Romney Fund-Raising Breakfast in Israel to Bar News Media

JERUSALEM — Mitt Romney’s high-dollar breakfast with donors at the King David Hotel here on Monday morning will be closed to the news media, his campaign decided Saturday, a change from the norm for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

A one-stop destination for the latest political news — from The Times and other top sources. Plus opinion, polls, campaign data and video.

The trip to Israel holds opportunity and peril for Mr. Romney, and his campaign aides have spent weeks preparing him for the fine diplomatic line he must walk while abroad. His relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, which dates to their days as young consultants in Boston, is being scrutinized for signs of warmth or cooling, and everything said — and unsaid — will be carefully parsed.

The fund-raiser may be an especially delicate situation for Mr. Romney because of the attendance of Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire casino magnate who has pledged to spend some $100 million this election to help defeat President Obama, as well as elect Republicans. Though Mr. Adelson first supported Newt Gingrich during the early nominating contests because of his strong support for Israel, he has since thrown his support behind Mr. Romney. Mr. Adelson and his wife recently gave $5 million to a pro-Romney “super PAC.”

Mr. Romney seems to be taking pains to keep the fund-raiser under wraps. Typically, a small pool of reporters is allowed into fund-raisers held in public locations, in order to provide a written report on Mr. Romney’s remarks. Though there have been a few occasions when the campaign has tried to limit access — citing an especially small venue or the fact that Mr. Romney was not giving formal remarks — this is the first time that a public fund-raiser has been closed without any explanation.

View the original article here

Land of the Mega-Voters

“No! No! No!” cried Heidi Heitkamp. She’s the Democratic senatorial candidate in North Dakota. I had just asked her whether residents of her state think it’s unfair that, in the Senate, each North Dakota voter has the clout of approximately 50 Californians.

She doesn’t.

That was the top thing I had always wondered about the politics of North Dakota, whose two U.S. senators serve a population of around 680,000. (Campaign-wise, it resembles the Iowa caucuses. Voters expect to have met the candidates personally. Sometimes they seem to expect the candidates to invite them home for dinner.)

I was wandering around the state this week, mulling its Senate race. Really, we can’t possibly focus on Barack Obama and Mitt Romney for another three months without an occasional reprieve.

So, North Dakota. Heitkamp, a former attorney general, is running against Representative Rick Berg, the state’s sole member of the House. In the beginning, the national Democrats wrote this one off as a long shot at best, but Heitkamp seems to have, at minimum, pulled even. On the campaign trail, she’s a happy warrior with the endless energy you’d need if you were running for office in a state where there’s a two-hour drive between even the smaller clumps of voters. She also has a dramatic story that centers on the year 2000, when she ran for governor and was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer, but she stayed in the race, campaigning even while she had chemotherapy and her trademark red hair fell out. She lost but seems to have made an indelible imprint on the public.

(The other happy Senate surprise for the Democrats is Arizona, where the party somehow came up with a Hispanic physician who is a disabled Vietnam veteran and former surgeon general for the Bush administration, as well as the hero of several dramatic rescues, during one of which he shot a deranged suspected murderer. I believe I speak for all the political hopefuls in America when I say that the bar for a potential upset win is being set unacceptably high.)

As soon as the North Dakota Senate race began, Republican super PACs began beating Heitkamp with the health care mallet. “Heidi endorsed Obamacare,” says one much-aired ad that features a very brief tape of Heitkamp saying, with no apparent enthusiasm, “It actually is a budget saver.” In response, she almost always brings the discussion back to her own story. Her next ad began with Heitkamp discussing her bout with cancer and adding, “When you live through that, political attack ads seem silly.”

“I have a pretty well-known pre-existing condition,” she says dryly.

My second big North Dakota question was why, if the voters were really obsessed about the economy and jobs, jobs, jobs, the state wasn’t tilting toward Obama. True, North Dakota hasn’t gone for a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson. But things are great! The unemployment rate is around 3 percent and close to zero in the areas around the booming oil industry. The farmers weren’t hit by the drought, and their crops are going to be worth a fortune at harvest time.

Much of this good news occurred on the president’s watch. Does he get credit? The answer, once again, is no, no, no.

“If Heidi is elected, I won’t lose sleep. She’ll do a great job,” said E. Ward Koeser, the mayor of the oil-boom town of Williston, a Republican who has endorsed Berg. “If Barack Obama gets elected, I’ll lose sleep.”

“Leadership means you take people who are polarized and get them together. I don’t think he was that good at building relations,” said Heitkamp, trying to explain her state’s antipathy toward Obama. “When people are mad at me, I always try to stand next to them for 20 minutes. They can’t stay mad.”

We will not try to envision the president using that tactic on John Boehner. But Heitkamp says she’ll be voting for Obama in November — because Mitt Romney supports the House Republican budget.

“People ask me why, and I point to that budget,” she says.

In 2010, North Dakota voters were furious about the national debt and the horrors they’d heard about Obamacare, and they tossed out virtually every Democratic incumbent they could get their hands on. Now Heitkamp is betting that the House budget, with its Medicare restructuring and dramatic program cuts will seem even more radical to the emotionally conservative North Dakotans than the stimulus or health care law. “There’s $180 billion in farm cuts in there,” she said, launching into a litany of government aid it would strip away from North Dakota.

Berg says the House budget is thrifty and represents the “North Dakota way of doing things.” We shall see. It’s up to the North Dakota voters. A very small number of North Dakota voters.

Eat your heart out, California.

View the original article here

In a U.S. Senate Runoff, Texas Republicans Spend to Agree

On the Republican side, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and Ted Cruz, the former state solicitor general, agree on virtually every issue that could come before them in the Senate. But more than $40 million has been spent by the campaigns and outside groups trying to convince voters that the race provides an opportunity to upend all that is wrong with the federal government. If the wrong candidate wins, each side insists, the opportunity will have been wasted.

“Ted is being viciously attacked by the establishment because he will bring real change to Washington,” former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska says in a robocall for Mr. Cruz.

In Gov. Rick Perry’s latest advertisement for Mr. Dewhurst, he counters: “David’s the one candidate best prepared to make conservative change happen in Washington. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

The Democratic candidates, former State Representative Paul Sadler of Henderson and Grady Yarbrough, a former teacher, have significant differences on the economy and illegal immigration, but they are struggling to draw the attention of voters or donors, as the campaigns’ spending is well under $1 million. Texas has not elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994.

Mr. Sadler said that those who dismiss Texas as a “red state” are ignoring how far to the right Mr. Dewhurst and Mr. Cruz are. Democrats have the chance to present a viable alternative, he said.

“The Republicans are singing the same hymnal,” Mr. Sadler said. “The real debate begins on Aug. 1, when there’s a contrast of substantive issues.”

Mr. Yarbrough agreed that Democrats are being underestimated. He has spent much of his savings on broadcasting television advertisements aimed at black and Hispanic voters.

“They’re the ones that put me in the runoff, and if I go to those voters and plead our case, I am sure they will come out again,” Mr. Yarbrough said. “I’m taking a $75,000 to $80,000 gamble here.”

Although the two races are drawing significantly different levels of interest, both have turned on whether the voters should value legislative experience.

Mr. Sadler says that only those who have held elected office are qualified to join the Senate. Mr. Dewhurst does not go quite as far but stresses his history of passing budgets and cutting taxes.

“You could argue that there’s not that much difference between us, other than that I’ve done all the things Mr. Cruz says that he wants to do,” Mr. Dewhurst said.

Both Mr. Cruz and Mr. Yarbrough dismiss “career politicians” as part of the problem in Washington.

“All over the country, Americans are fed up with the same tired establishment incumbents that don’t believe in anything,” Mr. Cruz told voters in Willis this month. “There is a tidal wave sweeping this country as Americans are looking for new leaders who will stand and fight and get back to the Constitution.”

View the original article here

Fioravante G. Perrotta, Aide to Lindsay and Rockefeller, Dies at 80

The cause was complications of oral cancer, said Michael Killorin, his partner of 49 years.

Mayor Lindsay called Mr. Perrotta “one of the bright young men” in public life, a distinction he earned by running Republican campaigns in heavily Democratic New York City; working as a high-level state insurance regulator; and running unsuccessfully in 1969 as the Republican and Liberal Parties’ candidate for city controller, as the office was called then. He did all this in his 30s.

As an aide to Governor Rockefeller from 1959 to 1962, Mr. Perrotta prepared legislation concerning civil rights, law enforcement, insurance and corporations. He was later the governor’s liaison with the state’s departmental heads.

Working for Mayor Lindsay from 1968 to 1970, Mr. Perrotta went from executive assistant to finance administrator, responsible for tax collecting and assessing functions. He was one of 10 administrators in the mayor’s so-called supercabinet.

When he resigned from the Lindsay administration to join a private law firm, doubling his salary, he took on the extracurricular task of running Governor Rockefeller’s re-election campaign in New York City. He shrugged off Mayor Lindsay’s frosty relations with the governor as simply a fight over scarce financial resources.

“The job of the mayor is to get as much money as he can,” Mr. Perrotta said in a 1970 interview with The New York Times. He went on to praise his new boss, saying that working for Mr. Lindsay had taught him how generous Mr. Rockefeller had been to the city.

Mr. Perrotta managed several Republican campaigns in New York City, including President Richard M. Nixon’s for re-election in 1972. He focused on blue-collar neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. Though Senator George S. McGovern won the city’s vote, Mr. Perrotta’s strategy helped narrow Nixon’s margin of defeat from four years earlier. In the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, for example — the sort of middle-class area Mr. Perrotta had singled out — Nixon increased his proportion of the vote to 30 percent from 11 percent.

Fioravante Gerald Gabriel Perrotta was born on July 26, 1931, in Lynbrook, on Long Island, where his father was a builder. His first name was derived from 13th-century Italian literature. Most people called him Fred.

He graduated summa cum laude from what is now St. John’s University and St. John’s University School of Law, where he was editor in chief of St. John’s Law Review. He was valedictorian at both graduations.

