure will allow personal cultivation of up to six marijuana
plants, but "grow-your-own" pot would be banned in Washington state.
Tvert said provisions legalizing simple possession would take effect after 30
days, once the election results are officially certified. The newly passed
amendment also mandates establishment of a regulatory framework for sales and
excise tax collections once the state legislature reconvenes in January 2013.
"The voters have spoken and we have to respect their will," Colorado Governor
John Hickenlooper, a Democrat who opposed the measure, said in a statement.
"This will be a complicated process, but we intend to follow through."
He added: "Federal law still says marijuana is an illegal drug, so don't break
out the Cheetos or gold fish too quickly."
(Reporting by
Keith Coffman; Additional reporting by Jonathan Kaminsky,
Laura
Zuckerman and Dan Whitcomb; Writing by Alex Dobuzinskis and Steve Gorman;
Editing by
Cynthia Johnston, Todd Eastham, Leslie Gevirtz and Ciro Scotti)
November 7,
2012
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM
Voters in
Maine and Maryland approved same-sex marriage on an election night that jubilant
gay rights advocates called a historic turning point, the first time that
marriage for gay men and lesbians has been approved at the ballot box.
While six states and the District of Columbia have legalized same-sex marriage
through court decisions or legislative decisions, voters had rejected it more
than 30 times in a row.
Results for the other two states voting on same-sex marriage, Minnesota and
Washington, were still coming in late Tuesday, but rights groups said that the
victories in two states and possibly more were an important sign that public
opinion was shifting in their direction.
“We have made history for marriage equality by winning our first victory at the
ballot box,” said Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign,
which raised millions of dollars for the races in the four states.
Matt McTighe, the campaign manager for Mainers United for Marriage, said, “A lot
of families in Maine just became more stable and secure.”
At a victory party in Baltimore, supporters of Maryland’s referendum danced and
cheered as balloons filled the air. “I’m so elated right now,” said Mary Bruce
Leigh, 32. “This is the civil rights issue of our time, and we have succeeded in
Maryland.”
In what appeared to be a close race in Minnesota, voters were asked to adopt a
constitutional amendment limiting marriage to a man and a woman. While the state
already has a law barring same-sex marriage, conservatives hoped to prevent a
future Legislature or court decision from reversing it.
In Washington State, supporters of a referendum authorizing same-sex marriage
appeared to have an edge in pre-election polls, but final results were not
expected until later this week because ballots were still being mailed in as
late as Tuesday.
Laurie Carlsson, 33, stood on a freeway overpass with a sign urging drivers to
honk for the referendum.
“Seattleites do not use their horns — ever — but today they’re honking,” Ms.
Carlsson said as a deafening roar erupted. “It’s making me giddy.”
It has been a constant theme of opponents of same-sex marriage that whenever it
has been put before voters it has lost. In 30 states, voters have limited
marriage to a man and a woman through constitutional amendments, and same-sex
marriage has also been blocked in referendums like those in California in 2008
and Maine in 2009.
This year, the legislatures in Washington and Maryland approved same-sex
marriage, but opponents gathered enough signatures to force referendums. In
Maine, since their loss in 2009, gay rights advocates have been cultivating
public opinion in one-on-one conversations, and this year sponsored their
successful repeat election.
In the final week of the campaign, the opponents of marriage rights, mainly
financed by the National Organization for Marriage and the Roman Catholic
Church, mounted a barrage of advertising and telephone appeals in all four
states, trying to convince undecided voters that “redefining marriage” would
force schools to “teach gay marriage” and require businesses and churches to
violate religious principles.
Rights groups have denounced those messages as misleading scare tactics and say
they do not seek to redefine marriage but to end discrimination.
For many weeks, reflecting their more than threefold advantage in fund-raising
nationwide, advocates of same-sex marriage have unleashed advertisements of
their own in which community members say that gay and lesbian friends deserve
the same chance to love and marry that others enjoy.
Pre-election polling in Washington State indicated that a slight majority of
voters supported the referendum. “We have weathered their waves of attacks and
not lost any ground,” said Zach Silk, the campaign manager of Washington United
for Marriage, in an interview before the voting began.
Frank Schubert, who managed the campaigns to ban same-sex marriage in all four
states, disputed the notion that Tuesday’s ballots were a major turning point.
“The votes are very close everywhere,” he said.
Isolde Raftery
contributed reporting from Seattle,
Mitt
Romney’s loss to a Democratic president wounded by a weak economy is certain to
spur an internecine struggle over the future of the Republican Party, but the
strength of the party’s conservatives in Congress and the rightward tilt of the
next generation of party leaders could limit any course correction.
With their party on the verge of losing the popular presidential vote for the
fifth time in six elections, Republicans across the political spectrum
anticipate a prolonged and probably divisive period of self-examination.
The coming debate will be centered on whether the party should keep pursuing the
antigovernment focus that grew out of resistance to the health care law and won
them the House in 2010, or whether it should focus on a strategy that recognizes
the demographic tide running strongly against it.
“There will be some kind of war,” predicted Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican
Party consultant, suggesting it would pit “mathematicians” like him, who argue
that the party cannot keep surrendering the votes of Hispanics, blacks, younger
voters and college-educated women, against the party purists, or “priests,” as
he puts it, who believe that basic conservative principles can ultimately
triumph without much deviation.
“We are in a situation where the Democrats are getting a massive amount of votes
for free,” Mr. Murphy said.
But the debate will not just be about demographics. Ralph Reed, a veteran of the
conservative movement, said that Mr. Romney’s loss would stir resentment among
those who believe the party made a mistake in nominating a more centrist
Republican who had to work to appeal to the party’s base.
“There’s definitely a feeling that it would be better to nominate a conservative
of long-standing conviction,” he said.
As a party, Republicans continue to depend heavily on older working-class white
voters in rural and suburban America — a shrinking percentage of the overall
electorate — while Democrats rack up huge majorities among urban voters
including blacks, Hispanics and other minorities. Not to mention younger
Americans who are inclined to get their political news from Comedy Central and
will not necessarily become more conservative as they age. The disparity means
that Democrats can get well under 50 percent of the white vote and still win the
presidency, a split that is only going to widen in the future.
According to exit polls, about 7 in 10 Hispanics said they were voting for Mr.
Obama. Mr. Romney won the support of nearly 6 in 10 whites. In urban areas,
white voters were split over the two candidates, but about 6 in 10 white voters
in the suburbs went for Mr. Romney, as did nearly two-thirds in rural areas.
Mr. Romney won a majority of voters 65 or older, while Mr. Obama was backed by 6
in 10 Americans under 30, and won a narrow majority of those under 44.
Even as they absorbed Mr. Romney’s defeat, the party’s top elected officials,
strategists and activists said they believed that Republicans had offered a
persuasive message of economic opportunism and fiscal restraint. While the
messenger may have been flawed, they argued, Republicans should not stray from
that approach in a moment of panic.
“The party has to continually ask ourselves, what do we represent?” said Senator
Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican seen as a top White House contender in 2016.
“But we have to remain the movement on behalf of upward mobility, the party
people identify with their hopes and dreams. People want to have a chance.”
Matt Kibbe, the president of the Tea Party-aligned group FreedomWorks,
acknowledged there would be a natural struggle for the identity of the party in
the election’s aftermath. But he argued that in some respects the fight had
already been waged and won by the energized grass-roots forces that have shaped
the contours of Republican politics in recent elections.
“You are going to see a continuation of the fight between the old guard and all
of the new blood that has come in since 2010, but I don’t know how dramatic it
is going to be,” he said. “It is getting to point where you can’t reach back and
pull another establishment Republican from the queue like we have done with
Romney.”
Besides Mr. Rubio, Representative Paul D. Ryan, the unsuccessful
vice-presidential candidate, will now be seen as a chief party voice, as will
Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin. House Republicans particularly can be expected
to gravitate to Mr. Ryan. Among others considered on the rise are Senator Rand
Paul of Kentucky, Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia and Gov. Bobby Jindal of
Louisiana, and all can to some extent attribute their success to Tea Party-style
politics with an emphasis on cutting spending and shrinking government.
As possible counterbalances, Republicans point to former Gov. Jeb Bush of
Florida, who has shown an ability to connect with Hispanic voters, and Gov.
Chris Christie of New Jersey, who has been able to win in a blue state. But the
more conservative up-and-comers seem to have the upper hand for now, even in
defeat.
And while Senate Republicans did not make the gains they anticipated — and some
of their likely wins became losses in races where their candidates were deemed
too extreme — they added internally to their conservative ranks, with victories
by Ted Cruz in Texas and other Republicans expected to pick off Democratic
seats.
With House Republicans easily holding on to their majority, Republicans will
arguably be more conservative in the 113th Congress than they were in the 112th.
The first test of whether Republicans see any political need to be more
conciliatory will come quickly in the lame duck session of Congress this month,
when they will face pressure from the White House, Congressional Democrats and
perhaps the Senate Republican leadership to strike a deal to avert the
expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the beginning of automatic across-the-board
spending cuts.
If rank-and-file Republicans dig in, it will be a seen as strong indication that
they remain unwilling to make the kind of concessions they fear could bring them
primary election challenges or cost them in a future presidential primary.
To some in the centrist wing of the party, the need to move toward the middle
could not have been more obvious as Republicans came into the 2012 election
cycle with built-in advantages in both the presidential and Congressional
contests.
“We have to recognize the demographic changes in this country,” said Senator
Susan Collins of Maine, who has watched as the number of her fellow moderate
Republicans in the Senate declined. “Republicans cannot win with just rural,
white voters.”
Democrats sense a parallel to their own recent history when an increasingly
liberal party seen as losing touch with mainstream America was defeated in three
consecutive presidential elections, in 1980, 1984 and 1988, before Bill Clinton,
who practiced a centrist style of politics, won two terms.
“They need a Bill Clinton moment,” said Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago and
former top aide to both Presidents Clinton and Obama. Though many Republicans
still see no impetus for drastic change, there does seem to be a growing
consensus that the party needs to somehow repair its relations with the nation’s
Hispanics, a group that has socially and fiscally conservative tendencies and
one in which Republicans enjoyed some success during the administration of
former President George W. Bush.
But that support has deteriorated steadily since the 2004 election. Mr. Rubio, a
Cuban-American, said his party has to begin by striking a different tone on
immigration, pushing for improvements in the existing immigration system and
talking more about the capacity to enter the United States legally.
Michael D.
Shear and Allison Kopicki contributed reporting.
November 7,
2012
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER
For
President Obama, now comes a second chance. An electorate that considers the
country to be on the wrong track nonetheless agreed to renew his contract in
hopes that the next four years will be better than the last.
A weary but triumphant president took the stage in Chicago early Wednesday
morning before a jubilant crowd, clearly relieved to have survived a challenge
that threatened to end his storybook political career. While he was speaking of
America, he could have been talking about himself when he told the audience: “We
have picked ourselves up. We have fought our way back.”
Mr. Obama emerges from a scalding campaign and a four-year education in the
realities of Washington a far different figure from the man sent to the White
House in 2008. What faces him in this next stage of his journey are not
overinflated expectations of partisan, racial and global healing, but granular
negotiations over spending cuts and tax increases plus a looming showdown with
Iran.
Few if any expect him to seriously change Washington anymore; most voters just
seemed to want him to make it function. His remarkable personal story and
trailblazing role are just a vague backdrop at this point to a campaign that
often seemed to lack a singular, overriding mission beyond stopping his
challenger from taking the country in another direction.
More seasoned and scarred, less prone to grandiosity and perhaps even less
idealistic, Mr. Obama returns for a second term with a Congress still at least
partly controlled by an opposition party that will claim a mandate of its own.
He will have to choose between conciliation and confrontation, or find a way to
toggle back and forth between the two.
“Will he be more pugnacious and more willing to swing for the fences on domestic
issues, judicial appointments and so forth?” asked Christopher Edley Jr., a dean
of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, and a longtime
Obama friend who has been disappointed at times. “You can react to a narrow
victory by trimming your sails, or you can decide ‘What the hell, let’s sail
into the storm and make sure this has meant something.’ “
The champagne bottles from victory celebrations in Chicago will barely be
emptied before Mr. Obama has to begin answering that question. The coming
end-of-the-year fiscal cliff prompted by trillions of dollars of automatic tax
increases and spending cuts could force Mr. Obama to define priorities that will
shape the rest of his presidency before he even puts his hand on the Bible to
take the oath a second time.
Mr. Obama has expressed hope that “the fever may break” after the election and
that the parties come together, a theory encouraged by allies like Senator John
Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts. “I’ve talked with colleagues in the Senate who
for months have told me they’re very anxious to get beyond the gridlock and
craziness,” Mr. Kerry said.
If that proves overly optimistic, allies said, then the president’s re-election
puts him in a stronger position than in the past. “I actually think he’s holding
a lot of cards coming off a win,” said John D. Podesta, who led Mr. Obama’s
transition team four years ago. “He can’t be overturned by veto, so he can
create a certain set of demands on Republicans that they’re going to have to
deal with.”
But even as votes were coming in, Republicans were making clear that Mr. Obama
will have to deal with them, too.
“If he wins, he wins — but at the same time, voters will clearly vote for a
Republican House,” said Representative Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican
who shouted “You lie!” at Mr. Obama during a speech to Congress. “The
consequence of that is our voters really anticipate and count on us holding
firm.”
It may have been inevitable that Mr. Obama could not live up to the heavy mantle
of hope and change he assumed in 2008 as the first African-American to be
elected president. Inheriting an economy in crisis, he pushed through a sweeping
stimulus package, the health care law and Wall Street regulatory measures, and
he headed off another depression. But he failed to change the culture of
Washington or bring unemployment down to healthy levels.
By 2010, amid a Tea Party revolt over rising national debt and expanding
government, his party lost the House. He spent the last two years trying to hang
onto the White House and preserve his accomplishments.
Now the struggle for re-election will be replaced by a struggle for Mr. Obama’s
political soul. Liberals who swallowed their misgivings during the campaign said
they would resume pressure on the president to fight for their ideas. Other
Democrats, and some Republicans, will push him to be more open to the views of
those who voted against him.
“He needs to do something dramatic to reset the atmosphere and in a dramatic way
demonstrate that he is very serious about finding bipartisan solutions,” said
David Boren, a former senator who now serves as the president of the University
of Oklahoma and as a co-chairman of the president’s intelligence advisory board.
Mr. Boren suggested that Mr. Obama appoint “a unity cabinet” bringing together
Republicans and Democrats.
Ilya Sheyman, the campaign director of MoveOn.org, said Mr. Obama’s base would
be hungry for action, not accommodation. “We see the president’s re-election as
a precondition for progress and not progress in itself,” he said.
Likewise, Lorella Praeli, director of advocacy and policy for the United We
Dream Network, a group advocating for young immigrants, said her members would
push Mr. Obama to revamp the immigration system. “We will hold the president
accountable not only on his promise on legislative relief, but also what he can
do administratively,” she said.
Mr. Obama seemed to address this tension in the closing speeches of his
campaign. “I want to see more cooperation in Washington,” he said in Mentor,
Ohio. “But if the price of peace in Washington” means slashing student aid,
reversing his health care program or cutting people from Medicaid, he added,
“that’s not a price I’ll pay.”
Still, Mr. Obama arguably did not help himself with a campaign strategy that
left many issues unaddressed. While he and his aides indicated occasionally in
interviews that he hoped to tackle the immigration system and climate change in
a second term, he rarely mentioned them in his campaign speeches. As a result,
it may be hard for him to claim a mandate on those issues.
“Nothing about the campaign has approved a mandate or an agenda,” said Ed
Rogers, a White House official under President Ronald Reagan and the first
President Bush who is now a top lobbyist. “I don’t think the House will meet him
where he wants to be met. I’m just pessimistic about our president having much
authority or much juice. Nobody’s going to be afraid of him.”
Mr. Obama is acutely aware that time for progress is limited in any second term,
as he increasingly becomes a lame duck. “The first 14 months are productive, the
last 14 months are productive, and you sag in the middle,” said Mayor Rahm
Emanuel of Chicago, Mr. Obama’s first White House chief of staff.
Given that dynamic, Democrats said Mr. Obama must move quickly to establish
command of the political process. “If you don’t put anything on the board, you
die faster,” said Patrick Griffin, who was President Bill Clinton’s liaison to
Congress and is now associate director of the Center for Congressional and
Presidential Studies at American University. “If you have no credibility, if you
can’t establish some sort of victory here, you will be marginalized by your own
party and the other side very quickly.”
All of that felt a thousand miles off on Tuesday night in Chicago. After all the
debates and ads and rallies, it was a moment for Mr. Obama and his team to
savor. There was a time even before he became president that Mr. Obama worried
about his meteoric rise, telling aides he did not want to be “like a comet
streaking across the sky” because “comets eventually burn up.” For now, the
comet streaks on.
November 7,
2012
The New York Times
By JONATHAN HAIDT
THE voters
have spoken. So, what now? How will our still divided government deal with our
mounting threats and challenges?
Shared fear can help.
A Bedouin proverb says, “Me against my brother, my brothers and me against my
cousins, then my cousins and me against strangers.” Human beings are pretty good
at uniting to fight at whatever level is most important at a given moment. This
is why every story about a team of warriors or superheroes features an internal
rivalry, but all hatchets are buried just before the climactic final battle in
which the team vanquishes the external enemy.
A national election focuses our attention on a single level of competition —
political party versus political party. Let’s call that “me and my brother
against our cousin.” But after that, it’s time for our national team to come
together to fight the many threats and enemies that confront us. Let’s unite
with our cousins to fight the stranger!
Except that we didn’t do it four years ago, when things looked even grimmer, and
there’s no sign that we’re going to do it now. Since the 1990s we’ve been stuck
at one level — party versus party. Partisanship is not a bad thing. We need
multiple teams to develop competing visions for voters to choose among. But when
so many of our leaders can’t even occasionally place national interest before
party interest, we’ve crossed over into hyperpartisanship. And that’s a very bad
thing, because it amplifies other problems like the debt crisis, the absence of
a rational immigration policy and our aging infrastructure.
We the people bear some of the blame for what’s happened in Congress, for we,
too, have become more angrily partisan. So what can we do to pull ourselves up
to that higher level? How can we unite not just with our brothers and sisters,
but with our cousins?
One way is to focus on common threats, rather than on common ground, just as the
Bedouin proverb suggests. It’s only the threat of the stranger that brings the
extended family together. A physical attack by outsiders — like Pearl Harbor or
9/11 — binds people together like nothing else. But what if there is no such
attack? Can trade competition with China do it? What about a threat we created
ourselves?
Well, that depends. A basic principle of moral psychology is that “morality
binds and blinds.” In many pre-agricultural societies, groups achieved trust and
unity by circling around sacred objects. In modern societies, much larger groups
bind themselves together by treating certain books, flags, leaders or ideals as
sacred and by symbolically circling around them. But if your team circles too
fast, you lose the ability to see clearly or think for yourself. You go blind to
evidence that contradicts your group’s moral consensus, and you become enraged
at teammates who suggest that the other side is not entirely bad (as New
Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie, is now finding out).
Unlike a foreign attack, a problem that threatens only one side’s sacred values
can therefore divide us, rather than unite us. It’s as though a giant asteroid
is headed for the Earth. One side sees it coming and screams, but the louder it
screams, the more stubbornly the other side covers its ears and averts its eyes.
Here are a few of the asteroids hurtling toward us, which half of us can already
see with our naked eyes:
• Rising temperatures. The left has been raising the alarm about global warming
since the 1990s. It’s a threat to the environment and to poor people around the
world — sacred values for liberals — but the right largely denies the scientific
consensus, in part because many of the remedies would require limits on industry
and intervention into markets (which would violate sacred values for some
conservatives). Hurricane Sandy gave us a small taste of what’s likely to happen
more frequently.
• Rising entitlements. The right has railed against entitlement spending since
the 1960s, and its frustration boiled over in the Tea Party movement. The
welfare state is a threat to traditional conservative values of personal
responsibility (people have less incentive to plan for their own future) and
fiscal solvency. Despite the logical errors in Mitt Romney’s “47 percent”
comments, we do face bankruptcy when the baby boomers retire and a shrinking
percentage of workers must pay the ever growing expenses of a ballooning class
of retirees. Yet the Democrats want to “protect” older Americans, students and
almost everyone else from the need to sacrifice.
• Rising inequality. The left has been protesting rising inequality since Ronald
Reagan cut taxes on the rich and benefits for the poor, and a great deal of
recent scholarship documents the socially, morally and economically damaging
effects of separating the haves ever further from the have-nots. Nearly all the
gains in productivity in the last 30 years have gone to the wealthiest, but the
right justifies the trend and denies its toxicity.
• Rising births to unmarried women. In 1960, 5 percent of American children were
born to unmarried women. In 2010, that number was more than 40 percent.
Conservatives treat the traditional family as the irreplaceable building block
of society and are therefore horrified that unmarried motherhood will soon be
the national norm. The left has been ambivalent about the value of marriage (at
least, before the push for gay marriage), sometimes viewing it as a patriarchal
institution and reluctant to admit that a stable marriage is very good for
children.
In other words, America faces many serious threats, but each side sees some and
denies others. Morality binds and blinds. The philosopher John Stuart Mill
described this problem in 1840, noting that in almost all major ideological
controversies, “both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong
in what they denied, and that if either could have been made to take the other’s
views in addition to its own, little more would have been needed to make its
doctrine correct.”
To see Mill’s diagnosis in action, note that marriage is disappearing primarily
among Americans without a four-year college degree. Marriage confers so many
benefits on children that it helps them rise into the upper tier of wealth;
children who don’t benefit from a stable marriage are more likely to fall. So if
you are a liberal who is worried about the inequality asteroid, you might
consider teaming up with a conservative group trying to promote marriage.
But then you’d run smack into the problem that women rarely want to marry a man
with no job and poor prospects. So if you are a conservative who cares about the
unmarried-mother asteroid, you might want to team up with liberal groups working
to improve educational equality and to find ways to keep poor young men in
school.
When we focus only on the one asteroid that most frightens us, we feel anger at
the partisans on the other side. We curse their blindness without recognizing
our own. But if we can look up into the sky and see a whole fleet of asteroids
heading for us, we lose our tunnel vision and experience a healthy form of
panic. We’re in big trouble, and anyone who does that hyperpartisan stuff now
should be ashamed — or kicked out of office. The day after Election Day is the
day for all of us, and our siblings and cousins, to come together and start
building an asteroid deflection system.
Jonathan
Haidt, a professor of business ethics
at the New
York University Stern School of Business, is the author, most recently,
of “The
Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.”
November 7,
2012
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
In October
2010, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, famously told The National
Journal, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President
Obama to be a one-term president.” And that’s how he and his party acted.
Well, Mitch, how’s that workin’ out for ya?
No one can know for sure what complex emotional chemistry tipped this election
Obama’s way, but here’s my guess: In the end, it came down to a majority of
Americans believing that whatever his faults, Obama was trying his hardest to
fix what ails the country and that he had to do it with a Republican Party that,
in its gut, did not want to meet him halfway but wanted him to fail — so that it
could swoop in and pick up the pieces. To this day, I find McConnell’s
declaration appalling. Consider all the problems we have faced in this country
over the last four years — from debt to adapting to globalization to
unemployment to the challenges of climate change to terrorism — and then roll
over that statement: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for
President Obama to be a one-term president.”
That, in my view, is what made the difference. The G.O.P. lost an election that,
given the state of the economy, it should have won because of an excess of
McConnell-like cynicism, a shortage of new ideas and an abundance of really bad
ideas — about immigration, about climate, about how jobs are created and about
abortion and other social issues.
It seems that many Americans went to the polls without much enthusiasm for
either candidate, but, nevertheless, with a clear idea of whom they preferred.
The majority seemed to be saying to Obama: “You didn’t get it all right the
first time, but we’re going to give you a second chance.” In a way, they voted
for “hope and change” again. I don’t think it was so much a ratification of
health care or “Race to the Top” or any other Obama initiative. It was more a
vote on his character: “We think you’re trying. Now try even harder. Learn from
your mistakes. Reach out to the other side, even if they slap away your hand,
and focus like a laser on the economy, so those of us who voted for you today
without much enthusiasm can feel good about this vote.”
And that is why Obama’s victory is so devastating for the G.O.P. A country with
nearly 8 percent unemployment preferred to give the president a second chance
rather than Mitt Romney a first one. The Republican Party today needs to have a
real heart-to-heart with itself.
The G.O.P. has lost two presidential elections in a row because it forced its
candidate to run so far to the loony right to get through the primaries,
dominated by its ultraconservative base, that he could not get close enough back
to the center to carry the national election. It is not enough for Republicans
to tell their Democratic colleagues in private — as some do — “I wish I could
help you, but our base is crazy.” They need to have their own reformation. The
center-right has got to have it out with the far-right, or it is going to be a
minority party for a long time.
Many in the next generation of America know climate change is real, and they
want to see something done to mitigate it. Many in the next generation of
America will be of Hispanic origin and insist on humane immigration reform that
gives a practical legal pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. The next
generation is going to need immigration of high-I.Q. risk-takers from India,
China and Latin America if the U.S. is going to remain at the cutting edge of
the Information Technology revolution and be able to afford the government we
want. Many in the next generation of America see gays and lesbians in their
families, workplaces and Army barracks, and they don’t want to deny them the
marriage rights held by others. The G.O.P. today is at war with too many in the
next generation of America on all of these issues.
All that said, my prediction is that the biggest domestic issue in the next four
years will be how we respond to changes in technology, globalization and markets
that have, in a very short space of time, made the decent-wage, middle-skilled
job — the backbone of the middle class — increasingly obsolete. The only
decent-wage jobs will be high-skilled ones.
The answer to that challenge will require a new level of political imagination —
a combination of educational reforms and unprecedented collaboration between
business, schools, universities and government to change how workers are trained
and empowered to keep learning. It will require tax reforms and immigration
reforms. America today desperately needs a center-right G.O.P. that is offering
merit-based, market-based approaches to all these issues — and a willingness to
meet the other side halfway. The country is starved for practical, bipartisan
cooperation, and it will reward politicians who deliver it and punish those who
don’t.
