Money men: Who are top 5 donors to Romney?

WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON For a casino mogul worth an estimated $25billion, $34.2 million may sound like chump change. Yet that's how much money Sheldon Adelson has donated so far to aid Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and organizations supporting Romney this election, making him the donor of donors for the GOP.

Other top donors giving millions of dollars to aid Romney's campaign include Texas money moguls and the head of an energy conglomerate.

Political donations can open doors that are closed to most people. Big-dollar donors are often invited to state dinners at the White House and other events with the president.

Based on an examination of more than 2.3 million campaign contributions The Associated Press has ranked the top five financial supporters bankrolling the Republican presidential run:

No. 1

Sheldon Adelson, 79, owner of the Las Vegas Sands casino empire.

Total: $34.2 million

Adelson is the largest declared donor to the Romney campaign and supporting political committees, providing more than $34.2 million this election season. He and his wife, Miriam, have given $10 million to Restore Our Future, a super PAC backing Romney. Adelson also joined relatives to give $24million to committees backing former GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. And he has made public pledges vowing to give as much as $100million this election more broadly to the GOP. He would benefit from loosened trade restrictions.

No. 2

Harold Simmons, 81, owner of Contran Corp., a Dallas-based conglomerate worth an estimated $9 billion that specializes in metals and chemical production and waste management.

Total: $16 million

Simmons is a longtime backer of GOP and conservative causes. He has donated $16 million to the party's efforts this year, including more than $11million to American Crossroads and $800,000 to Restore Our Future. Simmons also gave $2.2 million to Super PACs backing former GOP presidential candidates Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Rick Perry. He also owns a majority stake in Valhi Inc., a Texas-based waste management company, and could benefit from a proposed Nuclear Regulatory Commission rule change that would allow the company's Texas facility to store spent uranium from nuclear power plants.

No. 3

Bob J. Perry, 80, head of a Houston real estate empire worth an estimated $650 million.

Total: $15.3 million

Perry has given about $15.3million to aid the Romney campaign and allied causes so far this election season. Long active in Texas and national GOP politics, Perry donated nearly $9 million to Restore Our Future and a total of $6.5 million to American Crossroads. Before backing Romney this year, Perry gave $100,000 to the super PAC backing Texas Gov. Rick Perry (no relation).

No. 4

Robert Rowling, 58, head of Dallas-based TRT Holdings.

Total: $4.1 million

Rowling has given at least $4.1 million to Republican Party and candidates this election. Most of his donations, $4 million, went to Rove's American Crossroads, both through personal donations and through his firm. Rowling also has given $100,000 to the pro-Romney Restore Our Future super PAC. Rowling's holdings are worth an estimated $4.8 billion and include Omni Hotels, Gold's Gym and Tana Exploration, his family's oil company.

No. 5

William Koch, 72, an industrialist whose South Florida-based energy and mining conglomerate is worth an estimated $4 billion.

Total: $3 million

Koch has given $3 million to the Restore Our Future, including a $250,000 personal donation and $2.75 million through his corporation, Oxbow Carbon LLC, and a subsidiary, Huron Carbon. Unlike his brothers, who are longtime supporters of Republican and conservative causes, Bill Koch has funded both GOP and Democratic Party candidates in the past. Koch's corporate interests have repeatedly battled against what company officials have decried as government interference. Oxbow spent $570,000 last year on lobbying in Washington, mostly aimed at mining, safety issues and climate change.

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Consider campaign ad source – if you can

(PNI) Americans for Responsible Leadership this week dumped $350,000 into the campaign to kill this apparently unthinkable idea of changing the way we elect our leaders.

So who, you might ask, are the Americans for Responsible Leadership? These Americans who feel so committed to our present system of electing ideologues that they would pour this kind of money into defeating Proposition 121?

I can't tell you. Americans for Responsible Leadership are also Americans Who Believe That You Don't Need To Know Who They Are, You Just Need To Vote How They Want.

And so, they have thus far funneled $450,000 into the campaign to kill the "top two" primary initiative, according to documents on file with the Arizona Secretary of State's Office. And an additional $500,000 into defeating Proposition 204, the sales-tax hike for education and roads.