After law school, he worked for the United States attorney in Manhattan, then for a private law firm. After working as an aide to Governor Rockefeller, he was appointed to supervisory positions in the state insurance department. He left in 1967 to become vice president and secretary of the United States Life Insurance Company.

While working in the Lindsay administration he took a leave of absence to run for controller as a Republican and a Liberal on a Lindsay ticket that “fused” different parties. Mr. Lindsay had the Liberal Party nomination, for instance, while Sanford D. Garelik, Mr. Lindsay’s candidate for City Council president, was a registered Democrat. After he lost, Mr. Perrotta said he had run mainly to help Mr. Lindsay balance his ticket.

After a long legal career that included serving on the boards of several insurance companies, Mr. Perrotta retired in 1996 and moved to Naples, Fla., where he lived until his death.

In addition to his partner, Mr. Perrotta is survived by his sisters, Geraldine DeMilt and Rose Ferrara.

View the original article here

Senate Candidate in Hawaii Gets Unusual Support From Alaska

Linda Lingle may enjoy the broad and hopeful support of the Republican Party in her bid to fill an open Senate seat in Hawaii, but she can count out Representative Don Young of Alaska, a Republican who is not only supporting Ms. Lingle’s Democratic opponent, Representative Mazie K. Hirono, but went out of his way to make an ad with his House colleague.

After discussing his work with Ms. Hirono on an amendment that helped save funding for schools for native populations in their respective states, Mr. Young says: “Here’s what’s important, Hawaii: If you’re looking for a United States senator who doesn’t just talk about ‘bipartisanship,’ but actually knows how to work with both Republicans and Democrats to get things done, Mazie Hirono will be that senator.”

The often-irascible Mr. Young then tries to make unkind remarks about Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader and former speaker, while Ms. Hirono gives him a playful nudge.

Lawmakers from Hawaii and Alaska often bond over the far-flung and federally dependent nature of their states in a way that defies party loyalty. But endorsing a Democrat against a Republican challenger in a Senate race that could potentially help Republicans vault to a majority in the Senate, and to do it in such a public and aggressive manner, is unusual to say the least.

“Having worked together on several issues important to both Alaska and Hawaii,” said Luke Miller, a spokesman for Mr. Young, “Congressman Young and Congresswoman Hirono have developed a close personal friendship and working relationship. Congressman Young respects Congresswoman Hirono’s ability to work across party lines and do what’s best for the people of Hawaii.”

Mr. Young should not expect to hear “mahalo” from his fellow Republicans.

View the original article here

Parsing a Romney Alternative to Obama’s Health Care Law

With the Supreme Court on Thursday upholding President Obama’s health care law, Mr. Romney faces increased pressure to flesh out alternatives to the law that he and other Republicans despise.

Although Mr. Romney has repeatedly stressed his opposition to a federal mandate to buy insurance — a crucial provision of Mr. Obama’s law, modeled on a mandate Mr. Romney enacted as Massachusetts governor — he has devoted less time to describing his own health policies.

But in speeches in the past year, he has made clear that he favors tax breaks, increased competition and devolving decisions to states to make health care more affordable, proposals that reflect a consensus on health policy that has solidified in the last decade among Republicans.

Mr. Romney’s preferences, like those being proposed by Republicans in Congress, would put more emphasis on controlling health costs and less on reducing the ranks of the uninsured, the primary goal of the Obama plan. Conservatives say the new law does not seriously address rising health costs, a major factor in the high cost of insurance.

One of Mr. Romney’s chief proposals could shake up how the vast majority of Americans get health care — through employers. He would give a tax break to people who buy insurance individually on the open market, so they would enjoy the same advantage as workers who get insurance as a benefit at work, which is not taxed as income.

Aides to Mr. Romney said tax parity would introduce more consumer awareness of the costs of health insurance, and competition among insurers would drive down costs.

A tax incentive to buy insurance “has the potential to be significant,” said Lanhee Chen, Mr. Romney’s policy director. “It can be something that really moves our health care system in a good direction.”

Democrats warn that under such a system fewer employers will choose to offer health insurance, and older and sicker workers will be thrown into the market for individual insurance that they cannot afford.

When Senator John McCain proposed in 2008 to offer a $5,000 tax credit to families for health insurance, independent analysts estimated that the ranks of the uninsured would rise by one million, to 21 million people.

To make insurance affordable for low-income people or the chronically ill, Mr. Romney would encourage states to experiment with high-risk pools, offering subsidies to the poor and insurance-buying exchanges — in essence, harnessing the purchasing power of large groups.

Mr. Obama’s law currently encourages states to establish similar exchanges, a page taken partly from a successful exchange in Massachusetts created by Mr. Romney. But as the presumed Republican presidential nominee, Mr. Romney opposes a federal requirement that all states follow the Massachusetts example. In state legislatures around the country, conservative Republicans have often resisted creation of health insurance exchanges.

Still, one of Mr. Romney’s top advisers, Michael O. Leavitt, the former secretary of health and human services, has advised a half-dozen states about how to set up exchanges.

“An exchange can greatly expand the number of insurance choices available to employees of small businesses,” said W. Brett Graham, a partner in Mr. Leavitt’s health care consulting business.

One of the most ambitious changes Mr. Romney would enact is to transform Medicaid, which insures more than 50 million poor and disabled Americans, into a program of block grants, or lump-sum payments, to states. Grants would be capped to rise at the Consumer Price Index plus 1 percent a year.

The block-grant system that Mr. Romney supports is similar to a proposal in the House Republican budget fashioned by Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin in an effort to slow rapid growth of the program.

Democrats argue that turning Medicaid into a block-grant program with a cap would force states to cut vulnerable people from the rolls or reduce services as health care costs spiral.

“The vast majority of people on Medicaid are children and mothers,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a former health care adviser in the Obama administration. “I think it is cruel to drop coverage” for them.

View the original article here

Romney Campaign at Odds With G.O.P. on Health Care ‘Tax’

That message, delivered first by a top aide to Mr. Romney on television and later by the campaign, contradicts top Republican Party officials and leaders in Congress, who have spent the last several days eagerly accusing the president of levying a new tax.

By straying from the party message, Mr. Romney’s campaign offered a fresh example of his difficulty in carrying the conservative mantle on health care — a problem that his Republican rivals predicted during the primaries because he championed universal health coverage while he was the governor of Massachusetts.

Attacks by Mr. Romney on the president’s health care plan inevitably lead to comparisons with the Massachusetts law. And while Mr. Romney has pledged to repeal what conservatives call Obamacare, he had largely avoided calling the mandate a tax on Americans, perhaps because his plan included a similar mandate.

On Monday, Eric Fehrnstrom, Mr. Romney’s senior adviser, said the Massachusetts mandate was a penalty and that Mr. Romney agrees with Democrats that Mr. Obama’s health care mandate is not a tax, either.

“The governor disagreed with the ruling of the court,” Mr. Fehrnstrom said on MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown.” “He agreed with the dissent written by Justice Scalia, which very clearly stated that the mandate was not a tax.”

Democrats seized on Mr. Fehrnstrom’s comment. David Axelrod, Mr. Obama senior campaign adviser, said in an e-mail that Mr. Romney cannot agree with his fellow Republicans because to do so is “to condemn himself.”

For much of Monday, Republicans sought to minimize the differences between themselves and Mr. Romney by trying to focus on Mr. Obama’s own shifting characterization of the health care mandate. In 2010, Mr. Obama said the mandate should not be called a tax.

“The federal individual mandate in Obamacare is either a constitutional tax or an unconstitutional penalty,” Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for Mr. Romney, said. “Governor Romney thinks it is an unconstitutional penalty. What is President Obama’s position?”

But by insisting on calling the mandate a penalty, Ms. Saul effectively endorsed the weekend’s Democratic talking points and added to the clash with the Republicans’ line.

Republicans had seized on the Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday that the mandate, which will compel people to obtain health insurance, is valid as an exercise of the government’s taxing power. Republicans disagreed with the ruling, but saw the tax language as politically damaging to Mr. Obama.

Since becoming the presumptive Republican nominee, Mr. Romney has largely been in sync with other Republicans as they coalesced around his candidacy. But aides to the Republican leaders on Capitol Hill said the lawmakers have no intention of backing away from their tax message against Mr. Obama despite the disagreement.

Don Stewart, an aide to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said the issue puts the White House and Democrats “in a box: They either believe the mandate is an unconstitutional ‘penalty,’ or they believe it is a constitutional tax as the court ruled. It’s either unconstitutional, or it is a tax.”

Democrats fought back against that characterization on Sunday. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the health care mandate includes a “penalty” for a small number of “free riders” who choose not to buy insurance.

But as Mr. Romney pursues the presidency for a second time, some of his past statements characterizing the mandate match up more closely with the Democrats than they do with the Republicans.

The argument made by Ms. Pelosi on Sunday was the same one that Mr. Romney made in 2006 when he was fighting for his state’s health care plan. He repeated that argument during a debate in the 2008 presidential campaign.

In an opinion article in USA Today in 2009, Mr. Romney again used the term “free riders,” writing that a penalty like that in his health care plan “encourages ‘free riders’ to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical cost on to others.”

Those kinds of statements were the source of numerous attacks by Mr. Romney’s Republican rivals during the primaries.

Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota and a leading vice-presidential prospect, last year called Mr. Romney a “co-conspirator” in the passage of national health care, using the phrase “Obamneycare” to mock the health care plans.

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas predicted that health care would be a “major anchor” around Mr. Romney’s neck. Rick Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, called Mr. Romney “the weakest candidate” to prosecute the case against Mr. Obama’s health care plan.

View the original article here

Wisconsin: Democrats Take Senate

How Kurt Vonnegut taught one writer to hate the semicolon; how William James convinced him to love it.

On the eve of their Fourth of July concert in Salt Lake City, the Beach Boys still exhibit the political tensions that divide us all.

