A Sense of Waiting for Godot for Texas Democrats

We continue our Presidential Geography series, a one-by-one examination of the peculiarities that drive the politics in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Here is a look at Texas. FiveThirtyEight spoke with James R. Henson, the director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin; Robert D. Miller, the chairman of the Public Law Group at Locke Lord L.L.P.; and Steve H. Murdock, a professor in the department of sociology at Rice University in Houston.

“It’s only a matter of time.”

For more than a decade, that thought has provided solace to the out-of-power Democrats who dream of turning Texas blue, much like it was before Ronald Reagan won the state in 1980. The appeal for Democrats is obvious. If President Obama, for example, were somehow able to carry Texas and its 38 electoral votes, the electoral math would become very difficult for Mitt Romney.

A Democratic-leaning Texas may seem like a dream, but for years such a shift has appeared almost inevitable. The Hispanic population in Texas (38 percent) is the second largest in the nation, and it is growing quickly. The African-American population (12 percent) has kept pace with the state’s overall growth. And non-Hispanic whites have been shrinking as a share of the population.

In fact, sometime after 2000, non-Hispanic whites became a minority in the state. They now make up just 45 percent of the population, making Texas the only majority minority state that reliably votes Republican.

Yet, for all the talk of a politically competitive state, the Republican grip on Texas has never loosened.

“We’ve had this discussion for 10 years now, and nothing has changed,” Mr. Miller said.

“There’s been a ‘Waiting for Godot’ nature in terms of Democrats and Latinos here,” Mr. Henson said.

All 29 statewide elective offices are held by Republicans, and Texas Democrats have been left with a series of if-onlys. If only the local party were better organized. If only national Democrats invested more money in the state. If only we could get a charismatic Hispanic candidate on the ballot. And, the most fundamental “if only” of them all: if only Hispanic turnout were stronger.

Poor turnout has dulled the impact of the state’s Hispanic population at the ballot box. Hispanics may make up 38 percent of the population, but they have never exceeded 20 percent of the electorate in presidential elections, according to exit polls.

“Latino turnout is even lower here than it is in a lot of other places,” Mr. Henson said.

Hispanic turnout is creeping up incrementally, but the non-Hispanic white vote in Texas has become overwhelmingly Republican.

The political landscape in Texas is relatively straightforward. The Democratic strongholds are limited to the major cities — Austin, El Paso, Dallas and to a lesser extent Houston and San Antonio — and the heavily Hispanic Rio Grande Valley.

Republicans are dominant everywhere else, from suburbs to small towns to ranches and farms.

Each of the main cities has a different feel and contributes something unique to the state’s economy. Houston is a center for health care and energy jobs. Austin, the capital, has a flourishing music scene and is a major center for technology start-ups. Dallas has a large African-American community (25 percent) and a little bit of everything economically.

Outside of the cities, Texas has several distinct regions. East Texas is much like northern Louisiana. It is mostly rural, religious and conservative. The Panhandle is also deeply conservative, but feels more like the Great Plains, Mr. Henson said, and includes a streak of libertarianism.

West Central Texas around Midland and Odessa is the chief oil-producing region. Over all, Texas is among the nation’s top energy-producing states, particularly in oil, natural gas and wind. The state’s booming energy industries have helped its economy weather the Great Recession relatively well.

The Bellwether: Tarrant County

The Dallas-Fort Worth area is home to over six million people, and the two cities are often grouped together. But Tarrant County, which is home to Fort Worth, and Dallas County have separate identities. Dallas is more diverse than Fort Worth, a former cattle town that now revolves around industries like defense.

Non-Hispanic whites are still a slim majority in Tarrant County, which helps make it a much better statewide bellwether than Dallas County. Tarrant County exactly matched the statewide vote in 2008, and was just 1 percentage point more Republican in both 2004 and 2000.

The Bottom Line

There is little doubt that Mr. Romney will carry Texas. He is a 99 percent favorite in the state, according to the current FiveThirtyEight forecast.

But the long-term trend seems equally clear. Despite poor turnout, the Hispanic share of the electorate has steadily climbed, from 7 percent in 1984 to 20 percent in 2008, according to exit polls.

At the same time, the non-Hispanic white vote has consistently fallen. In 1984 it was 78 percent; by 2008 it was 63 percent.

The larger question is not if Texas will become more competitive, but when, both Mr. Henson and Mr. Miller said. And that largely depends on whether Democrats can improve turnout among Hispanics. They have a few things working against them.

First, the Texas Democratic Party has been out of power for a long time, with few elections to truly contest. “The party in the state has really atrophied,” Mr. Henson said.

Second, Hispanic culture in Texas has so far not placed a high value on participating in the electoral process, Mr. Miller said.

Even if Texas Hispanics do start punching their weight, the Republicans could make efforts to win their support. Partisan allegiances among Hispanics could become more balanced.

Those obstacles notwithstanding, there is no doubt that as the minority population in Texas has grown, so too has the potential for the state to become less firmly Republican. And there are already signs of a possible future: Mayor Julián Castro of San Antonio, a rising star in Democratic politics, gave the keynote address at the national convention in Charlotte, N.C.

But that Democratic comeback — whether led by Mr. Castro or someone else — may still be years away. In the meantime, Democrats will have to continue to wait.

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Legal Battles on Voting May Prove a Critical Issue in Election

In the last few weeks, nearly a dozen decisions in federal and state courts on early voting, provisional ballots and voter identification requirements have driven the rules in conflicting directions, some favoring Republicans demanding that voters show more identification to guard against fraud and others backing Democrats who want to make voting as easy as possible.

The most closely watched cases — in the swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania — will see court arguments again this week, with the Ohio dispute possibly headed for a request for emergency review by the Supreme Court.

In Wisconsin, the home state of the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, the attorney general has just appealed to the State Supreme Court on an emergency basis to review two rulings barring its voter ID law. But even if all such cases are settled before Nov. 6 — there are others in Florida, Iowa and South Carolina — any truly tight race will most likely generate post-election litigation that could delay the final result.

“In any of these states there is the potential for disaster,” said Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. “You have close elections and the real possibility that people will say their votes were not counted when they should have been. That’s the nightmare scenario for the day after the election.”

In the 2000 presidential election, a deadlock over ballot design and tallying in parts of Florida led the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, to stop a recount of ballots, which led to George W. Bush defeating Al Gore. Since then, both parties have focused on voting procedures.

The Obama campaign, for example, brought suit in Ohio over its reduction of early voting weekends used more by blacks than other groups.

Republicans have expressed concern over what they call voter integrity. They say they fear that registration drives by liberal and community groups have bloated voter rolls with the dead and the undocumented and have created loose monitoring of who votes and low public confidence in the system. They have instituted voter identification rules, cut back on early voting and sought to purge voter lists by comparing them with others, including those of the Department of Homeland Security.

Judicial Watch, a conservative organization aimed at reducing voter fraud, says it has found that voter rolls last year in 12 states seemed to contain an ineligible number of voting-age residents when compared with 2010 census data. It is suing both Indiana and Ohio for failing to clean up their rolls in keeping with their obligations under the National Voter Registration Act.

Democrats worry about what they call voter suppression. They say that voter fraud is largely a myth and that the goal of the Republican-led laws and lawsuits is to reduce voting by minorities, the poor and the young, who tend to vote more for Democrats.

At the Democratic National Convention in North Carolina on Thursday, Representative John Lewis of Georgia expressed his party’s view on voter-related Republican-led laws when he compared them to poll taxes and literacy tests used to prevent blacks from voting in an earlier era.

“Today, it is unbelievable that there are Republican officials still trying to stop some people from voting,” he said. “They are changing the rules, cutting polling hours and imposing requirements intended to suppress the vote.”

Courts have taken a mixed view of the two sides’ claims. Voter ID laws have been both upheld as fair and struck down as discriminatory. In Pennsylvania, a state judge upheld the voter ID law, and the State Supreme Court will hear appeal arguments on Thursday.

Elsewhere recently, Democrats have won more than they have lost, but appeals are forthcoming. A federal court agreed with the Justice Department that Texas’ voter ID law was discriminatory and also struck down the state’s curtailment of voter registration; in Ohio, early voting has been restored and rules restricting voter registration drives have been struck down. The Ohio case is under appeal to the Federal Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit under expedited review. Texas will also appeal but not in time to affect this election. A Justice Department challenge to South Carolina’s voter ID law is in federal court.

In Florida, a federal court ruled last month that a year-old state law that reduced the number of early voting days to 8 from 12 could not be enforced in 5 of the 67 counties that are covered under the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. But the court suggested that extending the hours of voting over the eight-day period in those five counties would satisfy the federal requirements. Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, was able to persuade election officials in four of the counties to extend their daily hours, but the supervisor of elections in Monroe County, which includes the Florida Keys, refused, saying that the county would maintain an early voting period of 12 days.

One issue that is likely to lead to lawsuits after Election Day is that of provisional ballots. Under federal law, anyone whose identity or voting precinct is in doubt can ask for a provisional ballot at any polling station and then has a number of days to return with the required documentation to make that vote count.

Lizette Alvarez contributed reporting.

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Romney Has Conciliatory Remarks on Obama and Health Overhaul

3:09 p.m. | Updated Mitt Romney said Sunday that he would retain elements of President Obama’s health care overhaul, blamed Republicans as much as Democrats for the “mistake” of agreeing to automatic cuts in military spending to avoid a fiscal crisis and acknowledged that Mr. Obama’s national security strategy has made America in “some ways safer.”