The votes have been counted. President Obama now needs to get to work to justify
the second chance the country has given him, and the Republicans need to get to
work understanding why that happened.
November 6,
2012
The new York Times
By JONATHAN WEISMAN
Democrats
snatched Republican Senate seats in Indiana and Massachusetts on Tuesday,
averted what once were considered likely defeats in Missouri and Montana, and
held control of the Senate, handing Republicans a string of stinging defeats for
the second campaign season in a row.
The final balance of power depended on the results of tight races in Nevada and
North Dakota, but it was clear that Democrats would maintain a majority and
could even add to the 53 seats that they and their independent allies control.
Senate leaders declared that their strong showing must be a signal to
Republicans to come to the table to deal with the nation’s intractable problems,
including the “fiscal cliff” facing Congress in January.
“Now that the election is over, it’s time to put politics aside and work
together to find solutions,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority
leader. “The strategy of obstruction, gridlock and delay was soundly rejected by
the American people. Now they are looking to us for solutions.”
In Indiana, Representative Joe Donnelly did what had seemed impossible by taking
a Senate seat for the Democrats in a heavily Republican state, just weeks after
his opponent, State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, said conception by rape was
God’s will.
In Wisconsin, Representative Tammy Baldwin became the first openly gay candidate
to secure a Senate seat with her defeat of former Gov. Tommy Thompson, a
Republican.
Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, a Democrat once considered the Senate’s
most endangered incumbent, beat Representative Todd Akin, who seemingly sank his
campaign when he said women who are victims of “legitimate rape” would not get
pregnant.
In Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard professor, swept from power
Senator Scott P. Brown, a Republican whose surprise victory in January 2010
heralded the coming of the Tea Party wave. In Virginia, former Gov. Tim Kaine
triumphed over another former governor, George Allen.
Democrats also scored a narrow victory in Montana, as Senator Jon Tester — one
of the party’s most endangered incumbents — beat Representative Denny Rehberg,
in what was believed to be the most expensive race in the state’s history.
Those Democratic triumphs followed quick wins in Connecticut, Florida, Ohio and
Pennsylvania, all states where Republicans had harbored ambitions of victory
that would propel them to a Senate majority for the first time since 2006.
Republicans lost another state when former Gov. Angus King Jr. of Maine, an
independent, won his race to succeed Senator Olympia J. Snowe, a moderate who is
retiring. Mr. King has yet to say which party he will caucus with next year, but
he had warned Republicans and Democrats that his treatment during the campaign
would bear on that decision. National Republicans and their “super PAC” allies
responded by pummeling him with negative advertisements that did little to shake
his lead.
“We said we’d defend all of our seats and would put half of their seats in
play,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the chairwoman of the Democratic
Senatorial Campaign Committee, who took that job last year when others had
refused it.
“No one believed me,” she said, “but we did just that.”
The Senate campaigns of 2012 will be remembered for the sudden salience of rape
as a destructive political subject and a Democratic surge in a year once
expected to be the party’s Waterloo. Two years after Tea Party-backed candidates
in Colorado, Delaware and Nevada fumbled away Republican chances at Senate
control, a new crop of conservatives appeared to do the same thing. That will
surely raise new questions about the failure of Washington Republicans to
control a right flank in their grass roots.
“They’re going to have to decide whether they want to be in the majority or the
minority,” Senator Snowe said. “It simply doesn’t make sense if Republicans
decide they’re going to drive an ideological agenda as opposed to a practical
agenda that is aligned with the principles of our roots.”
Representative Christopher S. Murphy fended off the deep-pocketed campaign of
the former wrestling executive Linda McMahon to win a Senate seat in
Connecticut, and Senator Bill Nelson of Florida easily defeated his Republican
challenger, Representative Connie Mack.
Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio held off Josh Mandel, the Republican state
treasurer, weathering an onslaught of negative advertising from outside groups
to keep a seat for Democrats in a presidential battleground that Republicans
were counting on.
In New York, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat, cruised to re-election.
Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, was also easily re-elected.
The results suggested that for the second consecutive election cycle,
Republicans’ high hopes for a takeover of the Senate were dashed in large part
by their own candidates. In 2010 and 2012, the disappointment could be laid at
the feet of a very conservative Republican primary electorate that was
determined to sweep out the party’s centrists.
Democrats started the cycle with 23 seats to defend and the Republicans 10, an
imbalance produced by the Democratic sweep of 2006. With only a three-seat
majority for the Democrats, including two independents who caucused with them,
holding on to control of the chamber seemed like an impossible task.
To defend some of the seats in heavily Republican states where Democrats were
retiring, the party recruited talented candidates like Heidi Heitkamp, a former
North Dakota secretary of state. They also pulled in strong candidates in
Arizona, Indiana and Massachusetts, forcing the Republicans to defend seats
across a broader map in a year that was supposed to be all offense.
More important, the Tea Party wave that began in 2010 kept rolling early this
year, again threatening the Republicans’ chances for a majority. In 2010,
primary voters in Colorado, Delaware and Nevada selected Tea Party-backed
conservatives, who may have wrecked the party’s hopes.
This time, conservatives defeated Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, a
Republican veteran who was expected to walk to re-election. Instead, they
nominated Indiana’s far more conservative treasurer, Mr. Mourdock, turning the
general election into a fight.
Republican primary voters in Missouri chose Mr. Akin, the most conservative
candidate in the field, to challenge Ms. McCaskill.
Republican fights between grass-roots conservatives and party-backed candidates
led to prolonged and expensive primaries in Arizona and Wisconsin as well. In
both cases, the party’s preferred candidate prevailed but emerged battered and
broke.
Michael N. Castle, a moderate Republican and former congressman from Delaware,
pointed to Ted Cruz, the Tea Party-backed Republican in Texas who coasted to
victory in the race for the Senate seat being vacated by Kay Bailey Hutchison.
“They can do that in Texas — that’s fine,” said Mr. Castle, who lost a Senate
primary in 2010 to Christine O’Donnell, who was backed by the Tea Party and then
lost in the general election. “But it gets a lot tougher in Indiana or
Delaware.”
He added, “The Republican Party as a whole needs to be more understanding about
what can fit into the different pockets of a diverse country.”
November 6,
2012
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES
and MEGAN THEE-BRENAN
With voters
worn by hard times yet many of them hopeful of better times ahead, Americans
reverted to more traditional lines compared with the broader-based coalition
that made Barack Obama president four years ago.
President Obama held onto the demographic groups that traditionally make up his
party’s base — young and unmarried people, political moderates, women, blacks,
Latinos, the least and most educated, city dwellers, lower-income voters and
union members — yet struggled with others who helped sweep him to victory in
2008.
Men, political independents and suburbanites — who backed Mr. Obama four years
ago — this time gave more votes to Mitt Romney, according to Edison Research
surveys of voters leaving the polls and of telephone interviews with some of the
roughly 30 million Americans who voted early.
The president did barely hold onto college graduates and mothers, two groups
that until 2008 were a mainstay of the Republican Party, and he hung onto Roman
Catholics. Mr. Obama and his campaign assiduously courted the groups, just as
last time. But he lost the independents who were among the most closely watched
groups in the crucial swing states of Ohio and Virginia, except in Florida,
where he had a narrow edge late in the evening.
Mr. Romney retained the support of most other typically Republican groups,
including whites, older Americans, Southerners, rural residents, married voters,
regular churchgoers and, overwhelmingly, white evangelical Christians, many of
whom expressed hostility toward Mr. Romney, as a Mormon, in his 2008 and 2012
campaigns.
Perhaps indicating their antipathy to Mr. Obama, white evangelical Christians
were more supportive of Mr. Romney than they were of Senator John McCain, the
Republican nominee of 2008, and roughly as supportive as they were of President
George W. Bush. And Mr. Obama’s support among Jewish voters slipped by eight
points.
Mr. Romney got the votes of more whites than Mr. McCain, and, unlike Mr. McCain,
he was supported by a majority of white voters under age 30.
In short, the electorate this year looked a lot more like that of 2004, when Mr.
Bush narrowly defeated Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, to win
re-election, than Mr. Obama’s diverse majority of 2008. The shifts among major
demographic groups were first seen in the 2010 midterm elections, when the
Democrats lost control of Congress as the economy sputtered. But Democrats made
up a larger share of the electorate, similar to 2008, at 38 percent, with 32
percent identifying as Republicans and 30 percent as independents.
Significantly, the electorate’s view of the government’s role in the economy has
shifted away from Mr. Obama’s call for a kind of public-private partnership, and
toward Mr. Romney’s hands-off, free-market platform.
In November 2008, when the country was floundering in the worst recession since
the Depression, Election Day surveys of voters found that 51 percent of them
wanted government to do more to intervene while 43 percent said it was doing too
many things better left to businesses. Now, after four years of government
activism, those numbers have flipped.
In some states where government intervention like the auto bailout was palpable,
however, Mr. Obama benefited. For example, Ohio voters overwhelmingly supported
the 2009 federal aid to automakers, according to surveys of those who voted, and
about three-quarters of them backed Mr. Obama.
This was no surprise: a big majority nationally said the economy was the most
important issue. Majorities of those voters and of the smaller portion who
called federal budget deficits the nation’s primary issue supported Mr. Romney.
Mr. Obama won most voters who named foreign policy or health care as their top
concern.
A majority still blames Mr. Bush more than Mr. Obama for the economy’s lingering
problems. That helps explain how the president remained a formidable contender
for a second term though no modern incumbent had won re-election with an
unemployment rate near 8 percent.
So does the growing share of voters who view the economy’s condition — and their
own — as improving. Four in 10 said the economy is getting better, and they
overwhelmingly supported Mr. Obama. Those who said it is “staying the same” or
getting worse backed Mr. Romney.
As in national polls before the election, just over half of voters said the
country is on the wrong track. Still, 54 percent of voters approved of Mr.
Obama’s job performance, about the same rating that Mr. Bush had when he was
re-elected.
The president was probably helped in the campaign’s final week by his widely
praised handling of the federal government’s response to Hurricane Sandy. Nearly
two-thirds of voters said it was a factor in their vote; those who called it
important chose Mr. Obama.
He was seen generally as more empathetic and better able to handle Medicare and
an international crisis. The two were about even when it came to who was better
able to handle the economy and the federal budget deficit.
Three-fifths of voters said they opposed raising taxes to help cut the deficit,
a finding that favored Mr. Romney. But almost half support higher taxes on
incomes over $250,000, as Mr. Obama has proposed.
The Obama campaign’s emphasis on winning Latino voters seemed to pay off. Mr.
Obama maintained support among Latino voters, who are about one in 10 of the
electorate, and growing, including in swing states and Republican states like
Texas.
Mr. Obama got about 7 in 10 Latinos and more than 9 of 10 black voters. He also
won overwhelming support from the small, growing slice of voters who are
Asian-Americans.
Some Republican leaders have warned of the danger for their party as the nation
becomes less white if Democrats solidify the allegiance of such ethnic groups as
Latinos and Asian-Americans, or, conversely, if Republicans forfeit it by
perpetuating their image as a party hostile to immigrants. A few leaders, like
former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, warned Mr. Romney during the Republican
nomination race that his hard-line stand on immigration could backfire.
Mr. Obama, aides say, will try to enlist Republicans in Congress to overhaul
immigration law, and the voter surveys provided ammunition: two-thirds said
illegal immigrant workers should be “offered a chance to apply for legal
status.”
Seven in 10 voters said they made up their mind before September; they favored
Mr. Obama.
November 6,
2012
The New York Times
By PETER APPLEBOME
HARTFORD —
Christopher S. Murphy, a 39-year-old three-term Connecticut congressman,
defeated the former wrestling executive Linda E. McMahon on Tuesday to win the
United States Senate seat held since 1989 by Joseph I. Lieberman, who is
retiring.
Mr. Murphy, a Democrat, defeated Ms. McMahon, a Republican, amid heavy turnout
to cap a meteoric political rise. Mr. Murphy, a lawyer, first won a seat in the
Connecticut House of Representatives in 1988 at age 25 and in 2006 defeated a
24-year incumbent, Nancy Johnson, to represent Connecticut’s Fifth District. He
will be the youngest member of the Senate.
The race was long and bitter, dominated by a media barrage by Ms. McMahon, 64,
who also lost a bid for the Senate in 2010 against Richard Blumenthal. Over the
two races, she spent nearly $100 million, almost all of it her own. In this
race, she tried to reach out to women, with whom she performed poorly last time,
by softening her image. She also tried to paint Mr. Murphy as a career
politician who had been careless about his personal finances.
But Mr. Murphy hit back on traditional Democratic themes, particularly women’s
issues, and performed strongly in the candidates’ four debates. And Ms. McMahon,
who over the two races spent more of her own money to win a Senate seat than
anyone in history, was bucking a stiff Democratic tide in a state that President
Obama carried easily and where Democrats hold all the state offices and control
both houses of the Legislature. They held on to all five United States House
seats in voting Tuesday.
“Tonight we proved that what matters most in life is the measure of your ideas,
the measure of your determination, the measure of your friends, not the measure
of your wallet,” Mr. Murphy told an exultant crowd here.
He was introduced by Senator Blumenthal, who clearly remembered his own brutal
race against Ms. McMahon and relished the outcome of both.
“In Connecticut, we have elections, not auctions,” he said.
In Stamford, Ms. McMahon thanked her supporters and asked them to stay involved
with the issues she raised.
“Everyone listen to me,” she said. “Charge them, challenge them to do what we
say, because they work for us. If we forget that, shame on us.”
With 72 percent of the vote reporting early Wednesday, Mr. Murphy had won about
53 percent of the vote, with 45 percent for Ms. McMahon.
Exit polls indicated that more than two-thirds of voters said that which party
controlled the Senate was a very important part of their vote, a clear advantage
for Mr. Murphy.
Ms. McMahon’s background as the former chief executive of World Wrestling
Entertainment — which she used to describe herself as a successful
businesswoman, and which her opponents used to portray her as a purveyor of
crass entertainment — was not as prominent a part of the campaign as it was in
2010. Still, according to exit polls, roughly 4 in 10 voters said Ms. McMahon’s
wrestling background played a role in their vote, and of those, 9 to 1 went for
Mr. Murphy.
And, despite advertisements aimed at softening her image, slightly more than
half of voters said Mr. Murphy had high ethical standards, while only 4 in 10
said that about Ms. McMahon. Mr. Murphy won the women’s vote by about 15
percentage points.
And, as in 2010, it appeared there were limits to what Ms. McMahon’s advertising
artillery could accomplish.
Mark Gudim, 31, a home inspector from Brookfield, said he was an unaffiliated
voter and was undecided until a few weeks ago when “I couldn’t take the
advertisements anymore.”
“I drive a lot every day for work, and every time I turned on the radio, there
she was,” he said. “It wasn’t about what she was going to do, it was always
bashing Chris Murphy. It definitely got old.”
Mr. Murphy’s election capped a night on which Democrats were poised to control
all six Senate seats in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. In New York,
Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, who was appointed by Gov. David A. Paterson and
then won a special election in 2010 to serve out Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate
term, defeated her Republican opponent, Wendy E. Long.
In New Jersey, the incumbent, Robert Menendez, defeated Joe Kyrillos, a
Republican state senator and a close ally of Gov. Chris Christie.
The Connecticut race was the most contested of the three and gained considerable
national attention as Ms. McMahon’s aggressive, well-financed campaign put Mr.
Murphy on the defensive and brought the race to a dead heat in several polls
before the four debates last month. But national Democrats and outside groups
threw some money into the race on Mr. Murphy’s behalf, and Ms. McMahon began
drawing heat for remarks she made in April proposing provisions that would allow
the reconsideration of Social Security and for refusing to provide specifics on
programs like Social Security and Medicare until after the election.
November 6,
2012
The New York Times
By JONATHAN WEISMAN
Democrats
snatched Republican Senate seats in Indiana and Massachusetts on Tuesday,
averted what was once considered a likely defeat in Missouri and held control of
the Senate, handing Republicans a string of stinging defeats for the second
campaign season in a row.
The final balance of power depended on the results of tight races in Montana,
Nevada and North Dakota, but it was clear that Democrats would maintain a
majority and could even add to the 53 seats that they and their independent
allies control. Senate leaders declared that their strong showing must be a
signal to Republicans to come to the table to deal with the nation’s intractable
problems, including the “fiscal cliff” facing Congress in January.
“Now that the election is over, it’s time to put politics aside and work
together to find solutions,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority
leader. “The strategy of obstruction, gridlock and delay was soundly rejected by
the American people. Now they are looking to us for solutions.”
In Indiana, Representative Joe Donnelly did what had seemed impossible by taking
a Senate seat for the Democrats in a heavily Republican state, just weeks after
his opponent, State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, said conception by rape was
God’s will.
In Wisconsin, Representative Tammy Baldwin became the first openly gay candidate
to secure a Senate seat with her defeat of former Gov. Tommy Thompson, a
Republican.
Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, a Democrat once considered the Senate’s
most endangered incumbent, beat Representative Todd Akin, who seemingly sank his
campaign when he said women who are victims of “legitimate rape” would not get
pregnant.
In Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard professor, swept from power
Senator Scott P. Brown, a Republican whose surprise victory in January 2010
heralded the coming of the Tea Party wave. In Virginia, former Gov. Tim Kaine
triumphed over another former governor, George Allen.
Those Democratic triumphs followed quick wins in Connecticut, Florida, Ohio and
Pennsylvania, all states where Republicans had harbored ambitions of victory
that would propel them to a Senate majority for the first time since 2006.
Republicans lost another state when former Gov. Angus King Jr. of Maine, an
independent, won his race to succeed Senator Olympia J. Snowe, a moderate who is
retiring. Mr. King has yet to say which party he will caucus with next year, but
he had warned Republicans and Democrats that his treatment during the campaign
would bear on that decision. National Republicans and their “super PAC” allies
responded by pummeling him with negative advertisements that did little to shake
his lead.
“We said we’d defend all of our seats and would put half of their seats in
play,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the chairwoman of the Democratic
Senatorial Campaign Committee, who took that job last year when others had
refused it.
“No one believed me,” she said, “but we did just that.”
The Senate campaigns of 2012 will be remembered for the sudden salience of rape
as a destructive political subject and a Democratic surge in a year once
expected to be the party’s Waterloo. Two years after Tea Party-backed candidates
in Colorado, Delaware and Nevada fumbled away Republican chances at Senate
control, a new crop of conservatives appeared to do the same thing. That will
surely raise new questions about the failure of Washington Republicans to
control a right flank in their grass roots.
“They’re going to have to decide whether they want to be in the majority or the
minority,” Senator Snowe said. “It simply doesn’t make sense if Republicans
decide they’re going to drive an ideological agenda as opposed to a practical
agenda that is aligned with the principles of our roots.”
Representative Christopher S. Murphy fended off the deep-pocketed campaign of
the former wrestling executive Linda McMahon to win a Senate seat in
Connecticut, and Senator Bill Nelson of Florida easily defeated his Republican
challenger, Representative Connie Mack.
Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio held off Josh Mandel, the Republican state
treasurer, weathering an onslaught of negative advertising from outside groups
to keep a seat for Democrats in a presidential battleground that Republicans
were counting on.
In New York, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat, cruised to re-election.
Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, was also easily re-elected.
The results suggested that for the second consecutive election cycle,
Republicans’ high hopes for a takeover of the Senate were dashed in large part
by their own candidates. In 2010 and 2012, the disappointment could be laid at
the feet of a very conservative Republican primary electorate that was
determined to sweep out the party’s centrists.
Democrats started the cycle with 23 seats to defend and the Republicans 10, an
imbalance produced by the Democratic sweep of 2006. With only a three-seat
majority for the Democrats, including two independents who caucused with them,
holding on to control of the chamber seemed like an impossible task.
To defend some of the seats in heavily Republican states where Democrats were
retiring, the party recruited talented candidates like Heidi Heitkamp, a former
North Dakota secretary of state. They also pulled in strong candidates in
Arizona, Indiana and Massachusetts, forcing the Republicans to defend seats
across a broader map in a year that was supposed to be all offense.
More important, the Tea Party wave that began in 2010 kept rolling early this
year, again threatening the Republicans’ chances for a majority. In 2010,
primary voters in Colorado, Delaware and Nevada selected Tea Party-backed
conservatives, who may have wrecked the party’s hopes.
This time, conservatives defeated Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, a
Republican veteran who was expected to walk to re-election. Instead, they
nominated Indiana’s far more conservative treasurer, Mr. Mourdock, turning the
general election into a fight.
Republican primary voters in Missouri chose Mr. Akin, the most conservative
candidate in the field, to challenge Ms. McCaskill.
Republican fights between grass-roots conservatives and party-backed candidates
led to prolonged and expensive primaries in Arizona and Wisconsin as well. In
both cases, the party’s preferred candidate prevailed but emerged battered and
broke.
Michael N. Castle, a moderate Republican and former congressman from Delaware,
pointed to Ted Cruz, the Tea Party-backed Republican in Texas who coasted to
victory in the race for the Senate seat being vacated by Kay Bailey Hutchison.
“They can do that in Texas — that’s fine,” said Mr. Castle, who lost a Senate
primary in 2010 to Christine O’Donnell, who was backed by the Tea Party and then
lost in the general election. “But it gets a lot tougher in Indiana or
Delaware.”
He added, “The Republican Party as a whole needs to be more understanding about
what can fit into the different pockets of a diverse country.”
(Reuters) -
U.S. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the former governor of
Massachusetts and private equity executive, lost his second bid for the White
House in Tuesday's election against President Barack Obama.
Here are key facts about him.
* Romney, 65, espoused traditional Republican positions to cut taxes, reduce
federal regulations, shrink government spending and bolster the U.S. military.
He vowed to create 12 million new jobs in his first term with a plan focused on
domestic energy development, expanded free trade, improving education, reducing
the deficit and championing small business.
* He lost the 2008 Republican presidential nomination to Senator John McCain but
entered this year's race with a large campaign war chest and the blessing of
many in the party establishment. Conservative unease over his reputation as a
moderate led to a stiff challenge in the Republican primaries.
* His net worth has been estimated at between $190 million and $250 million,
making him one of the wealthiest people to ever run for the presidency. Romney
has been criticized for holding money overseas and for not disclosing as many
tax releases as his opponents have demanded.
* Romney proposed to lower individual income taxes across the board to 20
percent while closing some loopholes, which he says would stimulate economic
growth without widening the federal deficit. He supported restructuring the
Social Security retirement program and the Medicare government health insurance
program for the elderly and disabled.
* He is a fifth-generation member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints, or Mormon church. He was a Mormon missionary in France for more than two
years after leaving high school and later became bishop and stake president in
Boston, roles akin to being a lay pastor. His faith, however, is viewed with
suspicion by some conservative evangelical Christians.
* Born into a well-off family and raised near Detroit, Romney was exposed to
politics early. His father, George, was chairman of American Motors Corporation
and governor of Michigan from 1963 to 1969. George Romney lost a bid for the
Republican presidential nomination in 1968 and served in President Richard
Nixon's Cabinet.
* In 1994, the younger Romney ran for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts as a
moderate Republican, but was handily defeated by incumbent Democratic Senator
Edward Kennedy. Eight years later, Romney was elected governor of Massachusetts,
where he instituted a statewide healthcare reform that became a model for
Obama's 2010 national healthcare overhaul.
* In 1999, Romney took over as head of the committee organizing the 2002 Winter
Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, which had been plagued by cost overruns and
scandal, and produced a successful event that helped establish his national
reputation as a premier problem-solver.
* As his party moved to the right, Romney changed his positions on sensitive
social issues, including abortion and gay rights. That fuelled criticism that he
lacked core beliefs and was motivated only by ambition. Romney referred to
himself as "severely conservative" during the 2012 Republican primaries but has
projected a more moderate image during the general election campaign.
* Romney met his wife, Ann, at a high school dance and they married in 1969,
while they were still in college. They have five sons and 18 grandchildren.
Romney has an English degree from Utah's Brigham Young University, which is
owned and run by the Mormon church, and a joint law degree and MBA from Harvard
University. He speaks French.
* Romney joined the management consultancy Bain & Company in 1977 and climbed
the ranks. In 1984, he co-founded the highly profitable private equity arm Bain
Capital, which invested in start-ups and fledgling companies including Staples,
Sports Authority and Domino's Pizza. Critics have highlighted the number of jobs
Bain cut while Romney was at its helm.
* Romney has battled a reputation for being uncomfortable and stiff when
campaigning and somewhat aloof when relating to ordinary Americans. The New York
Times once described his campaign persona as "All-Business Man, the world's most
boring superhero."
* He has little foreign policy experience. He stumbled in August during a
gaffe-filled trip to Britain, Israel and Poland that was meant to burnish his
credentials on the world stage. He has labelled Russia as America's "number one
geopolitical foe" and said that preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear
capability should be Washington's highest national security priority.
(Compiled by
Americas Desk; Editing by Will Dunham)
BOSTON
(Reuters) - A somber Republican crowd watched glumly on Tuesday as former
Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney failed in his bid to unseat President Barack
Obama, despite a stubbornly high unemployment rate.
Romney struck a conciliatory note as he conceded. Thanking his supporters, he
said he had called Obama and wished the Democrat the best.
"I so wish - I so wish that I had been able to fulfill your hopes to lead the
country in a different direction, but the nation chose another leader," Romney
said. "And so Ann and I join with you to earnestly pray for him and for this
great nation."
The hard-fought election did not end without some late confusion. Television
networks declared Obama the winner in the key state of Ohio, but by only a slim
margin.
The projected victory prompted questions about whether Romney's campaign would
challenge the result.
Romney waited almost two hours after networks called the election before making
his concession speech in the ballroom of a Boston convention center. Staffers
told waiting reporters there had been an unspecified delay.