View the original article here

Murdoch Chides Romney on Campaign and Obama Challenge

10:19 a.m. | Updated Rupert Murdoch is offering some unsolicited advice to the Romney campaign. Saying he met the candidate last week, Mr. Murdoch, the head of the News Corporation, suggested Sunday on Twitter that Mr. Romney may have to shed some of his current staff and replace them in order to go up against “Tough O Chicago Pros” — no doubt a reference to President Obama‘s campaign team, which is based in that city.

Met Romney last week.Tough O Chicago pros will be hard to beat unless he drops old friends from team and hires some real pros. Doubtful.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

Mr. Murdoch, of course, controls Fox News, a favored spot for influential Republicans including Mr. Romney himself. And it is not the first time the media baron has chimed in on Twitter with some musings on the presidential campaign and the candidates. He once chided Mr. Obama on the antipiracy front, for instance, and predicted Rick Santorum‘s strong showing in Iowa. On his Sunday Twitter burst, Mr. Murdoch also gave a more neutral take on the president, saying the election would be “referendum on Obama, all else pretty minor.”

US election is referendum on Obama, all else pretty minor.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

During the previous presidential election in 2008 Mr. Murdoch remained elusive on which candidate he liked, though he sent some signals that he may have preferred Mr. Obama. Speaking at the annual All Things Digital Conference in 2008 sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, a subsidiary of News Corporation which is controlled by Mr. Murdoch, he said of Mr. Obama, “He is a rock star,” adding, “he’ll probably win it.”

Mr. Murdoch then went on to say that Republican candidate at the time, John McCain, was a “patriot and a decent guy, but he’s unpredictable and he doesn’t know much about the economy, adding, “I think he has a lot of problems.”

Though originally giving strong praise for Mr. Santorum when he was still running for the Republican Party’s nomination, Mr. Murdoch has since offered mainly lukewarm words toward Mitt Romney. Mr. Murdoch recently took to Twitter to criticize Mr. Romney’ immigration policy. His message said: “When is Romney going to look like a challenger? Seems to play everything safe, make no news except burn off Hispanics.” When asked by one of his Twitter followers what he thought of the Mormon religion, Mr. Murdoch called it “a mystery to me, but Mormons certainly not evil.”

On Monday, Mr. Murdoch was back on Twitter again, this time saying he had heard from the Romney campaign and wants Mr. Romney to win to “save us from socialism.”

Romney people upset at me!Of course I want him to win, save us from socialism, etc but should listen to good advice and get stuck in!

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 2, 2012

Taylor Arluck contributed reporting.

View the original article here

Romney Campaign at Odds With G.O.P. on Health Care 'Tax'

That message, delivered first by a top aide to Mr. Romney on television and later by the campaign, contradicts top Republican Party officials and leaders in Congress, who have spent the last several days eagerly accusing the president of levying a new tax.

By straying from the party message, Mr. Romney’s campaign offered a fresh example of his difficulty in carrying the conservative mantle on health care — a problem that his Republican rivals predicted during the primaries because he championed universal health coverage while he was the governor of Massachusetts.

Attacks by Mr. Romney on the president’s health care plan inevitably lead to comparisons with the Massachusetts law. And while Mr. Romney has pledged to repeal what conservatives call Obamacare, he had largely avoided calling the mandate a tax on Americans, perhaps because his plan included a similar mandate.

On Monday, Eric Fehrnstrom, Mr. Romney’s senior adviser, said the Massachusetts mandate was a penalty and that Mr. Romney agrees with Democrats that Mr. Obama’s health care mandate is not a tax, either.

“The governor disagreed with the ruling of the court,” Mr. Fehrnstrom said on MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown.” “He agreed with the dissent written by Justice Scalia, which very clearly stated that the mandate was not a tax.”

Democrats seized on Mr. Fehrnstrom’s comment. David Axelrod, Mr. Obama senior campaign adviser, said in an e-mail that Mr. Romney cannot agree with his fellow Republicans because to do so is “to condemn himself.”

For much of Monday, Republicans sought to minimize the differences between themselves and Mr. Romney by trying to focus on Mr. Obama’s own shifting characterization of the health care mandate. In 2010, Mr. Obama said the mandate should not be called a tax.

“The federal individual mandate in Obamacare is either a constitutional tax or an unconstitutional penalty,” Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for Mr. Romney, said. “Governor Romney thinks it is an unconstitutional penalty. What is President Obama’s position?”

But by insisting on calling the mandate a penalty, Ms. Saul effectively endorsed the weekend’s Democratic talking points and added to the clash with the Republicans’ line.

Republicans had seized on the Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday that the mandate, which will compel people to obtain health insurance, is valid as an exercise of the government’s taxing power. Republicans disagreed with the ruling, but saw the tax language as politically damaging to Mr. Obama.

Since becoming the presumptive Republican nominee, Mr. Romney has largely been in sync with other Republicans as they coalesced around his candidacy. But aides to the Republican leaders on Capitol Hill said the lawmakers have no intention of backing away from their tax message against Mr. Obama despite the disagreement.

Don Stewart, an aide to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said the issue puts the White House and Democrats “in a box: They either believe the mandate is an unconstitutional ‘penalty,’ or they believe it is a constitutional tax as the court ruled. It’s either unconstitutional, or it is a tax.”

Democrats fought back against that characterization on Sunday. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the health care mandate includes a “penalty” for a small number of “free riders” who choose not to buy insurance.

But as Mr. Romney pursues the presidency for a second time, some of his past statements characterizing the mandate match up more closely with the Democrats than they do with the Republicans.

The argument made by Ms. Pelosi on Sunday was the same one that Mr. Romney made in 2006 when he was fighting for his state’s health care plan. He repeated that argument during a debate in the 2008 presidential campaign.

In an opinion article in USA Today in 2009, Mr. Romney again used the term “free riders,” writing that a penalty like that in his health care plan “encourages ‘free riders’ to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical cost on to others.”

Those kinds of statements were the source of numerous attacks by Mr. Romney’s Republican rivals during the primaries.

Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota and a leading vice-presidential prospect, last year called Mr. Romney a “co-conspirator” in the passage of national health care, using the phrase “Obamneycare” to mock the health care plans.

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas predicted that health care would be a “major anchor” around Mr. Romney’s neck. Rick Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, called Mr. Romney “the weakest candidate” to prosecute the case against Mr. Obama’s health care plan.

View the original article here

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Republicans Stay on Message

John Raoux/Associated PressAttorney General Eric Holder

Whatever you think about the House Republicans, you have to admit they stay focused. Yesterday, while the rest of the country was distracted by the Supreme Court decision on the most important piece of social legislation in generations, the House Republicans were concentrating on the big picture – the personal and political destruction of President Obama.

They weren’t dithering with softballs like fixing the student loan problem, or getting Americans back to work, or preventing violence against women. Not at all. Within a few hours of the Supreme Court announcement, House Republicans voted to hold Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents relating to an investigation into a botched drug and gun-running probe known as Operation Fast and Furious.

The White House made a mistake last week when it blocked a subpoena by invoking executive privilege, for which it had a weak constitutional claim. But Mr. Holder has already disclosed more than 7,600 documents. If there were some missing that were vital to the investigation by Rep. Darrell Issa and his House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, everyone would have been better served by an agreement between Congress and the White House to produce the documents.

That is especially true for the public. Last time I checked, that’s what everyone involved in this absurd partisan affair is supposed to be serving.

The Republicans are, of course, being wildly hypocritical about this whole thing. Many of the ones who are howling about Mr. Holder were quick and ferocious in their defense of President George W. Bush and his Attorney General Alberto Gonzales when he stonewalled Congress on documents and repeatedly misled them on issues like torture, warrantless wiretapping and the political purge of the U.S. Attorneys’ ranks.

But Mr. Issa had a plan that began even before he took over the chairmanship of the oversight committee – to tie up the Obama administration with non-stop investigations. “I want seven hearings a week, times 40 weeks,” Mr. Issa exulted at the time. He said he was going to be evenhanded, but he also called Mr. Obama ”one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times” – which is ridiculous.

And he has since shown that he planned to wield his gavel as a partisan weapon. Holding the attorney general in contempt fits perfectly into that plan. And it was a nice way to try to distract people from the huge loss the Republicans suffered at the Supreme Court yesterday. Fortunately, it didn’t work. No one paid attention.

View the original article here

Bending Toward Universal Health Care

IN finding the Affordable Care Act constitutional, a narrow majority on the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., has surprised almost everyone. The decision is a victory for the century-long struggle to ensure basic health coverage for virtually all Americans, and it sets the nation on a path toward more rational, cost-effective ways of delivering care. These will be the eventual outcomes — but months and years of fierce political battles lie ahead.

Although the court upheld the act, President Obama’s signature achievement to date, there were important twists. The federal government cannot order all Americans to have or buy health insurance, though it can collect a tax from those who do not have coverage after 2014. The federal government can offer the 50 states money to expand Medicaid coverage to all of the poor and near-poor — but cannot punish states that refuse by fully withdrawing existing Medicaid funds.

The decision shifts the political terrain for both parties. Over the past four years, the Republican Party has given up its traditional commitment to use regulated markets to extend health insurance coverage to all. It was Democrats who passed a law with elements long favored by Republicans — a law that radicalized Tea Party Republicans have now sworn to obliterate.

The ruling does not make President Obama’s tough re-election bid any easier. The health care law, as enacted in 2010, required everyone to buy insurance once it was affordable, but its authors avoided talking about Congress’s power to tax. Now the Roberts opinion makes it impossible to avoid speaking about a tax penalty. Media and legal analysts will want to keep the debates over the individual mandate going, and economists will ask whether taxes will need to be raised to compel recalcitrant holdouts to buy coverage after 2014. Will Mr. Obama be trapped in an endless mandate-discussion loop and forced to expend even more political capital on the one really unpopular part of health reform?

Not necessarily. Mr. Obama can now claim the mantle of “constitutionality” for his health care law — and start talking about the parts that are popular with 60 to 80 percent of Americans. Democrats, indeed all supporters of health reform, can tag Republicans with wanting to repeal or block those popular features like the insurance rules that protect people from being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions; the new benefits for young adults and older people on Medicare; the promised extension of affordable coverage to more than 30 million more low-income and lower-middle-income families; and tax credits for small businesses.