The remarks, made in an interview on the NBC News program “Meet The Press,” seemed to mark the emergence of a less openly partisan, more general-election-oriented Republican nominee, who is intent on appealing to middle-of-the-road voters who have not yet made up their minds. At one point, Mr. Romney said that a speech on Thursday by the country’s last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, had “elevated” the party’s convention in Charlotte, N.C.

When the show’s host, David Gregory, asked Mr. Romney what elements of Mr. Obama’s health care program he would maintain, Mr. Romney said he would still require that insurance companies cover those with pre-existing conditions, just as the president’s law has.

“I’m not getting rid of all of health care reform,” Mr. Romney said, while emphasizing that he planned to replace the president’s plan with his own. “There are a number of things that I like in health care reform that I’m going to put in place. One is to make sure that those with pre-existing conditions can get coverage.”

Mr. Romney, whose standing in several national polls improved slightly after the Republican convention in Tampa, said, “I’m in a better spot than I was before the convention.”

“People got to see Ann and hear our story,” Mr. Romney said, referring to this wife. “And the result of that is I’m better known, for better or for worse.”

With the Federal Reserve contemplating actions to stimulate the economy, Mr. Romney registered his disapproval, saying that he did not think that “easing monetary policy is going to make a significant difference in the job market right now.”

Mr. Romney, who has criticized the president over the rising federal debt, said he would seek to balance the budget in 8 to 10 years, perhaps after his own potential presidency would end. Any attempt to do so in a first term, Mr. Romney said, would have “a dramatic impact on the economy — too dramatic.”

Mr. Romney said he disagreed with a compromise made last year by the White House and Congressional Republicans that called for automatic cuts to military spending as a way to force a deal on deficit reduction.

“I thought it was a mistake on the part of the White House to propose it. I think it was a mistake for Republicans to go along with it,” he said.

The interview provided another forum in which Mr. Romney was questioned about the omission in his convention speech of any mention of the war in Afghanistan. Mr. Romney seemed defensive when Mr. Gregory asked him about criticism from the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard — and from others on both sides of the ideological divide — ­ that he did not speak about the conflict in accepting his party’s nomination at the Republican convention in Tampa, Fla.

“The Weekly Standard took you to task in your convention speech for not mentioning the war in Afghanistan one time,” Mr. Gregory asked. “Was that a mistake, with so much sacrifice in two wars over the period of this last decade?”

Mr. Romney answered, “You know, I find it interesting that people are curious about mentioning words in a speech as opposed to policy,” noting that he had discussed the war in Afghanistan just before the convention, in a speech to the American Legion. “I went to the American Legion,” he said, “and spoke with our veterans there and described my policy as it relates to Afghanistan and other foreign policy and our military.”

When Mr. Gregory noted that his American Legion address did not have the same large audience as the convention speech ­ — “tens of millions of people” — Mr. Romney replied: “You know, what I’ve found is that wherever I go, I am speaking to tens of millions of people. Everything I say is picked up by you and by others, and that’s the way it ought to be.”

In leaving the war out of his convention address, Mr. Romney seemed to have left an opening for President Obama, who said in his own speech: “Tonight, we pay tribute to the Americans who still serve in harm’s way. We are forever in debt to a generation whose sacrifice has made this country safer and more respected. We will never forget you.”

Pressed on his social views, Mr. Romney reiterated that he did not think that taxpayers should have to pay for abortions and that he wanted Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Reminded that he had once called himself a “severe” conservative, Mr. Romney seemed to play down that description. “I am as conservative as the Constitution,” he said.

In an appearance in Melborune, Fla., Sunday, President Obama, picking up where former President Bill Clinton left off, said that the budget proposals offered by Mitt Romney and Paul D. Ryan do not add up.

The president was quick to jump on appearances by his Republican rivals on the Sunday morning talk shows, in which they were asked separately what loopholes they would close to pay for their proposed tax cuts. Neither of the men answered the question.

The relationship between Mr. Obama and Mr. Clinton started off rocky — Mr. Obama, after all, ran against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2008. But after Mr. Clinton’s ringing endorsement of Mr. Obama in a well-received Democratic convention speech on Thursday, the president mentioned his Democratic predecessor at every stop on a bus tour of Florida over the weekend.

“President Clinton told us the single thing missing from my opponents’ proposal was arithmetic,” Mr. Obama told a rally here, to a burst of applause.

“When my opponents were asked about it today,” Mr. Obama said, “it was like 2 plus 1 equals 5.”

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this post misstated a subject Mitt Romney addressed during his convention speech. He did not mention conflict in Afghanistan.

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Corporate Contributions and Disclosure

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010 let loose a flood of unlimited independent spending in political campaigns. It has also inspired a wave of lawsuits seeking to overturn the reasonable campaign finance restrictions that remain on the books in various states.

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

Responding to one such lawsuit last week, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit unanimously and correctly rejected a constitutional challenge to Minnesota’s ban on direct corporate contributions to state political campaigns. The court said the plaintiffs failed to recognize that the Supreme Court had made a “significant distinction” between “independent expenditures” to a campaign and direct “contributions” to a campaign that justify greater restrictions.

In the real world that is an artificial distinction — the dangers in big, influence-seeking contributions exist whether the checks go directly to a campaign or for “independent expenditures.” But the Supreme Court recognized the potential for corruption in direct campaign giving in a 2003 decision upholding the federal ban on corporate contributions — a case the Eighth Circuit cited.

Another part of the Eighth Circuit decision found aspects of Minnesota’s disclosure law for independent expenditures unduly burdensome. A narrow majority objected to provisions requiring any “association” making independent expenditures of $100 or more a year to create a “political fund,” register it with the state and file regular reports, even for periods in which it was not engaged in political activity. The dissenters said the majority had exaggerated the hardship of compliance and underappreciated the strong public interest in requiring full transparency. In Citizens United, the Supreme Court emphatically endorsed requiring broad disclosure of independent expenditures.

Importantly, the new ruling casts no doubt on the constitutionality of the urgently needed federal disclosure bill Senate Republicans succeeded in blocking in July. The legislation has no registration or reporting provisions resembling those rejected in Minnesota. Rather it would require corporations, unions and any other organized group paying for election-cycle messages to disclose expenditures of $10,000 or more within 24 hours of making them, and to identify donors who write checks of $10,000 or more. The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, and his fellow Republican obstructionists can claim no new excuse for their self-interested behavior.

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Obama Campaign Says It Beat Romney in Fund-Raising for August

12:51 a.m. | Updated The Obama campaign announced early Monday that it had raised $114 million in August, saying it had brought in more than the Romney campaign for the first time since April.

That number was released just after Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee said that their campaign had raised more than $111.6 million in August, leaving the candidate and his party with about $168.5 million in cash at the beginning of September.

Both campaigns have said they hope to raise more than three-quarters of a billion dollars, amounts that would shatter previous records for presidential spending. Neither campaign is accepting public funds for the general election campaign.

Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, said in a statement: “The key to fighting back against the special interests writing limitless checks to support Mitt Romney is growing our donor base, and we did substantially in the month of August.”

The Obama campaign said on Twitter that 98 percent of donations in August were for $250 or less. The Republican effort raised about $34.6 million in donations of less than $250, the campaign said, about a third of the total — a better showing with small donors than Mr. Romney has had in the past.

In a statement, Spencer Zwick, Mr. Romney’s finance chairman, and Reince Priebus, the R.N.C. chairman, said: “Americans are not better off than they were four years ago and they are looking for a change of leadership. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are offering bold solutions to our country’s problems – that is why we are seeing such tremendous support from donors across the country.”

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Frederick Douglass and Voter Fraud

SUPPRESSING the black vote is a very old story in America, and it has never been just a Southern thing.

In 1840, and again in 1841, the former Frederick Bailey, now Frederick Douglass, walked a few blocks from his rented apartment on Ray Street in New Bedford, Mass., to the town hall, where he paid a local tax of $1.50 to register to vote. Born a slave on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1818, Douglass escaped in an epic journey on trains and ferry boats, first to New York City, and then to the whaling port of New Bedford in 1838.

By the mid-1840s, he had emerged as one of the greatest orators and writers in American history. But legally, Douglass began his public life by committing what today we would consider voter fraud, using an assumed name.

It was a necessary step: when he registered to vote under his new identity, “Douglass,” a name he took from Sir Walter Scott’s 1810 epic poem “Lady of the Lake,” this fugitive slave was effectively an illegal immigrant in Massachusetts. He was still the legal “property” of Thomas Auld, his owner in St. Michaels, Md., and susceptible, under the federal fugitive slave law, to capture and return to slavery at any time.

It was a risky move. If required, the only identification Douglass could give the registrar may have been his address in the town directory. He possessed two pieces of paper, which would only have endangered him more. One was a fraudulent “Seaman’s Protection Paper,” which he had borrowed in Baltimore from a retired free black sailor named Stanley, who was willing to support the young man’s escape.

The second was a brief three-line certification of his marriage to Anna Murray, his free black fiancée, who joined him in New York just after his escape. A black minister, James Pennington, himself a former fugitive slave, married them, but on the document he called them Mr. and Mrs. “Johnson.” Douglass was at least the fourth name Frederick had used to distract the authorities on his quest for freedom. He once remarked that a fugitive slave had to adopt various names to survive because “among honest men an honest man may well be content with one name ... but toward fugitives, Americans are not honest.”