But as more swing states, including Virginia, Nevada and Colorado, moved into
the Democratic column, aides said Romney would concede shortly.
He appeared on stage at about 1 a.m. and the ballroom fell silent. A small group
of men rendered an off-key version of "God Bless America" until Romney was
introduced.
PRIVATE
JETS
In his remarks, Romney called on elected officials to cross party lines and work
together.
"I believe in America. I believe in the people of America," he said, pausing in
a brief moment of emotion.
The gathering became increasingly quiet as the night progressed.
Romney advisers said they thought their candidate had been hurt by the divisive
Republican primary fight, and acknowledged that Obama's campaign had done a good
job defining Romney early.
"It was a close race, very disappointing obviously for those of us who supported
Governor Romney," said Bob Grady, a Jackson, Wyoming venture capitalist who has
been a Romney adviser and worked for President George H.W. Bush.
Grady said Republicans need to rethink their electoral strategy and reach out to
immigrant groups. But he said Obama faces a tough challenge in pulling the
country together to address the debt and deficit.
The ballroom began emptying when the networks announced that Obama won Ohio.
By the time Obama appeared in Chicago to make his victory speech, the Romney
event was empty except for hotel staff and hundreds of reporters.
(Reuters) -
Americans re-elected Democrat Barack Obama as president on Tuesday after a
tightly contested race against Republican Mitt Romney. Below are some comments
made by candidates, observers and voters:
OBAMA, tweeting after networks projected his victory:
"This happened because of you. Thank you."
"We're all in this together. That's how we campaigned, and that's who we are.
Thank you. -bo"
GEORGE SOROS, billionaire investor and big Democratic donor:
"The American electorate has rejected extremist positions, opening the door for
a more sensible politics. Hopefully the Republicans in office will make better
partners in the coming years, most urgently in avoiding the so-called fiscal
cliff."
JOHN BOEHNER, Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, on
Republicans maintaining House majority:
"The American people want solutions and tonight they responded by renewing our
House Republican majority. With this vote, the American people also made clear
there's no mandate for raising tax rates. Americans want better solutions that
will ease the burdens of small businesses, bring jobs home and let our economy
grow. We stand willing to work with any willing partner ... who shares a
commitment to getting those things done."
SCOTT BROWN, Massachusetts Republican, on losing Senate seat to Democrat
Elizabeth Warren:
"We stood strong in the fight and we stand strong now even in disappointment.
... You all sent me to Washington to be my own man, and I'll be returning my own
man. And for that, I am very, very proud."
WARREN, accepting the Massachusetts Senate seat:
"For every family that has been chipped and squeezed and hammered, we're going
to fight for a level playing field. ... To all the small business owners who are
tired of a system rigged against them, we're going to hold the big guys
accountable."
"An amazing campaign. And let me be clear: I didn't build that, you built that.
And you did what everyone thought was impossible: You taught a scrappy
first-time candidate how to get in the ring and win."
"I always said, don't trust those polls and that's been true. But I also think
that in the circumstances that we've all been through, that it's particularly
appropriate to thank God... So I say, to God alone, be the honor and the glory
regardless of how He decides to organize history."
SARAH PALIN, former Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor:
"I just cannot believe that the majority of Americans would believe that
incurring more debt is good for our economy, for our children's future, for job
creators. I cannot believe that the majority of Americans would believe that
it's OK not to follow the Constitution and not have a budget. ... It's a
perplexing time for many of us."
SYMONE VILLALONA, call-center worker in Nevada, first-time voter who backed
Obama:
"I like someone who's for the people, the middle class. Romney didn't seem like
he cared that much."
MELANIE KATSUR, attorney, Romney backer in Washington, D.C.:
"I think that the rate with which the deficits have grown is not acceptable. I
am fortunate enough to have a job, but I know a lot of people who don't."
LYDA SWOGGER, first-time voter supporting Obama in Ohio:
"Obama stands for most of the same things I do. He inherited a mess and he needs
more time to fix it."
PAUL DIRKS, retired mathematics professor and Obama supporter in Florida, on
this year's ad barrage:
"It's been the ugliest campaign I've ever seen in my life and I'm 71 years old.
... I felt like throwing stones at my TV."
NOREEN TAYLOR, Democrat voting in Nevada:
"Elections used to be about stuff, about issues and specifics. We used to have
statesmen. Now we just have salesmen."
(Reporting by
Reuters reporters around the country;
President
Obama’s dramatic re-election victory was not a sign that a fractured nation had
finally come together on Election Day. But it was a strong endorsement of
economic policies that stress job growth, health care reform, tax increases and
balanced deficit reduction — and of moderate policies on immigration, abortion
and same-sex marriage. It was a repudiation of Reagan-era bromides about
tax-cutting and trickle-down economics, and of the politics of fear, intolerance
and disinformation.
The president’s victory depended heavily on Midwestern Rust Belt states like
Ohio, where the bailout of the auto industry — which Mr. Obama engineered and
Mr. Romney opposed — proved widely popular for the simple reason that it worked.
More broadly, Midwestern voters seemed to endorse the president’s argument that
the government has a significant role in creating private-sector jobs and
boosting the economy. They rejected Mr. Romney’s position that Washington should
simply stay out of such matters and let the free market work its will.
The Republicans’ last-ditch attempt to steal away Pennsylvania by stressing
unemployment was a failure there and elsewhere. Voters who said unemployment was
a major issue voted mainly for Mr. Obama.
Mr. Romney, it turns out, made a fatal decision during the primaries to endorse
a hard line on immigration, which earned him a resounding rejection by Latinos.
By adopting a callous position that illegal immigrants could be coerced into
“self-deportation,” and by praising Arizona’s cruel immigration law, Mr. Romney
made his road in Florida and several other crucial states much harder. Only
one-third of voters said illegal immigrants should all be deported, while
two-thirds endorsed some path to legal residency and citizenship. The Republican
approach, if unchanged, will cost them dearly in the future.
Still, Mr. Obama’s victory did not show a united country. Richer Americans
supported Mr. Romney, while poorer Americans tended to vote for Mr. Obama. There
also remained clear divisions among voters by gender, age, race and religion.
African-Americans and Hispanics overwhelmingly supported Mr. Obama. White men
voted for Mr. Romney; he won among those who said they opposed gay marriage,
wanted to outlaw abortion, or favored mass deportation of illegal immigrants.
None of those are majority positions in this country anymore.
Mr. Romney’s strategy of blaming Mr. Obama for just about everything, while
serenely assuring Americans he had a plan to cut the deficit without raising
taxes or making major cuts in Medicare, simply did not work.
A solid majority of voters said President George W. Bush was to blame for the
state of the economy rather than Mr. Obama. And voters showed more subtlety in
their economic analysis than Mr. Romney probably expected. Those who thought the
housing market and unemployment were the nation’s biggest problems said they
voted for Mr. Obama. Those most concerned about taxes voted heavily for Mr.
Romney.
Significantly, 60 percent of voters said taxes should be raised either on the
rich or on everyone. Only 35 percent said they should not be raised at all; that
group, naturally, went heavily for Mr. Romney. The polling made it clear that
Americans were unhappy with the economic status quo, and substantial numbers of
voters said the economy was getting worse. But Mr. Romney did not seem to
persuade voters that the deficit was a crushing problem. Only 1 in 10 voters
said the deficit was the most important issue facing the country.
Republicans had to be disappointed in the results of their unrelenting assault
on Mr. Obama’s health care reform law. Only around a quarter of Americans said
it should be repealed in its entirety.
People who were comfortable with the rightward slide of the Republican Party (as
measured by their comfort with the Tea Party) voted heavily for Mr. Romney.
But Christopher Murphy’s victory over Linda McMahon in the Senate race in
Connecticut, Joe Donnelly’s defeat of Richard Mourdock in Indiana’s Senate race
and Claire McCaskill’s defeat of Todd Akin in the Missouri Senate race showed
the price the Republicans are paying for nominating fringe candidates in their
primaries.
The polls were heartening in that they indicated that a solid majority of
Americans believe abortion should be legal, and that half of Americans now say
their states should recognize marriages between same-sex couples.
That the race came down to a relatively small number of voters in a relatively
small number of states did not speak well for a national election apparatus that
is so dependent on badly engineered and badly managed voting systems around the
country. The delays and breakdowns in voting machines were inexcusable.
November 6,
2012
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER
CHICAGO —
He woke up in his old bed, here in sweet home Chicago. He played a superstitious
game of basketball with old pals and aides from the 2008 glory days, as he did
on many primary poll days back then. He did a few final interviews. And at the
end of the long election night, after he was re-elected president, he
congratulated his rival, Mitt Romney, saying, “We may have battled fiercely, but
it’s only because we love this country deeply.”
But before his victory speech before a screaming throng of thousands, President
Obama spent Election Day wrapping himself in the familiar, as around him, his
aides wrapped themselves in the fiercest of hopes that when all the votes were
cast, the country’s first black president would be joining the rarefied ranks of
two-term presidents.
Every one of them was nervous, yet still claiming to be convinced that Mr. Obama
would win. The veterans of the soaring 2008 campaign — Robert Gibbs, Reggie
Love, David Axelrod, David Plouffe (the latter two wearing Obama 2008 fleece
jackets) — joined with those who had joined only for the plodding 2012 campaign.
Even as they expressed cautious optimism, the campaign had a cross-your-fingers,
superstitious air.
Besides Jay Carney, the press secretary, Jon Favreau, Mr. Obama’s speechwriter,
and Ben Rhodes, a national security aide, stopped shaving as a good-luck charm
for Mr. Obama’s re-election. The president joked about his scruffy staffers
Monday night in Columbus, when he met up with some roadies after a rally who
were sporting Santa-style beards: “You guys got your playoff beards going, too?”
In one of the campaign’s central rituals, Mr. Obama played basketball on
Tuesday, because he believes that he does not win when he does not play. Twice
during his primary fight with Hillary Rodham Clinton back in 2008, he skipped
his afternoon game on the days ballots were cast. And both times he lost. “We
won’t make that mistake again,” Mr. Gibbs said.
At 1:07 p.m., on a chilly and drizzly Lake Michigan afternoon, Mr. Obama arrived
at the Attack Athletics basketball court on West Harrison Street in downtown
Chicago. Among the other players were Mr. Love, his former body man and a former
Duke University basketball player; the former Chicago Bull Scottie Pippen;
Education Secretary Arne Duncan and a cadre of close Chicago friends.
It was a rare reprieve from reporters, cheering crowds and caffeine-fueled
campaign volunteers, and a chance for the president to try to get his mind away
from the events of the day.
But there was also ordinary White House business. On Tuesday, he convened a call
with officials to talk about recovery efforts from Hurricane Sandy.
But at the end of the day, Tuesday was not about being president. It was about
trying to win the chance to be president for four more years. So along with the
basketball game and the conference call, Mr. Obama visited his campaign
headquarters in Chicago.
“Hi, is this Annie?” Mr. Obama said into a cellphone as he tried to rally voters
and volunteers. “This is Barack Obama.”
Annie — of Wisconsin, the campaign said — may not have been too convinced.
“This is Barack Obama,” the president repeated. “You know, the president?”
Finally, a conversation ensued. “She was very nice to me even though she
initially didn’t know who I was,” Mr. Obama said when the call ended.
By afternoon, supporters had started to stream into McCormick Place, the mammoth
convention center where Mr. Obama would address them when the results were
known. The difference between four years ago, when 200,000 people withstood the
cold in Grant Park, was notable.
As the crowds streamed into McCormick, Mr. Obama had dinner with his family in
the Hyde Park home where they had lived before he became president. He went to
the Fairmont Hotel downtown to watch the returns with friends and families.
Earlier in the day, the president told a Colorado radio station he had prepared
two different speeches for tonight.
The cross-your-fingers optimism continued right up until the moment — 10:12 p.m.
Central time — that NBC called the election for Mr. Obama. Worried aides had
been pointing to early signs of apparent success in Florida one minute, then
wailing, “Why haven’t they called Ohio?” the next.
But then, in an instant, everything changed. At the Fairmont, where Mr. Obama’s
top aides were awaiting results, people began crying with joy and exchanging
high fives. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who had been on the phone all
evening calling congressional leaders, bolted from his perch one floor below Mr.
Obama and headed upstairs to join his running mate.
And the president prepared to head to McCormick Place, with his victory speech
in tow.
“For the United States of America,” Mr. Obama said to the screaming crowd in
McCormick Place, “the best is yet to come.”
November 6,
2012
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY
and JIM RUTENBERG
Barack
Hussein Obama was re-elected president of the United States on Tuesday,
overcoming powerful economic headwinds, a lock-step resistance to his agenda by
Republicans in Congress and an unprecedented torrent of advertising as a divided
nation voted to give him more time.
In defeating Mitt Romney, the president carried Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, New
Hampshire, Virginia and Wisconsin, a near sweep of the battleground states, and
was holding a narrow advantage in Florida. The path to victory for Mr. Romney
narrowed as the night wore along, with Mr. Obama winning at least 303 electoral
votes.
A cheer of jubilation sounded at the Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago when
the television networks began projecting him as the winner at 11:20 p.m., even
as the ballots were still being counted in many states where voters had waited
in line well into the night. The victory was far narrower than his historic
election four years ago, but it was no less dramatic.
“Tonight in this election, you, the American people, reminded us that while our
road has been hard, while our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves
up, we have fought our way back,” Mr. Obama told his supporters early Wednesday.
“We know in our hearts that for the United States of America, the best is yet to
come.”
Mr. Obama’s re-election extended his place in history, carrying the tenure of
the nation’s first black president into a second term. His path followed a
pattern that has been an arc to his political career: faltering when he seemed
to be at his strongest — the period before his first debate with Mr. Romney —
before he redoubled his efforts to lift himself and his supporters to victory.
The evening was not without the drama that has come to mark so many recent
elections: For more than 90 minutes after the networks projected Mr. Obama as
the winner, Mr. Romney held off calling him to concede. And as the president
waited to declare victory in Chicago, Mr. Romney’s aides were prepared to head
to the airport, suitcases packed, potentially to contest several close results.
But as it became increasingly clear that no amount of contesting would bring him
victory, he called Mr. Obama to concede shortly before 1 a.m.
“I wish all of them well, but particularly the president, the first lady and
their daughters,” Mr. Romney told his supporters in Boston. “This is a time of
great challenges for America, and I pray that the president will be successful
in guiding our nation.”
Hispanics made up an important part of Mr. Obama’s winning coalition,
preliminary exit poll data showed. And before the night was through, there were
already recriminations from Republican moderates who said Mr. Romney had gone
too far during the primaries in his statements against those here illegally,
including his promise that his get-tough policies would cause some to
“self-deport.”
Mr. Obama, 51, faces governing in a deeply divided country and a partisan-rich
capital, where Republicans retained their majority in the House and Democrats
kept their control of the Senate. His re-election offers him a second chance
that will quickly be tested, given the rapidly escalating fiscal showdown.
For Mr. Obama, the result brings a ratification of his sweeping health care act,
which Mr. Romney had vowed to repeal. The law will now continue on course toward
nearly full implementation in 2014, promising to change significantly the way
medical services are administrated nationwide.
Confident that the economy is finally on a true path toward stability, Mr. Obama
and his aides have hinted that he would seek to tackle some of the grand but
unrealized promises of his first campaign, including the sort of immigration
overhaul that has eluded presidents of both parties for decades.
But he will be venturing back into a Congressional environment similar to that
of his first term, with the Senate under the control of Democrats and the House
under the control of Republicans, whose leaders have hinted that they will be no
less likely to challenge him than they were during the last four years.
The state-by-state pursuit of 270 electoral votes was being closely tracked by
both campaigns, with Mr. Romney winning North Carolina and Indiana, which Mr.
Obama carried four years ago. But Mr. Obama won Michigan, the state where Mr.
Romney was born, and Minnesota, a pair of states that Republican groups had
spent millions trying to make competitive.
Americans delivered a final judgment on a long and bitter campaign that drew so
many people to the polls that several key states extended voting for hours. In
Virginia and Florida, long lines stretched from polling places, with the Obama
campaign sending text messages to supporters in those areas, saying: “You can
still vote.”
Neither party could predict how the outcome would affect the direction of the
Republican Party. Moderates were hopeful it would lead the rank and file to
realize that the party’s grass-roots conservatism that Mr. Romney pledged
himself to during the primaries doomed him in the general election. Tea Party
adherents have indicated that they will argue that he was damaged because of his
move to middle ground during the general election.
As he delivered his brief concession speech early Wednesday, Mr. Romney did not
directly address the challenges facing Republicans. His advisers said that his
second failed quest for the White House would be his last, with his running
mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, standing as one of the leaders
of the party.
“We have given our all to this campaign,” said Mr. Romney, stoic and gracious in
his remarks. “I so wish that I had been able to fulfill your hopes to lead this
country in a different direction.”
The results were more a matter of voters giving Mr. Obama more time than a
second chance. Through most of the year slight majorities of voters had told
pollsters that they believed his policies would improve the economy if they
could stay in place into the future.
Mr. Obama’s campaign team built its coalition the hard way, through intensive
efforts to find and motivate supporters who had lost the ardor of four years ago
and, Mr. Obama’s strategists feared, might not find their way to polls if left
to their own devices.
Up against real enthusiasm for Mr. Romney — or, just as important, against Mr.
Obama — among Republicans and many independents, their strategy of spending vast
sums of money on their get-out-the-vote operation seemed vindicated on Tuesday.
As opinion surveys that followed the first debate between Mr. Romney and Mr.
Obama showed a tightening race, Mr. Obama’s team had insisted that its coalition
was coming together as it hoped it would. In the end, it was not a bluff.
Even with Mr. Obama pulling off a new sweep of the highly contested
battlegrounds from Nevada to New Hampshire, the result in each of the states was
very narrow. The Romney campaign was taking its time early Wednesday to review
the outcome and searching for any irregularities.
The top issue on the minds of voters was the economy, according to interviews,
with three-quarters saying that economic conditions were not good or poor. But
only 3 in 10 said things were getting worse, and 4 in 10 said the economy was
improving.
Mr. Romney, who campaigned aggressively on his ability to turn around the
deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, was given a narrow edge
when voters were asked which candidate was better equipped to handle the
economy, the interviews found.
The electorate was split along partisan lines over a question that drove much of
the campaign debate: whether it was Mr. Obama or his predecessor, George W.
Bush, who bore the most responsibility for the nation’s continued economic
challenges. About 4 in 10 independent voters said that Mr. Bush should be held
responsible.
The president built a muscular campaign organization and used a strong financial
advantage to hold off an array of forces that opposed his candidacy. The margin
of his victory was smaller than in 2008 — he held an advantage of about 700,000
in the popular vote early Wednesday — but a strategic firewall in several
battleground states protected his Electoral College majority.
As Mr. Romney gained steam and stature in the final weeks of the campaign, the
Obama campaign put its hopes in perhaps one thing above all others: that the
rebound in the auto industry after the president’s bailout package of 2009 would
give him the winning edge in Ohio, a linchpin of his road to re-election.
Early interviews with voters showed that just over half of Ohio voters approved
of the bailout, a result that was balanced by a less encouraging sign for the
president: Some 4 in 10 said they or someone in their household had lost a job
over the last four years.
He defeated Mr. Romney 52 percent to 47 percent in Hamilton County, home to
Cincinnati, but only because of the number of votes he banked in the month
leading up to Election Day.
Mr. Obama won despite losing some of his 2008 margins among his key
constituencies, including among younger voters, blacks and Jewish voters, yet he
appeared to increase his share among Hispanics and Asians. Early exit poll
results showed Latinos representing about 1 in 10 voters nationwide, and voting
for Mr. Obama in greater numbers than four years ago, making a difference in
several states, including Colorado and Florida.
He held on to female voters, according to preliminary exit polls conducted by
Edison Research, but he struggled even more among white men than he did four
years ago.
Mr. Romney’s coalition included disproportionate support from whites, men, older
people, high-income voters, evangelicals, those from suburban and rural
counties, and those who call themselves adherents of the Tea Party — a group
that had resisted him through the primaries but had fully embraced him by
Election Day.
The Republican Party seemed destined for a new round of self-reflection over how
it approaches Hispanics going forward, a fast-growing portion of the voting
population that senior party strategists had sought to woo before a strain of
intense activism against illegal immigration took hold within the Republican
grass roots.
It was the first presidential election since the 2010 Supreme Court decision
loosening restrictions on political spending, and the first in which both
major-party candidates opted out of the campaign matching system that imposes
spending limits in return for federal financing. And the overall cost of the
campaign rose accordingly, with all candidates for federal office, their parties
and their supportive “super PACs” spending more than $6 billion combined.
The results Tuesday were certain to be parsed for days to determine just what
effect the spending had, and who would be more irate at the answer — the donors
who spent millions of dollars of their own money for a certain outcome, or those
who found a barrage of negative advertising to be major factors in their
defeats.
While the campaign often seemed small and petty, with Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama
intensely quarreling and bickering, the contest was actually rooted in big and
consequential decisions, with the role of the federal government squarely at the
center of the debate.
Though Mr. Obama’s health care law galvanized his most ardent opposition, and
continually drew low ratings in polls as a whole, interviews with voters found
that nearly half wanted to see it kept intact or expanded, a quarter wanted to
see it repealed entirely and another quarter said they wanted portions of it
repealed.
In Chicago, as crowds waited for Mr. Obama to deliver his speech, his supporters
erupted into a roar of relief and elation. Car horns honked from the street as
people chanted the president’s name.
“I feel like it’s a repudiation of everything the Republicans said in the
campaign,” said Jasmyne Walker, 31, who jumped up and down on the edge of a
stone planter in a downtown plaza. “Everybody said that if he lost it would be
buyer’s remorse — that we were high on hope in 2008. This says we’re on the
right track. I feel like this confirms that.”
November 6,
2012
The New York Times
By MICHAEL COOPER
And then,
they voted.
Americans went to the polls on Tuesday to decide whether to give President Obama
a second term or to replace him with Mitt Romney after a long, hard-fought
campaign that centered on who would heal the battered economy and what role
government should play in the 21st century.
From makeshift voting sites in East Coast communities devastated by Hurricane
Sandy to the more typical voting booths set up in school gyms, libraries and
town halls across the rest of the country, people began lining up before dawn to
cast their ballots — collectively writing the ending to a bitter, expensive
presidential campaign in which the candidates, parties, and well-heeled outside
groups were on pace to spend some $2.6 billion.
In hotly contested areas like Milwaukee, Fairfax, Va., and Central Florida,
there were reports of long lines at polling sites. There were also long lines to
vote in states that were not on anyone’s list of battlegrounds, including New
York.
Mr. Romney, the Republican former governor of Massachusetts, cast his vote
Tuesday morning near his home in Belmont, Mass. When a reporter asked him for
whom he had voted, Mr. Romney replied, “I think you know.” Mr. Obama voted Oct.
25 in Chicago — becoming one of more than 31 million people who voted early this
year.
The president visited a campaign office in Chicago on Tuesday morning, where he
called and thanked several startled volunteers in Wisconsin and then spoke
briefly to the reporters who were traveling with him, congratulating Mr. Romney
for having run a “spirited campaign.”
“I also want to say to Governor Romney, congratulations on a spirited
campaign,'’ Mr. Obama said. “I know that his supporters are just as engaged and
just as enthusiastic and working just as hard today. We feel confident we’ve got
the votes to win, that it’s going to depend ultimately on whether those votes
turn out. And so I would encourage everybody on all sides just to make sure that
you exercise this precious right that you have that people fought so hard for,
for us to have.”
Both campaigns continued trying to grind out votes on Tuesday. Mr. Obama planned
a round of satellite television interviews with local stations in Colorado,
Florida, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, Washington and Wisconsin. Mr. Romney planned
campaign stops in Cleveland and Pittsburgh.
Given the way both men have sometimes seemed to be campaigning for the
presidency of Ohio — given the repeated stops they made there in their efforts
to claim the state’s 18 electoral votes — it was perhaps unsurprising that the
two campaigns should cross paths there on Election Day. Mr. Romney was waiting
in his campaign plane in Cleveland on Tuesday morning for the arrival of his
running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, when another plane
touched down and could be seen taxiing nearby. It was carrying Vice President
Joseph R. Biden Jr.
If both campaigns could seem small at times, the issues confronting the nation
remained big: how to continue to rebuild after the worst economic downturn since
the Great Depression; whether to implement Mr. Obama’s health care law to cover
the uninsured, or undo it; whether to reshape Medicare for future beneficiaries
to try to curb its costs; whether to raise taxes to reduce the federal deficit
or to rely on spending cuts alone; how to wind down the war in Afghanistan
without opening the region to new dangers; and how to navigate the post-Arab
Spring world.
On their frenzied final full day of campaigning, the candidates reprised their
central arguments before crowds in the same handful of swing states where the
campaign has been waged for much of the last year, as both men have battled for
the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. The campaigns were hoping
that huge turnout efforts would tilt contested states their way.
For all the twists and turns that the race has taken since the candidates downed
their first greasy pork chops on sticks at the Iowa State Fair, those core,
competing messages have remained remarkably consistent.
Mr. Obama reminded a crowd in Columbus, Ohio, on Monday how bad things were when
he took office, listed his achievements and argued that he has more work to do.
“In 2008, we were in the middle of two wars and the worst economic crisis since
the Great Depression,” Mr. Obama said. “Today our businesses have created nearly
five and a half million new jobs. The American auto industry has come roaring
back. Home values are on the rise. We’re less dependent on foreign oil than any
time in the last 20 years. Because of the service and sacrifice of our brave men
and women in uniform, the war in Iraq is over. The war in Afghanistan is ending.
Al Qaeda’s on the path to defeat. Osama Bin Laden is dead. We’ve made progress
these last four years.”