For as long as political scientists have measured public opinion, we have known that Americans respond to abstract questions by opposing “big government” but evaluate particular government benefits and actions very differently. As long as opponents of health reform could ask “Is it constitutional?” the argument was on their terrain. Now the debate will swerve back toward the popular core of the act, if the White House and Congressional Democrats are savvy in how they talk about existing and future benefits. (Reform supporters can also truthfully point out that only 2 out of every 100 people will be affected by the mandate without enjoying subsidies to help them buy affordable coverage.)

Mitt Romney and his fellow Republican refuseniks are in a new bind. They cannot wield the club of nonconstitutionality anymore. And in the debates, how is Mr. Romney going to bash Mr. Obama for extending to all Americans the very same insurance regulations and affordable health coverage that Mr. Romney enacted as governor for the people of Massachusetts — who like the results very much? We predict that Mr. Obama will eat Mr. Romney’s lunch.

Of course, it’s possible that the European economic crisis will send the world economy into another recession; that Mr. Romney and the Republicans will sweep the presidency and both houses of Congress; and that the Republicans will gut financing for the act. Using simple-majority budget rules, they could slash Medicaid and trim or delay subsidies to help low-income families buy private insurance. But they would still not have the 60 votes they’d need in the Senate to actually repeal the act — and the Supreme Court has now left intact the new rules for insurance companies and state-level exchanges prominently included in the law.

Moreover, the Republicans would create a political mess for themselves if they tried to “defund Obamacare,” as many conservative lawmakers have vowed. Insurers would still have to issue policies to all comers, sick or healthy — but they would not get millions of new paid customers using credits and subsidies to buy their products. The states, including those with Republican governors, would be left with millions of citizens needing health care, but much reduced funding to help them. Many insurance companies and health care providers, not to mention health care reformers and Democrats, would fight to restore financing.

The same kind of dynamics would play out for states that choose to opt out of the Medicaid expansion in the act. (The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that states may do so without losing all of their federal Medicaid financing.) The law provides for 90 percent federal subsidies for expanded Medicaid coverage, and states will find it hard to turn down this offer. As more and more states move toward universal coverage and well-functioning insurance exchanges, states that opt out will have trouble attracting businesses and health care professionals and lose out to other states in economic development.

In short, the historic court ruling ensures the law’s survival in the long run, even if partisan battles over particular regulations and expenditures continue for some time. The arc of history now bends toward health care for all — and greater efficiency in the system as a whole. Mr. Obama and the Democrats may have to talk about health care more than they had planned going into November. But in the months and years ahead, the political challenges for Mr. Romney and the Republicans are even greater.

Theda Skocpol, professor of government and sociology at Harvard, and Lawrence R. Jacobs, professor of political studies at the University of Minnesota, are the authors of “Health Care Reform and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

View the original article here

Republicans Wage Repeal Campaign on Social Media

The Republican National Committee released a video titled “The Final Verdict” on YouTube as part of its social media campaign in response to the Supreme Court ruling on the health care law.

Soon after the Supreme Court ruling on President Obama’s health care law was announced, Republican leaders took to Twitter with a new hashtag, #fullrepeal, aimed at helping to focus the conversation on ousting Mr. Obama in November and reversing the law.

The fight for #FullRepeal begins NOW. The way to get rid of #Obamacare is to defeat Obama in November.

— RNC (@GOP) 28 Jun 12

The hashtag and a new video on YouTube titled “The Final Verdict” are part of a social media strategy that Republican Party leaders agreed upon with Romney campaign officials this week in the event the court allowed the health care overhaul law to stand.

On Facebook, there’s a Repeal It Now page with a link to a petition and fund-raising drive.

As part of the plan, the Republican National Committee also introduced a new Web site, People v. Obamacare on Thursday morning to provide what it said was information for people “so they can continue to fight for free market health care solutions that will decrease costs and increase care.”

Users who do a Google search for Republican National Committee are directed to the new Web site, which features a tab showing the conversation on Twitter around the #fullrepeal discussion.

“Today’s Supreme Court decision sets the stakes for the November election,” said Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee in announcing the debut of site. “Now, the only way to save the country from Obamacare’s budget-busting government takeover of health care is to elect a new resident.”

To help drive the #fullrepeal message, the committee bought advertising space on Twitter, using what it is calling a promoted tweet, which directed people who were searching for information about the law to the new Web site.

By noon on Thursday, #fullrepeal was a trending topic on Twitter. According to Topsy analytics, the term has been mentioned thousands of times in the last 24 hours.

The Romney campaign embraced the hashtag with Andrea Saul, press secretary for Mr. Romney, using it throughout the day to announce updates on Twitter about how much money Mr. Romney had raised online from people upset with the decision.

9,500+ donations to @MittRomney & Victory today for #FullRepeal $1.1 million & climbing

— Andrea Saul (@andreamsaul) 28 Jun 12

The #fullrepeal hashtag accompanied Twitter posts from the National Republican Senatorial Committee; House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio; Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader; and even the College Republicans before the coordinated, strategic messaging spread to supporters across the country.

On July 11th, the House will once again vote to repeal ObamaCare. #healthcare #fullrepeal

— Eric Cantor (@GOPLeader) 28 Jun 12

#fullrepeal #4jobs RT @GOPLeader: During the week of July 9th, the House of Representatives will once again repeal ObamaCare.

— Speaker John Boehner (@SpeakerBoehner) 28 Jun 12

McConnell: “The Supreme Court has spoken. This law is a tax. The bill was sold to the American people on a deception” #fullrepeal

— NRSC (@NRSC) 28 Jun 12

“#Obamacare was bad policy yesterday. It’s bad policy today.” – #MittRomney #FullRepeal

— College Republicans (@CRNC) 28 Jun 12

The hashtag helped develop conversations on Twitter about the Republican leadership’s proposed next steps even among those with small followings.

@EmilyMcCargar only way to repeal now is get @MittRomney elected along with #GOP Senate majority. #FullRepeal

— jjrohloff (@jjrohloff) 28 Jun 12

It was also used on Twitter in posts criticizing Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. for voting in favor of the law.

CJ Roberts Opinion, pg 6: “It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.” #fullrepeal

— Rep. James Lankford (@RepLankford) 28 Jun 12

On the other side of the debate, supporters used Twitter to criticize the new Web site.

@GOP you mean peoplevromneycare?

— Raymond Rehayem (@libraryeye) 28 Jun 12

And to suggest new hashtags. In this case, a Twitter user suggested #moveforward.

.@GOPLeader: “For the next 5 years, I’ll keep putting politics before progress, despite overwhelming public sentiment to #MoveForward.”

— Jonas Heineman (@SanFranCitizen) 28 Jun 12

View the original article here

For Opponents of Health Care Law, No Easy Road to Repeal

The court’s ruling that Congress can use its taxing power to assess a penalty fee on Americans who ignore the individual insurance mandate certainly opens a gateway for anti-tax Republicans to attack the law. Should they win the White House and gain even a narrow majority in the Senate, Republicans would be able to use the same procedural approach Democrats took to get the health care law over the finish line two years ago to undo the taxes and federal subsidies that are at the core of the law.

But attacking the law by stripping away its layers of taxes, fees and subsidies is not the same as dismantling it. Undoing the major benefits and policies of the law — which include medical coverage for children up to age 26, protections for people with pre-existing conditions and the end of annual and lifetime caps on certain forms of coverage — would require the acquiescence of Senate Democrats, which is highly unlikely.

In essence, the Republicans could not muster sufficient votes by themselves to undo most of the regulations and benefits of the law, but could for the parts that pay for them.

“You can’t get everywhere with reconciliation,” said Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, referring to the Congressional process that Democrats used, which allows certain budget measures to pass with 51 votes instead of the 60 that would be required to block a filibuster vote on a full repeal. “You will need to use other procedures,” he said. He added later: “We may get a majority. But we will need to work with the other side.”

While some Republicans fantasize about a bipartisan solution to undoing the elements of the law, Representative Tom Price of Georgia, a physician who is the Republican leadership’s point man on health care, said Friday that a health and human services secretary under a Romney administration would dismantle other parts of the law through fiat.

That would no doubt attract lawsuits and might leave haters of the law unsatisfied.

For their part, Democrats have largely dismissed the biggest blow dealt to the law by the Supreme Court, which said the federal government could not require states to expand their Medicaid programs. Supporters of the law argue that the federal government offers too rich a cash incentive for any state to actually pass it up.

But while Democrats remain publicly confident that states will still choose to take the federal matching funds and expand Medicaid, Republican governors who have made undoing the law one of their main goals will be hard pressed to take up that optional expansion, especially since the federal dollars meant to help them would decrease over time.

Either way, whether Republicans lawmakers pull apart some of the law on their own, or if a large number of states opt out of expanding Medicaid, it will spell trouble for the health care industry. It is counting on the expansion of the market through the individual mandate, fees and the newly insured to cover the cost of greater benefits and regulations.

“It’s problematic to only take down the pieces with budgetary impact and leave the market reforms,” said Catherine Finley, a health care specialist at Thorn Run Partners, a Washington lobbying and government relations firm. “Doing so would seriously disrupt the functioning of the market.”

Both Republicans and Democrats agree in theory that part of the law should be changed, and President Obama has suggested he is open to improvements.

But bipartisanship around health care seems unlikely, no matter who runs Washington.

The central difficulty is the seemingly irreconcilable differences between the goal of most Democrats, which is to expand health care coverage to as many Americans as possible, and that of Republicans, which is to push down government spending on health care. With costs rising sharply every year, those basic conflicts will remain, and policy solutions inevitably will require a bias toward one of those goals.

Further, the partisan bitterness that began long before the Affordable Care Act was even a notion has only deepened during two years of divided government.