Should this fugitive, who had committed the crime of stealing his own freedom and living under false identities, have been allowed to vote? Voting reforms in recent decades had broadened the franchise to include men who did not hold property but certainly not to anyone who was property.

Fortunately for Douglass, at the time Massachusetts was one of only five Northern states that allowed suffrage for “free” blacks (the others were Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island).

Blacks in many other states weren’t so lucky. Aside from Maine, every state that entered the Union after 1819 excluded them from voting. Four Northern states — New York, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin — had reaffirmed earlier black voter exclusion laws by the early 1850s. A few blacks actually voted in New York, but only if they could pass a stiff property qualification. The sheer depth of racism at the base of this story is remarkable, since in no Northern state at the time, except New Jersey, did blacks constitute more than 2 percent of the population.

We do not know when Douglass cast his first vote. It might have been in 1840, in the famous “log cabin and hard cider” campaign mounted by the Whig Party for its candidate, Gen. William Henry Harrison. If so, he likely supported the Liberty Party’s James G. Birney, who represented the first genuinely antislavery party, however small, in American history; it achieved some strength in the Bay State.

In 1848 he spoke at the national convention of the newly formed Freesoil Party, and after 1854, haltingly at first and later wholeheartedly, he joined and worked for the new antislavery coalition known as the Republican Party, which ran and elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860. To this day, that “Grand Old Party” still calls itself the “party of Lincoln” and still claims Frederick Douglass as one of its black founders.

And indeed Douglass saw himself as a founder of that party, but only many years after a group of English antislavery friends purchased his freedom in 1846 for £150 ($711 at the time in American dollars). Douglass was in the midst of a triumphal two-year speaking tour of Ireland, Scotland and England; when he returned to America in 1847, he moved to New York in possession of his official “manumission papers.” He was free and legal, eventually owned property and could vote. Valued and purchased as a commodity, he could now claim to be a citizen.

David W. Blight, a professor of history at Yale, is writing a biography of Frederick Douglass.

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Clinton Was a Bipartisan President, Except When He Wasn't

Damon Winter/The New York TimesFormer President Bill Clinton was greeted with an extended standing ovation at the Democratic convention on Wednesday.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Perhaps only Bill Clinton could deliver one of the most brutal partisan poundings of the other party in recent memory and come out of it with people talking about how bipartisan he is.

For 48 minutes on Wednesday night, he extolled the virtues of working with Republicans, then eviscerated them as dangerous radicals. He offered more abundant praise of George W. Bush than most prime-time speakers at the Republican convention, then said he had left President Obama “a total mess.”

“It was a pretty bipartisan speech relative to a convention,” Howard Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chairman and Vermont governor, said on CBS News on Thursday morning.

Former Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, another former party chairman, pointed out the caveat. “It was bipartisan,” he said. “It was a little bit like giving someone flowers at the same time you’re taking a scalpel and dissecting them.”

In that sense, the speech was a vivid reminder of Mr. Clinton’s famed capacity for juggling many different ideas, personas and narratives, and along the way rewriting the history of his own presidency. The story line of a relatively bipartisan era when Democrats and Republicans came together to overhaul welfare, balance the budget and expand the economy profoundly oversimplifies a much more complicated, messier presidency.

As it happens, the revised version of history is something of a bipartisan conspiracy. As much as Mr. Clinton wants to emphasize those elements of his record, so now do Republicans, as a way of contrasting the popular Mr. Clinton with the not-so-popular Mr. Obama. They have praised Mr. Clinton as a bipartisan centrist, as opposed to the leftist Mr. Obama.

“Bill Clinton was a different kind of Democrat than Barack Obama,” Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, told CNN before the former president’s speech. “Bill Clinton gave us welfare reform. Bill Clinton worked with the Republicans to cut spending. Bill Clinton did not play the kind of political games that President Obama’s playing.”

After the speech, Mitt Romney’s campaign pressed home that theme. “President Clinton drew a stark contrast between himself and President Obama tonight,” said Ryan Williams, a campaign spokesman. “Bill Clinton worked with Republicans, balanced the budget and after four years he could say you were better off. Barack Obama hasn’t worked across the aisle.”

It is certainly true that Mr. Clinton in his instincts and messaging was more centrist than Mr. Obama, and the 42nd president emerged from the White House with a string of achievements that both parties laid claim to. But to say that Mr. Clinton worked together with Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Republicans on welfare, spending, trade and other issues is an exercise in selective amnesia.

Mr. Clinton’s first major budget plan passed Congress without a single Republican vote. Once Mr. Gingrich’s party took over Congress in the 1994 midterm elections, the two men clashed over spending so fiercely that the government was shut down. The two sides eventually drafted a plan to balance the budget, but it was made considerably easier by an economy that was growing so fast that few genuinely hard choices had to be made – and in fact the budget became balanced years before it was envisioned because of unexpectedly strong tax revenues.

Likewise, many talk today about how Mr. Clinton and Republicans worked together on overhauling welfare. Not exactly. Mr. Clinton had long supported limiting the number of years that recipients could receive benefits, requiring work in many instances and providing child care, training and other assistance to make that possible.

But he strongly opposed Mr. Gingrich’s more conservative vision of welfare and twice vetoed Republican proposals before bowing to the political winds in an election year and signing a third, somewhat modified version. Even then, he spoke out against limits on benefits to legal immigrants and promised to overhaul the overhaul.

By the time he appeared at the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte on Wednesday night, Mr. Clinton was grayer and memories fuzzier. The fights of his generation have faded with time, and the accomplishments have been accordioned into simple sentences. At some points it even seemed that Mr. Clinton had forgotten some of the harshest moments of his own time in the White House.

“Though I often disagree with Republicans,” he said, “I never learned to hate them the way the far right that now controls their party seems to hate President Obama and the Democrats.”

This from the man who was hated so much by Republicans that they impeached him for lying under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky – and who loathed a number of his enemies back.

But Mr. Clinton, more than most politicians, has always been able to reimagine himself and his place in America, and he has a knack for eventually reconciling with those he battled against.

He beat the elder George Bush in 1992, then once out of office became such good friends with him that they hang out in the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, Me. He beat Bob Dole for re-election in 1996, then bestowed on him the Medal of Freedom. He campaigned against George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 but now travels the country with him giving joint speeches.

He even broke bread at points with conservative figures like Richard Mellon Scaife, Rupert Murdoch and Christopher Ruddy who were among his biggest antagonists in the 1990s. (The one exception has always been Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel who investigated his attempts to cover up his affair with Ms. Lewinsky in a sexual harassment lawsuit. “That’s another kettle of fish,” he once said.)

In any case, Mr. Clinton’s speech on Wednesday night was seen as a template for Mr. Obama, an example of how to run in a difficult year. “Cooperation works better,” Mr. Clinton said and noted the various Republicans Mr. Obama had appointed. But he went on to say that Republican plans “will hurt poor kids,” explode the debt, “force seniors to pay more for drugs,” cut taxes for millionaires and raise them for the middle class.

“They want to go back to the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place,” he said. Then he appropriated the Republicans’ greatest recent hero, Ronald Reagan. “As another president once said, there they go again.”

The truth is that party conventions and election campaigns are partisan affairs. If Mr. Clinton provided any lesson for the current president on Wednesday, it might not be in how to be bipartisan, but how to be partisan and win while not looking like it.

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What to Watch For in Obama's Speech

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — President Obama takes the stage Thursday night competing against a formidable array of convention speakers: Mitt Romney, Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton — and Barack Obama.

Not easy. Still, one thing Mr. Obama has proved over the years is that he can deliver the big speech, particularly when he might be backed into a corner. And Mr. Obama has a big advantage here: He is going last.

Here are a few things to watch out for when Mr. Obama takes the stage.

• One of Mr. Romney’s most effective arguments last week was directed at Obama voters of 2008. The president, Mr. Romney said, was a perfectly nice man who was over his head in the White House, and it was O.K., he said, to vote against him as expression of disappointment. Nothing personal. Mr. Obama is going to have to find a way to turn that back. He might argue to disappointed supporters that they should stick with him through this election, appealing to their reservoir of personal affection. But he could also try to simply demonize Mr. Romney.

• Speaking of which, how much will the name “Mitt Romney” be heard Thursday night? Mr. Obama has attacked Mr. Romney, harshly and often, on the campaign trail over the last few weeks, particularly on his business background and his refusal to release more years of tax returns. Many Democrats have warned that Mr. Obama risked dragging himself down with those kinds of partisan attacks, and some suspect that they have pushed down his unfavorable ratings in some polls. And a national television audience is a different venue than a campaign rally, so there is a pretty strong argument not to reprise them here, particularly because so many previous speakers have already taken on Mr. Romney.

Still, Mr. Obama has a rare opportunity to draw the contrast between himself and Mr. Romney on issues and what they will do as president, and turn this fall campaign into the kind of election he has always said he wanted: a starkly different choice between two visions of government’s role in America’s future. On Wednesday night, Mr. Clinton offered Mr. Obama a road map on how to present that choice, and Mr. Obama is not too proud to take such advice from the last Democratic president.