Mr. Romney told a crowd in Lynchburg, Va., on Monday that the country needs a
new direction after Mr. Obama. “He’s tried to convince you that these last four
years have been a success,” he said. “And so his plan for the next four years is
to take all the ideas from the first term — the stimulus, the borrowing,
Obamacare, all the rest — and do them over again. He calls that ‘Forward.’ I
call it ‘Forewarned.’ The same course we’ve been on won’t lead to a better
destination. The same path means $20 trillion of debt at the end of a second
term. It means crippling unemployment continuing for another four years. It
means stagnant take-home pay. It means depressed home values. And of course, it
means a devastated military.”
But at times the campaign has been as notable for what was left unsaid as for
what was said.
Both men seemed to avoid speaking of some of their biggest legislative
achievements. Mr. Romney rarely invoked the health care law he enacted as the
governor of Massachusetts, which was a model for Mr. Obama’s health care law
which many Republicans derided as “Obamacare” and which Mr. Romney has vowed to
repeal. And Mr. Obama, for his part, rarely spoke about the $787 billion
stimulus bill he signed early in his term, which used a combination of tax cuts,
aid to states and infrastructure spending to try to bolster the economy — but
which was seen as insufficient by some liberals and as inefficient by some
conservatives.
For all the clear differences between the two men, they were both somewhat hazy
about their plans for the next four years.
Mr. Romney called for cutting income tax rates across the board by 20 percent
while offsetting the lost revenue by eliminating tax breaks, but failed to
specify which ones, even after some nonpartisan groups questioned whether it was
mathematically possible for him to achieve all his goals. He called for
overhauling the Medicare system so that a decade from now, beneficiaries would
receive fixed amounts of money from the federal government with which to buy
private or public coverage — and even tapped Representative Paul D. Ryan of
Wisconsin, one of the main proponents of such an approach, as his running mate.
But he declined to give details of just how it would work, making it difficult
to evaluate.
And Mr. Obama did not lay out a detailed agenda for his second term, and instead
spoke generally of trying to finish the things left undone in his first term. If
he wins, though, he is still likely to face the opposition of the Republicans in
Congress who have blocked many if his initiatives. So during the campaign Mr.
Obama has made it clear that he still wants to rewrite the nation’s immigration
laws, which he failed to persuade Congress to do in his first term. In the
course of three debates he did not even utter the words “climate change,” an
issue that was thrust to the fore soon afterward when Hurricane Sandy made
landfall, destroying parts of the Jersey Shore and flooding Manhattan.
As tightly scripted as both campaigns were, there were moments when both
candidates were knocked off their messages, sometimes in revealing ways.
Mr. Romney’s trip abroad over the summer was overshadowed by controversy after
he offended his British hosts by publicly questioning whether they were prepared
for the London Olympics. Then, there was the release of a secretly recorded
videotape that captured Mr. Romney telling wealthy donors that 47 percent of
Americans pay no taxes and see themselves as victims. And one of the big moments
of his campaign, his speech at the Republican National Convention, was upstaged
by the odd introduction he received from Clint Eastwood, who spoke to an empty
chair representing the president.
Mr. Obama’s low-wattage performance at the first presidential debate, in Denver
— he later joked that he had had a “nice long nap” there — wound up dispiriting
his supporters and firing up opponents. The deadly attacks on the diplomatic
mission in Benghazi, Libya, on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks
thrust the president into a complex national security crisis near the end of the
campaign. And earlier in the campaign, Mr. Obama was knocked off his timetable
and publicly endorsed same-sex marriage earlier than he had planned after Vice
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. got out ahead of the administration and voiced his
own support of it.
The biggest unplanned moment, of course, occurred when Hurricane Sandy hit and
knocked the presidential campaign off the front pages the week before the
election. As the scope of the disaster sank in, there was a brief respite from
campaigning. Then it resumed, at a more frenetic pace than ever.
There were long lines of voters in many of the swing states that will decide the
election. In Kensington, N.H. — a swing town in a swing county in a swing state
— Lee Veader said that he hoped that the election would bring relief from what
he said had been the most acidic campaign that he could remember, with
partisanship as rife in his own social circles as it has been on cable
television.
“There’s really people that we’re close with that are willing to let politics
end relationships — we’re talking friends that you’ve been friends with for
years that all of a sudden can’t get past not sharing the same viewpoint,” said
Mr. Veader, a registered Republican who voted for Mr. Romney. “People really
feel strongly how they stand nowadays. It’s not as gray as it used to be —
because of that, it just gets personal.”
Diane Chigas, a receptionist at a law firm who is an independent voter, said
that she was voting for Mr. Obama, in large part because of his health care law.
“I had to work through two years of chemo so I wouldn’t lose my insurance,” said
Ms. Chigas. “I’m not a pre-existing condition. I’m a person.”
Dennis Carroll, a retired small-business owner, said that he opposed Mr. Obama’s
plan to raise taxes on the wealthy and that he was voting for Mr. Romney. “He’s
doing class warfare,'’ Mr. Carroll said of the president. “I’m not a rich guy,
but they pay their fair share.”
Inside the polling station, the election moderator, Harold Bragg, stuck ballots
into a wooden box and steeled himself for the task of counting them all by hand
later this evening. “It’s been very busy, we have yet to see a break this
morning,” said Mr. Bragg. “I’d say we’re doing three-to-one what we normally
do.”
November 6,
2012
The New York Times
By ETHAN BRONNER
In Virginia
and Texas some voters waited in line for four hours. In Pennsylvania, there were
inappropriate demands for official photo IDs. Recorded calls went out to
residents of Florida saying misleadingly that they had until 7 p.m. “tomorrow”
to vote. And in Ohio, there seemed to be an unusually high number of provisional
ballots, causing concern that they might not all get counted.
Election Day had its share of flaws and partisan disputes, but it seemed
unlikely late Tuesday that they would cause a major shift in the result or set
the stage for a big lawsuit. A judge in Galveston, Tex., ordered polls to stay
open a bit late because of crowds, and there were court orders in Pennsylvania
barring observers from interfering with voters. Still, the day was largely
uninterrupted by judicial activity.
Legal action might follow later, once margins of victory in swing states were
clearer. As for Election Day itself, the lack of court activity may have been
because both Democrats and Republicans had trained and planned for months and
were out in force watching poll workers — and each other.
Liberal nonpartisan groups, gathered into an alliance called Election
Protection, said they received more than 80,000 calls to their hot line seeking
help from confused voters. The alliance, organized by the Lawyers Committee for
Civil Rights Under Law, had 5,000 lawyer volunteers in the field and 2,000
people on phones in 28 call centers in 80 jurisdictions.
One of their biggest concerns was the apparently large number of provisional
ballots given to voters in Ohio, the state many consider the central
battleground for the presidential election. Provisional ballots are given when
information presented by the voter does not match the registration roll or
insufficient identification is presented. By law, provisional ballots must be
counted if officials later determine the voter is legitimate. Many provisional
ballots end up not getting counted.
At the Mother of Christ Church in Cincinnati, there was frustration among those
advised to use such ballots.
“I don’t want to vote provisionally — I want to vote for real,” Canessa Harrell,
42, told poll workers. Ms. Harrell said poll workers at another precinct had
told her to come to Mother of Christ Church to vote, but when she arrived there,
she was not listed in the rolls for the precinct. “Will my vote count?” she
asked.
“It will still count,” a worker said, following Ms. Harrell, who had decided to
leave instead.
Another woman, Shanika Jones, 22, stood with her two young children waiting to
vote, only to learn that she would also have to cast her vote on a provisional
ballot. She had applied to vote by mail weeks ago, she said later, but forgot to
send that ballot in and figured that she could still vote in person on Tuesday.
In Columbus, Annie Womack, who was volunteering for the N.A.A.C.P. to watch
polls, said she saw people walk away rather than agree to wait in another line
and receive a provisional ballot. In Ohio in 2008, about 20 percent of
provisional ballots were discarded.
Another concern had to do with voter identification requirements in
Pennsylvania. A law passed earlier this year said voters had to present an
official form of photo ID at the polls, but a judge said that would not go into
effect for this election. He said poll workers should ask for the ID but voters
without them could go ahead and vote in a normal manner anyway.
But there were examples of voters without the ID being told they could not vote
without it. In Allegheny County in the southwestern part of the state, a judge
barred people outside polling stations from demanding identification from voters
after a complaint that poll workers were seeking ID from people outside a
polling place in Homestead, Pa.
“Individuals outside of the polls are prohibited from questioning, obstructing,
interrogating or asking about any form of identification and/or demanding any
form of identification from any prospective voter,” wrote Judge Guido A.
DeAngelis of the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas.
Republicans also had concerns. Ron Hicks, a lawyer for the Republican Committee
of Allegheny County, said Democratic poll watchers had also been yelling and
intimidating some voters.
Latino voters said they faced daunting lines in Virginia, Ohio, Nevada and
especially South Florida, but many Latino leaders said the wait was largely a
result of robust turnout.
“Latino community members are convinced this is a critical election for their
issues and they are going to vote no matter what,” said Arturo Carmona,
executive director of Presente.org, a Latino mobilization network.
The misleading phone calls to 12,500 voters in Pinellas County, Fla., saying
they had till “tomorrow” to vote, was an error, according to a spokeswoman for
the county supervisor of elections. She said the calls had started going out
Monday night and inadvertently continued on Tuesday. Corrections were issued.
In New Jersey and parts of New York, Hurricane Sandy left some stuck without
heat, gas or electricity, making voting an exceptional burden and causing worry
that the vote tallies would slide down.
And in Fulton County, Ga., which includes Atlanta, some machines failed to
operate and there were too few workers.
Secretary of State Brian Kemp of Georgia said through a spokesman that the
situation was “extremely concerning.” Some voters there also had to use
provisional paper ballots until issues at dozens of polling places were
resolved.
Reporting was
contributed by Jon Hurdle from Philadelphia, Lizette Alvarez from Miami,
Campbell
Robertson from Tampa, Fla., Monica Davey from Cincinnati,
Manny
Fernandez from Houston, Michael Grynbaum from Milwaukee,
Jack Healy
from Denver, Fernanda Santos from Phoenix,
Kim Severson
from Atlanta and Julia Preston from New York.
November 6,
2012
The New York Times
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER,
THOMAS KAPLAN
and WENDY RUDERMAN
People
whose lives were upended by Hurricane Sandy joined other voters on Tuesday to
cast ballots after elected officials in New York and New Jersey rushed to
relocate scores of polling places that had become unusable because of power
failures, flooding or evacuations.
With neighborhoods still inundated by debris, silt and water, many people had to
go to great lengths to cast a ballot in places that are little recovered from
what officials describe as the worst storm damage to hit the New York City
region, and where the prospect of more violent wind and torrential rain is
looming this week.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that a powerful northeaster expected to hit the
area late on Wednesday could bring a surge in the water level of 2 to 4.5 feet
at high tides — far less than the hurricane brought ashore, but enough to
reflood low-lying areas.
Mr. Bloomberg said that the city would not require an evacuation of Zone A — its
low-lying waterfront areas — but that police cars with loudspeakers would travel
through several shorefront neighborhoods to alert residents. He implored
residents to use shelters. The storm is expected to carry winds of 25 to 35
miles per hour to the city, with gusts up to 55 m.p.h. late Wednesday afternoon.
With one eye on the approaching storm, untold thousands of residents in the
region devoted their energy, patience and, in some cases, ingenuity to voting.
Just after daybreak in Bay Head, N.J., Shelly Coleman and her husband, Terrance,
bundled up in winter jackets, left their sodden, water-damaged home and headed
to the Bay Head firehouse, where a makeshift polling place had sprouted —
literally overnight.
The couple walked through the sand-blown and mucky streets, sidestepping the
occasional dead fish that lay on its side, a lifeless eye staring up at them.
The firehouse, powered by an industrial-size generator that rumbled like the
engine of a jet airliner, was one of the few places with heat in the tiny
seaside borough, just below Point Pleasant Beach.
“Guess what? We got water back on Friday. It was so exciting,” Ms. Coleman said,
approaching the borough’s clerk.
Another voter, Leslie Wentz, 58, said she had no heat and had not showered in
days. The election, she said, was not her top priority, but she voted anyway.
“I think everybody is just in survival mode,” she said. “Everybody is trying to
survive. The town is doing a great job. The church is doing a great job, but I
feel like the federal government is not coming in and doing anything. I can’t
get anybody to help me.”
Though the region hit by Hurricane Sandy is not expected to be in play in the
presidential election, the combination of the storm and heavy turnout yielded
long lines, confusion, frustration and anger.
At several polling sites in New York City, the vote scanning machines being used
for the first time in a presidential election malfunctioned, forcing workers to
resort to paper ballots and slowing the process even more.
Maura Green was trying to vote in the East Village but her ballot was rejected
by the scanning machine, and she had a hard time getting help from poll workers
some of whom were blaming one another for the problems.
“It seemed the poll workers were not very organized or didn’t prepare,” Ms.
Green said. “It was very chaotic. They didn’t seem to have a plan.”
Mr. Bloomberg said in a briefing that he was aware of the problems. He said
machines were delivered late to some sites, others opened late, there were long,
confusing lines and some polling sites did not have sufficient fuel to power
generators.
“Be patient; it is worth the wait to be part of the process,” the mayor said.
But he also criticized some of what was happening, like the jamming of ballot
scanners and the collation of paper ballots for results.
“It is just a nightmare and it is really hard to understand in this day and age
how you could do that,” he said.
Mr. Bloomberg and other officials have emphasized the efforts the city has
exerted to recover after the storm and provide tens of thousands of New Yorkers
with food aid and emergency shelter, while also trying to coordinate the
logistics of holding a presidential election so even voters in the worst-hit
areas, like Staten Island and the Rockaways, can take part in it.
As of Tuesday, about 350,000 homes are still dark, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said.
Although power has been restored to more than 1.7 million homes in New York
since the storm hit, Mr. Cuomo affirmed his annoyance with Consolidated Edison
and the Long Island Power Authority for the pace of restorations, a message that
resonated among some voters as they made the trek to the ballot box.
Randy Harter, 66, an artist and designer, voted in Westchester County, where his
frustration at what he described as an incompetent government response to the
storm had transformed into frustration with his voting experience.
When Mr. Harter asked an election worker for help to fill out a paper ballot he
had never seen before, he was told: “Just fill it out.” When his ballot was
inserted, the machine jammed. A second machine also jammed. He eventually was
given an envelope in which to place a ballot that would be hand-counted. The
entire voting experience took 45 minutes, Mr. Harter said.
On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, hundreds of voters waited on the sidewalk
and packed into a gym at Public School 163. Voters had to wait in different
lines to determine their election district, to get a ballot, to fill out the
ballot and to get the ballot scanned. The process took an hour. There was no
help for the disabled, and people grew increasingly upset.
Officials tried to make the process work smoothly especially for those living in
areas hard hit by the hurricane.
New Jersey and New York both said they would allow voters uprooted by Hurricane
Sandy to cast provisional ballots anywhere in their states.
But the provisional ballots would, in many cases, allow residents to vote only
in statewide contests and in the presidential election, in which President Obama
is heavily favored in both states. The ballots could not be used in local and
Congressional races, which in some areas are far more competitive.
New Jersey went further, saying it will let displaced voters vote by fax or
e-mail. Ballot-integrity advocates warned that this raised risks of fraud by
hackers, or mischief by partisan local officials because electronic ballots lack
secrecy and are not safeguarded by witnesses.
Across the storm-damaged region on Monday, some residents voted early, saying it
felt like an important step back toward normalcy.
On Tuesday, the line to vote at an East Village polling station extended half a
block down First Avenue and rapidly built westward on Ninth Street. By 8:40
a.m., at least 175 people were patiently reading papers, manipulating
smartphones and drinking coffee, advancing not even a foot a minute.
Alex Schroder, 23, said she hoped it would be no longer than an hour, because
she had to get to her job as a preschool teacher.
“I am really excited to vote,” she said, “so I don’t mind waiting.” She said
that she really wanted Mr. Obama to win, and that the issues in this election —
women’s roles, economics, gay rights, the environment — were deeply important to
her.
In Forest Hills, Queens, Ann Dichter, 63, said she had never seen as busy a
polling place in her 10-plus years there as she did Tuesday. Asked what was on
her mind this day, she began a tirade against one of the presidential
candidates, then stopped and summed up her mind-set thusly: “Women’s rights.”
In New York, there are very tight Congressional or legislative races in Queens,
on Staten Island, on Long Island and in Westchester County, all of which were
hit hard by the storm. Candidates in those races went to great lengths to ensure
that their supporters could surmount the extraordinary obstacles to voting this
year.
On Staten Island, the Congressional campaign of Mark Murphy, a Democrat running
against Representative Michael G. Grimm, a Republican, sent volunteers to
gasoline lines across the borough with iPhones to help idling voters figure out
where they should go on Tuesday. Mr. Grimm’s campaign said it was recruiting
volunteers with full gas tanks to transport to the polls voters whose cars were
destroyed or had no gas.
Just before the election, local and state officials were plainly having trouble
conveying information about Election Day obstacles and remedies. New Jersey
officials could not say how many polling places had been moved — though they
said fewer than 100 still needed “some resolution.” Polling places require power
to run their electronic machines. As of Monday night, more than 100 polling
places in New York State had been changed, including about 60 in the city. Most
were in Brooklyn and Queens; in two cases, in the Rockaways and the Throgs Neck
section of the Bronx, the city was setting up polling places in tents powered by
generators and outfitted with portable heaters.
The city’s Board of Elections also arranged for shuttle buses that would run
every 15 minutes to ferry voters to and from polling places in three areas hit
particularly hard by the storm: the Rockaways, Coney Island and Staten Island.
Juan Carlos Polanco, a commissioner on the Board of Elections, said it had done
everything in its power to publicize the new locations of polling places.
But the board has a troubled track record, even when elections are not preceded
by hurricanes. In 2010, computer malfunctions and delayed openings of polling
places led Mr. Bloomberg to pronounce the board’s handling of the election a
“royal screw-up.” In June, the five-way Democratic primary for Representative
Charles B. Rangel’s seat took weeks to be counted.
Local elected officials were not optimistic about Tuesday. Councilwoman Gale A.
Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat, said she had heard from utility workers scheduled
to work 12-hour shifts on Election Day who had no idea how they were supposed to
vote. And Councilman Jumaane D. Williams, a Brooklyn Democrat, questioned why
thousands of voters taking refuge at evacuation shelters would not be able to
cast provisional ballots at their shelters.
In Ocean County, officials took extra steps to allow displaced residents to
vote. They sent a mobile voting bus to shelters there and in adjacent Burlington
County. They also sought to address the problem of provisional ballots by
printing 50,000 generic ballots and allowing voters to fill in the names of
their local candidates.
For candidates in tight races, the effort to get voters to the polls was both
frantic and delicate.
On Long Island, volunteers for Randy Altschuler, the Republican challenging
Representative Timothy H. Bishop, a Democrat, called voters to make sure they
knew that the election was still taking place and to offer rides. But every
conversation began with a question about whether the voters needed help.
Reporting was
contributed by Joseph Berger, Christine Hauser,
REUTERS -
The U.S. Electoral College was established in the Constitution as a compromise
between electing a president by a vote in Congress and by popular vote of
citizens. Here are some facts about the Electoral College:
* The Electoral College, which is not a place but a process, consists of 538
electors. To win the presidency, a candidate must win at least 270 electors.
* The number of electors equals the number of lawmakers in Congress - 435 in the
House of Representatives and 100 in the Senate, plus three for the District of
Columbia. Each state's allotment of electors equals its number of
representatives in the House plus one for each of its two senators.
* Most states have a winner-take-all system for awarding electors. The
presidential candidate who wins the popular vote in the state gets all of the
state's electors. Maine and Nebraska have a variation of "proportional
representation" that can result in a split of their electors between the
candidates.
* Critics say the Electoral College does not meet the original intent because a
candidate can lose the nationwide popular vote and still win the election by
winning the right combination of states. That happened most recently in the
controversial election of 2000 when Democrat Al Gore got the most votes but
Republican George W. Bush won the presidency. Republicans Rutherford B. Hayes in
1876 and Benjamin Harrison in 1888 also won in the Electoral College despite
losing the popular vote.
* There is no constitutional requirement that electors vote according to the
results of the popular vote, although some states require it.
* The electors meet in their states in December and cast their votes for
president and vice president.
* If no presidential candidate reaches 270 electoral votes, the election goes to
the House of Representatives, with each state having one vote.
The House has decided two presidential elections - that of Thomas Jefferson in
1800 and John Quincy Adams in 1824.
The Senate would elect the vice president, with each senator casting one vote.
That raises the possibility of a president and vice president from different
parties.
* The biggest Electoral College prizes are California, with 55; Texas, with 38;
and New York and Florida, each with 29. California and New York are considered
reliably Democratic, Texas reliably Republican and Florida is a battleground
state that could go either way.
* Among the other important swing states this year, Ohio has 18 votes, Virginia
13, Wisconsin 10, Colorado 9, Nevada 6, Iowa 6 and New Hampshire 4.
* The system explains why candidates tend to spend a disproportionate amount of
time and money on trying to secure the battleground states. It also means that
what appears to be a tight race in national opinion polls may be less close when
viewed state by state.
SOURCES: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Reuters.
November 5,
2012
The New York Times
By MOTOKO RICH
ATLANTA —
Staff members in the charter school division of the Georgia Department of
Education keep notepads in their offices inscribed with a mantra: “Is it best
for students? Then do it.”
But when it comes to charter schools, parents, teachers, education officials and
legislators are deeply divided over what exactly would be best for students.
Here in Georgia, the future of charters, which are publicly financed but
privately operated, could be determined Tuesday by a ballot measure that asks
voters to amend the State Constitution so that an appointed statewide commission
could authorize new schools.
Along with high-stakes testing and tenure changes, legislative efforts to expand
charter schools are among the most contentious issues in education circles.
Proponents say charters can experiment with new teaching strategies to help
struggling students or those stuck in failing public schools. Detractors say the
charters drain precious public money and energy from neighborhood schools.
At issue in Georgia is who should decide whether a charter school can open.
Supporters of the amendment say a commission focused exclusively on charters is
necessary to override resistant local school boards and ensure that parents have
ample educational choices.
“Education is one of the few things in our country that you have no choice,”
said Lyn Carden, the board chairwoman of the Georgia Charter Educational
Foundation, which operates two charter schools that were initially denied
applications by their local school boards.
“You live in this neighborhood, you go to this school,” Ms. Carden said. “For
some parents, it works great, but not all schools are right for all kids.”
Critics of the amendment say families already have plenty of choices, including
charter schools authorized by local school boards.
“We are not arguing the merits or demerits of charter schools,” said Herb
Garrett, the executive director of the Georgia School Superintendents
Association. “We’re just saying that decisions about new schools in a community
ought to be made by elected officials who represent those citizens, not a bunch
of political appointees in Atlanta who have no idea what’s going on in a local
school district.”
The Georgia initiative, as well as a ballot measure in Washington State that
would permit charters there for the first time, is being closely watched across
the country. In both states, the measures have attracted financial support from
national business leaders and advocacy groups.
In Washington, donors supporting the charter ballot initiative include Bill and
Melinda Gates; the parents of Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of
Amazon; and Nicholas Hanauer, a prominent venture capitalist. Alice Walton, the
daughter of Walmart’s founder, Sam Walton, has contributed to campaigns
supporting the measures in both Georgia and Washington.
Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party organization founded by the billionaire
Koch brothers, has donated to a committee supporting the charter amendment in
Georgia. Students First, a group run by Michelle A. Rhee, the former schools
chancellor in the District of Columbia, has also contributed and is helping to
organize supporters in the state.
The roster of contributors in Georgia includes several companies that manage
charter schools, including K12 Inc., Charter Schools USA and National Heritage
Academies. In all, committees supporting the ballot measure have collected 15
times as much as groups opposing the measure, according to public filings.
Opponents point to such wealthy donors and argue that the charter amendment is
part of a broader agenda designed to privatize education and discredit public
schools.
The heavy spending, some education experts say, could rouse the kind of
opposition that exploded during the teachers’ strike in Chicago in September.
The union there railed against teacher evaluations and challenges to union
seniority that are advocated by some of the same groups behind the charter
movement.
The Chicago strike “was a serious pushback against these fairly radical
reformers coming in with a lot of money,” said John S. Ayers, the executive
director of the Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives at Tulane
University. “It will be interesting to see what happens in Georgia.”
As with many battles over public education, political alliances are being
remade. Here in Georgia, where the charter amendment could give the state more
power to overrule local education boards, conservatives who typically champion
decentralized government are giving the amendment full-throated support.
Meanwhile, some Tea Party members have joined Democratic legislators, including
State Senators Jason Carter and Vincent D. Fort, in opposing the measure. The
state’s school superintendent, John D. Barge, a Republican, has come out against
it as well.
The measure’s supporters say local school boards tend to be hostile to charter
school applicants because they see them as competing for students and state
financing. Public school districts “have a monopoly they wish to protect,” said
Chip Rogers, a Republican state senator who sponsored the bill that put the
measure on the November ballot. “But if they’re not serving their kids, you have
to give them an additional option.”
Critics note that local school boards have repeatedly granted approval for
charters. Of the 108 independent charter schools operating in Georgia, nearly 9
of 10 were authorized locally, said Louis Erste, the director of the State
Education Department’s charter schools division.
Although the State Supreme Court last year struck down a previous incarnation of
a state charter commission established in 2008, charter applicants rejected by
local school boards may still appeal to the State Board of Education.
Many voters simply find it difficult to understand the amendment’s details and
consequences.
“I find it offensive that voters literally have to have a law degree to figure
out what is going on here,” said Elizabeth Hooper, a mother of three children
who have attended public schools in Alpharetta, a suburb of Atlanta. “The
General Assembly is using the voter as a pawn.”
At a forum about the measure last month, Monica Henson, the executive director
of the Provost Academy, an online school that had been authorized by the now
defunct state commission, said the amendment would help other similar schools
start and grow.
“How can something like this be bad for kids?” she asked.
Ms. Henson said the school, which allows students to work on computers at home,
served students who were at risk of dropping out of traditional schools, many of
them from poor and minority families.