For example, in 2009 Republicans who supported the expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program felt betrayed when Democrats, taking their lead from the new Obama administration, unilaterally dropped several important features that Republicans had managed to win in an earlier bill at some political risk. Democrats opted for a more partisan bill that covered various groups that Republicans had resisted.

“I’m a little bitter,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah. “I worked my butt off” on the measure, he said, only to end up voting against it. “It set the tone.”

Democrats feel equally angry that, in spite of packing the health care bill with many ideas, including the individual mandate, that originated with Republicans years ago, they could get no Republican cooperation in the end.

Many Republicans also say that they would like to preserve many aspects of the law, including the provisions for dependent coverage for adult children and for lifting annual and lifetime spending caps.

However, “it might be difficult for the Romney administration to come back and say, ‘Oh we really like some parts of A.C.A., we are not going to repeal them,’ ” said James Brasfield, a professor of management and political science at Webster University in St. Louis.

It is possible that governors and legislatures may do some of the Congressional Republicans’s work for them by opting out of the Medicaid expansion. But that expansion was going to put 16 million to 21 million additional people into the system.

Insurance companies had or were developing plans to cover these new Medicaid enrollees, also anticipating millions of new customers who were going to buy insurance through new federally subsidized purchasing exchanges. That would be endangered if Republicans legislate away the subsidies, and possibly harm the party’s friendly relationship with the companies.

“That population presents great opportunities for health plans,” Ms. Finley said. “Now we have to see how the states play this out. If they opt out of the expansion, it certainly would decrease the availability of new markets.”

View the original article here

Will Time Heal Health Care Wounds?

When the Supreme Court declared the Affordable Care Act’s provision for an individual mandate to buy medical insurance constitutional, the majority did so by placing the mandate within Congress’s power to tax rather than under the Commerce clause. While the decision keeps most of the law intact, what does it mean politically? And how will the characterization of the mandate as a tax play among supporters and opponents of the legislation?

Supreme Court rulings on politically prominent issues can have three effects on subsequent attitudes among the public: legitimation, backlash or polarization. As Nathan Persily, Jack Citrin and Patrick Egan show in their 2008 book, “Public Opinion and Constitutional Controversy,” legitimation occurs when public opinion moves in line with the court, as it has over time with regard to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school integration decision and to gender equality decisions like Stanton v. Stanton in 1975, which invalidated laws predicated on traditional gender roles that differentiated between men and women in the allocation of government benefits.

Backlash occurs when public opinion moves directly in opposition to the court’s ruling, as when the public shifted, more in favor of school prayer and against flag burning after controversial decisions on those issues. Crucially, under polarization, overall opinion does not shift but different groups move in opposite directions. Examples include the gap in abortion opinion that grew between Protestants and Catholics after Roe v. Wade in 1973 and the difference between liberals and conservatives that widened after the Lawrence v. Texas gay rights decision in 2003.

A look at public opinion during the first few years after the Massachusetts health care reform in 2006 offers some insights into what might happen now at the national level. Although there has not been a legal challenge as dramatic as the suits against the Affordable Care Act, the Commonwealth’s experience does show how public opinion changes with health reform implementation. Of course, the Massachusetts case is different because it is a state-level reform that cannot elicit the objections to federal intervention that the Affordable Care Act. does, and yet the case is informative because the underlying structure of the reform is nearly identical. So what happened? There is evidence of both mild legitimation and pronounced polarization.

Polls by the Harvard School of Public Health in the first years after the law was implemented show that both the health reform overall and the individual mandate became more popular. Support for the Commonwealth’s reform increased from 61 percent in September 2006, shortly after implementation began, to 69 percent two years later, in June 2008. Similarly, support for the individual mandate increased from 52 to 58 percent. Overall support for the reform has dropped and risen since, with the percentage in favor of the mandate falling back to 51 percent. It is not always steady progress.

There is also evidence of sharp partisan polarization over the issue: Democrats became more supportive of the reform and the mandate while Republicans became more opposed, despite the fact that the legislation was signed by a Republican governor (after having passed the Democrat-controlled state legislature). In 2006, Democrats were 12 points more likely than Republicans to support the law (68 to 56 percent). By 2008, that gap had grown to 32 points (76-44).  Similarly, Democrats were 5 points more likely than Republicans to support the individual mandate in 2006 (56 to 51 percent), a gap that grew to 17 points two years later (65 to 48 percent).

Politically we might expect similar polarization at the national level. While increased familiarity and experience with the new legislation may enhance overall support in ways that might elate proponents of the law, implementation also seems to breed antagonism, perhaps precisely because opponents find such success threatening. That the court’s ruling defines the mandate’s penalty as a tax opens up opportunities for damning rhetoric from the reform’s opponents as well. Already we are hearing reminders that candidate Obama promised not to raise taxes on the middle class. As Sarah Palin wrote on Facebook after the court released its decision, “Obama promised the American people this wasn’t a tax and that he’d never raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000.” Now, she said, we “see that this is the largest tax increase in history.” Glenn Beck’s Web site agreed: “No taxes on the middle class? Lies! Obamacare now Obamatax.”

However, a large group – both in Massachusetts and nationwide – are political Independents, whose opinions are informative because they are one group not constrained by partisanship. Their support for the Massachusetts reform and mandate grew over time, from 60 to 70 percent for the overall reform, from 53 to 58 percent for the individual mandate. With Democrats and Independents constituting a majority of voters nationwide, supporters of the Affordable Care Act may not just celebrate the law’s survival but also have good reason to expect that its popularity will increase — if the law, having made it through the Supreme Court, now also survives the political threat of a Republican repeal effort.

Andrea Louise Campbell is an associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her April 4 Op-Ed essay, “Down the Insurance Rabbit Hole,” was cited by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her concurring opinion in the health care decision on Thursday.

View the original article here

For Attorneys General, Health Law Long Shot Brings Payoffs

But by the time the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling to uphold the law on Thursday, the litigation hatched by conservative state legal officials like Bill McCollum, who was Florida’s attorney general, had attracted a legitimacy born of shifting scholarly opinion, early victories in strategically selected lower courts and popular discontent spurred by the Tea Party.

While they fell short of their ultimate goal, they got much farther than almost anyone had predicted, and can claim significant victories — both legal and political. The intellectual underpinning of the litigation had always been the argument that the health care law’s individual insurance mandate was an unconstitutional use of Congress’s authority to regulate commerce. On that score, the attorneys general won, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. the deciding vote.

“Well, at least it’s clear that they can’t order you to buy broccoli,” Mr. McCollum said, a final nod to the vegetable that played a central role in the plaintiffs’ case. “There are now very specific limits to the commerce clause.”

There were other upsides for conservatives in the 5-to-4 ruling. The attorneys general gained flexibility for their states in deciding whether to help pay for a coming Medicaid expansion, and the decision that the individual mandate constitutes a tax handed political ammunition to opponents of Mr. Obama and Democrats in Congress.

Moreover, the loose confederation of opponents — Republican officials from 26 states, party operatives, Federalist Society lawyers, conservative law professors, business leaders and Tea Party advocates — prompted a national conversation that helped keep health care near the top of the domestic agenda in both the 2010 and 2012 campaigns. And it prevented the Obama administration from gaining traction in promoting the benefits of the law.

“It’s kept them on defense,” said Henry McMaster, an early organizer of the group when he was South Carolina’s attorney general.

Randy E. Barnett, a libertarian Georgetown law professor who is among those credited with providing an intellectual framework for challenging the mandate, put it a different way. “Who would have thought that we could win while losing?” he asked.

The litigation arose out of conservative outrage in late 2009 over the so-called Cornhusker kickback, a $100 million Medicaid deal for Nebraska intended to win the vote of that state’s Democratic senator, Ben Nelson, for the plan. That legislative move riled Mr. McMaster into organizing conference calls with counterparts in other states. Public outcry and the threat of litigation helped kill the deal, with Mr. Nelson calling Mr. McMaster on New Year’s Eve to ask, “What do I need to do to call the dogs off?”

But even earlier, the attorneys general had shifted to a pet concern that Mr. McCollum had been raising relentlessly in the calls: the individual mandate.

In September 2009, Mr. McCollum, a former congressman with solid conservative credentials, was leafing through The Wall Street Journal when he noticed an opinion column by two former law partners, David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey. The headline was unequivocal: “Mandatory Insurance Is Unconstitutional.”

Many lawyers considered the premise frivolous. But after research by his chief deputy, Joe Jacquot, a former Senate Judiciary Committee aide who had helped manage Chief Justice Roberts’ confirmation, Mr. McCollum concluded that the lawyers had a compelling case.

Mr. McCollum provided not only the impetus for the lawsuit, but also the venue. He persuaded his colleagues that an early victory was crucial, and that the friendliest path would be through the Federal District Court in Pensacola, Fla., and then the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta.

In contrast to the partisan opposition from other corners, the Republican attorneys general pledged to talk only about the legal issues, Mr. McMaster said.

“We stressed that in our conference calls,” said Mr. McMaster, who like Mr. McCollum returned to practicing law after losing a primary election for governor in 2010. “This is all about the law, about the Constitution. Don’t let anybody in anybody’s office say anything ugly about the president or the Congress. Stay in your lane.”

But Drew Edmondson, who was the attorney general of Oklahoma and one of the few Democrats invited to join the conference calls, said he had perceived the agenda as “clearly political with a legal hook” — an effort driven partly by opposition to the Obama administration.

The attorneys general had hoped for a united front, but Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, the Republican attorney general in Virginia, brought a federal lawsuit of his own in Richmond, challenging the mandate on the ground that it violated a states’ rights bill recently passed in the commonwealth with Tea Party backing.

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.

View the original article here

Seven Consequences of the Health Care Ruling

“I have had some bitter disappointments as president,” Harry S. Truman wrote in his memoirs, “but the one that has troubled me most, in a personal way, has been the failure to defeat the organized opposition to a national compulsory health insurance program.” He was just the first in a long line of presidents stymied by health reform. Now Barack Obama has succeeded where his predecessors failed. Or has he?

The Supreme Court’s blockbuster decision on Thursday has consequences that will reverberate for years. Here are seven big ones.