• The so-called peanut gallery — strategists, columnists, contributors and the like — have not shied from offering their suggestions on what Mr. Obama should put in the speech. One of the most striking suggestions was to use this speech to lay out a detailed and politically ambitious plan to deal with the deficit. That seems unlikely, but you never know.

• Mr. Obama’s campaign has, not surprisingly, tried to keep a lid on details of the speech. But he put out a Web-only video on Thursday that offered a bit of a preview of what he will say, called “Promises Kept.” “From cutting taxes for middle-class families to bringing about comprehensive health care reform to reinvesting in education and infrastructure, President Obama has kept his promise to rebuild America for millions of families,” the video said.

• This convention has been notable for the repeated focus, every night, on social issues: There has been talk about abortion rights, contraception, same-sex marriage and the lifting of the ban on gays serving openly in the military. The issues play well inside the convention; but perhaps not as well across the country. Will Mr. Obama feel a need to spend much time talking about these issues, or has that box already been checked?

• Latino voters have been one of the main targets of this convention — witness the lineup of speakers — but Mr. Obama has had at times rocky relations with these voters because of what many saw as his delay in pushing an overhaul of the immigration law and the administration’s aggressive crackdown on illegal immigrants. He helped himself by issuing an executive action delaying deportation proceedings against many young immigrants who are in this country illegally. Still, immigration seems like one topic that is going to be hard for Mr. Obama to avoid.

• Mr. Obama’s aides said this would be a forward-looking speech, and Mr. Clinton certainly helped a lot by making the case against Republicans and their conduct over the last four years. But watch to see the extent to which Mr. Obama blames Republicans for struggles during his first term. Might Mr. Obama acknowledge some errors over his first four years?

• Thursday night’s speech was originally supposed to be in a stadium — a reprise of Mr. Obama’s triumphant convention speech in Denver four years ago — but fear of bad weather prompted convention organizers to move it back inside. That means a smaller crowd and, at least, potentially less energy. It also means that unlike last time, this will look like just another convention speech in an arena. Whether anyone outside the arena will notice is another question.

One big loss (unless convention planners pulled off a miracle Wednesday night): Not enough time to string up the balloon drop that photographers so love.

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The Ryan Sinkhole

Unlike the Republican platform, which has mostly been ignored outside of the abortion issue, the Paul Ryan budget is the core document of the 2012 campaign. It is the most explicit expression of the Republican agenda, endorsed by the party’s presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, and backed by decisive majorities of House and Senate Republicans.

That much is known. What people have not been talking about enough is that the Ryan budget contains an $897 billion sinkhole: massive but unexplained cuts in such discretionary domestic programs as education, food and drug inspection, workplace safety, environmental protection and law enforcement.

The scope of the cuts – stunning in their breadth — is hidden. To find the numbers, turn to page 16 of the Concurrent Resolution on the Budget – Fiscal Year 2013. In Table 2, Fiscal Year 2013 Budget Resolution Discretionary Spending, in the far right hand column, you’ll see the nearly $897 billion figure, which appears on the line marked “BA” for Budget Authority under Allowances (920) as $896,884 (because these figures are listed in millions of dollars).

According to the House Budget Committee, of which Ryan is the chairman:

The federal budget is divided into approximately 20 categories known as budget functions. These functions include all spending for a given topic, regardless of the federal agency that oversees the individual federal program. Both the president’s budget, submitted annually, and Congress’ budget resolution, passed annually, comprise these approximately 20 functions.

Within the 20 “budget functions” lurks — at number 19 — “Function 920.” In a masterpiece of bureaucratic obscurantism, the explanation provided by budget committee reads as follows:

FUNCTION 920: ALLOWANCES

Function 920 represents a category called “allowances” that captures the budgetary effects of cross-cutting proposals or contingencies that impact multiple functions rather than one specific area of the budget. It also represents a place-holder category for any budgetary impacts that the Congressional Budget Office has yet to assign to a specific budget function. C.B.O. typically reassigns the budgetary effects of any legislation enacted within Function 920 once a new baseline update is released.

Mary Altaffer/Associated PressPaul Ryan t-shirt.

The importance of the nearly $1 trillion in unexplained and unspecified cuts that Ryan and the Republican party are proposing, under the catch-all rubric of “Function 920: Allowances,” cannot be overestimated. These invisible cuts are crucial to the Republican claim that the Ryan budget proposal will drastically reduce the federal deficit (eliminating it entirely in the long run) and ultimately erase the national debt.

Ryan’s plan was passed 228-191 by the House on March 29, 2012, with no Democrats voting yes. On May 16, the Senate rejected the plan by a vote of 58-41. The vote among Senate Republicans was 41-4 in favor.

While the Ryan budget does specify cuts in programs serving the poor, many of whom are Democratic constituents (Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment benefits), it hides under the abstruse veil of “Function 920 allowances” the cuts in programs popular with many other voters.

This maneuver stands in stark contrast to Ryan’s campaign rhetoric. At a rally last Tuesday in Westlake, Ohio, Ryan declared:

We will not duck the tough issues. We will not kick the can down the road.

Romney and Ryan have made their willingness to stand tall and to confront forthrightly the problems facing the nation a central theme of their campaign. In Ryan’s words, again from Westlake:

We will lead. We will not blame others for four years; we will take responsibility and fix this country’s problems.

The lack of detail in the Ryan budget applies mainly to programs of importance to the voters Republicans continue to angle for, including swing voters concerned about programs like education, environmental protection and food safety.

Interviews I conducted with New Hampshire voters last month reveal the political liabilities of telling potential Republican voters exactly what the Romney-Ryan ticket intends to cut. Two voters, both Republicans, told me they could not bring themselves to vote for their party this year because the Ryan budget cuts spending for veterans’ benefits.

In an interview days after Romney announced on a Saturday that he had picked Ryan, George Lemieux said, “Based on what Romney did this weekend, I would not vote for him.” Lemieux, a 67-year-old Vietnam War veteran who spent 26 years in the Army, declared that “Ryan wants to decimate Medicare; he wants to decimate the V.A. I have a brother who is dependent on V.A. disability, and he wants to cut it out entirely.”

“The Ryan budget will kill everybody,” said Aura-Lee Nicodemus, another woman I met, who works at the V.A. Medical Center in White River Junction, Vt. and is active in the advocacy organization, Disabled American Veterans. “I’m a registered Republican and I can’t vote for Romney. His actions speak louder than words.”

There is a clear rationale for their concerns.

Under the Ryan budget, “Mandatory and Defense and Nondefense Discretionary Spending” – which includes Function 920 Allowances, but excludes Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — would fall from 12.5 percent of Gross Domestic Product in 2011 to 6.75 percent in 2023, 5.75 percent in 2030, 4.75 percent in 2040 and 3.75 percent in 2050, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.

The C.B.O. cautiously notes how difficult it would be to cut such spending to 3.75 percent of G.D.P.:

By comparison, spending in this category has exceeded 8 percent of G.D.P. in every year since World War II. Spending for defense alone has not been lower than 3 percent of G.D.P. in any year during that period.

Romney, in fact, has committed himself to keeping the Pentagon budget (Function 050) at 4 percent of G.D.P. By 2050, that would leave zilch under the Ryan plan for such separately funded programs as Veterans Benefits (Function 700); the administration of justice, including the F.B.I. (Function 750); Education, Train and Social Services (Function 500), and pretty much anything else.

The big question posed by the comments of the two defecting Republicans I interviewed in New Hampshire is: are Romney and Ryan so committed to the principle of deficit reduction that they are willing, in an election year, to take on veterans? That would be extraordinary. The answer is no.

I emailed the Romney campaign. Here’s what I asked:

Talking to voters in New Hampshire, some veterans voiced strong concerns over the scope of likely cuts to the V.A. in the Ryan budget. Has Governor Romney said what will happen to veterans’ benefits under his administration?

The campaign immediately disputed any suggestion that the ticket supported cuts in services for veterans. Here is the Romney campaign’s emailed response:

That is false. Here are the facts:

- The House-passed Fiscal Year 2013 budget matches the President’s discretionary request for veterans for fiscal year 2013: $61.3 billion. Over the ten-year window, the House-passed budget is actually above the President’s request on both the mandatory and discretionary side of the ledger.

- On the mandatory side, the House Republican budget calls for $270 million more than President’s request. On the discretionary side, the House Republican budget calls for $16.4 billion more than President’s request, increasing America’s funding for services and benefits earned by veterans.

In an accompanying statement, Andrea Saul, the Romney campaign spokeswoman, said:

Gov. Romney opposes President Obama’s plan of drastic cuts to veterans’ benefits and the military while exploding the federal budget elsewhere. President Obama’s own V.A. Secretary has admitted that Obama’s devastating defense budget cuts put veterans’ funding at risk for an arbitrary across-the-board cut. Gov. Romney and Paul Ryan are committed to keeping faith with our veterans and providing the care they so richly deserve.

Hmm. How does this fit with the deficit-reducing claims of the Ryan budget and with Ryan’s boast that “We will not duck the tough issues? We will not kick the can down the road?”

It turns out that a reading of the Ryan budget — if you don’t parse Function 920 — is deceptive. In the case of veterans’ benefits, for example, Andrea Saul’s claim that the Romney-Ryan ticket is “committed to keeping faith with our veterans” appears, on the surface, to be legitimate, because none of the mysterious Function 920 cuts show up in her computations.