Such arguments anger black leaders who say charter schools either isolate
African-American students or allow white families to escape to schools where
children can avoid black classmates.
“Charter schools tend to resegregate or reinforce segregation,” said Mr. Fort,
the chairman of the legislature’s black caucus committee on education.
Mr. Fort and others point to Pataula Charter Academy, a school in the southwest
corner of the state that was approved by the short-lived charter commission
three years ago. Three-quarters of the school’s 358 students are white, while
the five counties that feed into it have populations that are 50 percent to 90
percent black.
“Of course, these numbers are not where we want to be,” said Cheryl Weathersby,
Pataula’s business director. Ms. Weathersby said the school, which admits
students by lottery, received few applications from black families.
Along the road leading to Pataula, neighbors had stuck orange signs into their
front yards that read “Yes, Public Charter Schools — Amendment One.” A teacher
at the school wore a green T-shirt with “Vote Yes for Charter Schools”
emblazoned on the back.
Ms. Weathersby said the charter amendment was crucial to Pataula’s survival. “It
scares me for parents,” she said. “What about our children? They’d have to go
back to schools that didn’t work for them.”
For Republicans intent on unraveling President Obama’s accomplishments, electing
Mitt Romney has been only one part of the equation. Almost as important was
installing a Republican majority in the United States Senate, where 50 votes
(plus the vice president) would be necessary to repeal much of health care
reform, roll back tax increases on the rich and gut social welfare programs.
The party’s hopes, however, have been severely damaged in recent weeks.
Republican candidates who are crucial to regaining a majority in the Senate have
tumbled, according to a variety of polls, and Democrats are now considered
likely to retain control. The reason for this is clear: Primary voters chose
several unappealing or ideologically driven candidates who repelled
general-election voters once they began speaking their minds.
In a country facing enormous economic and international challenges, for example,
it is stunning that two Midwestern Democrats are leading their races solely
because their Republican opponents explained in shocking detail why they oppose
a rape exception to a ban on abortion. Neither Richard Mourdock of Indiana nor
Representative Todd Akin of Missouri felt any need to hold back, because their
beliefs are central to why they were nominated.
Mr. Akin, who is running against Senator Claire McCaskill, has long opposed
abortion in all cases, and, in August, he announced that it was not really an
issue because, in cases of “legitimate rape,” the female body shuts down the
conception process. Mr. Mourdock, who is running against Representative Joe
Donnelly, a Democrat, said last month that pregnancy resulting from rape was
“something that God intended to happen.” Both candidates could still win in
their conservative states, but, for now, their insensitive rigidity has left
them behind.
In Wisconsin, Representative Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, has benefited from the
comments of her opponent, former Gov. Tommy Thompson. He said he would come up
with programs “to do away with Medicaid and Medicare.” Josh Mandel, a Republican
who is challenging Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, has a tissue-thin résumé and
no fixed position on a variety of issues. In Florida, Representative Connie Mack
IV, a Republican who is challenging Senator Bill Nelson, has been crippled by
revelations that he did marketing work on behalf of Hooter’s and has a history
of barroom brawling and road rage.
Republicans in two relatively liberal northeastern states are fighting a huge
Democratic headwind stirred up by the presidential race. Most polls in
Massachusetts have shown Senator Scott Brown either tied with his Democratic
challenger, Elizabeth Warren, or behind. (Ms. Warren’s solid agenda on behalf of
consumers and against economic inequality has won her enthusiastic support.) In
Connecticut, Linda McMahon’s enormously expensive, self-financed Republican
campaign has not bought her a lead in the polls against Representative
Christopher Murphy, so now she is committing a laughable party heresy by urging
voters to support both her and Mr. Obama.
The House is likely to remain in Republican hands, so keeping Democrats in
control of the Senate is the best way to fight off savage budget cuts like those
endorsed by Mr. Romney and Representative Paul Ryan. That effort has been made a
lot easier by Republican Senate candidates displaying their true colors.
November 4,
2012
The New York Times
By JONATHAN WEISMAN
and DEREK WILLIS
PAINESVILLE, Ohio — A torrent of outside money has dropped into this state in
the closing days of the campaign to try to unseat Senator Sherrod Brown, a
Democrat, part of a late onslaught across the country that Republicans hope will
salvage a respectable showing in Senate races they once had high hopes for.
In Ohio, Arizona, Indiana and even Missouri, once thought to be an uneven
contest, a last-minute rush of money on both sides suggests that neither party
believes that the balance of power in the next Senate is set.
In Virginia, George Allen, a Republican, has latched on to Mitt Romney, hoping
that the top of the ticket can still lift him back to the Senate seat he lost
six years ago. In Nevada, Representative Shelley Berkley, a Democrat, has
reached into her own wallet, lending her Senate campaign a quarter of a million
dollars for the last stretch.
But the hopes of the Republican Party for at best a tie in the Senate now seem
to rest on the slender shoulders of Josh Mandel, a baby-faced 35-year-old Ohio
state treasurer who concedes that he looks 19. With just one day to go,
Republicans are in danger of losing Senate seats in Indiana, Maine and
Massachusetts. If they did, they would need to sweep all of the contests in
which they either lead or are nearly tied — in Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota,
Virginia and Wisconsin — and then hope that Mr. Mandel can pull out a victory.
“We started off this race down 17. By Thanksgiving, we were down 15. By the
Super Bowl, we were down 12. Spring training, down 10. About a month ago, we
were down 7,” Mr. Mandel told a packed house of young door-knockers and phone
bank volunteers at the Lake County Republican Party headquarters on Saturday
night, many of them from out of state. “And a new poll came out this morning
that has us tied, 48-48.”
That poll was something of an outlier. Most other surveys have given Mr. Brown a
lead larger than the one President Obama has over Mr. Romney in Ohio. But the
Republican Party’s deep-pocketed allies are determined to give him a late surge.
Since Oct. 17, the beginning of the final reporting period, 40 groups have spent
$13.9 million on the Senate race in Ohio, 43 percent of the $32.7 million spent
since the primaries. Of that late rush, nearly 9 of every 10 dollars have been
spent on behalf of Mr. Mandel.
Mr. Brown has treated his younger rival with dismissive contempt, suggesting
that outside money is the only reason there is a race here.
But Mr. Brown and his allies have played the game as well, using negative
advertising to paint Mr. Mandel as a brat who stocked the treasurer’s office
with friends and cronies while not bothering to show up for work.
“Sherrod Brown likes to complain and play holier than thou when it comes to
independent expenditures,” Mr. Mandel said in an interview here. “We’re not
complaining. I’m a grown man, and I have no problem with people running attack
ads against me. I understand it’s part of the political process.”
At this point, he said, even his wife records the television shows she wants to
watch so that she can skip over the political ads.
Mr. Brown said: “I’m not whining about the money. I’m just saying there’s never
been this much outside money in any Senate campaign anywhere. It’s why there’s a
race.”
The ad barrage in the state is having an impact. John Carson, a 54-year-old
mathematician in Findlay, Ohio, and a Republican, said he still had not decided
whom to vote for in the presidential election. But as Mr. Mandel prepared
another visit to his town, nicknamed Flag City, he had stronger feelings about
the Senate race.
“I have a real bad feeling about Mandel,” he said. “It’s really the advertising,
his and Brown’s. He’s a slick politician just out for himself.”
Allies of both parties are hoping minds are not completely made up in several
states. In the past two weeks, $22 million has poured into the Senate race in
Virginia. Outside groups have dumped $17.2 million into Wisconsin, $12.7 million
into Arizona, $11.3 million into Indiana, $8.6 million into Montana and $8.5
million into Nevada.
In some of those states, like Wisconsin and Nevada, groups supporting Democratic
candidates have outspent the Republican groups. In most of the others, the
Democratic groups are not far behind. Only in Ohio are the numbers so lopsided,
reflecting the stakes Republicans see in that race and the confidence they have
in their private polling. It also shows the certitude among Democrats that they
have it won.
Mr. Mandel said his campaign’s internal polling had the race tied, but, he said,
he has at least a two-percentage-point lead with Ohio’s most enthusiastic
voters. A poll released Sunday by The Columbus Dispatch showed Mr. Obama with 50
percent and Mr. Romney with 48 percent, which was within the poll’s margin of
sampling error of two points, and had Mr. Brown ahead of Mr. Mandel by six
points, 51 percent to 45 percent, exceeding the margin of error.
Mr. Mandel has had to suffer some indignities in his quest for the Senate. Over
the weekend, he played the sidekick to the House speaker, John A. Boehner of
Ohio, who barnstormed the state with Mr. Mandel but always played the top act of
the show. In Painesville on Saturday night, Mr. Mandel gave brief remarks from
his stump speech and then introduced Mr. Boehner, who promptly forgot his name.
“I’ve got to tell you, I’m proud of our ticket. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan,” Mr.
Boehner said. “Uh, we’ve got, uh, he was just here. I’m going brain-dead. Josh
Mandel!”
Mr. Mandel shrugged it off. “Listen,” he said, “he’s third in line to be
president. This is one of most important and powerful leaders we have in this
country. He’s a lot more important guy than I am.”
The late rush to help Mr. Mandel may reflect the narrowing of the Senate playing
field. The toughest races to handicap do not really include Ohio. In Montana, a
freshman Democratic senator, Jon Tester, is nearly tied with the state’s only
House member, Denny Rehberg, a Republican. Of the $8.5 million in outside money
spent on the Senate race in that state, 39 percent has come in the last two
weeks, most of it for Mr. Rehberg.
In Wisconsin, polls have given leads to both former Gov. Tommy G. Thompson, a
Republican, and his Democratic opponent, Representative Tammy Baldwin. Of the
$17.2 million spent so far by outside groups in that race, 45 percent has come
in since Oct. 17, but in this case, Ms. Baldwin, who would be the first openly
lesbian senator, has benefited from a national network of supporters who have
outspent Mr. Thompson’s allies.
Outside of Ohio, nowhere is the last-ditch spending spree more prominent than in
Indiana, where Republican groups are rushing to try to salvage the campaign of
the state treasurer, Richard E. Mourdock, who may have doomed the prospects of a
Republican Senate seat by saying that conception from rape is God’s will.
Forty-seven percent of the outside money spent on the Indiana Senate race has
been spent in the last 18 days. Of that, $6.6 million has been spent on Mr.
Mourdock’s behalf, versus $4.7 million for his opponent, Representative Joe
Donnelly, a Democrat.
Even Representative Todd Akin of Missouri, largely written off in his attempt to
unseat Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, has made a move. National
Republicans had sworn they would not back Mr. Akin after he commented that
conception would not result from “legitimate rape.”
But coordinated spending between his campaign and the Missouri Republican Party
topped $1.1 million in the race’s final week, a figure higher than either group
has on hand. That has led to speculation that the National Republican Senatorial
Campaign is shifting money to the state party. Officials of the N.R.S.C. have
refused to comment on the move.
The final days of the Missouri race have included a $2 million ad blitz on
behalf of Mr. Akin, who has been vastly outspent by Ms. McCaskill throughout the
race. Ms. McCaskill has continued to put her own pressure on Mr. Akin, a
six-term member of the House, releasing a new ad that used a clip from an
interview in which Mr. Romney called for Mr. Akin to drop out of the race.
Indiana, Montana and Wisconsin could determine whether Republicans can at least
gain seats in the Senate, instead of leaving the Democrats’ 53-seat majority
intact or even augmented. Ms. Baldwin, who is from Madison, a liberal bastion,
and has one of the most left-leaning voting records in the House, would appear
to be an unlikely powerhouse.
And it is not that she is doing incredibly well in a state where Republicans
dominated the 2010 elections and fended off attempts to recall a conservative
governor a few months ago. Those “too liberal” attacks being hurled at her seem
to be effective, said Charles Franklin, the poll director at Marquette
University.
What is perhaps more surprising, he said, is that Mr. Thompson, a popular
four-term governor of the state, has his own negatives that appear to be just as
strong.
“Both of these ad campaigns have been effective, and they’ve been sticky,” Mr.
Franklin said, adding that both candidates are seen more unfavorably than
favorably by Wisconsin voters. “They’ve stuck to the candidates that they’ve
been directed toward.”
In Montana, each Senate candidate has been crisscrossing from the ski towns and
pristine parks in the west to the oil-rich plains in the east, stopping in tiny
towns to press for support from handfuls of voters at cafes and gas stations.
Windshield time, it is called. Mr. Tester kept up a punishing schedule through
the weekend, while Mr. Rehberg laid low and let the advertising speak for him.
That included a direct-to-camera plea from Mr. Romney.
“It’s all going to come down to voter turnout,” Mr. Tester said in a phone
interview as he rolled across the state.
Indiana could prove to be the 2012 equivalent to Nevada and Delaware during the
2010 Senate races, when Republicans looked poised to easily take Democratic
seats only to nominate Tea Party-backed candidates who proved too conservative
for the general electorate. But outside groups seem determined to keep Mr.
Mourdock in the game.
Jonathan Weisman reported from Painesville, Ohio, and Derek Willis from
Washington. John Eligon contributed reporting from St. Louis, Jack Healy from
Denver and Steven Yaccino from Chicago.
November 4,
2012
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
BOSTON —
Even in the darkest days of Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaign, when she was
being pummeled for claiming Native American ancestry, her team expressed
optimism that she would win in November. Why? Because, they said, she would have
a superior ground game that would turn out the vote when it mattered most, on
Election Day.
That assertion is now being put to the test. Her campaign officials say they
expect to have 24,000 volunteers working for them on Tuesday roughly 10 in each
of the state’s 2,174 precincts to get her supporters to the polls. That would be
by far a record number in Massachusetts. In the days before the election, they
expect to knock on one million doors and make two million phone calls.
Her army on the ground is clearly one of Ms. Warren’s strength in her
hard-fought attempt to unseat Senator Scott P. Brown. But what Mr. Brown, as a
Republican in a deep blue state, may lack in ground organization, he makes up
for on the stump as a natural-born campaigner who makes a personal connection
with voters.
“I’m from here, O.K.?” Mr. Brown said from the stage at a boisterous rally
Thursday night in Wakefield, where he grew up. “I married a local Waltham girl.
My kids were born here. I know this town like the back of my hand.” Huge cheers
erupted from the packed hall.
Ms. Warren is greeted like a rock star. A rally in Boston on Saturday with
Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and civil rights icon, brought
down the house. And Mr. Brown has some organization, his team says it has
quadrupled the strength of any previous Republican campaign in the state. Recent
polls have shown Ms. Warren with a very slim advantage, though all have been
within the margin of sampling error.
“It’s widely recognized that the Democrats here have the edge in terms of
numbers, and that’s the real danger for Brown,” said Peter Ubertaccio, a
political scientist at Stonehill College. “But Brown has been able to blunt the
Democratic knocking-on-door strategy through sheer force of personality, and
that’s what has kept this race so close.”
The Warren campaign has been tilling the fields for months.
It has 48 field offices and 74 paid field organizers, including several veterans
of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. On Saturday alone, they
made more than 370,000 phone calls and knocked on more than 123,000 doors; those
knocking included Michael S. Dukakis, the former governor and Democratic
presidential candidate.
“The ground game is the only thing that matters in the end,” said John Walsh,
chairman of the state Democratic Party. On Election Day itself, he said, Team
Warren will be joined by thousands of members of unions and groups like the
Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Workers from Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s
machine in Boston have already been folded in.
They intend to start at 5 in the morning by hanging a card on the front doors of
likely Warren voters, reminding them to vote. Warren workers at the polls will
keep track of who has voted.
Ms. Warren’s closing television ad presents her as a fighter for the middle
class. “Know this,” she says directly to the camera. “My fight is for you.
Always has been. And I won’t back down, no matter how long the odds or how
powerful the opposition.”
On the stump, she fires up her supporters with a reminder that Mr. Brown has
voted against equal pay for women, coverage for birth control and a Supreme
Court nominee who supports abortion rights. If she wins, Ms. Warren will become
the first woman in state history elected to the Senate. Polling shows she has
lopsided support among women while Mr. Brown has lopsided support among men.
Mr. Brown’s get-out-the-vote effort cannot match Ms. Warren’s, since the
Republican Party has little institutional history in the state. But the party
said that Mr. Brown’s 2010 election had given it a base on which to build.
“We are running by far the largest volunteer field organization in our party’s
history,” said Tim Buckley, a spokesman for the state Republican Party.
Still, Brown supporters are trying to turn their field disadvantage into a
strength. At a Brown rally here on Sunday, former Gov. William F. Weld, a
Republican, cast the race as a showdown between “man versus machine.” He said
that just as a machine was working to get Ms. Warren elected, a machine would
tell her how to vote. “The machine never rests,” he said.
Voter mobilization for Mr. Brown relies less on foot soldiers and more on a
personal, down-home appeal as he and his camera-ready family barnstorm across
the state in a bright blue bus.
“It is about whose side you’re on,” Mr. Brown said at the Wakefield rally,
co-opting a phrase from Ms. Warren as he cast her as a non-compromiser. “She’ll
have a message of division, us versus them, haves and the have-nots, men versus
women,” he said. “I mean, come on. How about somewhere in the middle? How about
‘maybe’? How about ‘together’? How about sitting down and having a beer and a
pizza and solving our problems?”
His closing television ad is a 60-second montage of upbeat images backed by
swelling music as Mr. Brown says, “I’ve kept my promise to be an independent
voice.” It also features a clip of him with President Obama.
His party label, and his party’s presidential standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, have
been airbrushed out of his campaign. At his rallies, Mr. Brown leads his
audiences in chants of his slogan, “people over party.”
One of the biggest wild cards in this race is the presidential election. Mr.
Obama leads Mr. Romney here by double digits, but this has not translated into a
corresponding lead for Ms. Warren. It does suggest that Mr. Brown has won over
plenty of Obama voters; the question is whether he can win enough of them.
WHAT a difference four years makes. Barack Obama may be the president of
masterful inactivity, but an awful lot has changed under his watch, not least
what Europe thinks of him.
What has become clear, and what — given the views of Mitt Romney and the
Republicans — will be true over the next term, is that the United States and
Europe seem to occupy not just different continents, but different planets. We
both see very different places when we look at the globe: we are struck by
America’s constant, furious obsession with the Middle East, the fond and
venerable bearing of ancient grudges against the vestiges of Communism, the
bizarre choice of friends and enemies. (This, I hasten to add, isn’t a
comparative value judgment; Europe has no monopoly on right thinking or clear
viewing.) Partly for that reason, this election has met with barely a shrug of
interest in Europe; it hardly makes the front pages or the broadcast news.
Four years ago we sat rapt on the edge of our seats. Remember Mr. Obama’s 2009
visit to Berlin? The huge adoring crowds that evoked the ghost of John F.
Kennedy and “Ich bin ein Berliner”? Today he’d be lucky to fill a bus with
Teutonic fans or, if they did appear, to be heard over their guttural jeering.
The disappointment that all Americans may be harboring over the Obama term is
nothing compared with the garland-wrenching grief in Europe.
It’s not the disappointment; it’s the hope we can’t bear.
There was a feeling that for the first time in a generation there might be a
president who was the sort of American Europeans yearned to love. He seemed to
have a very European perspective: his non-establishment background, his cadence,
the liberality all promised to be one-worldy. After George W. Bush — possibly
the most unpopular president since Richard M. Nixon — he was the fresh air from
the West that everybody craved. He would be the leader of the free world that
the free world could respect in difficult times.
Then it happened. It, meaning nothing. The first thing that didn’t happen was
the closing of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. Then, the cessation of drone
strikes didn’t happen. Then, any serious movement on the Palestinian question or
the attempt to curb the bellicosely right-wing Israeli government didn’t happen.
All that was galling, but what was really insufferable was that Mr. Obama never
wrote, he never phoned, he never sent flowers or asked what we’d like, or if we
had a beverage preference. He plainly didn’t care about Europe, and he didn’t
care to pretend that he cared, which of course would have been the European
diplomatic option.
Mr. Obama’s coolness, his inability or unwillingness to project warmth, to
compliment those who felt insecure, or for whom a pat on the back or a mention,
a mere mention, would mean a great deal, is the most inexplicable snub seen from
Europe, where etiquette and insincerity are social skills.
But there is a more fundamental problem between Western Europe and America. We
may be linked by a belief in a free society and a popularly answerable
government, but our democracies don’t mesh — not simply the systems, but the
parties.
In Europe, the gamut of electable politicians is pretty much the same in every
country, but there is no European equivalent to the Republican Party, not until
you get to Hungary or Serbia. Democrats would partially overlap with
conservatives or Christian Democrats here, but the absence of any sort of
electable socialist movement in America is a constant subject of
incomprehension. We believe the left wing is always a necessary element in the
balance of democracy.
But the idea that a democratic president could want to disengage with the rest
of the world and to retreat to fortress America, to pull up the drawbridge on a
messy world, is the most inexplicably wounding thing of all. Meanwhile, the
Republicans would want to get involved with the rest of us only to lay down the
law and protect American interests and biblical Israel.
And despite such aggressive lack of interest, the American public seems not to
care; if anything, it seems to prefer its politicians not talk too much about
the world beyond its borders.
Here, then, is the one place where the Old and New Worlds might collide: they
both face a democratic deficit. Fewer and fewer people on either side of the
Atlantic care to vote for anyone at all. In fact, the thing that may unite
Europeans and Americans more than anything else is a collective dismissal of
democracy, and a plague on the houses of all politicians.
A. A. Gill is
a contributing writer for Vanity Fair and The Sunday Times of London.
November 5,
2012
The New York Times
By KEVIN M. KRUSE
Princeton,
N.J.
THE director Steven Spielberg, whose “Lincoln” biopic opens Friday, recently
said he hoped the film would have a “soothing or even healing effect” on a
nation exhausted after yet another bitter and polarizing election.
But there’s one line attributed to Lincoln that Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays the
president, doesn’t utter in the film: “You may fool all the people some of the
time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all
of the people all the time.”
The omission makes sense. Not only is the line probably apocryphal, but also,
this Election Day just might demonstrate that you really can fool all of the
people — or at least enough of them — in the time it takes to win the White
House.
Venomous personal attacks and accusations of adultery, miscegenation and even
bestiality are as old as the Republic. Aaron Burr was the sitting vice president
when he killed Alexander Hamilton.
But while the line between fact and fiction in politics has always been fuzzy, a
confluence of factors has strained our civic discourse, if it can still be
called that, to the breaking point.
The economic boom and middle-class expansion of the postwar era encouraged
relative deference for officials, journalists and scholars. It’s true that
reporters and politicians had far cozier relationships, but the slower news
cycle allowed more time for verification and analysis.
Candidates accordingly believed that being caught in an outright lie could
damage their careers. (As Daniel Patrick Moynihan reportedly said, “Everyone is
entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”) They tended only to bend
the truth, not break it.
In 1948, President Harry S. Truman denounced Republican financiers as
“bloodsuckers” and “gluttons of privilege,” but grounded his inflammatory
language in the facts of Congress’s legislative record. He denied his “give ’em
hell” reputation, saying later only that “I used to tell the truth on the
Republicans, and they called it that.”
Two years later, Richard M. Nixon, running for the Senate from California, said
his opponent, Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, was “pink right down to her
underwear,” a red-baiting remark, but one that referred to statements she’d made
calling for global disarmament and civil rights for women and blacks.
The brass-knuckle 1964 campaign is remembered for Lyndon B. Johnson’s alarmist
“daisy ad,” which suggested that Barry M. Goldwater’s election might lead to
nuclear war. But it rested on statements Goldwater had made indicating a loose
attitude toward nuclear weapons. (“Lob one into the men’s room in the Kremlin,”
he once joked.)
The attack ads devised by the strategist Lee Atwater for Vice President George
Bush in the 1988 campaign, one of the dirtiest ever, were grounded in at least a
kernel of truth. Mr. Bush’s opponent, Michael S. Dukakis, might not have
deserved blame for the furlough program that let Willie Horton commit additional
crimes, but at least the program and prisoner were real. Atwater exploited these
events, but did not invent them.
At least four factors since the 1970s have lowered the cost for politicians who
lie and, more important, repeat their fabrications through their attack ads.
First is the overall decline in respect for institutions and professionals of
all kinds, from scientists and lawyers to journalists and civil servants.
Second are changes in media regulation and ownership. In 1985, the conservative
organization Fairness in Media, backed by Senator Jesse Helms, tried to arrange
a takeover of CBS and “become Dan Rather’s boss.” It failed, but two years later
conservatives set the stage for an even bigger triumph. For decades, radio and
television broadcasters had been required to present multiple viewpoints on
contentious public debates on the grounds that they were stewards of the public
airwaves. But in 1987, members appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the
Federal Communications Commission abolished this “fairness doctrine.” The change
facilitated the creation of conservative talk radio and cable outlets to combat
perceived liberal bias. Liberals followed suit with programming (albeit less
effective) of their own.
As this cacophony crescendoed, a third trend developed as political operatives
realized they had more room to stretch the truth. In 2004, an aide to President
George W. Bush dismissed a journalist for being part of a “reality-based
community” of people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious
study of discernible reality.” But even Mr. Bush believed there were limits to
truth-bending. The ads that attacked the military service of Senator John Kerry
came from the ostensibly independent “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.” After the
ads aired, Mr. Bush belatedly called them “bad for the system.”
A fourth factor: most news organizations (with notable exceptions) abandoned
their roles as political referees. Many resorted to an atrophied style that
resembled stenography more than journalism, presenting all claims as equally
valid. Fact checking, once a foundation for all reporting, was now deemed the
province of a specialized few.
But as this campaign has made clear, not even the dedicated fact-checkers have
made much difference.
PolitiFact has chronicled 19 “pants on fire” lies by Mr. Romney and 7 by Mr.