Passing health reform has always been hard, but now it’s gotten a lot harder. The United States does not have national health insurance for a not-so-simple reason: Congress. The people elect presidential candidates who promise the reform. Congress, through the years, has said, no thanks. It is so difficult because it takes 60 votes in the Senate and tight discipline in the House. By climbing so visibly into the fray, the court served notice that it would become an active part of the process. Yes, the Democrats won — this time. But the decision was close, technical and studded with new barriers to Congressional action on profound challenges that remain. More than 15 million Americans are still uninsured, even with the health reform; the cost of drugs, devices and procedures continues to spiral; worsening inequality has exacerbated enormous differences in health outcomes. Future health reforms will take 60 votes in the Senate and 5 on the bench.

The biggest winner is the Roberts court. The court was drifting into perilous territory. A polite fiction long justified the idea of nine unelected justices overruling Congress and the states: They merely interpret the law. That fiction had been slipping badly ever since Bush v. Gore in 2000. A recent New York Times survey found that three-quarters of the public believed that politics was a frequent factor in court decisions. Political scientists have lots of studies showing just that. Striking down the signal achievement of this administration on a straight party-line vote would have put the court deeper into dangerous territory, with liberals gradually signing up for the longstanding conservative effort to curb the Supreme Court’s powers — perhaps by limiting terms to 15 years, for example. With his exquisitely complicated ruling — siding with the liberals on taxing powers, not on the interstate commerce clause — the chief justice restored the idea that the court is wrestling with the complicated tangle of law — not punching in a partisan vote. In the process, he slipped the health care issue right back to where it belongs: before the voters.

The biggest losers are Medicaid and the poor. Very quietly, the Affordable Care Act introduced a revolutionary change: All poor people in America would get Medicaid. The new law would have extended Medicaid to everyone with incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty line ($23,050 a year for a family of four). Aren’t the poor already covered? That depends on where they live. In New York, most adults up to 150 percent of the poverty line are covered; in Texas, Medicaid reaches only to 26 percent of the poverty line — a family of four is not eligible if they earn, say, $9,000 a year. The court ruled that Congress may not require states to expand Medicaid. States can stick to their old Medicaid programs. Stingy states may choose to stay stingy. That part of the decision flew under the media radar. But it is a significant blow to liberals who had a simple way to grow benefits by expanding programs.

For the Obama administration, the hard job begins now. When Truman put national health insurance in play, he did something bizarre. He refused to argue for it. While opponents cried “socialism,” Truman remained mum. That silence became a not so proud Democratic legacy. As soon as Mr. Obama proposed the legislation, opponents began repeating “death panels,” “taxes” and “government takeover”; the Democrats responded by getting down into the policy weeds of their complicated law. The president’s statement on Thursday was a case in point. Down the checklist he went: policy details, moving story, pivot to the economy. When you say health reform, my summer neighbors in New Hampshire all nod their heads and say “death panels.” The question for Obama and the Democrats: What do you have that will match that? If they don’t come up with something stirring, the reform that survived the court could be lost in the election.

Big changes are ahead for health care. When the Clinton health reform went down to defeat in 1994, something curious happened. The health care system ran with many of the reforms that the Clintons had recommended. The managed-care revolution sprang from the failed reform. The Obama reform promises even greater changes: new incentives for hospitals to deliver more efficient care, new incentives to nudge physicians into primary care, and powerful new rules to stop insurance companies from cherry-picking the people they cover. The court gave the hospitals, doctors and insurance companies a green light to run with these changes. In many cases, they will. The medical system is going to change regardless of what Mitt Romney might do in his first week in office.

For the Republicans, “no” is not enough. Republicans have their campaign slogan: Repeal and replace! But history has a funny lesson for them. Every Republican administration in the past 60 years has proposed health care reform. There is no escaping it. What is the next Republican administration’s health care policy going to look like? There are plenty of popular provisions in the Affordable Care Act. The party of “hell, no” might be wise to think of ways to remake the law in its own image. Repeal may sound good now, but history is unambiguous. An administration without a health policy will soon be vulnerable to attacks. Cruel! Unfeeling! Out of touch! A quiet Republican conversation about what to cut, what to keep, and what to change will pay big dividends in the future.

But Democrats can’t rest easy. The Supreme Court weakened a major prop of classical liberalism: the interstate commerce clause. When Congress passed the blockbuster Civil Rights Act of 1964, it relied on its interstate commerce powers. Even an Alabama barbecue shack with a local clientele could not discriminate against blacks; after all, it served food that came from out of state. The Supreme Court this week backed way off from that expansive reading of the commerce clause. Mainstream Democrats looking to expand social welfare policies have gotten lazy: they’ve recycled Republican ideas — Bill Clinton borrowed from Richard M. Nixon the idea of building on employer-based private insurance to achieve national coverage, and Barack Obama borrowed from Republicans like Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island the idea of mandating individual coverage to broaden the private insurance pool. It’s high time for the Democrats to get more creative.

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of a barbecue
shack that was barred, by the Supreme Court, from discriminating against black customers following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was in Alabama, not Atlanta.

James A. Morone, a professor of political science at Brown, is the co-author of “The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office.”

View the original article here

Romney Campaign Unleashes Coordinated Response to Court Ruling

Moments after the Supreme Court ruled on President Obama’s health care law, Lanhee Chen, the policy director for Mitt Romney, sent an e-mail to about three dozen senior Republicans on Capitol Hill and in state attorneys general’s offices.

“Please stand by. Reviewing. Will circulate answer,” the e-mail, sent at 10:17 a.m. said in part.

Minutes later, at 10:27 a.m., Mr. Chen sent another e-mail: “Go with upheld.”

Those three words unleashed a public relations plan that was nine weeks in the making and designed to make sure that the Republican response to whatever the court decided served Mr. Romney’s presidential ambitions.

“Everyone at the table understood the importance of this decision,” said Sean Spicer, the communications director for the Republican National Committee, which coordinated the planning. “The only way we were ever going to get rid of Obamacare is if we are committed to electing Governor Romney.”

For more than two months, a group of top aides to Mr. Romney met weekly with staff members to Republican lawmakers, legislative campaign committees and representatives of the state attorneys general. The meetings, led by Jeff Larson, the chief of staff at the Republican National Committee, were usually held at 3 p.m. in a conference room on the fourth floor of the committee’s headquarters.

The group developed three scenarios. Scenario One assumed the court had upheld the health care law. Scenario Two assumed the court had overturned it. Scenario Three contemplated a variety of partial rulings.

In each case, the group developed separate statements, Twitter hashtags, videos and Web sites. Mr. Spicer said there were spirited discussions (many hashtag suggestions were discarded, for example) as the group debated how to respond.

But in all cases, it was agreed that Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, was in charge of the message.

“Everybody was going to take their cue from Governor Romney,” Mr. Spicer said.

On Thursday morning, communications and policy aides from Capitol Hill and from Mr. Romney’s Boston headquarters convened in a first-floor conference room at the Republican National Committee that had been turned into a war-room. A large monitor was running TweetDeck. The group watched the initial, confusing reports about the court’s decision.

Then, they waited for Mr. Chen’s e-mail.

“Once Lanhee gave the green light, we were hitting our state parties, our surrogates,” Mr. Spicer said. The minute the e-mail arrived, Scenario One went into operation.

The surrogate list, developed over weeks, included dozens of state and national Republican officials, booked onto television and radio programs from morning to night. The switch was thrown on a Web site: peoplevobamacare.com. Republican officials everywhere started posting on Twitter with the agreed-upon hashtag: #fullrepeal.

The plan was originally designed for a Monday implementation, Mr. Spicer said (the court’s last scheduled day of the term). He said it will be compressed a bit because of the Thursday decision.

And what about Scenarios One and Two? “We had mapped out every conceivable scenario,” Mr. Spicer said.

But he’s not saying anything much about those.

Follow Michael D. Shear on Twitter at @shearm.

View the original article here

Washington Is Stuck, but He’s Getting Out

Washington

In the outer office, constituents were dropping by unannounced, more or less demanding to see the congressman, “right here on his doorstep,” as one visitor insisted. In his inner sanctum office, Representative Gary Ackerman was happily contemplating his departure from all that after 30 years in Congress.

“I like to work, but in order to work you need a work product,” said the New York Democrat, who described arriving in the Capitol as a “bright and bushy-tailed liberal,” up from a childhood in a public housing project, eager to pass a law on his first day. He is exiting not so much in despair as relief to be gone from the legislative intransigence that he sees extended across the aisle by the House Republican majority.

Sounding like an anthropologist, Mr. Ackerman talked of spending enough time in Congress to remember dealing creatively with an extinct species known as moderate Republicans. “Oh yes, compromise,” he said nostalgically of such long-ago behavior. “They’ve all been quieted, muzzled, taking pledges before they ever get here,” he said, his tone unabashedly partisan. “It’s not that they’re running a Do Nothing Congress — they’re running an Undo Everything Congress.” He quoted a Capitol truism: “Any jackass can kick down the barn.”

The low point, he said, was when a Republican friend told him that private caucus meetings featured prayer gatherings where lawmakers hold hands and invoke God for or against specific measures on the House agenda. “In the past, a fight was over how to make a good bill better. Now it’s become Good versus Evil.”

As one of scores of lawmakers expected to depart this year, Mr. Ackerman may be typical, with no big, historic law named after him, but a number of successful efforts like spearheading a campaign to feed the starving in Ethiopia and sponsoring the “Baby AIDS” legislation, which required that mothers be notified if newborns tested positive for H.I.V. He survived a political scuffle or two, resigning from the ethics committee in 1992 after being entangled in the scandal over abuses of House checking accounts. In campaigning, he recalls taking out a loan of $160,000 for his first run, and three decades later he admits to cringing at the need to beg people for $1 million-plus every two years to keep his job. He described slinking off to his party’s campaign committee office near the Capitol where, in separate phone cubbies, lawmakers must turn themselves into jolly mendicants to check-writing supporters. “A sad tale of woe to see famous politicians calling and schmoozing, and everyone knows why.”