If veterans’ benefits are to be protected, what programs will be on the chopping block to achieve the $897 billion in cuts listed under the mysterious “Function 920 allowances” category? Will it be education or food inspectors, air traffic controllers or homeland security?

The Ryan budget does, in fact, “duck the tough issues.” Ryan claims to be proposing major steps toward a balanced budget and long-term debt reduction, but he doesn’t really tell voters how he is going to get there.

Interestingly, the budget proposed by President Obama does specify where cuts would be made, including those called for in the Budget Control Act, the measure approved by Congress and signed into law on August 2, 2011, as part of the deal to raise the debt ceiling and to avoid default on government debt.

A statement in the Obama administration budget claims credit for making explicit the “difficult trade offs” to reach spending reduction goals:

In the Budget Control Act, both parties in Congress and the President agreed to tight spending caps that reduce discretionary spending by $1 trillion over 10 years. This budget reflects that decision. Thus, for all the priority areas we are investing in, difficult trade-offs had to be made to meet these very tight caps. Discretionary spending is reduced from 8.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2011 to 5.0 percent in 2022.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the omissions in the Ryan budget is the failure of Obama and other Democrats to capitalize on it.

Leading Democrats I spoke to, who refused to be identified because they did not want to be quoted faulting their own party, cited two factors limiting their ability to mount a counter-attack. First, the complexity of the issue makes it difficult for reporters to understand and write about the subject. After wading my way through all of this, I know what they mean. Second, the Ryan tactic of obscuring the cuts successfully plays to a fundamental ambivalence that amounts to an internal contradiction in public opinion: strong support for spending cuts in the abstract, but opposition to many specific cuts in programs that have popular support.

In a speech on April 3 at the Associated Press luncheon in Washington, Obama tried to make the case against Ryan well before he was picked to run for vice president. Applying the $897 billion in cuts under “Function 920 Allowances” to domestic spending programs, Obama projected a future scenario:

The year after next, nearly 10 million college students would see their financial aid cut by an average of more than $1,000 each.  There would be 1,600 fewer medical grants, research grants for things like Alzheimer’s and cancer and AIDS.  There would be 4,000 fewer scientific research grants, eliminating support for 48,000 researchers, students, and teachers.  Investments in clean energy technologies that are helping us reduce our dependence on foreign oil would be cut by nearly a fifth.

If this budget becomes law and the cuts were applied evenly, starting in 2014, over 200,000 children would lose their chance to get an early education in the Head Start program.  Two million mothers and young children would be cut from a program that gives them access to healthy food.  There would be 4,500 fewer federal grants at the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. to combat violent crime, financial crime, and help secure our borders.  Hundreds of national parks would be forced to close for part or all of the year.  We wouldn’t have the capacity to enforce the laws that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, or the food that we eat.

Cuts to the F.A.A. would likely result in more flight cancellations, delays, and the complete elimination of air traffic control services in parts of the country. Over time, our weather forecasts would become less accurate because we wouldn’t be able to afford to launch new satellites. And that means governors and mayors would have to wait longer to order evacuations in the event of a hurricane.

Ryan, in the meantime, remains consistent. Two days after his speech in Westlake, on Sept. 6, he reiterated his claims at a rally in Colorado Springs:

So here is our commitment. We are not going to duck the tough issues and kick the can down the road. We are going to lead and fix this mess in Washington. And we are not going to spend the next four years blaming people from the last four years. We’re going to take responsibility and get the job done, reach across the aisle and fix this problem, get people back to work, create jobs, growth.

In an interview, Christopher Van Hollen Jr. of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, told me that the Ryan budget “is a shell game designed to hide the damage to the country.” Van Hollen is frustrated that the damage to which he alludes has not become a campaign issue: “The magnitude of this budget gimmick takes your breath away.”

Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics,” which was published earlier this year.

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Voter Suppression, Then and Now

New Haven

SUPPRESSING the black vote is a very old story in America, and it has never been just a Southern thing.

In 1840, and again in 1841, the former Frederick Bailey, now Frederick Douglass, walked a few blocks from his rented apartment on Ray Street in New Bedford, Mass., to the town hall, where he paid a local tax of $1.50 to register to vote. Born a slave on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1818, Douglass escaped in an epic journey on trains and ferry boats, first to New York City, and then to the whaling port of New Bedford in 1838.

By the mid-1840s, he had emerged as one of the greatest orators and writers in American history. But legally, Douglass began his public life by committing what today we would consider voter fraud, using an assumed name.

Kevin Stanton

It was a necessary step: when he registered to vote under his new identity, “Douglass,” a name he took from Sir Walter Scott’s 1810 epic poem“Lady of the Lake,”this fugitive slave was effectively an illegal immigrant in Massachusetts. He was still the legal “property” of Thomas Auld, his owner in St. Michaels, Md., and susceptible, under the federal fugitive slave law, to capture and return to slavery at any time.

It was a risky move. If required, the only identification Douglass could give the registrar may have been his address in the town directory. He possessed two pieces of paper, which would only have endangered him more. One was a fraudulent “Seaman’s Protection Paper,” which he had borrowed in Baltimore from a retired free black sailor named Stanley, who was willing to support the young man’s escape.

The second was a brief three-line certification of his marriage to Anna Murray, his free black fiancée, who joined him in New York just after his escape. A black minister, James Pennington, himself a former fugitive slave, married them, but on the document he called them Mr. and Mrs.“Johnson.”Douglass was at least the fourth name Frederick had used to distract the authorities on his quest for freedom. He once remarked that a fugitive slave had to adopt various names to survive because “among honest men an honest man may well be content with one name … but toward fugitives, Americans are not honest.”

Should this fugitive, who had committed the crime of stealing his own freedom and living under false identities, have been allowed to vote? Voting reforms in recent decades had broadened the franchise to include men who did not hold property but certainly not to anyone who was property.

Fortunately for Douglass, at the time Massachusetts was one of only five Northern states that allowed suffrage for “free” blacks (the others were Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island).

Blacks in many other states weren’t so lucky. Aside from Maine, every state that entered the Union after 1819 excluded them from voting. Four Northern states — New York, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin — had reaffirmed earlier black voter exclusion laws by the early 1850s. A few blacks actually voted in New York, but only if they could pass a stiff property qualification. The sheer depth of racism at the base of this story is remarkable, since in no Northern state at the time, except New Jersey, did blacks constitute more than 2 percent of the population.

We do not know when Douglass cast his first vote. It might have been in 1840, in the famous “log cabin and hard cider” campaign mounted by the Whig Party for its candidate, Gen. William Henry Harrison. If so, he likely supported the Liberty Party’s James G. Birney, who represented the first genuinely antislavery party, however small, in American history; it achieved some strength in the Bay State.

In 1848 he spoke at the national convention of the newly formed Freesoil Party, and after 1854, haltingly at first and later wholeheartedly, he joined and worked for the new antislavery coalition known as the Republican Party, which ran and elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860. To this day, that “Grand Old Party” still calls itself the “party of Lincoln” and still claims Frederick Douglass as one of its black founders.

And indeed Douglass saw himself as a founder of that party, but only many years after a group of English antislavery friends purchased his freedom in 1846 for £150 ($711 at the time in American dollars). Douglass was in the midst of a triumphal two-year speaking tour of Ireland, Scotland and England; when he returned to America in 1847, he moved to New York in possession of his official “manumission papers.” He was free and legal, eventually owned property and could vote. Valued and purchased as a commodity, he could now claim to be a citizen.

A series about the complexities of voters and voting.

In Douglass’s greatest speech, the Fourth of July oration in 1852, he argued that often the only way to describe American hypocrisy about race was with “scorching irony,” “biting ridicule” and “withering sarcasm.” Today’s Republican Party seems deeply concerned with rooting out voter fraud of the kind Douglass practiced. So, with Douglass’s story as background, I have a modest proposal for it. In the 23 states where Republicans have either enacted voter-ID laws or shortened early voting hours in urban districts, and consistent with their current reigning ideology, they should adopt a simpler strategy of voter suppression.

To those potentially millions of young, elderly, brown and black registered voters who, despite no evidence of voter fraud, they now insist must obtain government ID, why not merely offer money? Pay them not to vote. Give each a check for $711 in honor of Frederick Douglass. Buy their “freedom,” and the election. Call it the “Frederick Douglass Voter Voucher.”

Give people a choice: take the money and just not vote, or travel miles without easy transportation to obtain a driver’s license they do not need. It’s their “liberty”; let them decide how best to use it. Perhaps they will forget their history as much as the Republican Party seems to wish the nation would.

Such an offer would be only a marginal expense for a “super PAC” — plus a bit more to cover the lawyers needed to prove it legal under federal election law — and no one would have to know who paid for this generous effort to stop fraud. Once and for all, the right can honestly declare what the Supreme Court has allowed it to practice: that voters are commodities, not citizens.

And, if the Republican Party wins the election in November, this plan will give it a splendid backdrop for next year’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of its great founder’s Emancipation Proclamation.

David W. Blight, a professor of history at Yale, is writing a biography of Frederick Douglass.

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Ryan Defends His 'Yes' Vote on Automatic Defense Cuts

WASHINGTON – Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Republican nominee for vice president, on Sunday defended his decision to support automatic cuts in defense spending as a way to force a deal on reducing the deficit, an approach that was sharply criticized by his running mate, Mitt Romney.