Obama since 2007, but Mr. Romney’s whoppers have been qualitatively far worse:
the “apology tour,” the “government takeover of health care,” the “$4,000 tax
hike on middle class families,” the gutting of welfare-to-work rules, the
shipment by Chrysler of jobs from Ohio to China. Said one of his pollsters, Neil
Newhouse, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”
To be sure, the Obama campaign has certainly had its own share of dissembling
and distortion, including about Mr. Romney’s positions on abortion and foreign
aid. But nothing in it — or in past campaigns, for that matter — has equaled the
efforts of the Romney campaign in this realm. Its fundamental disdain for facts
is something wholly new.
The voters, of course, may well recoil against these cynical manipulations at
the polls. But win or lose, the Romney campaign has placed a big and historic
bet on the proposition that facts can be ignored, more or less, with impunity.
Kevin M.
Kruse, a professor of history at Princeton, is the co-editor, most recently,
of “Fog of
War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement.”
November 5,
2012
The New York Times
By FRANK BRUNI
SEATTLE
The nation’s vigilant theocrats figured us out. We can’t slip anything past
them. It’s not the right to marry that we’re after — to make the same commitment
that our straight peers are automatically able to, even if they’re thrice
divorced, tipsy and standing before an Elvis impersonator in Vegas. It’s the
nation’s young. We’re out to recruit the next generation, plump up our ranks and
pave the way to a gay utopia in which the Tony Awards get higher Nielsen ratings
than the Super Bowl and we all dance at the inauguration of President Ellen
DeGeneres.
Please. If you think we have time for such elaborate stratagems, you
underestimate how many hours we put in at the gym. Besides which, I prefer
football to “Footloose,” and I can round up plenty of other gay men who are with
me on that, along with lesbians more loyal to “The View” than to “Ellen.”
On this Election Day, citizens in four states are weighing in on same-sex
marriage. Minnesotans are deciding whether to ban it in their Constitution, but
here in Washington and in Maine and Maryland as well, the issue is whether to
permit it, and a majority of “yes” votes would mark the first time that a state
has done so by popular referendum.
That milestone seems within reach, and horrified opponents have responded with
their favorite and nastiest scare tactic, the insinuation that America’s
children are about to be corrupted. This fearmongering worked four years ago in
California, where voters rejected same-sex marriage after the repeated broadcast
of a commercial in which an adorable little girl exultantly informs her aghast
mother that in school that day, she learned that princes could marry princes and
that she could marry a princess. A stern-looking man then sweeps in to warn
viewers that they will be saying O.K. to such ostensible brainwashing if they
let gay couples say “I do.”
The analogous commercial this year spotlights David and Tonia Parker, who insist
that after Massachusetts began to allow same-sex marriage in 2004, their son and
other children were forced to learn about homosexual relationships in school.
While it’s true that some schools mentioned same-sex couples in diversity
discussions, it wasn’t mandated by the state or connected to the advent of
same-sex marriage, and the referendums this Election Day say nothing at all
about curriculums. Moreover, a federal court that heard a lawsuit by the Parkers
rightly determined that a cursory reference to gay couples in classrooms “does
not constitute ‘indoctrination,’ ” as the Parkers had claimed.
David Parker is just a textbook homophobe in the garb of a humbly concerned
parent. He has likened homosexuality to alcoholism and equated teachers who
mention it to sexual predators using foul language in the park.
He and his ilk love to link gay rights with sexual predation. An ad used in
Florida in 2009 shows a blond girl in a pink T-shirt entering a playground
restroom; seconds later, a man in a baseball cap and sunglasses follows her in.
The commercial then claims that the Gainesville City Commission made this legal,
presumably by including transgendered people in an anti-discrimination ordinance
that covered public accommodations.
As for anti-gay crusaders’ fixation with indoctrination, I’d like them to
explain how so many of us turned out gay or lesbian despite having straight
parents and, in my day, being exposed to movies, TV shows and Top 40 songs that
portrayed an almost exclusively heterosexual world.
I’d also like them to meet Jeff DeGroot, 27, a law student here who has been
giving public speeches in support of the Washington referendum. He grew up in
Oregon with two mothers — “the most wonderful parents in the world,” he told me
— who went to all his hockey games, nagged him about his homework and have now
been together for 38 years. They were even married to each other briefly after a
county clerk in Oregon began to grant same-sex marriage licenses in 2004. The
Oregon Supreme Court nullified those weddings the following year, devastating
them, he said.
Surely, I remarked, his upbringing had made him homosexual.
He laughed. “My girlfriend would have something to say about that,” he said.
You are who you are. And that’s all that Jeff and I and others who endorse
same-sex marriage want anyone to be.
I have 11 nieces and nephews, the oldest of whom is 16, and do you know how many
times I’ve discussed my sexual orientation with her? Zero. She knows I’m gay,
knows my partner — and that’s that. Instead we talk about the New York Giants,
whom she roots for, and the Denver Broncos, my team.
The Broncos won on Sunday. I’ve decided to treat that as an omen that at least
one of the same-sex marriage referendums will succeed, and that unjustified
fears and an unjustifiable inequality are in retreat.
November 5,
2012
The New York Times
By ROGER COHEN
NEW YORK —
Four years ago, on the eve of the victory of Obama in the 2008 election, I
attempted to define what America is.
It is renewal, I suggested, the place where impossible stories get written.
It is the overcoming of history, the leaving behind of war and barriers, in the
name of a future freed from the vengeful clamp of memory.
It is reinvention, the absorption of one identity in something larger — the
notion that “out of many, we are truly one.” Americans are decent people.
They’re not interested in where you came from. They’re interested in who you
are.
At the close of this endless campaign — on one of those crisp, clear New York
days where the glimmer of possibility seems to lurk at the tapering edge of the
city’s ruler-straight canyons — it is worth recalling that America, alone among
nations, is an idea; and that idea dies when hope and possibility disappear.
As a naturalized American who recalls the 1,000 faces in the room where I swore
the oath of allegiance and how they mapped the world and yet shared some
essential notion of humanity, I confess to the convert’s zeal. I had to take a
dictation back then to become a citizen. It was supposed to prove my command of
English. The second sentence was, “I plan to work very hard every day.” So here
I am writing, loneliest of tasks.
It has been a hard, uneven road from 2008. The idealism vested in America’s
first black president was also vested in an introverted man whose talent for the
deal-making that oils the wheels of politics proved limited. Barack Obama is the
least “political” president since Jimmy Carter.
The United States is as divided today as it was four years ago — over economic
policy, of course, but more deeply over social policy: the whole regressive
God-invoking push of the Republican right against a woman’s right to abortion,
gay rights, marriage equality and so on.
One nation sometimes feels like two.
But even with its debt and division and uneven recovery the United States has
come a long way from the abyss of 2008. Obama is a man more likely than not to
make smart decisions. He’s also lucky. Sandy blew in a week before the election
and by the time it blew out Mittmentum was dented, Bloomberg on board and New
Jersey’s Republican governor cooing.
There have been big achievements: the winding down of the wars, health reform,
getting Osama bin Laden, and restoring the battered American idea.
Obama has fallen short of the pledge he made in 2009 when said we “cannot keep
this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values.”
Drone killings have nothing to do with due process. But the country no longer
inhabits the “dark side” of torture and rampant renditions.
By allowing gays to serve openly in the military and by signing legislation to
back equal pay for equal work for women, Obama has strived to make the United
States more inclusive.
America turns its back on its core ideas when it discriminates against women or
on the basis of people’s sexual orientation.
Romney has led a campaign that has said everything and the contrary, embracing
war then peace, changing positions on Obamacare, refusing to reveal how he will
offset tax cuts. He wants to deny women the right to abortion. His America, it
seems, would be more unequal and divided.
Last week I wrote about the sharp divisions in the Jewish community of
Cleveland, Ohio, where the Senate candidacy of a young right-wing Jewish
ex-Marine named Josh Mandel has exacerbated the tensions of a close campaign
where some Jews have tried hard to portray Obama as anti-Israel. Mandel, who has
campaigned against the Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown, is related by
marriage to the influential Ratner family.
After the column a paid ad in the form of an open letter to Mandel from several
members of the Ratner family appeared in the Cleveland Jewish News. It read in
part:
Dear Josh, Your cousins, Ellen Ratner and Cholene Espinoza, are among the
many wonderful couples whose rights you do not recognize. They were married
almost eight years ago in Massachusetts, at a time when it was the only state in
the nation to allow same-sex marriage. Their wedding, like yours, was a
beautiful and happy occasion for all of us in our family. It hurts us that you
would embrace discrimination against them.
We are equally distressed by your belief that gay men and women should not be
allowed to serve openly in the military. Like you, Cholene spent many years in
the armed forces. A graduate of the Air Force Academy and an accomplished pilot,
she became the second woman in history to fly the U-2 reconnaissance plane. And
yet, you have argued that she, like many gay and lesbian soldiers, should be
forced to live a life of secrecy and lies.
The letter embodies the spirit that overcame slavery and Jim Crow and has made
America an ever-reinvented land always pushing to the next frontier. It is cause
for hope.
November 5,
2012
The New York Times
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER,
THOMAS KAPLAN
and WENDY
RUDERMAN
Elected
officials in New York and New Jersey scrambled Monday to enable displaced
citizens to vote in the election on Tuesday, relocating scores of coastal
polling places that had become unusable because of power failures, flooding or
evacuations.
New Jersey and New York both said they would allow voters uprooted by Hurricane
Sandy to cast provisional ballots anywhere in their states.
“Just because you’re displaced doesn’t mean you should be disenfranchised,” Gov.
Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said in announcing the step on Monday.
But the provisional ballots would, in many cases, allow residents to vote only
in statewide contests and in the presidential election, in which President Obama
is heavily favored in both states. The ballots could not be used in local and
Congressional races, which in some areas are far more competitive.
New Jersey went further, saying it will let displaced voters vote by fax or
e-mail. Ballot-integrity advocates warned that this raised risks of fraud by
hackers, or mischief by partisan local officials because electronic ballots lack
secrecy and are not safeguarded by witnesses.
Across the storm-damaged region, bleary-eyed, disheveled residents drove long
distances and waited in long lines at government offices to cast early ballots
Monday, and many said voting felt like an important step back toward normalcy.
In New York, there are very tight Congressional or legislative races in Queens,
on Staten Island, on Long Island and in Westchester County, all of which were
hit hard by the storm. Candidates in those races went to great lengths to ensure
that their supporters could surmount the extraordinary obstacles to voting this
year.
On Staten Island, the Congressional campaign of Mark Murphy, a Democrat running
against Representative Michael G. Grimm, a Republican, sent volunteers to
gasoline lines across the borough with iPhones to help idling voters figure out
where they should go on Tuesday. Mr. Grimm’s campaign said it was recruiting
volunteers with full gas tanks to transport to the polls voters whose cars were
destroyed or had no gas.
Many voters already confronted confusion and signs of chaos as they sought to
vote Monday, or to figure out where they could vote on Tuesday.
“They told me I can register today, but I can’t vote in this election,” said
Helen Colon, 69, a retired woman who journeyed to the Staten Island’s eastern
shore to register her disabled husband to vote, after trying but failing to do
so online. “At least that’s what I think they said.”
Local and state officials were plainly having trouble conveying information
about Election Day obstacles and remedies. New Jersey officials could not say
how many polling places had been moved — though they said fewer than 100 still
needed “some resolution.” The outdated Web site for hard-hit Ocean County
directed residents of Seaside Heights to that shore town’s flooded,
unelectrified, empty community center.
In New York City, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg worried aloud that the relocation
of polling places could depress turnout — since, he said, motivating people to
cast their ballots was a chore even in an ordinary election year.
“The question is: Will they make the effort?” he said.
Polling places require power to run their electronic machines. As of Monday
night, more than 100 polling places in New York State had been changed,
including about 60 in the city. Most were in Brooklyn and Queens; in two cases,
in the Rockaways and the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx, the city was setting
up polling places in tents powered by generators and outfitted with portable
heaters.
The city’s Board of Elections also arranged for shuttle buses that would run
every 15 minutes to ferry voters to and from polling places in three areas hit
particularly hard by the storm: the Rockaways, Coney Island and Staten Island.
Juan Carlos Polanco, a commissioner on the Board of Elections, said it had done
everything in its power to publicize the new locations of polling places.
“We want New Yorkers to be patient tomorrow,” Mr. Polanco said. “Elections are
hard enough to run as it is.”
But the board has a troubled track record, even when elections are not preceded
by hurricanes. In 2010, computer malfunctions and delayed openings of polling
places led Mr. Bloomberg to pronounce the board’s handling of the election a
“royal screw-up.” In June, the five-way Democratic primary for Representative
Charles B. Rangel’s seat took weeks to be counted.
Local elected officials were not optimistic about Tuesday. Councilwoman Gale A.
Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat, said she had heard from utility workers scheduled
to work 12-hour shifts on Election Day who had no idea how they were supposed to
vote. And Councilman Jumaane D. Williams, a Brooklyn Democrat, questioned why
thousands of voters taking refuge at evacuation shelters would not be able to
cast provisional ballots at their shelters.
Mr. Williams said, “My guess is if you don’t have your house, you have no place
to live, you may not have food, this is probably not at the top of your list of
things to do.”
In Ocean County, officials took extra steps to allow displaced residents to
vote. They sent a mobile voting bus to shelters there and in adjacent Burlington
County. They also sought to address the problem of provisional ballots by
printing 50,000 generic ballots and allowing voters to fill in the names of
their local candidates.
For candidates in tight races, the effort to get voters to the polls was both
frantic and delicate.
On Long Island, volunteers for Randy Altschuler, the Republican challenging
Representative Timothy H. Bishop, a Democrat, called voters to make sure they
knew that the election was still taking place and to offer rides. But every
conversation began with a question about whether the voters needed help.
“It’s really a totally different script,” said Diana Weir, Mr. Altschuler’s
campaign manager.
Many barrier-island voters forced from their homes seemed to clutch at the
chance to vote as if it were a memento salvaged from the flotsam of their
pre-storm lives.
Justine Fricchione, 29, of Lavallette, N.J., voted at the county building in
Toms River on Monday, she said, because without television, Internet or a
charged cellphone, she had not been able to find out where to go on Election
Day. She was forced to move because her home was severely damaged, and then
again when her grandmother’s house lost power. But as the daughter of a onetime
Jersey City councilman, she said, she was not going to be deterred.
“It’s your right to vote,” she said. “You figure out how to get there, and you
just do it.”
November 5,
2012
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG
and JEFF ZELENY
The most
expensive presidential race in American history now becomes the biggest show on
television, a night with enough uncertainty that it could become a telethon
lasting well into morning.
For the third time in the last four presidential campaigns, the Democratic and
Republican presidential nominees went into Election Day close in the national
polls, with not one of the major opinion surveys giving President Obama or Mitt
Romney a lead of statistical significance.
But presidential races are decided in the states, and the nation will get an
answer to the opposing cases for victory that each candidate has made for so
many months. It will finally know, as one of Mr. Obama’s top aides has put it,
“which side is bluffing” and whether battleground-state polls, which have given
Mr. Obama a slim but consistent edge where it matters most, accurately foretold
the outcome. As the night unfolds, clues to the outcome will spill out well
before the votes are counted.
If exit polling indicates that Mr. Romney is substantially exceeding the share
of the white vote that went to Senator John McCain four years ago, that will be
a sign that he is replicating the coalition that gave President George W. Bush a
second term. If Mr. Obama can win Virginia, a battleground with an early
poll-closing time, Mr. Romney’s options for getting an Electoral College
majority will be substantially reduced. And in Ohio, the vote in Hamilton
County, which Mr. Obama and Mr. Bush both won, could signal who takes the state.
On Monday, Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama went on traditional last-day blitzes across
the most important swing states, overlapping in the place that is expected to
have the lead role in Tuesday’s drama, Ohio.
For Mr. Obama, it was the last day of campaigning in a career that took him in a
few short years from the Illinois State Senate to the United States Senate and,
finally, the White House. For Mr. Romney, it was to be the end of his seven-year
quest for the presidency. But late Monday, his aides announced that he would
make one last pass at Pennsylvania and Ohio, with stops in Pittsburgh and
Cleveland on Tuesday.
Some Republicans said they believed the final push was needed given that Mr.
Romney was going into Election Day without any of the top competitive states
definitively in his column. A senior party strategist lamented that for all the
optimistic signs, there was a preponderance of evidence “cutting against us.”
Democrats will be on high alert on Tuesday for what they consider attempts to
suppress the vote, while Republicans make a case that strict voter
identification rules and counting procedures be followed to guarantee the
integrity of the outcome. Batteries of lawyers are standing by for both sides in
the swing states, especially Ohio, where the skirmishing was already under way.
The rise of early voting across the country meant that even before Election Day,
more than 30 million Americans had cast their ballots. Those results will be
reported Tuesday night, providing a new element for viewers at home: many states
will report initial results that encompass far more votes than ever before.
Now, as the campaigns say, it is all about turnout. But beyond the cliché, the
main question is not only how many but also who.
Mr. Romney’s campaign built its theory of winning around the idea that turnout
for Mr. Obama will fall well below his 2008 tally. The Obama campaign did not
entirely disagree, but believes it has rebuilt his coalition of women,
Hispanics, blacks and young voters just enough to win.
Here is a guide to what to look for as the night progresses to know who is up,
who is down and whether, should there be delayed counts, recounts and court
challenges, Election Day becomes Election Week or — gasp! — Month. (All times
below are Eastern.)
At 7 p.m., when the voting ends in Virginia, an early clue to whether the night
will be a long one or a short one may emerge. Both sides pursued the state’s 13
electoral votes tenaciously, but they are more central to the strategy of Mr.
Romney, who made two stops there on Monday.
If Mr. Obama carries Virginia, the path to victory narrows considerably for Mr.
Romney, who will have to all but run the table of the remaining contested
states. A senior adviser to the Romney campaign said the state’s importance is
greater than its electoral votes because the outcome there could set the tone
for the rest of election night.
At 7:30, the polls close in Ohio, where the 18 electoral votes are critical to
both men. The county-by-county tallies will be carefully scrutinized when the
returns start rolling in. But a word of warning: campaign officials do not
expect an outcome for several hours — at the least. And if Mr. Obama appears to
take a commanding lead right out of the gate, Republicans can take heart in the
knowledge that the early vote — an expected Obama strength — is counted first,
with the ballots from Election Day coming in later.
If Mr. Romney carries Ohio, viewers should settle in for a long night. A Romney
victory there could signal that the vaunted ground organization of the Obama
campaign is faltering and that his Midwestern firewall is cracking.
The television networks — and their high-tech maps — will spotlight the three
C’s of Ohio: Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati. The president is looking for a
strong performance in Cleveland, which Mr. Romney is visiting Tuesday in the
hope of shaving down Democratic margins. And Republicans are looking for
strength in Cincinnati and its surrounding area of Hamilton County; when Mr.
Obama won the county in 2008, he was the first Democrat in a generation to do
so.
But if Mr. Obama wins Ohio, history will be on his side (no Republican has won
the White House without Ohio), as will the landscape of swing states. With Ohio
in his column, he could lose Colorado, Virginia and Florida and still defeat Mr.
Romney by 281 to 257 electoral votes.
At 8, the voting ends in Florida, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. If the
television networks are not able to call Pennsylvania quickly, Democrats have
reason to move to the edge of their seats. But with 29 electoral votes, Florida
is the biggest prize on the battleground map. The Obama campaign is not counting
on victory there, but Mr. Romney needs to win. Otherwise, his advisers in Boston
believe that Mr. Obama will be re-elected.
But keep this in mind about Florida: the ballot in many counties is unusually
long, running more than 10 pages in some areas of the state because of judicial
elections and initiatives, which means voting could take longer. And long lines
in Florida could mean a long night ahead for Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney.
At 9, the voting ends in Colorado and Wisconsin. The states together have 19
electoral votes — one more than Ohio — and some strategists believe that the
states could be split by Mr. Romney (Colorado) and Mr. Obama (Wisconsin). But if
both states fall in one campaign’s favor, that candidate is almost certainly
heading to the White House.
At 10, the polls close in Iowa. Both campaigns carefully courted the state, with
its six electoral votes. The president selected Iowa as the site of his final
rally on Monday night, a decision that his advisers said was rooted more in the
symbolism of the place, where his victory in the 2008 caucuses solidified his
rise on the national stage.
The result will answer the question of whether the visit to Des Moines was a
moment of nostalgia or a last-minute scramble for support — or both.
November 5,
2012
The New York Times
By JEREMY W. PETERS
As the
cable news channels count down the hours before the first polls close on
Tuesday, an entire election cycle will have passed since President Obama last
sat down with Fox News. The organization’s standing request to interview the
president is now almost two years old.
At NBC News, the journalists reporting on the Romney campaign will continue to
absorb taunts from their sources about their sister cable channel, MSNBC. “You
mean, Al Sharpton’s network,” as they say Stuart Stevens, a senior Romney
adviser, is especially fond of reminding them.
Spend just a little time watching either Fox News or MSNBC, and it is easy to
see why such tensions run high. In fact, by some measures, the partisan
bitterness on cable news has never been as stark — and in some ways, as silly or
small.
Martin Bashir, the host of MSNBC’s 4 p.m. hour, recently tried to assess why
Mitt Romney seemed irritable on the campaign trail and offered a provocative
theory: that he might have mental problems.
“Mrs. Romney has expressed concerns about her husband’s mental well-being,” Mr.
Bashir told one of his guests. “But do you get the feeling that perhaps there’s
more to this than she’s saying?”
Over on Fox News, similar psychological evaluations were under way on “Fox &
Friends.” Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist and a member of the channel’s “Medical
A-Team,” suggested that Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s “bizarre laughter” during the
vice-presidential debate might have something to do with a larger mental health
issue. “You have to put dementia on the differential diagnosis,” he noted
matter-of-factly.
Neither outlet has built its reputation on moderation and restraint, but during
this presidential election, research shows that both are pushing their stridency
to new levels.
A Pew Research Center study found that of Fox News stories about Mr. Obama from
the end of August through the end of October, just 6 percent were positive and
46 percent were negative.
Pew also found that Mr. Obama was covered far more than Mr. Romney. The
president was a significant figure in 74 percent of Fox’s campaign stories,
compared with 49 percent for Romney. In 2008, Pew found that the channel
reported on Mr. Obama and John McCain in roughly equal amounts.
The greater disparity was on MSNBC, which gave Mr. Romney positive coverage just
3 percent of the time, Pew found. It examined 259 segments about Mr. Romney and
found that 71 percent were negative.
MSNBC, whose programs are hosted by a new crop of extravagant partisans like Mr.
Bashir, Mr. Sharpton and Lawrence O’Donnell, has tested the limits of good taste
this year. Mr. O’Donnell was forced to apologize in April after describing the
Mormon Church as nothing more than a scheme cooked up by a man who “got caught
having sex with the maid and explained to his wife that God told him to do it.”
The channel’s hosts recycle talking points handed out by the Obama campaign,
even using them as titles for program segments, like Mr. Bashir did recently
with a segment he called “Romnesia,” referring to Mr. Obama’s term to explain
his opponent’s shifting positions.
The hosts insult and mock, like Alex Wagner did in recently describing Mr.
Romney’s trip overseas as “National Lampoon’s European Vacation” — a line she
borrowed from an Obama spokeswoman. Mr. Romney was not only hapless, Ms. Wagner
said, he also looked “disheveled” and “a little bit sweaty” in a recent
appearance.
Not that they save their scorn just for their programs. Some MSNBC hosts even
use the channel’s own ads promoting its slogan “Lean Forward,” to criticize the
Republicans. Mr. O’Donnell accuses them of basing their campaigns on the false
notion that Mr. Obama is inciting class warfare. “You have to come up with a
lie,” he says, when your campaign is based on empty rhetoric.
In her ad, Rachel Maddow breathlessly decodes the logic behind the push to
overhaul state voting laws. “The idea is to shrink the electorate,” she says,
“so a smaller number of people get to decide what happens to all of us.”
Such stridency has put NBC News journalists who cover Republicans in awkward and
compromised positions, several people who work for the network said. To distance
themselves from their sister channel, they have started taking steps to reassure
Republican sources, like pointing out that they are reporting for NBC programs
like “Today” and “Nightly News” — not for MSNBC.
At Fox News, there is a palpable sense that the White House punishes the outlet
for its coverage, not only by withholding the president, who has done interviews
with every other major network, but also by denying them access to Michelle
Obama.
This fall, Mrs. Obama has done a spate of television appearances, from CNN to
“Jimmy Kimmel Live” on ABC. But when officials from Fox News recently asked for
an interview with the first lady, they were told no. She has not appeared on the
channel since 2010, when she sat down with Mike Huckabee.
Lately the White House and Fox News have been at odds over the channel’s
aggressive coverage of the attack on the American diplomatic mission in
Benghazi, Libya. Fox initially raised questions over the White House’s
explanation of the events that led to the attack — questions that other news
organizations have since started reporting on more fully.
But the commentary on the channel quickly and often turns to accusations that
the White House played politics with American lives. “Everything they told us
was a lie,” Sean Hannity said recently as he and John H. Sununu, a former
governor of New Hampshire and a Romney campaign supporter, took turns raising
questions about how the Obama administration misled the public. “A hoax,” Mr.
Hannity called the administration’s explanation. “A cover-up.”
Mr. Hannity has also taken to selectively fact-checking Mr. Obama’s claims,
co-opting a journalistic tool that has proliferated in this election as news
outlets sought to bring more accountability to their coverage.
Mr. Hannity’s guest fact-checkers have included hardly objective sources, like
Dick Morris, the former Clinton aide turned conservative commentator; Liz
Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney; and Michelle Malkin,
the right-wing provocateur.
Telling the truth is not just a problem for the White House, Ms. Malkin asserted
recently, before attacking Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the
chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. “We’ve talked about them
before,” Ms. Malkin said, “the lying liars and the crap weasels, like Debbie
Wasserman Schultz out there. And she really is in a classlessness all by
herself.”