Constituents from the old Sixth District, which straddled the Queens-Nassau border, couldn’t accuse Mr. Ackerman of losing track of home. He chose not to sink deep roots in Washington, and lived on a houseboat on the Potomac called the Unsinkable, which sank and was replaced by Unsinkable II. Over the years, he watched sizable yachts owned by lobbyists tie up at his marina, but he loathes the idea of cashing in as a lobbyist after retirement as so many colleagues do. Only more “hat in hand” behavior, he said, describing a pathetic subgroup of ex-congressmen. “Guys who lose or give up their seats and never go home and hang around town because home is no longer real — and this place became real.”

Sometimes he sounds passionate enough to go another two years. But at 69, Mr. Ackerman suddenly decided he had had enough of politics where healthy compromise is off the table, with no sign that the majority pendulum would swing back in time for him. So he quit, and then quickly endorsed Assemblywoman Grace Meng, to help her win the primary in the heavily Democratic district. She fit in with the philosophy he celebrated at a recent farewell dinner, that politics, at its heart, should be driven by a desire to help people, not attack government.

Looking back, he says he’s still haunted by some votes he took. One was for the repeal of the 1988 Medicare catastrophic coverage plan. “We were so proud” when the plan passed, he said, “but the seniors became outraged it would cost them $6.35 or something, and started a big rebellion. The public isn’t always right, you know.” Democrats quickly repealed the good measure, following their panicked leadership “like a bunch of sheep,” Mr. Ackerman bitterly recalled. “I didn’t come here to go along, but I went along.” And he regrets voting for the Iraq invasion, he says, on the basis of “contrived, phony evidence.”

Still, he departs as he arrived — an optimist about the public’s eventually making good choices. He sports a carnation every day just as he did as a city public school teacher, his first job. His sense of humor is intact.

“What do I do with all these plaques?” he asked, puzzling over 11 cartons of them, collected over the years from groups like the East Bayside Homeowners Association and American Veterans for Equal Rights for being a solid public servant. More constituents were coming and going in the anteroom, looking for the congressman who was happily making his own plans to be gone.

View the original article here

In Health Ruling, Relief for Obama but a Blow to Conventional Wisdom

The Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision on Thursday to uphold most of President Obama’s health care law represents a hurdle cleared for Mr. Obama. He had been at risk of seeing his most ambitious policy initiative — and most expensive, in terms of the political capital it required — neutered or
overturned by the court.

If Mr. Obama is the victor from the standpoint of public policy, however, some observers have claimed that the decision could help Mitt Romney in terms of electoral politics.

With due respect, I think this counterintuitive conclusion is too cute by half. It may involve the same sort of wishful thinking that liberals were guilty of when some began to argue that the court striking the health care bill would actually help Mr. Obama politically.

Other analyses issued before the decision had implausibly argued that both Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama could benefit from the law being upheld. They seem to forget that in contrast to public policy, electoral politics is largely a zero-sum game.

The health care law is likely to remain fairly unpopular; opinions about it have been essentially unchanged for most of the last two years. The bill was probably partially responsible for the significant losses that Democrats endured in the 2010 midterm elections.

But continued dissatisfaction over the health care bill was presumably already priced into the polls. A decision that upholds the status quo is not likely to change that much.

To the extent there are marginal effects of the court’s decision, they would seem to be positive for Mr. Obama. The framework of the bill has now been endorsed by the court, including by John G. Roberts Jr., the relatively conservative and relatively well-respected Chief Justice who wrote the majority opinion.

To be clear, the risks to Mr. Obama may have been somewhat asymmetric. A decision to strike the law might have harmed him more than the decision to uphold it will help.

And be wary of whatever the polls say for the next week or two — the short-term reaction to the news of the ruling may not match its long-term political effects. As before, the presidential election is mostly likely to be contested mainly on economic grounds. Next week’s jobs report is likely to have a larger effect on the election than what the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.

But particularly given the public’s confusion over the health care law, my view has been to keep it simple: Mr. Obama got the good headline here, and that is likely to be most of what the public reacts to.

It is not as though, if the law had been struck down, Republicans would have stopped talking about the folly of the legislation. Members of the public, in mostly opposing the law, had not been objecting to its technical details, some of which they actually supported when quizzed about the specific aspects of the health care overhaul.

Instead, it was to the impression that it represented an overreach on behalf of Mr. Obama — at a time when there is profound skepticism about the direction of government and the efficacy of its policy — that left him vulnerable.

When the dust settles, it seems implausible that Mr. Obama would have been better off politically had his signature reform been nullified by the court. Then Mr. Obama’s perceived overreach would have had the stench of being unconstitutional.

Some of the analyses that claim the law could help Mr. Romney instead argue that Thursday’s decision could motivate the Republican base. But the Republican base was already reasonably well motivated for the election. A decision to strike down the law, meanwhile, would have represented a victory for movement conservatism — and victory can be its own motivating force.

Although some liberals had claimed that a decision to strike the law could have motivated Democratic turnout in anger against the Supreme Court’s decision, it can likewise be argued that it would have left Democrats despondent, particularly given that any efforts to replace an overturned law would have faced huge political obstacles in the near term. The effects on the party bases are hard to sort out.

It is what passes for conventional wisdom that may have been the clearest loser with the court’s decision. Sentiment in prediction markets and among pundits had been that the law was more likely than not to be overturned.

As I wrote on Wednesday, some of these analysis may have gotten ahead of themselves in trying to read the tea leaves.

Statistical methods to predict the court’s decision, which have been more reliable than expert judgment in the past, had pointed to a case that was too close to call.

In another blow to conventional wisdom, the decision to uphold the law came in a 5-to-4 vote, but with Chief Justice Roberts voting with the four liberals on the court while Justice Anthony M. Kennedy voted with the conservatives — and he signed a strongly worded dissenting opinion that claimed the entire law should have been struck down.

This permutation had been considered unlikely by experts, most of whom had predicted a 6-to-3 ruling for the law, or a 5-to-4 ruling against it, with Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy voting together in either case. And if the decision had been 5 to 4 in favor of the law, it was thought that Justice Kennedy and not Chief Justice Roberts would have been more likely to join the majority.

Who came out looking better than the pundits? Interestingly, it may be high school students.

High school students participating in a Supreme Court “fantasy league” sponsored by the nonprofit Harlan Institute had been about evenly divided in predicting the court’s decision, with 57 percent thinking the mandate would be overturned and 43 percent saying it would be upheld.

Nor did the oral arguments in the case, which substantially affected the conventional wisdom, alter the students’ opinions much. Instead, they had seen the case as a tossup from the beginning.

I suspect these students would have been wise enough to avoid some of the counterintuitive speculation about the decision’s political effects that you will now be seeing on television.

View the original article here

Donors' push strengthens behind Romney

WASHINGTON – Republican donors rallied to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign in May. Scores of his allies wrote five-figure checks to fuel his joint fundraising with the Republican Party, and hundreds more contributed for the first time, newly filed campaign-finance reports show.

By Isaac Brekken, AP

Individuals who supported the failed campaign of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, right, donated to Mitt Romney's camp.

By Isaac Brekken, AP

Individuals who supported the failed campaign of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, right, donated to Mitt Romney's camp.

Their support helped the former Massachusetts governor surge past President Obama's fundraising totals for the first time last month, as donors rushed to unite behind the party's presumptive nominee.

More than 1,100 individuals who had donated to Romney's rivals in the battle for the GOP nomination contributed to his main campaign account last month, a USA TODAY analysis shows. The biggest share came from individuals who had backed the failed campaign of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, long a fundraising powerhouse in Republican politics.

In addition, more than 40% of the nearly $5 million raised by a pro-Romney super PAC came from first-time donors — more than a dozen of whom gave at least $50,000 each.

The Restore Our Future super PAC, which can raise and spend unlimited amounts, launched a $7.6 million advertising campaign in nine battleground states this week, attacking the president's economic record.

Romney, who survived a bruising and expensive primary fight, must sustain his pace to compete with Obama, who shattered political money records in 2008. Romney and his fundraising team, led by private-equity manager Spencer Zwick, have proved skilled at recruiting fundraisers — known as "bundlers" for their ability to bundle together contributions from relatives, friends and associates.

Romney will court and reward those bundlers this weekend at the exclusive Deer Valley resort in Utah, where they will have the chance to mingle with him, his top campaign aides and some of the party's biggest names.

"Overall, the fundraising leadership has been as well run and organized as I have seen," said Lewis Eisenberg, who chaired Sen. John McCain's presidential fundraising in 2008 and backs Romney. "The results of last month's fundraising tell the story."

Las Vegas businessman Bill Brady is among the new donors. He wrote his first check to Restore Our Future last month, donating $100,000 and gave $33,300 to Romney and the Republican National Committee in May, records show.

Brady, whose family owns companies that distribute janitorial cleaning supplies and hotel linens, said Obama's calls to end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest taxpayers has caused so much uncertainty that he's unwilling to make new business investments.

"We don't know where President Obama is going," he said. "But I have great confidence that the business community will be understood by President Romney."

Brady is among the mega-donors descending on Park City, Utah, this weekend, where donors who have contributed at least $50,000 each and the fundraisers who have collected at least $250,000 will be feted. The two-day gathering includes a cookout with Romney — along with an array of policy and strategy briefings.

Attendees include McCain and former Florida governor Jeb Bush, along with two former secretaries of State, Condoleezza Rice and James Baker. Potential Romney running mates, including Tim Pawlenty and Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, also are slated to appear.

Rewarding top-flight donors with exclusive access is standard practice in presidential campaigns. McCain mingled with fundraisers in Aspen and at his ranch in Sedona, Ariz., during the 2008 campaign. President George W. Bush entertained fundraisers at his Texas ranch.

"This event will give Gov. Romney and the leaders of our party a chance to meet, or become reacquainted, with major donors and will leave them feeling good and motivated to go out and continue raising the money needed for victory," Eisenberg said.