Mr. Ryan said that he backed the deal, which could result in an automatic 8 percent cut in defense spending in January, in an effort to compromise with Democrats on deficit reduction.

“I worked with President Obama to find common ground to get a down payment on deficit reduction,” Mr. Ryan said on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.” “It wasn’t a big down payment, but it was a step in the right direction.”

Mr. Ryan emphasized that he and his fellow House Republicans had come up with alternative spending cuts to prevent the automatic reductions from taking effect. He accused Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats of failing to do their part.

“We passed, in the House, a bill to prevent those devastating defense cuts by cutting spending elsewhere,” Mr. Ryan said. “The Senate’s done nothing. President Obama’s done nothing.”

“We wanted to have a bipartisan agreement; we got that,” he added. “And the president hasn’t fulfilled his end of that bipartisan agreement.”

The House bill, which Mr. Ryan wrote and Senate Democrats oppose, would stave off reductions in military spending by cutting safety-net programs for the poor, including food stamps, school lunch subsidies and children’s health insurance.

Mr. Obama said in an interview broadcast on Sunday that any budget deal should require the wealthiest Americans to do their part by paying higher taxes, an approach that has been rejected by Mr. Ryan and Mr. Romney.

In a “Face the Nation” interview, Mr. Obama said that he was “willing to do more” to work with Republicans to find additional spending cuts. ”But we’ve also got to ask people like me or Governor Romney who have done better than anybody else over the course of the last decade, and whose taxes are just about lower than they’ve been in the last 50 years, to do a little bit more.”

At the Democratic National Convention, former President Bill Clinton accused Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan of planning to eliminate tax deductions that help the middle class and the poor, including for home mortgages and charitable donations, to cover the costs of their proposed tax cuts.

In a separate appearance on the ABC News program “This Week,” Mr. Ryan declined to say whether that was true.

“Our priorities are high-income earners should not get these kinds of loopholes,” said Mr. Ryan, who repeatedly refused to specify the particular loopholes he had in mind.

“We want to have this debate with Congress,” he said. “And we want to do this with the consent of the elected representatives of the people and figure out what loopholes should stay or go and who should or should not get them.”

On foreign policy, Mr. Ryan told the host of “This Week,” George Stephanopolous, that he and Mr. Romney agreed with Mr. Obama’s plan to leave Afghanistan by 2014. But he said he feared that the troops lacked adequate resources.

“Where we’ve taken issue is making sure that the generals on the ground get the resources they need throughout the entire fighting season so that they can keep our soldiers safe and operating counterinsurgency strategy,” said Mr. Ryan, who described the killing of Osama bin Laden ”a great success.”

Mr. Ryan also defended Mr. Romney, who has been criticized by Democrats for describing Russia as the country’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe.”

On “Face the Nation,” Mr. Ryan said that a nuclear Iran was the United States’ biggest foreign policy threat, and that Mr. Romney meant to say that “among the other powers, China and Russia, that Russia stands as a great threat.”

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Akin Defends Cashflow After Ad Dispute

It’s not quite “Mad Men Missouri,” but a little drama is playing out in a dispute between a beleaguered Senate candidate and a television ad department in the state.

The candidate is Representative Todd Akin, a Republican who is on the defensive for remarks he made in his campaign against Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat. The television station is KOMU-8, an NBC affiliate in Colombia, Mo., that reported that it had pulled Mr. Akin’s ads midway through its intended run because of an unpaid bill.

The report immediately prompted questions about whether Mr. Akin had the cash to go forward with his bid.

His campaign has been operating without help from national Republican groups after he said on Aug. 19 that women’s bodies could often prevent pregnancy in cases of “legitimate rape,” and G.O.P. leaders, including Mitt Romney, have urged him to step aside.

But speculation that the campaign is beset by both unpaid bills and empty war chests are “factually false,” said Rick Tyler, a senior adviser to Mr. Akin’s campaign.

“In the last 18 days, we have raised over $400,000 online alone,” Mr. Tyler said. While he would not say how much of that is in the bank, he insisted the campaign was not in debt.

As for the ads, according to Mr. Tyler, the Akin campaign booked – and paid for – half a week of ads, thinking they would probably re-up for the rest of the week. And they did, he said – “but a day later.”

Tom Dugan, the general sales manager at KOMU, said the campaign booked a full week of ads, but only paid for half.

Both sides agree that after KOMU’s news division ran an article saying the ads had been pulled because of lack of payment, the Akin campaign canceled its remaining buy.

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Obstruct and Exploit

There were good reasons for these positive assessments. Although you’d never know it from political debate, worldwide experience since the financial crisis struck in 2008 has overwhelmingly confirmed the proposition that fiscal policy “works,” that temporary increases in spending boost employment in a depressed economy (and that spending cuts increase unemployment). The Jobs Act would have been just what the doctor ordered.

But the bill went nowhere, of course, blocked by Republicans in Congress. And now, having prevented Mr. Obama from implementing any of his policies, those same Republicans are pointing to disappointing job numbers and declaring that the president’s policies have failed.

Think of it as a two-part strategy. First, obstruct any and all efforts to strengthen the economy, then exploit the economy’s weakness for political gain. If this strategy sounds cynical, that’s because it is. Yet it’s the G.O.P.’s best chance for victory in November.

But are Republicans really playing that cynical a game?

You could argue that we’re having a genuine debate about economic policy, in which Republicans sincerely believe that the things Mr. Obama proposes would actually hurt, not help, job creation. However, even if that were true, the fact is that the economy we have right now doesn’t reflect the policies the president wanted.

Anyway, do Republicans really believe that government spending is bad for the economy? No.

Right now Mitt Romney has an advertising blitz under way in which he attacks Mr. Obama for possible cuts in defense spending — cuts, by the way, that were mandated by an agreement forced on the president by House Republicans last year. And why is Mr. Romney denouncing these cuts? Because, he says, they would cost jobs!

This is classic “weaponized Keynesianism” — the claim that government spending can’t create jobs unless the money goes to defense contractors, in which case it’s the lifeblood of the economy. And no, it doesn’t make any sense.

What about the argument, which I hear all the time, that Mr. Obama should have fixed the economy long ago? The claim goes like this: during his first two years in office Mr. Obama had a majority in Congress that would have let him do anything he wanted, so he’s had his chance.

The short answer is, you’ve got to be kidding.

As anyone who was paying attention knows, the period during which Democrats controlled both houses of Congress was marked by unprecedented obstructionism in the Senate. The filibuster, formerly a tactic reserved for rare occasions, became standard operating procedure; in practice, it became impossible to pass anything without 60 votes. And Democrats had those 60 votes for only a few months. Should they have tried to push through a major new economic program during that narrow window? In retrospect, yes — but that doesn’t change the reality that for most of Mr. Obama’s time in office U.S. fiscal policy has been defined not by the president’s plans but by Republican stonewalling.

The most important consequence of that stonewalling, I’d argue, has been the failure to extend much-needed aid to state and local governments. Lacking that aid, these governments have been forced to lay off hundreds of thousands of schoolteachers and other workers, and those layoffs are a major reason the job numbers have been disappointing. Since bottoming out a year after Mr. Obama took office, private-sector employment has risen by 4.6 million; but government employment, which normally rises more or less in line with population growth, has instead fallen by 571,000.

Put it this way: When Republicans took control of the House, they declared that their economic philosophy was “cut and grow” — cut government, and the economy will prosper. And thanks to their scorched-earth tactics, we’ve actually had the cuts they wanted. But the promised growth has failed to materialize — and they want to make that failure Mr. Obama’s fault.

Now, all of this puts the White House in a difficult bind. Making a big deal of Republican obstructionism could all too easily come across as whining. Yet this obstructionism is real, and arguably is the biggest single reason for our ongoing economic weakness.

And what happens if the strategy of obstruct-and-exploit succeeds? Is this the shape of politics to come? If so, America will have gone a long way toward becoming an ungovernable banana republic.

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Cutting the Deficit, Compassionately - Economic View

Thanks to former President George W. Bush — remember the compassionate conservative? — I have a good name for the fundamental principle that should guide the Democratic alternative: compassionate deficit reduction. The essence is to cut the deficit in a way that does as little harm as possible to people, jobs and economic opportunity. This principle was implicit in much of what President Obama proposed in his 2013 budget, and in what he said about the deficit at the Democratic convention on Thursday. But embracing it more explicitly would improve the substance of the president’s plan, and make it easier to explain to voters.

The first tenet is to go slowly. Investors are willing to lend to the United States at the lowest interest rates in our history. That gives us the ability to cut the deficit on our own timetable. We should pass a comprehensive, aggressive deficit reduction plan as soon as possible, but the actual spending cuts and tax increases should be phased in as the economy recovers.

Why is this the compassionate approach? Because immediate, extreme austerity would plunge us back into recession. The Congressional Budget Office set off alarm bells a few weeks ago when it said that going over the fiscal cliff — a reference to the nearly $500 billion of automatic fiscal contraction scheduled for the start of 2013 — would cause a rapid rise in unemployment. Well, duh.

A crude rule of thumb is that every $100 billion of deficit reduction will cost close to a million jobs in the near term. If that isn’t a reason to move gradually, what is? But if you need another, just look at Europe.

A concrete way to adjust gradually is to pair serious long-run deficit reduction measures with equally serious, near-term jobs measures — like a sizable short-run infrastructure program and a one-year continuation of the payroll tax cut for working families first passed in 2010. President Obama advocated both in his proposed American Jobs Act last September.