And they've sunk a startling $11million into defeating a pair of California props -- one a tax increase and the other a measure aimed at limiting the political activity of unions.

Had they incorporated in some other state, the Americans would likely have to tell us who they are. But because this is Arizona -- where talk of transparency is mostly just that, talk -- we have no right to know where the money is coming from to sell us on killing these initiatives.

Thank you, Arizona Legislature.

Americans for Responsible Leadership was incorporated by Robert Graham of Phoenix, who owns a wealth-management company and is campaigning to become the next chairman of the state Republican Party.

The other directors are Eric Wnuck of Cave Creek, who runs a medical-imaging company and briefly ran for Congress in 2010, and Steve Nickolas of Scottsdale, who owns a bottled-water company.

Graham didn't return my call to talk about his covert operation.

It is one of a parade of so-called non-profits that have sprung up since a landmark 2010 Supreme Court decision said corporations have a First Amendment right to spend as much as they want on political campaigns.

Because the Legislature has thus far declined to force these covert corporations to disclose their contributors, we are left to wonder who it is who so badly wants to defeat the top-two primary.

Lest you think that's the only way special interests are concealing their attempts to manipulate your vote, think again.

Last week, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Crane McClennen gouged another galling loophole into campaign-finance laws, ruling that the Committee for Justice & Fairness didn't have to disclose who it really was when it ran an attack ad against Tom Horne in the final weeks of his 2010 campaign for attorney general.

In that ad, the Justice & Fairness people informed us that Horne, as a state legislator, had voted against tougher penalties for rape and as state superintendent had allowed a pornography-viewing teacher back into the classroom.

"Tell Superintendent Horne to protect children, not people who harm them," the ad said, just weeks before the election.

What it didn't say was who the Committee for Justice & Fairness was.

Had curious voters dug into Internal Revenue Service records, they would have found that Justice & Fairness was really the Democratic Attorney General Association.

Both the Maricopa County Attorney's Office and a state administrative-law judge determined that the independent committee should have registered with the state and filed campaign-finance reports.

However, the group's attorney, Tom Irvine, countered that Justice & Fairness didn't need to tell us who they really were because they weren't advocating Horne's defeat.

They were simply educating voters about "the important issue of protecting Arizona schoolchildren from statutory rape and from teachers who view pornographic materials in the classroom."

Which would be laughable, except that last week, Judge McClennen agreed with Irvine, calling the law requiring such disclosure "unconstitutional."

Irvine said the group didn't have to register because it never used any of the so-called "magic words" that constitute express advocacy -- vote for, elect, reject, etc.

The more issue-oriented sort of "electioneering," he said, is not regulated in Arizona.

"The reason they didn't register here is the Arizona Legislature has chosen not to have electioneering committees regulated at all," he said. "So, it's a choice the Arizona Legislature made."

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery said it's clear the group was advocating for Horne's defeat and thus should have had to disclose who was behind the ads. He plans to appeal McClennen's ruling.

"People need to know who's doing what," he told me.

He's right.

Especially now when we're getting "No on 121" ads asking, "Why are special interests trying to eliminate your vote?" and warning, "Don't let special interests eliminate your election choice in Arizona."

Ads, I might add, that are being paid for by special interests.

We just don't know whose (interests, that is), beyond the fact that they are Americans and apparently for "Responsible Leadership."

I'd say consider the source.

The problem is, you can't.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizona republic.com or 602-444-8635.

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Social issues keep creeping in to muddle what needs fixing

We shouldn't be talking about this silliness -- Big Bird, "bull-----er," or a girl's "first time."

We should be talking about The Issues, we keep telling ourselves. But in the waning days of the presidential campaign, these are the issues -- binders full of cultural issues that continue to divide us and by which Barack Obama hopes to win re-election.

It is no accident that the war of competing economic theories has devolved into the same old culture war, beginning with the debate about the contraception mandate under the Affordable Care Act. Ever since, the Obama campaign has strategically tried to push the Republican Party and Mitt Romney into a corner by advancing the war-on-women narrative.

That Obama has had ample help from certain outspoken players (Missouri and Indiana Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, respectively, to name the most notorious) has made Romney's challenges only greater. But the war against women has always been a red herring.