For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

View the original article here

USA TODAY/Gallup Poll: Latinos strongly backing Obama

WASHINGTON – President Obama has built an overwhelming lead among Latino voters, a nationwide USA TODAY/Gallup Poll of Hispanics finds, as Republican challenger Mitt Romney faces a difficult path ahead to make inroads among what has been the nation's fastest-growing ethnic group for a generation.

By Nicholas Kamm, AFP/Getty Images

President Obama announced on June 15 that the U.S. will stop deporting young law-abiding illegal immigrants who satisfy broad criteria.

By Nicholas Kamm, AFP/Getty Images

President Obama announced on June 15 that the U.S. will stop deporting young law-abiding illegal immigrants who satisfy broad criteria.

The president leads Romney 66%-25% among more than 1,000 Latino registered voters surveyed April 16 to May 31, matching his muscular showing in the 2008 election among Hispanics. Romney is in the weakest position among Latinos of any presidential contender since 1996 — and in those intervening 16 years their percentage of the electorate has doubled.

Since the poll was taken, Obama has fortified Hispanic enthusiasm by announcing he would block the deportation of an estimated 800,000 undocumented young Latinos who were brought to the United States as children. In a subsequent USA TODAY/Gallup survey, taken Wednesday-Saturday, more than eight in 10 Latinos approved of the president's action, most of them strongly.

"I've seen that affect a lot of families, so that's actually something I'm pretty much in favor of," says Jonny Rozyla, 22, a college student from Anoka, Minn., a poll respondent who was interviewed by phone. His mother was born in the United States and his father emigrated from Mexico. Rozyla says he "strongly disagrees" with Romney's statements about a controversial Arizona immigration law. "I don't think he's for the people, mostly," he says of Romney. "He's more for the rich than the poor."

Romney's troubles with Hispanic voters are likely to be spotlighted this week following the Supreme Court's ruling on Monday striking down three parts of the Arizona law. The court upheld the section of the law requiring police to check a person's immigration status when there is reasonable doubt about it.

During the GOP primaries, Romney endorsed the right of Arizona and other states to pass laws on immigration. And in recent days, he has sidestepped questions about whether he would overturn Obama's action blocking some deportations.

In a positive sign for the GOP over the long term, the poll finds a generational shift among Latinos that could open the door for Republicans as this immigrant group, like the ones that went before it, deepens its roots in the United States. But for the next four months of this election year, Romney's path is steeply uphill.

"He has the most conservative position on immigration reform of any nominee of our lifetime," Obama campaign manager Jim Messina says. "It's not the only issue Latino voters care about, but it is an important issue that shows people whose side they are on, and it's clear that Mitt Romney's against them."

Romney campaign pollster Neil Newhouse says the economy is the top issue for Latinos, as for other voters.

"President Obama's last-minute pandering to Hispanics can't make up for his record of failed policies that have resulted in Hispanics comprising fully one-third of Americans who are living in poverty," Newhouse says. "Once Hispanic voters realize the president's broken promises to their community, Gov. Romney will win more than his share of their votes. This is why our campaign has been ramping up efforts to get our message to Americans of Hispanic descent."

On Friday, Romney announced Hispanic "Juntos con Romney" ("Together with Romney") teams in 15 states, and his campaign has begun airing more TV and radio ads on Spanish-language stations. In a speech to a convention of Hispanic officials in Orlando on Thursday, he took a softer tone on immigration than he had when battling for the Republican nomination.

He received a friendly reception from NALEO, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. But Obama, who spoke Friday, got a jubilant one.

Romney's comments during the GOP primaries are creating serious obstacles for him now. He promised to veto a proposal that would provide a path to citizenship for young Latinos brought here illegally as children, and he said he wouldn't have voted to confirm the woman who became the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice.

"Running an ad that says, 'I would never vote for Sonia Sotomayor,' 'I would veto the DREAM Act' — those are really easy things to crystallize and repeat," says Sylvia Manzano, a political scientist at Texas A&M University who studies Hispanic politics.

A generational shift?

The USA TODAY Poll's findings offer encouragement for Republicans down the road. Among second-generation Latinos — that is, those whose parents were born in the United States — attitudes about the role of government shift significantly and openness to conservative policies expand.

That doesn't mean Republicans are guaranteed to gain Hispanic support over time, but it does mean there will be more opportunities for them to do so. That raises questions about the argument by some analysts that the nation's changing demographics all but ensure Democratic majorities in the future.

Consider: On a list of a half-dozen issues, Latino registered voters who immigrated to the U.S. themselves rate immigration policies, a particular sore point with the GOP, as their highest priority. Latinos whose parents were born here rank immigration last.

Parker Maldonado, 43, a financial adviser from Goddard, Kan., who was called in the poll, is more concerned about pocketbook issues and argues that other Hispanics should be, too. His grandmother came from Puerto Rico and his grandfather emigrated from Spain. "Immigration is not going to mean anything if our economy doesn't improve," he says.

Asked about the issues most important to him, Joel Gomez, 31, who emigrated from Mexico 10 years ago, praises Obama's recent step for young Hispanics. "That's a relief for Latinos," says the Maryland construction worker, who was surveyed in Spanish. "We can walk without fear through the streets."

Gomez, who became a U.S. citizen three years ago, is inclined to cast his first presidential vote for Obama. Maldonado says he is likely to vote for Romney.

In the USA TODAY survey, Latino registered voters who immigrated say by almost 5-to-1 that the government should do more to solve our country's problems (a generally liberal view) rather than saying the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses (a generally conservative view).

Among registered Hispanic voters who are the U.S.-born children of immigrants, that ratio narrows to nearly 2-1.

And among those whose parents were born in the U.S., the split is about even.

The findings are based on a nationwide poll of 1,753 Hispanic adults, including 1,005 registered voters, taken in English and Spanish from April 16 to May 31. The margin of error is +/- 3 percentage points for the full sample and +/- 4 for registered voters only. The poll was supplemented by a survey Wednesday through Saturday of 424 Hispanics.

Obama scores a wide lead among all three Hispanic groups, supported by 72% of Latino registered voters who immigrated themselves and by 69% of those with at least one immigrant parent. Among those whose parents were born in the USA, 58% support the president.

Still, Romney does twice as well among second-generation Latinos compared with immigrants. Among immigrant voters, just 18% support Romney. That number rises to 22% among the children of at least one immigrant parent and to 35% among Hispanics whose families have been in the U.S. for two generations or more.

Democratic pollster Margie Omero says she heard threads of "generational movement and shift" in a focus group of Hispanic women in Las Vegas this month that she helped run with Republican pollster Alex Bratty. The session was part of a series sponsored by Wal-Mart on middle-income women seen as swing voters and dubbed "Wal-Mart Moms."

"They talked about what their parents went through and how different that was from what they were going through, and their children," she says. "That's what we've seen with immigrant communities over our history. Each generation faces a different type of struggle, a different kind of interaction with the American community."

Obama pollster Joel Benenson cautions, though, that what he calls a "damaged" relationship between the GOP and many Hispanic voters at a time Latino political power is rising will make those negative attitudes hard to reshape, even decades from now.

"What's the defining dynamic politically at the point at which you become engaged in voting and politics?" he asks. "We've gone through people who came in through the anti-war movement or the women's movement or the civil rights movement in the late '60s, early '70s. You had Reagan Democrats… who were in the early formative years of their politics when they voted for Reagan in the '80s. Those things that are really vibrant at the time you come into the political system can shape your thinking for a long time."

A growing advantage

Whatever the long-term prospects for the GOP, in this election year Obama is solidifying the big gains he scored among Hispanics in 2008. Surveys of voters as they left polling places then found that 67% of Latinos voted for him, up by double digits from Democrat John Kerry's share four years earlier and about the same level of support he has now.

That advantage is increasingly powerful. An analysis of U.S. Census data by Mark Lopez of the non-partisan Pew Hispanic Center shows that the proportion of Latino eligible voters grew from 2008 to 2010 in seven of the 12 battleground states likely to determine November's outcome — potentially a critical margin in a close election.

Meanwhile, the Republican share of the Latino vote continues to erode, from 44% for George W. Bush in 2004 to 31% for John McCain in 2008 to 25% in the survey for Romney. "We've seen a sharp drop-off … between 2004 and 2008," acknowledges Ed Gillespie, a senior Romney adviser and former Republican Party national chairman. "It was a factor, obviously, in the margin of President Obama's win. We do need to do better with Hispanic voters, and I think we can."

GOP strategist Leslie Sanchez estimates Romney needs the votes of 35% of Latinos to be competitive in November.

A senior Obama campaign official who was willing to speak about strategy only on condition of anonymity puts the bar higher in some key states. He calculates Romney needs to get a bit more than 40% of the Hispanic vote to win the battlegrounds of Florida and Nevada, where Latinos make up a significant share of the electorate.

Harsh rhetoric and hard-line policies toward illegal immigrants have soured many Latinos toward the GOP, even those who aren't particularly concerned about immigration for themselves and their families. "It's the lens by which Hispanic voters view the Republican Party," says Sanchez, author of Los Republicanos: Why Hispanics and Republicans Need Each Other. "It's the tinted lens."

In the roundtable discussion in Las Vegas, nine Latinas talked about their lives, their families and the election. The focus group was streamed live to a small group of reporters in Washington, D.C. They saw their votes as mattering: "We're a community, and we want our voice to be heard," Karla Luarte, the mother of three, said as heads nodded around the table.

Six of the women had voted for Obama in 2008, but several expressed disappointment in him now. Some have seen family members struggle to find a job; others have had trouble holding on to their houses. They note he has failed to enact the comprehensive immigration legislation he promised during the 2008 campaign.

They didn't know much about Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, though his business experience impressed some. The aspirational message of the American dream, which is what many Republicans say they offer, struck a chord as they talked about their hopes for their children.

Still, asked which candidate they trusted more on immigration, eight hands went up for Obama and one for Romney.

Contributing: Marisol Bello, Aamer Madhani

For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

View the original article here