Even better would be to give businesses increasing employment a tax credit so large they couldn’t help but notice it, and state and local governments a round of aid generous enough to finally stop the hemorrhaging of teacher jobs and essential government services.

A second feature of compassionate deficit reduction is well-designed tax reform that raises at least some additional revenue. Our budget problems are so large that solving them entirely through spending cuts would devastate the social safety net and slash investments essential for long-run growth and economic opportunity. So revenue increases must be part of the package.

President Obama has repeatedly urged Congress to let the Bush tax cuts expire for those earning more than $250,000 a year. Increasing rates on top earners is an obvious way to raise revenue from those who can afford it most.

Many experts also recommend raising revenue by lowering tax expenditures — the roughly $1 trillion of deductions, credits and loopholes in the income tax code. Cutting tax expenditures would probably have fewer undesirable incentive effects than raising marginal tax rates. But it’s important to move carefully. Many tax expenditures, like the mortgage interest deduction and the tuition credit, go to middle-class families. Cutting only those expenditures wouldn’t be compassionate: it would shift tax burdens toward ordinary families already struggling to make ends meet.

One big tax expenditure benefiting the wealthy is the low tax rate on capital gains and dividends. The tax cuts of 2003 lowered the top rate on this income to 15 percent, far below the 35 percent top rate on other income. Compassionate deficit reduction requires a willingness to raise this preferential rate.

Government health care spending is a major cause of our terrifying long-run budget outlook. Any effective deficit plan has to slow that spending growth. But a compassionate plan would minimize risk to people, especially the most vulnerable.

The central question is whether Medicare and Medicaid should remain entitlement programs guaranteeing a certain amount of care, as Democrats believe, or become defined contribution programs in which federal spending is capped, as Republicans suggest.

Democrats have been forceful in explaining that if the federal contribution is limited and competition doesn’t magically slow costs commensurately, individuals and states will have to pay more. With Medicare, if individuals couldn’t pay the extra cost, they’d have to settle for less complete coverage and fewer benefits. With Medicaid, if states weren’t willing to pay the extra cost, they’d have to throw people off the rolls.

But Democrats need to explain their own plans for slowing government health care spending. To start with, they shouldn’t be defensive about having found $716 billion of Medicare savings as part of the health care reform legislation. They should explain, as former President Bill Clinton did in his speech on Wednesday, that these were reasonable changes that reduced overpayments to providers. They should ask Mitt Romney, who has vowed to roll back these reforms, why he wants to waste taxpayers’ money.

Moreover, Democrats should explain that compassionate deficit reduction will involve more such reforms. Fortunately, there is much inefficiency in the current system, so it should be possible to cut costs without lowering benefits. But if we can’t save enough money by reducing waste and finding better ways to provide care, we might have to consider more painful choices.

Making the wealthy pay a larger share of their Medicare costs, through further means-testing of benefits, would be one way to go. Gradually raising the Medicare eligibility age would be another. That may not sound like a winning message until you contrast it with the Republican plan, which trusts private insurers to decide how to cut costs.

Dealing with the deficit will require more than increasing revenue and reforming health care programs. We’ll also have to cut other spending. Compassionate deficit reduction requires that we choose carefully what to trim.

Spending that protects children, such as money for school lunches and vaccinations, must be maintained. So should assistance for workers displaced by international trade and for veterans struggling to recover from combat wounds.

Democrats shouldn’t be ashamed to advocate actually increasing spending that encourages opportunity and long-run growth. Aid for effective public education and Pell grants that help low-income students go to college aren’t luxuries — they are the building blocks of tomorrow’s labor force and the foundation of the American dream. And spending on infrastructure and basic scientific research is essential for the growth of productivity and standards of living.

BUT to make support for good spending credible, compassionate deficit reducers should be specific about what they would cut. Personally, I’d start with agricultural price supports and subsidized crop insurance programs that mainly benefit large commercial farmers. High-speed rail might be next. (Sorry, Mr. Vice President.) And if the defense secretary says that there is $487 billion that can be safely cut from the Pentagon’s budget over the next 10 years, we should listen to him.

Honest talk about the deficit is risky. Voters are more enthusiastic about the abstract notion of deficit reduction than about the painful details of accomplishing it. But deficit reduction is coming, and this election will most likely determine how it’s done. Democrats owe it to the American people to detail their more compassionate approach so that voters can make an informed choice.

Christina D. Romer is an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and was the chairwoman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.

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<nbsp/> Clinton states his case for a 2nd Obama term

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — CHARLOTTE, N.C. Former President Bill Clinton wowed the crowd at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday with a full-throated defense of President Barack Obama's job record during a dramatic speech that heaped ridicule on the Republicans' rationale for ousting Obama.

Clinton, who occupied the White House and handily won re-election during an economic-boom period in the 1990s, formally offered Obama's name for renomination in the latest twist in a relationship that has not always been so friendly. The 42nd president -- whose wife, Hillary Clinton, gave Obama his stiffest Democratic competition in the 2008 primaries -- delivered a powerful address that Obama may find difficult to top.

Obama will formally accept his party's nomination today, the same day that former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona is expected to lead the convention in the Pledge of Allegiance. It would be Giffords' highest-profile public appearance since a nearly fatal assassination attempt almost two years ago during a constituent event outside Tucson.

Clinton's 48-minute primetime remarks, which Obama listened to from backstage at Time Warner Cable Arena, praised the president's handling of the economy and hailed him as the man who "stopped the slide into depression and put us on the long road to recovery" and who is still "committed to constructive cooperation."

Clinton acknowledged that Obama is not satisfied with the economic situation but stressed that Americans are better off than when he took office during the recent recession, which he blamed on the Republicans.

"In Tampa, the Republican argument against the president's re-election was actually pretty simple and pretty snappy," said Clinton, referring to last week's Republican National Convention, where former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was nominated for president. "It went something like this: We left him a total mess, he hasn't finished cleaning it up yet, so fire him and put us back in."

The case for Obama's second term is stronger, Clinton said. "Here it is: He inherited a deeply damaged economy. He put a floor under the crash. He began the long hard road to recovery and laid the foundation for a more modern, more well-balanced economy that will produce millions of good new jobs, vibrant new businesses and lots of new wealth for the innovators."

Clinton's speech preceded the traditional convention roll call in which delegates from Arizona and other states announced their support for their party's renomination of Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, whose acceptance speeches have been moved indoors because of weather concerns.

Arizona's delegation, which consists of 80 delegates and six alternates, were joined for the roll call by CC Goldwater, granddaughter of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, a five-term Arizona Republican and 1964 GOP presidential nominee.

"My grandfather wouldn't recognize the Republican Party of today," said an audibly nervous Goldwater, who endorsed Obama over Sen. John McCain in 2008 and is supporting Democrat Richard Carmona in this year's Arizona Senate race. "Barry Goldwater believed in personal freedoms, the right to privacy and a woman's right to choose. On behalf of the Arizona delegation, I want to cast 77 votes for Arizona for Barack Obama."

Other high-profile speakers on the convention's second night included House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Massachusetts; and Sandra Fluke, a recent law-school graduate whose advocacy for contraception coverage by insurance companies prompted conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh to call her a "slut."

Giffords, the three-term Arizona Democrat whose ongoing recovery from a gunshot wound to the head has inspired the nation, and her retired NASA astronaut husband, Mark Kelly, were sighted in Charlotte on Wednesday, and news of her likely appearance electrified the convention as it spread from delegate to delegate. Giffords resigned from Congress on Jan. 25 to focus on her rehabilitation.

The tightly choreographed convention was knocked off script briefly Wednesday as Democratic delegates amended their recently adopted 2012 party platform to include a reference to God and to acknowledge that "Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel."

The original platform, which delegates endorsed Tuesday, drew criticism for the omissions. The changes were made only after multiple voice votes and over loud dissent.

If Obama wins a second term, he will become only the second Democrat to do so since Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the first since Clinton was re-elected in 1996.

Clinton asked delegates and television viewers to choose what kind of a country they want to live in.

"If you want a winner-take-all, you're-on-your-own society, you should support the Republican ticket," Clinton said. "But if you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibility -- a we're-all-in-this-together society -- you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden."

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton, who is attending the convention, said he hopes Clinton's message of compromise resonates. Clinton stressed that in the real world, compromise and cooperation trump the "politics of constant conflict." Stanton noted that Clinton for much of his presidency had to deal with a GOP Congress and held him up as an example of someone who could work with his opponents.

"Pretty much wherever Bill Clinton goes, he's the big star," Stanton said. "Bill Clinton is very popular in America today. He is very popular among both parties. I think that was harkening back to an era when there was bipartisan agreement. And Bill Clinton was a great messenger: No one could speak to an audience of 15,000 people but make you feel like he was speaking just to you, individually, like Bill Clinton."

In another development, convention organizers announced Wednesday that Obama's acceptance speech would be moved from the outdoor Bank of America Stadium, where the NFL's Carolina Panthers play, to the Time Warner Cable Arena, a smaller, in-door facility that is home to the NBA's Charlotte Bobcats and was host to the first two days of the convention.

Steve Kerrigan, the Democratic National Convention Committee CEO, said forecast thunderstorms forced the venue change, although the decision came amid speculation that Democrats were struggling to fill the stadium's more than 65,000 seats.