Peter Johnson, a commentator and the personal lawyer to Roger Ailes, the Fox
News chairman, has suggested that the president is a liar and has even wondered
whether the administration chose not to aid American forces in Libya for the
sake of appearances. “Was there a political calculation that was made to
sacrifice Americans on the ground so we didn’t kill innocents in front of the
consulate?” he asked.
Mr. Johnson then noted another political scandal that broke in an election year
and failed to receive adequate scrutiny at the time: Watergate.
November 4,
2012
The New York Times
By ASHLEY PARKER
and MICHAEL BARBARO
DENVER — As
he ponders two futures, one in the White House, the other back home in Belmont,
Mass., Mitt Romney is juggling two books: “Mornings on Horseback,” a biography
of President Theodore Roosevelt, and “The Faithful Spy,” an escapist thriller
about a daring C.I.A. agent.
He wakes up around 5 a.m. for a workout and a conference call with his senior
staff members, as he has all year, but he is adjusting to one of the new burdens
of a would-be president: a widening security bubble that keeps him from popping
into McDonald’s to grab his favorite Fruit and Maple Oatmeal and from regularly
hitting the hotel gym. (An elliptical machine now awaits him in most hotel
rooms.)
And although supporters have started to call Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts
governor, “Mr. President” wherever he goes, he returns several times a day to an
airplane seat whose custom-made headrest reminds him, in bright red and white
stitching, that for now he remains just “The Gov.”
In the frenzied, final days of a roller-coaster two-year run for president, Mr.
Romney, the Republican nominee, has arrived at a strange and unfamiliar moment.
The political prize that eluded him in 2008, and his father, George, four
decades before that, is suddenly within agonizingly close reach, despite it all:
an ugly and seemingly endless primary, wall-to-wall attacks by Democrats on the
private equity firm he founded, a botched foreign trip and, not infrequently,
gaffes.
All around him, aides who as recently as a month ago had been steeling
themselves for defeat, murmuring that they had never really envisioned a job in
the White House anyway, are now allowing themselves to privately muse about what
life in Washington would be like.
Their boss is doing the same.
At a rally on Friday night, Mr. Romney stood before more than 20,000 cheering
Ohioans, with his five sons sitting off to the side in red or navy “Romney-Ryan”
fleeces. “Tonight we entered the final weekend of the campaign,” Mr. Romney told
supporters in West Chester. “At Obama rallies, they’re saying, ‘Four more
years.’ We have a different cry, of course. What is it?”
The crowd began chanting: “Four more days! Four more days!”
“Exactly right,” Mr. Romney said.
He knows, of course, that it could all end for him on Tuesday inside a ballroom
at the Boston Convention Center, a prospect that would snuff a decade’s climb
through the ranks of American politics. He is 65, and it is hard to imagine a
third presidential campaign. But for now, he seems to be willing himself into
the presidency, as much for the confidence of his staff as for motivating the
undecided voters who may glimpse him on television.
On Friday, he started to read the line of a speech loaded into his teleprompter
for a rally at a warehouse in West Allis, Ohio. “I want to help the hundreds of
thousands of dreamers,” the prepared text had him saying. “I will.”
He decided to tweak the wording. “When I am president,” he added, his voice
rising, “I will.”
He has pushed for a closing campaign message that outlines his plans for “Day
One” in the White House — a phrase that now appears on his signs and podiums and
in his stump speech. In private conversations with staff members, he has begun
dropping references to “January,” as he envisions how he might govern.
“This is a person who realizes that the presidency is within his grasp,” said
Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior adviser who has worked with Mr. Romney for the past
decade.
The changes in Mr. Romney’s mood and demeanor over the past few weeks are
subtle, those close him to say. Mr. Romney has never been known for Clintonian
eruptions of emotion. But he now exudes a new and unmistakable confidence.
At the end of a giant rally, held a few days ago at a high school football field
in Land O’ Lakes, Fla., Mr. Romney did something unusual for him. He raced
through an open corridor on the field, both arms extended as he high-fived the
eager voters, celebrity style. “You don’t see Mitt walk into a donor meeting
slapping high fives,” Mr. Fehrnstrom said. “It’s just a very different mood and
feel.”
Mr. Romney started the fall with an unhurried public schedule of just a few
events a week, bogged down with fund-raising commitments and reluctant to plunge
too quickly into the sleepless, barnstorming phase of the race. Now, he is
cramming three or four events into each day, a wearying regimen that has
occasionally become apparent in his hoarse voice and verbal slips.
At a rally in Des Moines on Sunday, Mr. Romney flubbed one of his signature
stump speech lines: “Employment is higher today than when Barack Obama took
office,” he said, accidentally substituting “employment” for “unemployment.”
Recalling his visit late last week with the owner of a struggling barbecue
restaurant in Richmond, Va., he blanked on the company’s age. “She said, ‘We’re
closing down for good after 82 years’ — was it 62 or 82?” he said. “Well, it’s
one of the two. After 62 or 82 years, she’s closing down.” To limit
exhaustion-induced errors, Mr. Romney is increasing his use of teleprompters in
the last days of the race, aides said.
The disciplined candidate is also letting down his guard in unexpected ways. In
Ohio last week, he broke from his usual script to reflect on the exhausting work
of running for president. “This job,” he said, “is quite an undertaking.”
Later, he talked about the difficulty of relaxing after hectic hours of
campaigning. “I get so much energy from you, by the way, that at the end of the
day, it takes me a long time to slow down and fall asleep,” he told thousands of
people on a field in Davenport, Iowa.
Two years into the race, Mr. Romney’s interior life remains something of a
mystery — not just to voters but even to some of his aides. He seems capable of
truly unwinding only in the company of his family. He eschews the raucous staff
dinners and late-night strategy huddles that are a staple of campaign life. At
night, he sometimes eats alone in his hotel room, savoring his solitude over
takeout that aides order from nearby restaurants.
Aboard his plane, he devotes little time to chitchat. “He just goes right to his
seat, takes out his iPad and gets to work,” said Kevin Madden, a senior adviser.
He makes a point of talking to his wife, Ann — who is keeping her own slightly
less demanding schedule of rallies and talks — every day in conversations
squeezed in on the plane just before takeoff, in his sport-utility vehicle
between events or at night back in his hotel room. On Sundays, he calls each of
his five sons — all of whom have been campaigning with him recently — to check
in, sometimes patching them into a conference call.
He is a careful student of the race that has enveloped his life. When he boards
the front cabin of his campaign plane each morning, aides have already arranged
the local and national newspapers on the table before him. He is a scanner of
headlines and photos, not a cover-to-cover reader, they said. (“Four Days to
Seal the Deal,” was the first headline he saw Friday, on the cover of USA
Today.)
On the plane that now doubles as his home on the road, he stocks peanut butter,
honey and whole wheat bread, the components of his go-to sandwich. Hidden away,
in an overhead bin or a nearby fridge, are his guilty pleasures: granola bars,
pita chips, Kit Kats, Snickers and Greek yogurt with honey. (“The Greek yogurt
industry has got to have a boost, just from the front of the plane,” Mr. Madden
said.)
In the waning days of the race, Mr. Romney’s world has become smaller and ever
more tightly controlled. He no longer ventures to the press cabin of his plane,
as he used to, apparently fearing an encounter that could change the contours of
the race.
After the third presidential debate, reporters asked Mr. Madden if Mr. Romney
might hold a news conference to talk about the last days of the campaign. Mr.
Madden scoffed: if you want to know what the candidate thinks, he said, listen
to his speeches.
“The door to a brighter future is there, it’s open, it’s waiting for us,” Mr.
Romney likes to say at the end of his speeches now. “I need your vote, I need
your help. Walk with me, walk together.”
On Saturday, he surrounded himself with his entire team of top advisers, who
made a rare joint appearance on his plane for the closing 72 hours of the race.
Many of them have worked with him since his days in the Massachusetts
Statehouse, and he wanted them by his side.
Over the weekend, he took out his iPhone and began to surreptitiously record
video of his aides asleep in their seats. As he prowled the cabin, laughing
quietly to himself, he seemed to understand that come Tuesday, win or lose, this
chapter of his life would be over.
November 4,
2012
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER
BRISTOW,
Va. — President Obama looked out at the sea of shivering supporters at a chilly
late-night rally here and soaked in the wave of blue campaign placards and the
flashing of a thousand smartphone cameras.
It was 37 degrees, and he warmed his left hand in his pocket even as he jabbed
at the air with his right. Midnight was approaching. It was the last rally of
the last Saturday of his last campaign, and he drifted off script.
“I was backstage with David Plouffe,” Mr. Obama told the crowd, referring to his
political guru, who looked surprised as he stood offstage. “And we were talking
about how, as the campaign goes on, we’ve become less relevant. I’m sort of a
prop in the campaign. He’s just bothering a bunch of folks, calling, asking
what’s going on.”
Indeed, for Mr. Obama, the campaign is effectively over. Oh, there will be a
final round of rallies on Monday, a final frenetic swing through swing states
and plenty of Plouffe phone calls asking what is going on. But the machinery
they have assiduously put in place over four years is now on remote control. The
campaign is out of their hands, and so is the fate of the 44th president.
Win, and he has a chance to secure a legacy as a president who made a mark not
simply by virtue of his original barrier-breaking election but also by
transforming America in his image — for the better, he hopes; for the worse, his
critics fear. Lose, and he becomes an avatar of hope and change who could not
fulfill his own promise and whose programs might not survive his remarkable rise
and fall.
It is in moments like these that nostalgia takes hold for a president on the
precipice. With each passing day, aides said, Mr. Obama has taken note every
time he passes a milestone.
“This is my last debate prep practice,” he said at Camp David.
“This is my last walk-through,” he said, touring a debate stage.
“This is my last debate,” he said after squaring off a third time with Mitt
Romney.
The “lasts” piled up on a bone-weary final weekend as he raced from Ohio to
Wisconsin, Iowa to Virginia, New Hampshire to Florida and back to Ohio, then
Colorado and Wisconsin again. What he hopes most is that these are not the last
days of his presidency.
“You can see the nostalgia, the wistfulness, setting in,” observed Dan Pfeiffer,
one of his longest-serving advisers and now the White House communications
director. “The focus here is winning and making the case, but the last campaign
of a man’s life — you every once in a while pause and think about that.”
Other than a brief interlude for Hurricane Sandy, the White House has been
relocated to Air Force One for months. Mr. Obama half-jogs off the plane and
half-jogs onto the stage, his coat off, his sleeves rolled up, his tie usually
gone. He has grown hoarse arguing his case. Between stops, he huddles in the
plane’s conference room, nursing his throat with tea and scratching out his
speech in longhand.
His daily routine has been upended, but he tries to keep up his workout regimen
in hotel fitness centers. He eats whenever he can, usually whatever the Air
Force stewards are serving aboard the plane or something brought in before a
speech. Occasionally, when he stops to glad-hand at a pizza place or a doughnut
shop, he may snack in the motorcade to the next campaign rally; at a Cleveland
meat shop, he bought barbecue jerky.
He is happier whenever he gets time with Michelle Obama, but she has largely
kept a separate schedule. Like any father on the road, he makes sure to call his
wife and children every evening. To keep him company in recent weeks, friends
like Marty Nesbitt and Mike Ramos have accompanied him aboard Air Force One.
Between conference calls on storm recovery on Sunday, he checked out the Chicago
Bears football game on the Air Force One television.
The other day, Mr. Obama landed in Chicago to vote and spotted his former chief
of staff Rahm Emanuel, now the city’s mayor, waiting on the tarmac. A huge grin
appeared on the president’s face, and he pointed at Mr. Emanuel. The mayor
grinned and pointed back. The two embraced like long-lost brothers and chatted
happily before walking, arm in arm, to shake hands with bystanders.
“He’s got his goal in eyesight, and he’s driving to the basket,” Mr. Emanuel
said later. “He’s a happy warrior, I’d say.”
Happier with the debates over. He considered preparations for the first one “a
drag,” as he put it, and got walloped. It was an eye-opener for a president who
has never lacked confidence, a moment when he “faced his own political
mortality,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “The first debate turned a switch for him. He
came out of that very focused on ensuring that would never happen again.” By his
own reckoning, Mr. Obama had failed to “communicate why he wants a second term,”
said another adviser.
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, who played Mr. Romney during debate
rehearsals, said Mr. Obama recognized the peril. “He just decided in his mind
that he needed to bear down and win, period,” Mr. Kerry said in an interview.
“He’s a competitive guy. He’s very analytical. He knows exactly what he had not
done and exactly what he wanted to do.”
After coming out stronger in the later debates, Mr. Obama could finally return
to the trail, where the affirmation of the crowd beats the pounding of the
pundits. The crowds are smaller — he drew 24,000 here in Bristow, compared with
60,000 and 80,000 in his final days in 2008 — but they are enthusiastic, and he
draws energy from them.
“The president seemed relaxed,” said former Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio, who
campaigned with him in that state. “You don’t see a lot of anxiety or frenetic
behavior.”
Mr. Obama seems to enjoy his unannounced stops even more, allowing a tiny peek
into his interior life. At the Common Man restaurant in Merrimack, N.H., he met
a woman with two daughters. “You can’t beat daughters,” he said, reflecting on
his own, who were, he added, still at a good age: “They still love you. They’re
still cute. They don’t talk back too much.”
One of his favorite stops was the employee cafeteria at the Bellagio hotel and
casino in Las Vegas, where he greeted kitchen workers and room cleaners. “For
him, that was the people he’s fighting for,” Mr. Plouffe said later. “He loves
stuff like that. That was a unique one.”
It made such an impression that Mr. Obama was still talking about it a day
later. “That thing at the Bellagio yesterday was great,” he told reporters on
Air Force One. Then, recalling that his press secretary’s van broke down, he
joked, “I think every trip we’re going to find at least one occasion to ditch
Jay Carney.”
Very rarely does Mr. Obama confront the nearly half of America that polls say do
not support him, those who blame him for the economic troubles still afflicting
the country. He seemed taken aback at Cleveland’s West Side Market when he asked
a chicken vendor how business was going.
“Terrible since you got here,” the man said.
The vendor later told his local newspaper he had meant only that the president’s
party had blocked his business that day. But he inadvertently voiced the
frustrations of many Americans.
Nor has Mr. Obama faced many tough questions lately, like those about the
response to the attack in Benghazi, Libya, since he generally does not take
questions from the reporters who trail him everywhere.
Instead, he sticks to generally friendlier broadcast interviews, sometimes
giving seven minutes to a local television station or calling in to drive-time
radio disc jockeys with nicknames like Roadkill.
With Michael Yo, a Miami radio host, he revealed his first job — Baskin-Robbins,
“paid minimum wage” — and addressed a feud between Mariah Carey and Nicki Minaj:
“I’m all about bringing people together,” he said.
He relishes rare moments away from politics. He had dinner one night at a
Washington restaurant with several swing-state Democrats who had won a contest
to meet the president. He had done his homework; he knew their names and their
children’s names. But as he tucked into a dinner of salmon, asparagus and
potatoes — he left most of the potatoes — he was eager not to dwell on the
campaign.
“We didn’t really talk about politics very much,” said Kimberley Cathey, 41, a
speech language pathologist from North Carolina. “I don’t recall really in the
hour and a half we talked anything major about the election,” said her husband,
Ron, also 41. “It was pretty much a night away from that.”
The president did contemplate the possibility of defeat, but said he and his
family “would be fine no matter what the outcome,” Ms. Cathey said. Mario Orosa,
44, a technical specialist at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron,
Ohio, said he had asked Mr. Obama, “What was the last thing that made you really
nervous?” The president replied, “I don’t remember.”
He is not a nervous man. But even his famous cool may be challenged on Tuesday
night. For the “prop,” it is all over but the waiting, while Mr. Plouffe makes
some calls and bothers some more folks.
November 5,
2012
The New York Times
By ANNIE LOWREY
WASHINGTON
— The presidential candidates held another animated debate on Sunday night, one
dedicated to covering the many contentious political issues that the previous
debates had failed to address.
But it was not Mitt Romney and President Obama sparring over the legality of
drone strikes or the best way to end poverty in America. The event was not held
in a well-lighted theater, or broadcast to millions at home.
Instead it was four third-party candidates striving to win attention and sway
votes in the waning hours of the presidential campaign from a crowded room in
the back of a Bohemian coffee shop.
The candidates — Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party, Jill Stein of the Green
Party, Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party and Virgil Goode of the Constitution
Party — sparred at an event moderated by the most famous third-party candidate
in recent memory, Ralph Nader.
They met at the back of Busboys and Poets, a popular coffeehouse in the U Street
neighborhood of Washington, debating in front of black-and-white portraits of
Gandhi, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Dalai Lama.
While Mr. Nader had a significant impact on the 2000 election, this time the
lesser-party candidates may affect the results only in certain swing states.
Both Mr. Johnson and Mr. Goode, who served six terms as a Virginia congressman
and whose most famous campaign plank is a hard line on immigration, might siphon
votes away from Mr. Romney in that state, which many polls show is a dead heat
between Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama. The Green Party’s Ms. Stein, a Massachusetts
physician, has drawn attention in New Hampshire.
Mr. Johnson’s and Mr. Goode’s ability to draw away votes has led to criticism
from Republicans and even behind-the-scenes efforts to get them off ballots. Mr.
Goode, who was a Republican and a Democrat before leaving those parties, is not
on the ballot on Pennsylvania after a Republican effort to remove him.
Mr. Johnson had to fight to get himself on the ballot, though he will appear in
nearly every state, and his candidacy may threaten to pull away votes from Mr.
Romney in the hotly contested states of Colorado and Nevada.
The evening’s central theme — one that united the four candidates, whose
positions caused them to be at odds on many issues — was that over the course of
the long, bitter presidential campaign the major-party candidates have for the
most part ducked some of the country’s most pressing concerns.
That list included reforming a broken immigration system, helping the poor,
fixing campaign finance and arresting climate change.
There is “no more urgent or consequential challenge” than global warming, said
Mr. Anderson, the former mayor of Salt Lake City. “We have basically declared
war on the future.”
But it is the role of third parties to push those issues into the mainstream,
said Mr. Nader.
“Dissent is the mother of ascent,” he said, opening the debate.
The evening started with more than two dozen yes-no-pass policy questions, in
which the candidates showed how much they agreed despite their different
political leanings, particularly on issues that they said the Democrats and
Republicans had both abandoned reasonable policy.
Topics included military spending (way too high) and corporate power in
Washington (way too strong).
Mr. Nader asked if the four candidates as a group would support getting out of
Afghanistan, ending the ethanol subsidy and reducing the defense budget, along
with a hodgepodge of other concerns. The candidates responded, “Yes,” in unison.
“Convergence!” Mr. Nader cried.
But on other issues, they found no convergence, and that led to some spirited
sparring. Mr. Goode voiced his opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion. Ms.
Stein pushed for government to do more for the environment and to create green
jobs. The candidates debated monetary stability, and whether it made sense to
raise the minimum wage.
Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama, though absent, loomed large. And a two-party system
that blocks out third-party voices seemed to be the candidates’ central
opponent.
In this election the four have remained largely a fringe presence, and just
getting their voices out and finding a better platform for their ideas became a
refrain.
“Who the hell is Gary Johnson?” the former New Mexico governor and Libertarian
candidate asked. He said he would have “desperately needed” more national news
media attention to get voters interested.
The Commission on Presidential Debates requires candidates to have the support
of 15 percent of the electorate. Many third-party supporters say that is far too
high.
November 4,
2012
The New York Times
By BRIAN STELTER
This has
been the year of the big media gaffe.
NBC News edited a 911 tape of George Zimmerman in a way that implied race as a
factor in the Trayvon Martin shooting. CNN and Fox News falsely reported that
the Supreme Court had struck down the individual mandate at the heart of the
Obama administration’s health care law. ABC News wrongly suggested a link
between a mass shooting in Colorado and the Tea Party. Just last week during the
storm, CNN repeated a false rumor about flooding at the New York Stock Exchange.
Now the media are gearing up for election night, the finale of the year’s
biggest story. It’s a chance to regain some credibility — presuming, of course,
that television networks and other news organizations get their state-by-state
projections right. They all say they will, still mindful of the mistakes made in
2000, when the networks prematurely called Florida for Al Gore and then George
W. Bush.
The same precautions that were put in place after 2000 will be in place again
this Tuesday. At NBC, for instance, the statisticians at the “decision desk”
that makes projections “are literally sealed off from the rest of us,” said Mark
Lukasiewicz, the senior vice president of specials for NBC News.
Different this time will be the level of noise on the Web, where armchair and
professional pundits alike will react to the election results in real time. On
election night in 2008, a few Web sites, including Slate and Time.com, stated
the obvious — that Barack Obama was going to win the presidency — well before
the TV networks and major newspapers said so. In large part that’s because the
networks and newspapers were waiting for the polls to close on the West Coast.
They will abide by the same principle again on Tuesday night, ruling out any
such pronouncement before 11 p.m. Eastern. But more Web sites and individual
users will most likely try to call the race early, creating a cacophony on
social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
A memo on Saturday to employees of The Associated Press, the country’s biggest
news wire service, asked them to refrain from adding to the noise by posting to
Twitter about other news outlets’ calls. “If A.P. has not called a particular
state or race, it’s because we have specifically decided not to, based on the
expertise and data we have spent years developing,” the memo read.
In calling a state for Mr. Obama or Mitt Romney, news organizations will
consider several data sources, including exit poll results and raw vote totals —
“a brain trust of data,” said Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews, the vice president for
news for CBS News.
Executives at the major networks said in interviews that they don’t expect to be
able to project a winner at 11 p.m. this year, given the closeness of the
presidential race in several swing states. “I’m not even going to guess what
time it will be,” said Marc Burstein, the senior executive producer for special
events at ABC News. He predicted an abundance of caution this year because of
the trend of early voting in many states.
For election night ABC is uniquely situated in Times Square, which filled up
with supporters of Mr. Obama on election night in 2008. This time, too, “I
expect a gigantic crowd,” Mr. Burstein said. NBC is expecting the same at
Rockefeller Plaza, which it has re-christened Democracy Plaza with exhibits and
video screens, just as it did in 2004 and 2008.
All of the executives interviewed said they would be entirely comfortable making
projections after their competitors. “In a close contest, we’ll simply wait,”
said Sam Feist, the Washington bureau chief for CNN. And all of them cited the
journalism chestnut that it’s better to be right than first. “It’s always lovely
when the two coincide,” said Ms. Ciprian-Matthews of CBS, “but everybody here is
absolutely on the same page: accuracy comes first.”
Fox News did not respond to an interview request.
CNN, which was criticized for crowding its studio with anchors and analysts in
2008, will have more reporters in the field this time, including a half-dozen in
Ohio alone. Reprising what it called “ballot cams” on primary nights, CNN will
have crews at “key voting and vote-counting locations” in battleground states,
Mr. Feist said.
“We proved during the primaries that doing real reporting on those nights can
make a difference,” he said.
No matter the outcome, some partisans will claim that the election is
illegitimate, if the election year rhetoric is to be believed. Continuing an
effort that started in 2004, networks and other news outlets will ask the public
to alert them to voter irregularities and allegations of voter suppression. “We
have an entire team working on those stories,” Mr. Lukasiewicz of NBC said.
Dozens of news and opinion Web sites will offer essentially live coverage on
election night, some with TV-like newscasts and others with live blogs. But the
biggest audiences are still expected to tune to the big three broadcast
networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, and the big three cable news networks, Fox News,
MSNBC and CNN.
Four years ago, Brian Williams was the anchor on NBC, Charles Gibson on ABC and
Katie Couric on CBS. Mr. Williams is back for his second presidential election
night as anchor, but Mr. Gibson, who retired three years ago, will not; heading
the coverage instead will be the pair that sat alongside him in 2008, Diane
Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos. Ms. Couric, now of ABC, will join them from
time to time with social media reaction — a role that did not exist on the
network’s coverage last time.
On CBS, Scott Pelley will anchor his first presidential election night. It’s
also the first time for Rachel Maddow, on MSNBC, and Bret Baier and Megyn Kelly,
on Fox News. On PBS, Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff will make up national
television’s first two-woman anchor team on election night.
Half a dozen smaller channels will also have hours of live election talk, as
will countless local stations — paid for in part by the revenue from innumerable
election ads. Discussing the extent of the coverage, Mr. Feist of CNN said, “You
cannot find an available high-definition satellite path for Tuesday night in
this country. There are none left. The country is at capacity.”
November 4,
2012
The New York Times
By MARK LEIBOVICH
RALEIGH,
N.C. — By Sunday, Bill Clinton sounded awful, as if he had been gargling with
Liquid-Plumr. You could hear his voice dying steadily over the last 72 hours of
campaigning: hoarse Friday in Florida, cracking Saturday across Virginia and
dissolving fully to a slight husk here Sunday, after two stops in New Hampshire
and before another in Minnesota.
“As you can see, I have given my voice in the service of my president,” Mr.
Clinton said, wheezing while introducing President Obama at a late-night set at
a Bristow, Va., amphitheater on Saturday. He kept coughing, patting his chest
and mouthing words that carried only muffled strains in chilly air. Black tea
with honey and a steady diet of cough drops between events helped little.
It was as if the 42nd president could go fully silent at any second, except that
he never did — speaking for 25 minutes Saturday night and more than 40 at his
nine solo shows over the weekend to cap off a campaign star turn that could not
differ more from what many considered his more dutiful efforts for Mr. Obama
four years ago.
After talking (and pointing and gesticulating) for three-quarters of an hour
before a crowd of 4,000 at an amusement park here Sunday night, Mr. Clinton
spent an additional 10 minutes high-fiving his way along a rope line with a big
grin.
If there has been one enduring lesson from his career, it is that the Big Dog is
resilient. He can be disgraced, impeached, defeated — but he comes back. The
full spectacle of this has been on riveting, if raspy, display in the closing
days of the presidential campaign.
Mr. Clinton, 66, has jumped into a hopscotch of battleground states in what —
depending on his wife’s future plans — may or may not be his last campaign tour
as a Super Surrogate. He is scheduled to appear, if not be heard, at four stops
across Pennsylvania on Monday.