Random comments by a couple of outliers provided wind for Obama's sails. Akin's remarks, that women don't get pregnant when "legitimately" raped, was just idiotic and immediately dismissed by Republican Party leadership, including Romney. Yet Mourdock's view, that a child conceived by rape is God's will, deserves some perspective.

Obviously, he wasn't endorsing rape. He apparently belongs to that sliver of pro-lifers who insist that even babies conceived of rape are worthy of protection. They, too, are God's children.

Although most Americans, including those who are enthusiastically pro-life, support exemptions for rape and incest, Mourdock's argument is not nonsensical. If life begins at conception, then one life is not worth less than another owing to the circumstances of creation. The embryo bears no blame.

Given this context, Mourdock's argument is logical.

But we bend logic as needed. We weigh pros and cons and make difficult choices. Thus, most would resolve Mourdock's Muddle as follows: Given the horror of rape and the consequences for the woman, we find for the woman. It is no good solution, certainly not for the gestating human. It is also certainly not a decision one should make for another.

Mourdock may have been indelicate in stating his position, but he is hardly a monster for believing that the definition of life, like the definition of rape, should not be parsed. As to Romney's choice to not comment, why would he? This is the ultimate no-win.

Romney's position on the subject is clear. He supports exceptions for rape and incest. He also said early in the primary season: "Contraception, it's working just fine. Just leave it alone."

So, why are we still talking about it? This pseudo-debate is, as Joe Biden would put it, "malarkey." Just possibly, a child could recognize the "bull-----er" aspect to this non-issue, to borrow the phrasing of Obama during a recent Rolling Stone interview.

The contraception issue never would have come up but for Obama's decision to force the hand of the Catholic Church. By placing religious institutions in the position of having to provide health insurance to pay for contraception as well as sterilization, which, agree or not, are against church teaching, Obama created the conversation.

Obama reasoned correctly that he had the majority with him, especially among women and youths, for many of whom these debates seem antiquated to not-applicable. Hence, a new Obama ad by HBO "Girls" creator and star Lena Dunham in which she compares voting for the first time to, you know, "doing it" for the first time. It's … what it is: A message to young women that losing one's virginity is top of the bucket list, but first, you gotta vote for the president who touts free contraception.

The same ol' culture wars. But, of course, women have had access to birth control for decades, and no one is trying to take it away. Anyone who suggests otherwise may have been spending too much time with Big Bird.

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Feminist Steinem to address YWCA

After more than 40 years as an advocate for gender equality, Gloria Steinem in conversation is a living op-ed column.

Gloria Steinem, Presented by the YWCA

When: Tuesday, Oct. 30. VIP reception at 11-11:45 a.m. Registration at 11:30 a.m, luncheon and presentation at noon.

Where: Ritz-Carlton Phoenix, 2401 E. Camelback Road.

Admission: $145, including luncheon and presentation, $250 with VIP reception, luncheon and presentation, $75 for students; student scholarships are available.

Details: 602-258-0990, ywcaaz.org.

She name-drops international human-rights advocates, quotes just-published research statistics on equality and offers family-focused solutions to seemingly intractable public-policy issues.

At 78, Steinem is one of the mothers of the American feminist movement. She spoke with TheRepublic in advance of her appearance as keynote speaker at a lunch for the YWCA Maricopa County at the Ritz-Carlton Phoenix on Tuesday, Oct. 30.

After so many years of talking, marching and coordinating, Steinem speaks effortlessly but thoughtfully, moving rapidly through such far-ranging topics as the work being done by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, why American society still lacks gender parity and why she believes in re-electing President Barack Obama.

Steinem is addressing the Valley at a time when women's roles are being hotly debated because of shifts driven by the recession and by years of agitation by gender-equality advocates, on such blogs as Feministing and Jezebel, and in such books as Hanna Rosin's "The End of Men."

These conversations represent what some call a fourth wave of feminism, focusing not just on women's rights but, following Steinem's ever-inclusive lead, attempting to fold in broader social-justice issues.