On Tuesday, Ben LaBolt, the Obama-Biden campaign's national press secretary, told reporters that the plan was to proceed at Bank of America Stadium rain or shine. He denied that the campaign would have any problem finding enough people to fill the seats.

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Column: Obama takes aim at Romney

Cal Thomas is a conservative columnist. Bob Beckel is a liberal Democratic strategist. But as longtime friends, they can often find common ground on issues that lawmakers in Washington cannot.

By H. Darr Beiser,, USA TODAY

Head of the Democratic National Committee: Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida tests the podium Tuesday in Charlotte, in preparation for the first day of the party's convention.

By H. Darr Beiser,, USA TODAY

Head of the Democratic National Committee: Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida tests the podium Tuesday in Charlotte, in preparation for the first day of the party's convention.

Today:Obama takes the stage

Bob: Gallup reports that Mitt Romney had the smallest polling increase from any presidential convention since 1984. Romney's address to the GOP convention in Tampa, according to Gallup, was the least well-received speech since Bob Dole in 1996. Romney wanted this election to be a referendum on Barack Obama, but because Romney failed to close the sale on his own candidacy, he's given Obama an opening to make Romney an issue.

Cal: Nice try at those DNC talking points, Bob. Here in North Carolina, where I am spending the week with your political brethren, the new Elon University/Charlotte Observer Poll shows Romney leading President Obama 47% to 43% in the state. But enough about polls. Last week, we agreed on what Romney needed to say to the GOP convention and those watching on TV. Now, what do you think the president should say in his speech tonight?

Bob: In his acceptance speech, Romney did not harshly attack the president, which I thought was a good strategy. He let others, including Paul Ryan, do his dirty work for him. Speaker after speaker at the Democratic convention has attacked Romney for proposing warmed over policies from "the last century" and his running mate as radical and dangerous. Obama should do something similar, and to the extent he mentions Romney, it should be to compare the president's policies, popular or not, with Romney's lack of a single new idea.

Cal: The "last century" with its economic booms and defeat of communism in Russia and fascism in Germany is looking better all the time. I agree the president has a record. I anticipate the "failure" of the Democratic convention will be that Democrats will offer more of the same failed solutions. The president made some spectacular promises four years ago, few of which he has kept. It's going to be very difficult to defend that record, given the high expectations he generated, especially on unemployment, which he pledged the stimulus would hold to under 8%. Even Maryland Democratic Gov. Martin O'Malley admitted to Bob Schieffer last Sunday on CBS's Face the Nation that America is no better off today than it was four years ago.

Bob: My cardinal rule in politics is to effectively manage expectations. The goal of any campaign should be to keep expectations in the right place so the candidate's strengths can exceed expectations and in the process minimize his weaknesses. If any president has ever suffered from high expectations, it's Barack Obama.

Cal: That was not the Republicans' fault. He almost single-handedly created those expectations with all of that lowering of the oceans business and other messianic talk.

Columns

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes a variety of opinions from outside writers. On political and policy matters, we publish opinions from across the political spectrum.

Roughly half of our columns come from our Board of Contributors, a group whose interests range from education to religion to sports to the economy. Their charge is to chronicle American culture by telling the stories, large and small, that collectively make us what we are.

We also publish weekly columns by Al Neuharth, USA TODAY's founder, and DeWayne Wickham, who writes primarily on matters of race but on other subjects as well. That leaves plenty of room for other views from across the nation by well-known and lesser-known names alike.

Bob: I agree. Obama has himself to blame after raising expectations during his extraordinarily effective campaign in 2008. He made promises that were nearly impossible to fulfill, particularly about changing the tone in Washington. He did not expect to be facing a Republican Party that had moved radically to the right and had no interest in working with President Obama.

Cal: Whatever happened to the Democratic Leadership Council, which Bill Clinton headed? These were moderate Democrats who were willing to compromise to move the ball forward. Look at the convention lineup of speakers. There isn't a pro-life, smaller-government, lower-taxes, less-spending, traditional-marriage speaker among the lot. The Democratic Party is now ruled exclusively by the hard left, and yet there are many Democrats who favor some, or all, of these moderate-to-conservative issues. Do you think the president in his speech tonight will have anything to say to these Democrats?

Bob: The DLC was a Clinton-driven organization that left the scene when he did. If you like radical speakers, Tampa was full of them last week. Back to the president's speech. I think Obama must address the expectations issue, and I know some people around him agree. As he told a CBS reporter, he failed "to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism."

Cal: It's a little late for that, don't you think?

Bob: No, I don't. For all his formidable skills as a campaigner and orator, Obama failed to tell the country why he was embarking on new directions in health care and why his stimulus package was necessary. He never sought to downplay the expectations of 2008 when he knew full well that they could not be met. Therefore, I think Obama needs to do a bit of mea culpa in his speech to let the voters know that he knows he hasn't met all their expectations, but that he is making every effort to do so.

Cal: A mea culpa doesn't fit his personality and will seem disingenuous. It would be like Madonna suddenly advocating modest dress. The public is cynical enough about politicians in both parties. The late comedian George Burns is supposed to have said, "Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you've got it made." Given the public's growing distrust of government, it is increasingly difficult to "fake sincerity." You've been a strategist. Should he attack Romney, or ignore him?

Bob: As I've mentioned, a little of both. When Obama talks about Romney, he should avoid talking about Bain Capital and Romney's refusal to release more of his tax returns. Those issues have been covered in his advertising and by others. Rather, Obama should point out that Romney is quick to raise all the problems facing America and has yet to offer solutions to solve them.

Cal: That's a fair point. As for Bain, Deroy Murdock wrote last week in the New York Post, "Bain's private-equity executives have enriched dozens of organizations and millions of individuals in the Democratic base — including some who scream most loudly for President Obama's re-election." So lay off Bain, Mr. President, and tell us if we're in for more of the same policies if you are re-elected.

Bob: Speaking of policies, even TheWall Street Journal panned Romney's speech because he offered no new policies beyond cutting taxes, increasing defense and, in a break with his running mate, Romney said he will protect Social Security and Medicare. This adds up to massive deficits and perhaps taxes on the middle class. It's no wonder so many economists laugh at Romney's warmed over trickle-down policies.

Cal: With the national debt climbing past $16 trillion, I'm glad you are suddenly concerned with debt, which is caused by overspending, not under-taxing. More and more voters don't trust either party to do what it says, but I think they'll give Republicans one more chance to rescue us from this financial sinking ship. If they fail, as we have written in a previous column, voters will keep tossing out incumbents until they get leaders who will do the necessary things to repair the economy.

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#DNCEconomy: Romney's wrong economic answers

Given Mitt Romney's business record as an outsourcer and tax avoider, and his desire to continue the failed economic policies of George W. Bush, President Obama should be 20 points ahead in the polls right now, not struggling to stay even.

By Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

By Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

At a time when the wealthiest people are doing phenomenally well, Romney's plan to provide more tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires is dead wrong.

At a time when we have lost more than 56,000 factories and 5.3 million decent-paying manufacturing jobs since 2000, Romney is wrong in pushing for more unfettered free trade, which will make it easier for large corporations to throw American workers out on the street and ship American jobs to China and other low-wage countries.

At a time when millions of Americans continue to struggle through the horrendous recession caused by the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street, Romney is wrong to believe we need more deregulation of too-big-to fail financial institutions.

In order to win support from the American middle class, it is absolutely imperative that the president provide a strong agenda that speaks to their needs, and that makes clear he will fight to win those proposals against the right-wing extremists who now control the Republican Party. Here is some of what the president should advocate:

1) The president must make it clear to the American people that he will not cut Social Security. Social Security has not added one penny to the deficit because it is funded by the payroll tax. Social Security has a $2.7 trillion surplus and can pay out every benefit owed to every eligible American for the next 21 years.

2) Obama must tell the American people that he is not going to balance the budget on the backs of the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor. The deficit was largely caused by Bush's two unpaid-for wars, tax breaks for the rich and the Wall Street-caused recession. The president must reduce the deficit by asking the wealthiest people in this country to start paying their fair share of taxes, by ending enormous corporate tax loopholes and by taking a hard look at wasteful military spending.

3) Given that real unemployment is 15%, the president must propose a major jobs program to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure (roads, bridges, water systems, waste water plants, airports and railroads) and, in the process, create millions of good paying jobs.

4) The president must accelerate his efforts to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel and into energy efficiency and such sustainable energy sources as wind, solar, geothermal and biomass. This would not only address the planetary crisis of global warming but also create jobs.

5) The president must call for real Wall Street reform that ends the largest unregulated gambling casino in the history of the world, and that demands Wall Street invest in the productive economy.

Columns

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes a variety of opinions from outside writers. On political and policy matters, we publish opinions from across the political spectrum.

Roughly half of our columns come from our Board of Contributors, a group whose interests range from education to religion to sports to the economy. Their charge is to chronicle American culture by telling the stories, large and small, that collectively make us what we are.

We also publish weekly columns by Al Neuharth, USA TODAY's founder, and DeWayne Wickham, who writes primarily on matters of race but on other subjects as well. That leaves plenty of room for other views from across the nation by well-known and lesser-known names alike.

6) The president must support a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, the disastrous U.S. Supreme Court decision that allows corporations and billionaires to buy politicians.

Bernie Sanders is the independent senator from Vermont.

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