He also includes a fair amount in his speeches about Bill Clinton: his
enthusiasm (higher than four years ago), his legacy (“I am the only living
former president that ever gave you a budget surplus”) and, yes, his wife, the
mention of whom brings big applause and the occasional “We love you, Hillary!”
cry from the crowd.
Whoever wins Tuesday, the 2012 campaign has solidified (or restored) Mr.
Clinton’s status as the hardest-working man in a game he loves and plays like no
one else. “The master, Bill Clinton,” Mr. Obama called him on Saturday, hailing
his predecessor as “a great president and a great friend.”
Unsaid, at least here, is that Mr. Clinton has also been a salvation to Mr.
Obama. He gave what was widely considered the best speech at the Democratic
National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., rocking a strong endorsement of the
president while arguably conveying the re-election rationale better than Mr.
Obama or his campaign has.
“He has been our economic validator,” Jim Messina, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager,
said of Mr. Clinton.
Likewise, Mr. Clinton’s presidency exemplifies what Mr. Obama is trying to make
a case for. In the early 1990s, President Clinton also inherited a lagging
economy, and then he led economic prosperity in his second term. Mr. Obama, who
wrapped his former rival in a full-on hug onstage in Charlotte (their recent
joint appearances have featured more cursory bro-hugs), said he should name Mr.
Clinton to a new position known as Secretary for Explaining Stuff.
Out of public view, the former president has been equally tireless. In a
20-minute car ride Saturday after a rally in Chesapeake, Va., to the Norfolk
airport, Mr. Clinton recorded 40 “robo-calls” for Democratic Congressional
candidates across the country. In addition to headlining 37 rallies for Mr.
Obama over the last seven weeks of the campaign (including events scheduled
through Monday), Mr. Clinton is serving as a back-channel strategist for the
re-election enterprise.
On the morning after the third debate between Mr. Obama and Mitt Romney on Oct.
22 in Boca Raton, Fla., Mr. Clinton met Mr. Messina for an impromptu breakfast
meeting in a suite at a Hyatt Regency hotel in Chicago. Red-eyed after arriving
from Boca Raton at 3:30 a.m. and subsisting on Coke Zero, Mr. Messina received,
he said, a simple directive from former president, who was in Chicago to give a
speech: I am yours in the final weeks. Mr. Clinton said he would undertake a
heavy regimen in battleground states.
Previously, Mr. Clinton had served as an active behind-the-scenes strategist,
speaking regularly to the president, Mr. Messina and David Axelrod, the senior
strategist. He made suggestions on what themes the campaign should emphasize and
where. He advocated, according to top officials, for Mr. Obama to run
advertisements in Florida that portrayed Mr. Romney as a threat to Medicare and
Medicaid — something the campaign ultimately did. As he stumped across the state
Friday, Mr. Clinton also drove home that portrayal.
During the Republican primary battle, Mr. Clinton also counseled Mr. Messina and
Mr. Axelrod to “have an early conversation” with Democratic base voters in
battleground states, so as not to let any disappointment they felt over Mr.
Obama’s record calcify into indifference.
But by far Mr. Clinton’s most striking contributions have come in his natural
Big Stage habitat. When Hurricane Sandy forced Mr. Obama off the campaign trail
early last week, Mr. Clinton called Mr. Messina and suggested that he take on
some of the events that the president would miss. Mr. Clinton stumped alone in
Orlando, Fla., and with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Youngstown, Ohio.
He has hailed Mr. Obama’s post-storm cooperation with Republican leaders like
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and has ridiculed Mr. Romney as wishy-washy
enough to “be the chief contortionist for Cirque du Soleil.”
But subtext will inevitably abound in the Clinton orbit. For starters, while his
“friendship” with the president is clearly improved, it remains a source of
intrigue, given the strains that were sown during Mr. Obama’s primary run
against Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008.
“This is not about relationships,” said Terry McAuliffe, Mr. Clinton’s close
friend, the former Democratic National Committee chairman and a possible
candidate for governor of Virginia, where he accompanied Mr. Clinton on
Saturday. “This is bigger than that.” By “bigger,” Mr. McAuliffe meant that Mr.
Clinton is chiefly concerned with the direction of the country, not his
relationship with anyone.
It also calls to mind a maxim uttered often among Democrats, and not always with
reverence: that it is “all about the Clintons.” And it is not difficult to view
Mr. Clinton’s investment in Mr. Obama’s re-election without an eye to whether
Mrs. Clinton runs in 2016, something that she has denied interest in but that
many Democrats have urged.
It is also impossible to miss what is Mr. Clinton’s most reliable applause line
on the stump and something he manages to belt out in full voice.
“By the way,” he says in praising Mr. Obama’s foreign policy record, “he’s got a
heck of a secretary of state, too.”
November 4,
2012
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER
and MICHAEL D. SHEAR
HOLLYWOOD,
Fla. — President Obama and Mitt Romney hunted for last-minute support on Sunday
in a frenetic sprint across battleground states, even as their parties faced off
in the first of what could be a growing number of legal disputes over
presidential ballots and how they are counted.
In Florida, the state’s Democratic Party filed a lawsuit on Sunday morning that
would force the Republican-led government to extend early voting in South
Florida after complaints that extremely long lines on Saturday had prevented
some people from casting their ballots. The Republican-controlled Legislature
cut back early voting, which ended Saturday, from 14 days to eight.
The lawsuit was followed by a chaotic day in the Democratic stronghold of
Miami-Dade County, which opened one of its election offices for two hours to
accept completed absentee ballots and then shut down only to reopen again on
Sunday afternoon. Three counties said they would open again on Monday, but
Democratic lawyers will continue to argue in court that in-person early voting
should continue through Tuesday in Broward County.
In Ohio, Republican election officials will go to court on Monday to defend an
11th-hour directive to local election officials that critics say could
invalidate thousands of provisional ballots by forcing voters to attest to the
type of identification they provide.
Together, the pre-election legal skirmishes were a potential preview of the
clashes that could emerge in as many as a half-dozen swing states over Tuesday’s
voting. The closeness of the races in those states has intensified the stakes of
voter turnout, smooth operations at polling places, ballot problems and
recounts.
In the battles, Republicans are mobilizing to defend against what they say is
the potential for voter fraud, and Democrats are preparing to protect against
what they say are efforts to suppress voting rights.
“The larger issue, in my view, is the scale of the effort that is required to
have Election Day run smoothly,” said Robert Bauer, the chief counsel for Mr.
Obama’s campaign. “Any number of things can go wrong, not by anybody’s fault or
intention, but we are fully prepared and so, we believe, are election officials
around the country.”
On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney presented themselves as agents
of change while painting the other as an obstacle — final arguments in a
nip-and-tuck race that may hinge on the success of the campaigns’ elaborate
turnout operations.
“The question of this election comes down to this,” Mr. Romney told a crowd of
about 4,500 on Sunday morning in Des Moines. “Do you want four more years like
the last four years, or do you want real change? President Obama promised
change, but he couldn’t deliver it.”
Speaking to 23,000 people on a high school football field in Hollywood, Fla.,
Mr. Obama scoffed at Mr. Romney’s bid to claim the mantle of change, deriding
him as a political quick-change artist who is repackaging the failed policies of
previous Republican administrations.
“When you make this choice, part of what you’re choosing is who do you trust,”
Mr. Obama said. “After four years as president, you know me by now. You know I
mean what I say and I say what I mean.”
Racing the sun as well as the clock, both campaigns brimmed with confidence
about their chances on Tuesday, though polls showed Mr. Obama holding a slender
lead in several of the battleground states he needs to win the Electoral
College. That advantage was evident in the itineraries of the two men on Sunday.
While each covered familiar ground from New Hampshire to Ohio, Mr. Romney sought
to open a new front with a rally in Pennsylvania. Tightening polls have given
him hope that he can take the state from Mr. Obama, who won there by a
double-digit margin in 2008. But the president’s advisers dismissed the foray as
a desperate move by a challenger running out of other paths to victory.
At the rally in Morrisville on Sunday, Mr. Romney made a point of mentioning a
high-profile supporter, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, whose lavish praise
of Mr. Obama’s leadership after Hurricane Sandy has raised Republican eyebrows.
“He’s giving it all of his heart and his passion to help the people of his
state,” Mr. Romney said of the governor.
In Hollywood, Fla., Mr. Obama was endorsed by Pitbull, a Cuban-American hip-hop
artist, one of many celebrities lined up by the campaigns to help draw crowds.
In Pennsylvania, the Marshall Tucker Band warmed up the audience for Mr. Romney,
while Stevie Wonder played “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” for Mr. Obama at a rally
in Cincinnati.
Hours earlier in New Hampshire, Mr. Obama spoke to 14,000 people beneath the
gold dome of the State House in Concord on a bright, chilly day that recalled
any number of days that he and other hopefuls had walked the streets in their
quest for a victory in the nation’s first presidential primaries.
Nearby was a reminder of how the state almost dashed his dreams in 2008. On a
line of paving stones in front of the New Hampshire State Library are chiseled
the names of winners in the state’s primary, including Hillary Rodham Clinton,
whose victory there halted, for a time, Mr. Obama’s surge after he won the Iowa
caucus.
On this Sunday, however, Mr. Obama had the fortifying presence of former
President Bill Clinton, who noted approvingly in his introductory speech that
Mr. Obama wanted to accomplish many of the same things that Mr. Clinton had
during his two terms in office.
“The test should be: What did the president do? What are the results? And
compared to what?” Mr. Clinton said. “Compared to what could have happened,
Barack Obama has done a good job.”
Savoring the moment, his voice not yet raw from too many speeches, Mr. Clinton
gleefully accused Mr. Romney of shifting his position on the bailout of the
automakers so many times that he could find work as “chief contortionist in
Cirque du Soleil.”
Moments earlier, in Des Moines, Mr. Romney told his supporters that the clock
had nearly run out on the president’s time in office, and he promised to usher
in a new era of economic hope for families who are struggling across the
country.
“Instead of building bridges, he’s made the divide wider,” Mr. Romney said. “Let
me tell you why it is he’s fallen so short of what he promised: it’s because he
cared more about a liberal agenda than he did about repairing the economy.”
Mr. Romney led the crowd in a call and response: “I mean, do you think Obamacare
created jobs? Did his war on coal, oil and gas create jobs? Did Dodd-Frank
regulations help banks make more loans? Does raising taxes put people to work?”
“No,” the crowd cried out in response to each question.
Iowa was also the scene of skirmishing over voting, as Republicans on Sunday
night accused Democratic operatives of encouraging older voters to illegally
fill out absentee ballots for their family members. A letter to the state’s top
election official from the chief counsel of the Republican National Committee
said that a news report of “the alleged conduct of Democratic and Obama
operatives, if true, is highly disconcerting.”
With the election being waged most intensely in fewer than a dozen states, the
candidates seemed to be shadowboxing each other, with one arriving in a state
just hours after the other left.
After Iowa, Mr. Romney held rallies in Ohio and Virginia. He planned events in
Florida, Virginia, Ohio and New Hampshire on Monday.
Mr. Obama went from Concord to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Cincinnati. He then
headed for Aurora, Colo., and was scheduled to arrive in Madison, Wis., not long
before dawn on Monday.
Ashley Parker
contributed reporting from Des Moines, Lizette Alvarez from Miami,
If Congressional Republicans get their way, expiring cuts in the estate tax for
America’s wealthiest families will be extended in 2013. But under their cruel
plan, enhancements to tax credits for low- and moderate-income working families,
which are also set to expire at the end of the year, would end.
Extending the estate tax cut would benefit the estates of the wealthiest 0.3
percent of Americans who die in 2013 — about 7,000 people. Ending the tax
credits would hurt some 13 million working families, including nearly 26 million
children, many of whom live at or near the poverty line.
Republicans in the House have already approved legislation — and similar
legislation has been introduced in the Senate — that would undo a compromise tax
plan approved in 2010. Back then, Republicans demanded estate tax cuts in
exchange for extending the bolstered earned-income tax credits and child tax
credits for working families that had been part of the 2009 stimulus.
Under duress, the Obama administration agreed to temporarily raise the value of
an estate that would be exempt from tax to $5 million ($10 million for married
couples) from $3.5 million ($7 million for couples), the level in 2009. It also
agreed to cut the top estate tax rate to 35 percent from 45 percent. In exchange
for that tax cut, Republicans agreed to preserve improvements to the
earned-income tax credit and child credit that help to ensure that low-income
working families with children do not fall below the poverty line. Now, with
another year-end showdown looming over expiring tax cuts, Republicans want to
keep the generous provisions for the estate tax and end the enhancements to the
working family tax credits.
The winners would be the few and the wealthy: the Tax Policy Center has
estimated that the estate tax breaks save wealthy heirs an average of $1.1
million per estate, compared with the 2009 estate tax law. The losers would be
the many and the hard pressed: a married couple with three children and earnings
at the estimated poverty line ($27,713) would lose $1,934 in tax credits in
2013, according to a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The divide is especially noteworthy in the swing states. In Florida, 900 estates
would get an estate-tax break, while nearly one million Florida families, with
1.7 million children, would see a tax increase. In Ohio, 140 estates would get a
tax cut, while nearly 500,000 families, with nearly one million children, would
face higher taxes. In Virginia, 220 estates would get a tax break, compared with
275,000 working families, with nearly 500,000 children, that would have their
taxes rise.
The heirs of the wealthiest people in America do not need continued tax breaks,
nor can the nation afford the giveaway. Low- and moderate-income working
Americans need all the help they can get. That is not the way Republicans see
it, but that is the way it is.
November 3,
2012
The New York Times
By ASHLEY PARKER
PORTSMOUTH,
N.H. — With just 72 hours before the polls open, Mitt Romney kicked off his
busiest day of the general election so far, racing through four events in three
states on Saturday as he made his final appeal to voters.
His message: A Romney administration offers the reality of the hope, change and
bipartisanship that President Obama promised four years ago but failed to
deliver.
“I’ve watched over the last few months as our campaign has gone from a start to
a movement,” Mr. Romney said at a morning rally at an airport hangar here. “It’s
not just the size of the crowds. It’s the conviction and compassion in the
hearts of the people.”
The lessons he learned as governor of Massachusetts, working with a largely
Democratic legislature, he added, would serve him well in the White House.
“I learned that respect and good will goes a long way, and it’s likely to be
reciprocated,” he said. “That’s how I would conduct myself as president. I won’t
just represent one party. I will represent one nation.”
Mr. Romney also made an explicit appeal to undecided voters, urging his
supporters to “spend some time in the next three days to see neighbors and maybe
ones with an Obama sign in front of their home and just go by and say, ‘Look,
let’s talk this through a bit.’ ”
“Because you see, President Obama came into office with so many promises, and
he’s fallen so far short,” Mr. Romney said. “And just remind them of some of the
things that they may have forgotten. He said he was going to be the postpartisan
president, but he’s been the most partisan, dividing and demonizing.”
At his next stop, in Dubuque, Iowa, Mr. Romney again criticized the president
over his campaign pledges in 2008.
“Words are cheap,” he said. “You can say whatever you want to say in a campaign,
but what you achieve — results — those are earned, those can’t be faked.”
Mr. Romney was joined on his campaign plane by nearly his entire top team, a
close-knit coterie of senior advisers, many of whom have been with him since his
days in the Massachusetts Statehouse. Their mood was both upbeat and nostalgic.
Boarding the plane in New Hampshire to head to Iowa, they posed for a quick
group picture on the tarmac — a photo that, depending on the outcome of Election
Day, could be either a glimpse into a future White House, or a keepsake for old
friends of a campaign that did not quite go their way.
Mr. Romney’s wife, Ann, made a brief trip back to the press cabin to pass out
pumpkin whoopie pies. Though she remained determinedly on-message and positive,
talking about the people who are “really, really hurting,” her face and demeanor
belied a weariness. (Mrs. Romney, who has multiple sclerosis, was seen limping
off the campaign plane on Friday night. Aides said that it was not a flare-up
like the one she had during the primaries, and that she was merely “exhausted.”)
“Three more days,” she said, echoing what has become a refrain on the campaign
trail, as voters chant the number of days until, they hope, Mr. Romney becomes
the president-elect. “It’s been long. It’s been a long road.”
On the stump in the morning, Mr. Romney offered a series of aggressive lines
against Mr. Obama, criticizing the president for remarks he made Friday in Ohio
when he told his supporters that “voting is the best revenge.”
“Vote for revenge?” Mr. Romney asked, rhetorically. “Let me tell you what I’d
like to tell you: Vote for love of country.”
Friday night in Cincinnati, Mr. Romney drew more than 20,000 cheering voters. On
Saturday, his crowds were more modest: 2,000 in Portsmouth, 2,100 in Dubuque and
4,500 in the conservative stronghold of Colorado Springs. But at his last rally
of the evening, in Englewood, Colo., Mr. Romney drew a roaring crowd of 17,000
that filled a stadium and banged inflatable noise sticks as the candidate and
Mrs. Romney took the stage.
“One final push is going to get us there,” he urged. “I need your vote, I need
your work, I need your help. Walk with me.”
November 3,
2012
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER
DUBUQUE,
Iowa — If anything gets under President Obama’s skin in the final, fraught days
of this campaign, it is Mitt Romney’s attempt to expropriate the “change” label,
which Mr. Obama all but trademarked in his historic run for the White House four
years ago.
On a morning-to-midnight tour of Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa and Virginia on Saturday,
Mr. Obama repeatedly scoffed at Mr. Romney’s effort to present himself as a
change agent, calling him instead a “talented salesman” who was merely dressing
up the failed policies of the George W. Bush administration for a new decade.
Speaking to 4,000 supporters at a high school in Mentor, Ohio, Mr. Obama tried
to square a circle, insisting he was both a familiar, trustworthy leader and an
insurgent who could break the gridlock in Washington.
“Back in 2008, when I was talking about ‘change we can believe in,’ I wasn’t
just talking about changing presidents; I wasn’t just talking about changing
parties,” he said. “I was talking about changing our politics. I ran in 2008
because the voices of the American people, your voices, had been shut out of our
democracy for too long.”
Despite the frustrations of his first term, for which he blamed “protectors of
the status quo,” Mr. Obama said he could still upgrade the nation’s schools,
keep college affordable, expand production of clean energy, and rebuild aging
roads and bridges.
Mr. Obama, in an echo of his post-partisan pitch in 2008, even encouraged
supporters to vote for Republicans for Congress if they concluded that those
candidates were “serious about putting people first instead of putting elections
first.” It was not clear how that message would play with Democratic candidates
down the ticket.
The president also drew an obvious distinction with Mr. Romney, after accusing
him of dishonesty in tying the Obama administration’s bailout of the auto
industry to jobs lost to China. “You do want to be able to trust your
president,” he said. “You want to know that the president means what he says,
and says what he means. And after four years as president, you know me.”
Among supporters, the mood mirrored the man: sobered by experience but searching
for the old magic.
“He’s going in the right direction, but he hasn’t had enough time to get it
done,” said Susanne Dauler, 78, a retired teacher from Wickliffe, Ohio. “But I
still believe in him.”
Breaking Up
the Band
As Mr. Obama makes what is almost certainly his last campaign trip as a
candidate, the charter group of advisers who worked for him in 2008 have begun
packing the seats on Air Force One for what is turning into a nostalgic farewell
tour — complete with a final gig in Des Moines.
“It’s like the band is breaking up,” said David Axelrod, the senior strategist
who functions as the group’s shaggy elder.
Among the returning members: Robert Gibbs, the former press secretary; Reggie
Love, the president’s former personal aide; Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy
national security adviser; Jon Favreau, the chief speechwriter; and Jennifer
Psaki, the campaign’s press secretary.
Superstition abounds. Mr. Favreau and Mr. Rhodes are growing beards that they
said they would not shave until after Election Day. That day, the group plans to
meet for lunch at the Gage, the Chicago restaurant where they ate on Election
Day four years ago.
“There is a sense on this trip of going all the way back to the beginning,” Mr.
Rhodes said. In drafting the final version of the president’s stump speech, Mr.
Favreau said Mr. Obama’s aides were reminiscing about his first stump speeches,
many honed in Iowa.
Now 31 and contemplating a future outside of politics, Mr. Favreau said, “Never
in my life will I have another experience like this.”
Help From
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton has become the workhorse of the campaign, stumping tirelessly for
the president across the battleground states, sometimes several each day. And
Mr. Obama is showing his gratitude, heaping praise on the 42nd president in his
stump speech.
“For eight years, we had a president who shared our beliefs: his name was Bill
Clinton,” Mr. Obama said in Lima, Ohio. “By the end of President Clinton’s
second term, America had created 23 million new jobs. Incomes were up. Poverty
was down. Our deficit became the biggest surplus in history.”
For three days last week, when Hurricane Sandy kept Mr. Obama off the trail, Mr.
Clinton served as his proxy and validator, standing in at rallies in Florida and
Ohio. On Saturday, the two men were scheduled to appear together in Bristow, Va.
Mr. Clinton’s support is all the more striking, given the well-publicized chill
in their relationship after the 2008 campaign. While Mr. Clinton is solidly
behind Mr. Obama now, he acknowledges it was not always so.
“I am far more enthusiastic about him this time than I was last time,” he said
Friday.
Benghazi
Protests
The deadly attack on the American Mission in Benghazi, Libya, and the White
House’s shifting account of it, has been a story mainly in Washington. But on
Friday, it erupted on the trail in Ohio, when protesters lined the entrance to a
high school in Lima, holding signs and shouting at Mr. Obama’s limousine.
“When the president called the Navy SEALs, they killed Osama bin Laden. But when
the Navy SEALs called the president, he let them die,” said one sign.
A Tea Party group from Mansfield, Ohio, organized the protest, saying on its Web
site that “the mainstream media is not covering this story, so it’s up to us to
inform our fellow citizens.”
At a rally for Mr. Romney on Friday evening in West Chester, Ohio, a line of
prominent Republicans hammered Mr. Obama for the episode, with some accusing the
White House of trying to cover up security lapses in Libya because of the
election.
“When I think about these last few days,” said Senator Kelly Ayotte of New
Hampshire, “I think about two words: budget and Benghazi.”
November 3,
2012
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
IN this
year’s campaign furor over a supposed “war on women,” involving birth control
and abortion, the assumption is that the audience worrying about these issues is
just women.
Give us a little credit. We men aren’t mercenaries caring only for Y
chromosomes. We have wives and daughters, mothers and sisters, and we have a
pretty intimate stake in contraception as well.
This isn’t like a tampon commercial on television, leaving men awkwardly
examining their fingernails. When it comes to women’s health, men as well as
women need to pay attention. Just as civil rights wasn’t just a “black issue,”
women’s rights and reproductive health shouldn’t be reduced to a “women’s
issue.”
To me, actually, talk about a “war on women” in the United States seems a bit
hyperbolic: in Congo or Darfur or Afghanistan, I’ve seen brutal wars on women,
involving policies of rape or denial of girls’ education. But whatever we call
it, something real is going on here at home that would mark a major setback for
American women — and the men who love them.
On these issues, Mitt Romney is no moderate. On the contrary, he is considerably
more extreme than President George W. Bush was. He insists, for example, on
cutting off money for cancer screenings conducted by Planned Parenthood.
The most toxic issue is abortion, and what matters most for that is Supreme
Court appointments. The oldest justice is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a 79-year-old
liberal, and if she were replaced by a younger Antonin Scalia, the balance might
shift on many issues, including abortion.
One result might be the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which for nearly four
decades has guaranteed abortion rights. If it is overturned, abortion will be
left to the states — and in Mississippi or Kansas, women might end up being
arrested for obtaining abortions.
Frankly, I respect politicians like Paul Ryan who are consistently
anti-abortion, even in cases of rape or incest. I disagree with them, but their
position is unpopular and will cost them votes, so it’s probably heartfelt as
well as courageous. I have less respect for Romney, whose positions seem based
only on political calculations.
Romney’s campaign Web site takes a hard line. It says that life begins at
conception, and it gives no hint of exceptions in which he would permit
abortion. The Republican Party platform likewise offers no exceptions. Romney
says now that his policy is to oppose abortion with three exceptions: rape,
incest and when the life of the mother is at stake.
If you can figure out Romney’s position on abortion with confidence, tell him:
at times it seems he can’t remember it. In August, he abruptly added an
exception for the health of the mother as well as her life, and then he backed
away again.
Romney has also endorsed a “personhood” initiative treating a fertilized egg as
a legal person. That could lead to murder charges for an abortion, even to save
the life of a mother.
In effect, Romney seems to have jumped on board a Republican bandwagon to
tighten access to abortion across the board. States passed a record number of
restrictions on abortion in the last two years. In four states, even a woman who
is seeking an abortion after a rape may be legally required to undergo a
transvaginal ultrasound.
If politicians want to reduce the number of abortions, they should promote
family planning and comprehensive sex education. After all, about half of all
pregnancies in the United States are unintended, according to the Guttmacher
Institute, which conducts research on reproductive health.
Yet Romney seems determined to curb access to contraceptives. His campaign Web
site says he would “eliminate Title X family planning funding,” a program
created in large part by two Republicans, George H. W. Bush and Richard Nixon.
Romney has boasted that he would cut off all money for Planned Parenthood — even
though federal assistance for the organization has nothing to do with abortions.
It pays for such things as screenings to reduce breast cancer and cervical
cancer.
Romney’s suspicion of contraception goes way back. As governor of Massachusetts,
he vetoed a bill that would have given women who were raped access to emergency
contraception.
Romney also wants to reinstate the “global gag rule,” which barred family
planning money from going to aid organizations that even provided information
about abortion. He would cut off money for the United Nations Population Fund,
whose work I’ve seen in many countries — supporting contraception, repairing
obstetric fistulas, and fighting to save the lives of women dying in childbirth.
So when you hear people scoff that there’s no real difference between Obama and
Romney, don’t believe them.
And it’s not just women who should be offended at the prospect of a major step
backward. It’s all of us.