Since founding Ms. Magazine in 1972, Steinem has broadened her advocacy to workers' rights, non-violent conflict resolution and the end of child abuse and institutionalized violence. She's working on a book reflecting on her years of activism called "Road to the Heart: America As If Everyone Mattered."

Talking to Steinem today, she's a woman with an eye for all types of social injustice, but she's also hopeful and believes each individual can effect change. This is why she continues to speak publicly and write.

Question: Why partner with the YWCA, and what do you plan to address in your talk?

Answer: The YWCA is such an important institution and it doesn't get credit, so I always try to include them. They kept their heart and spirit between the suffragette era when they were founded and the current one. Most of the organizations strong in the suffragette era didn't continue, but YWCA did, ? continuing to serve all women.

I want to talk about two things: One, the great adversary to the women's movement is the idea that the women's movement is over, which is just another form of backlash, and two, how important this election is.

Q. What do you mean when you talk about attacks on feminism?

A. Most women are not worried about having it all, they're worried about losing it all. Having it all is only applicable to a very small, privileged group. The same people who were saying 30 years ago that feminism was unnatural or going against God, it's the same people who are saying it's not necessary anymore.

We need changes in policy. It's not possible for the individual to solve all these issues by herself. The individual cannot solve the problem that this is the only advanced democracy in the world without state health care. To blame the individual for the situation is to keep that person from making change. It's a way of shifting responsibility for action and inaction.

Q. Who comes to hear you speak?

A. It's so diverse. I'm met by hearty organizers who say, "We've organized this for tonight; we've rented a hall," and they're always worried that not enough people will come, but then the hall is overflowing. The interest is huge. Women's issues are not just women's issues; they're our daily lives, but because it's not reflected in the media, it may come as a surprise. The media treats women like they're separate.

Q. Is this why you want to talk about the election?

A. If you read the public opinion polls, you see all the issues are majority issues: equal pay, reproductive rights, environmental quality. But you don't see that because we have very low voter turnout. Right now, the electorate is still older, richer and Whiter than the population. I am certainly advocating that people vote for Obama because the Republican Party is no longer run by Republicans. This party is so extremist that they could no longer nominate Nixon, the first Bush and Reagan. It's very dangerous for one of our two great parties to be run by extremists.

Q. What's your favorite part of addressing groups?

A. Listening. That's my favorite part. If you create a space where people are free to speak their minds, then they do. It's creating a space in which the people in the room get to know each other. … Often somebody on one side of the room asks a question and someone on the other side answers it. It's what organizers do, we make spaces in which people can find community.

I hope that we have a long discussion time after I speak. That, to me, is when I get to learn and I discover if I can be helpful in specific ways.

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Justice fights effort to oust him

An Arizona Supreme Court justice has taken the highly unusual step of forming a campaign committee to fight a Republican and "tea party" effort to vote him off the bench.

Fliers and Web postings advocate a "no" vote on retention of Justice John Pelander because he joined in a Supreme Court decision allowing an initiative that would scrap the two-party primary system to appear on next month's ballot.

Pelander formed a political committee through which he has spent his own money to hire a publicist. He also has named a treasurer but did not specify what the committee will do. He is not allowed to raise money.

Pelander said he formed the committee, named Retain Justice John Pelander, because he wants to combat allegations in the campaign. He said he knows of no other instance in which an Arizona Supreme Court justice has formed a political committee in a retention race in the past four decades.

"I'm concerned on two fronts," Pelander said. "The Supreme Court ruling in this case is being mischaracterized. So, I view it not only as a personal attack on me as the only (Supreme Court) judge on the retention ballot, but also as an affront to the integrity of the court."

In addition, Phoenix attorneys Paul Eckstein and Mark Harrison have formed an independent expenditure committee called Save Our Judges to counter the anti-Pelander campaign. Eckstein said that the committee will do a mass e-mailing and that if it raises sufficient money, it will run radio ads, as well.

The anti-Pelander fliers were distributed across the Valley. The Arizona Republic obtained campaign literature opposing various judges that was circulated in three legislative districts in the East and West Valleys.

Pelander was part of a three-judge panel that in September unanimously upheld a lower-court ruling to allow Proposition 121, the so-called top-two primary initiative, to go forward.

One of the East Valley fliers states that Pelander voted to uphold the ruling "in the face of overwhelming evidence of fraudulent signatures collected for Proposition 121." The statement was repeated in a tea party post attributed to former state Senate President Russell Pearce. Pearce could not be reached for comment.

The circular goes on to recommend that all Arizona Court of Appeals judges on this year's retention ballot also be voted down because they were appointed by former Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano. Some of the postings target Superior Court judges, as well, especially Napolitano appointees.

Pelander, a Republican who was appointed to the Court of Appeals by then-Gov. Fife Symington, was appointed to the Supreme Court by Gov. Jan Brewer.

Brewer spokesman Matthew Benson said the governor stands behind Pelander.

"The governor has not agreed with every decision he has made, but she continues to believe he is impartial and guided by the law and Constitution in his rulings," Benson said.

The issues in the Supreme Court ruling had to do with circulation of petitions for Prop. 121. The initiative would replace the party-primary system with one that puts all candidates on a single primary-election ballot. The top two vote-getters would then oppose each other in the November elections regardless of their party affiliations.

Opponents of the initiative sued to keep the measure off the ballot, pointing out that some of the petitions did not have requisite signatures by the petition circulator and that other circulators were unqualified because they had felony convictions. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge John Rea threw out the questioned signatures but ruled that there were still sufficient signatures to place the initiative on the ballot.

The opponents appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, saying in part that they did not have enough time to present their case. A three-judge panel that included Pelander, Chief Justice Rebecca White Berch and Vice Chief Justice Scott Bales reviewed transcripts and pleadings and upheld the lower-court decision. Bales wrote the opinion.

Earlier this month, Pelander got a call from a friend in Tucson who had come across a flier calling for Pelander's ouster. Republican Party officials began disseminating the information with voter materials.

Karen Thomas, founder of the Sun City West and Sun City Grand Republican Women, said her GOP district chairman passed out cards for voters to take to the polls, including the information about judges.

Thomas created her own list of judges to retain and vote out, which she sent to the Republican Women organizations and legislative districts. It was republished online. Pelander's name was prominently displayed as a judge to vote against.

Critics of the effort question its facts. The literature describes petition signatures deemed as invalid as "fraudulent." The conservative Newsmax website reported that Pelander "supported" the controversial proposition, instead of that he had upheld the lower- court decision allowing the measure to go on the ballot.

It would take a majority of voters to vote Pelander or any other merit-selected judge out of office.

Supreme Court justices, Appeals Court judges and Superior Court judges in Maricopa, Pima and Pinal counties are appointed by the governor from a list of nominees vetted by special selection committees. Judges in other counties are elected.

If a merit-selected judge is voted out, a new judge is appointed by the governor to fill the vacancy. Only two judges have lost retention elections since merit selection began in 1974; none has lost since 1978.

This year, nine Appeals Court judges and 76 Pima and Maricopa County Superior Court judges are up for retention. Pelander is the only Supreme Court justice on the list.

Those judges are evaluated by the Arizona Commission on Judicial Performance Review and are available online. But with every election, independent lists by self-proclaimed judicial-watchdog groups, usually conservative, circulate their own evaluation lists.

Arizona is not the only state where judges are being challenged because of rulings that angered politicians. Conservative groups are lobbying against retaining an Iowa Supreme Court justice who was among a panel that allowed same-sex marriage in that state. Three Florida Supreme Court justices are being targeted in retention elections for rejecting a ballot initiative against the federal Affordable Care Act.

Some of those pushing Pelander's removal also supported another ballot initiative this year that would give the governor more control over the merit-selection process and remove the requirement of nominating judicial candidates from both parties. Pearce sponsored the bill to put the measure on the ballot.

Some of the Arizona judges targeted for removal are nonchalant about the tea party lists.

"There have been lists in the past," said Judge Roland Steinle of Maricopa County Superior Court. "If I wake up the day after the election and the tea party votes me out, I guess I'll find something else to do."

County Superior Court Judge Timothy Ryan is identified in one list as a liberal Democrat; the list refers to his 2007 battles with then-County Attorney Andrew Thomas over a law denying bail to illegal immigrants. Ryan was a Republican when he was appointed to the bench. The new list, he said, is a "cut-and-paste" from the last time he was up for retention.

Arizona Appeals Court Judge Peter Swann also is condemned in several of the campaign fliers, but he said, "The fact that I was appointed by Janet Napolitano does not illustrate my ideology."

Swann said 99 percent of the court's decisions are unanimous, even though the panels are made up of judges from both parties. The judges, he said, "leave their politics in the garage."

"If the voters think our decisions are out of step, then they have a right to complain," Swann said. "But not one of these attacks has cited a decision that they find objectionable."

However, Thomas, of Republican Women, said Pelander should be ousted because he "was one of three judges who could have stopped that proposition from going on the ballot."

Pelander said his campaign is aimed at protecting the justice system. "Some people think judges should be surrogates of their political agendas, and judges cannot, simply cannot, decide cases based on political factors or personal policy preferences," he said. "The day we do that, our justice system will collapse."

Reach the reporter at michael.kiefer@arizonarepublic.com.

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$30 million Goldwater Library coming to Mesa

Downtown Mesa will be home to a library honoring the legacy of late Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater.

Goldwater timeline

Jan. 1, 1909 -- Born at 710 N. Center St. (now Central Avenue), Phoenix.

1928 -- First flying lesson.

1929 -- Leaves University of Arizona after a year when his father dies; takes first job in family department store.

1934 -- Marries Margaret "Peggy" Johnson of Muncie, Ind.

1941 -- Enlists for active duty in Army Air Corps, forerunner to U.S. Air Force.

1949 -- Wins Phoenix City Council seat as part of a civic-reform movement.

1952 -- Runs for U.S. Senate, defeats incumbent Ernest McFarland, the Senate majority leader, by 6,500 votes.

July 16, 1964 -- Accepts Republican presidential nomination in San Francisco, declaring in the most famous passage of his speech that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."

November 1964 -- Loses to incumbent Lyndon Johnson by 16million votes.

1968 -- Re-elected to Senate, succeeding Carl Hayden.

1974 -- Visits President Richard Nixon in White House, tells him his presidency cannot be saved.

1980 -- Wins fifth and final term in Senate.

1985 -- Peggy Goldwater dies.

1986 -- Senate passes Goldwater bill to reorganize the military.

1987 -- Says embattled Arizona Gov. Evan Mecham should resign.

1989 -- Castigates Religious Right, says Republican Party has been taken over by "a bunch of kooks."

1992 -- Marries Susan Shaffer Wechsler.

1993 -- Says military should end its ban on gays.

May 29, 1998 -- Dies at his Paradise Valley home.

Establishment of the Barry and Peggy Goldwater Library and Archives is scheduled to be announced this morning at the Mesa Arts Center.

The $30million research and education center in the heart of Arizona's third-largest city is expected to contain not only the Goldwater archives but papers from other Arizona politicians.

It will also showcase artifacts from Goldwater's life, his trajectory having paralleled that of Arizona's statehood while deeply influencing national and global politics.

The library's website describes the facility as "a cultural and historical institution of global significance."

The archives are certain to be both voluminous and rich: The late author William F. Buckley reported that after leaving the Senate, Goldwater dictated more than 24,000 letters in a single year.

The library's website calls Goldwater's papers "one of the premier congressional collections in the United States."

Mesa was not the first choice for a library honoring the father of modern American conservatism. The original plan was to find a site in downtown Phoenix, but talks fell through because the city insisted that the Goldwater Library foundation also build two apartment buildings as part of the project.

"We're not in the apartment business," said Judy Eisenhower, executive director of the library foundation who also worked for Goldwater for 311/2 years as his secretary and then chief of staff.

Mesa makes a bid

Eisenhower said Mesa Mayor Scott Smith heard about a year and a half ago that the library was looking for land and invited the board to consider Mesa.

Eisenhower said Mesa's growing list of downtown assets was instrumental in the board's decision to locate there.

This year, four private liberal-arts colleges have announced plans to establish campuses there. Earlier this month, the city nailed down final funding for a light-rail extension through the heart of the city. And Mesa is working with national arts groups to boost the profile of its growing downtown arts-and-cultural district.

Downtown already is home to four museums, including a new wing of the Mesa Historical Museum that is expected to morph into that facility's main campus within a few years.

"Light rail is very important to a project like this, particularly for ASU students," Eisenhower said, while also mentioning the incoming colleges. "Where it's going in downtown Mesa is just perfect for us. … It's the right thing to do."

Mesa Councilman Chris Glover, who was credited by several sources with helping bring the talks to fruition and now sits on the library foundation's board, called landing the library "a momentous achievement" for Mesa.

It is not a done deal, however. Formal agreements still need to be hashed out between the Goldwater organization and the city, and there remains the big question of money.

Glover said the government of Taiwan has pledged $10million toward the center. Goldwater championed the cause of the Chinese nationalist government, which fled the mainland in 1949, and Glover said Taiwan is interested in academic-exchange programs with the Goldwater Library.

Smith said the library will be privately funded and operated, with the city's chief role being to provide the land.

The City Council considered the proposal in executive session last week and will have its first public discussion on Thursday morning.

Smith said another catalyst for the library coming to Mesa was the February Republican presidential debate at the Mesa Arts Center, about a block from the prospective library site.

The library, planned to encompass 40,000 square feet, will contain lecture halls and research facilities in addition to museum displays.

"They want to house all of the papers for everybody who has represented Arizona in Washington, D.C., since statehood and even other things pertaining to Arizona history," Glover said.

Last week, however, outgoing Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said he was donating his historical papers to his alma mater, the University of Arizona.

Political earthquake

The Goldwater Library board has solicited support from a wide variety of political figures, including 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, who died this week.

McGovern, quoted on the library's website, said he and Goldwater were friends despite their divergent politics.

"Such an institution can be a focal point for the study, research and discussion of one of the most important figures in 20th-century American history," McGovern said.

That statement speaks to why Goldwater is deemed worthy of the honor of a stand-alone library dedicated to his life, a rarity for a U.S. senator.

The five-term senator was, in sum, a one-man political earthquake who shattered an ideological landscape that had stood for decades.

His victory at the 1964 Republican National Convention wrested control of the party from Eastern country-club types and moved it west. The most notable result of that was the 1980 election of California's Ronald Reagan as president.

Goldwater's opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act helped pull the Deep South into the GOP's orbit after almost a century of Democratic dominance there. Indeed, apart from Arizona, the only states Goldwater carried were in the South, and to this day, Southern "red" states are an integral factor in the presidential-election calculus.

Further, and probably most importantly, Goldwater's powerful articulation of conservative principles moved the entire American political apparatus rightward so forcefully that one analyst has observed that the 1992 Democratic platform was almost identical to the Republican platform of 1968.

On the Republican side, the rightward impulse was so dramatic that, in later years, Goldwater denounced some aspects of it, saying the party had been taken over by "kooks." He reserved special venom for the Religious Right.

Those who analyzed Goldwater's politics over the years, however, said those statements did not spring from a softening of his conservatism, but more from the fact that it was of the libertarian variety: He objected as much to "conservatives" meddling in private lives as to liberals doing so.

That side of Goldwater, by itself, could keep scholars busy for decades.

Deep Arizona roots

But the man was inextricably woven into the fabric of Arizona history, as well. His ancestors were front and center during Arizona's frontier days, one having been present in Tombstone on Oct. 26, 1881, when bullets flew at the O.K. Corral.

Goldwater was born before Arizona became a state. He inherited the reins of a pioneering retail chain and, with his own hands, helped clear the landing strip that became Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

He was an early and enthusiastic photographer, radio operator and aviator -- the latter interest leading to a World War II military career that saw him flying equipment and planes to war zones all over the world.

Had he never been anything but a photographer, he would still stand as a legend in that field. Over the years, Arizona Highways published about 300 of his pictures, including one of the most famous Arizona photos ever taken: a 1946 cover shot of two Navajo children herding sheep in a snowy landscape.

None of which is to say anything about his early political life as a corruption-fighting Phoenix city councilman or his 30 years in the U.S. Senate, during which he shaped a major overhaul of the military.

His friends, acquaintances and enemies included a virtual who's who of 20th-century politics, ranging from China's Chiang Kai-shek to Planned Parenthood executive Gloria Feldt to Richard Nixon.

Nixon's Watergate scandal put Goldwater at the center of one of the most dramatic moments in American history. On Aug. 7, 1974, Goldwater went to the White House with U.S. Rep. John Rhodes, R-Ariz., and Sen. Hugh Scott, R-Pa., to tell Nixon that he would be convicted and expelled from office if he were impeached by the U.S. House. Nixon announced his resignation the next night.

Coincidentally, Rhodes' 2003 funeral was at Mesa's First United Methodist Church, just a block east of the prospective Goldwater Library site.

Copyright 2012 The Arizona Republic|azcentral.com. All rights reserved.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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How the G.O.P. Became the Anti-Urban Party

“Wade into the crowd, wade into the fray, hold a hell of a rally in an American city — don’t they count anymore?” Peggy Noonan lamented in The Wall Street Journal. “A big, dense city with skyscrapers like canyons, crowds and placards, and yelling. All of our campaigning now is in bland suburbs and tired hustings.”

But the fact is that cities don’t count anymore — at least not in national Republican politics.

The very word “city” went all but unheard at the Republican convention, held in the rudimentary city of Tampa, Fla. The party platform ratified there is over 31,000 words long. It includes subsections on myriad pressing topics, like “Restructuring the U.S. Postal Service for the Twenty-First Century” and “American Sovereignty in U.S. Courts,” which features a full-throated denunciation of the “unreasonable extension” of the Lacey Act of 1900 (please don’t ask). There are also passages specifying what our national policy should be all over the world — but not in one American city.

Actually, that’s not quite true. Right after “Honoring Our Relationship With American Indians” and shortly before “Honoring and Supporting Americans in the Territories,” the Republican platform addresses another enclave of benighted quasi-citizens: the District of Columbia. Most of what it has to say is about forcing the district to accept school vouchers, lax gun laws and the fact that it will never be a state. It also scolds the district for corruption and “decades of inept one-party rule.” Only a city would get yelled at.

The very few sections that address urban concerns contain similar complaints about cities’ current priorities — not to mention the very idea of city life. The Republican platform bitterly denounces the Democrats for diverting some highway fund money to Amtrak and harrumphs that it is “long past time for the federal government to get out of the way and allow private ventures to provide passenger service to the Northeast corridor. The same holds true with regard to high-speed and intercity rail across the country.”

The Obama administration, the Republicans conclude damningly, is “replacing civil engineering with social engineering as it pursues an exclusively urban vision of dense housing and government transit.”

Unsurprisingly, the chairman of the Republican platform committee, Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, is from a state that has no city with a population of 500,000 or more. One of his two “co-chairmen” was Senator John Hoeven of North Dakota, which ranks 47th among the states in population density. The other was Marsha Blackburn, who represents a largely suburban district of Tennessee.

IT could hardly be otherwise. The Republican Party is, more than ever before in its history, an anti-urban party, its support gleaned overwhelmingly from suburban and rural districts — especially in presidential elections.

This wasn’t always the case. During the heyday of the urban political machines, from the Civil War to the Great Depression, Republicans used to hold their own in our nation’s great cities. Philadelphia was dominated for decades by a Republican machine. In Chicago — naturally — both parties had highly competitive, wildly corrupt machines, with a buffoonish Republican mayor, “Big Bill” Thompson, presiding over the city during the ascent of Al Capone. In the 1928 presidential election, the Republican Herbert Hoover swept to victory while carrying cities all across the country: Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Chicago; Detroit; Atlanta; Birmingham, Ala.; Houston; Dallas; Omaha and Los Angeles.

With the possible exception of Houston or maybe Omaha, it’s all but inconceivable that Mr. Romney will carry any of those cities. And that’s due in good part to the man Hoover defeated, more than 80 years ago.

The rise of Alfred E. Smith to the top of the Democratic Party confirmed a sea change in American life. Smith was not simply the first Catholic to lead a major-party ticket. He was also a quintessentially urban candidate, like no one who has ever seriously contended for the presidency before or since.

Kevin Baker is the author of the “City of Fire” series of historical novels: “Dreamland,” “Paradise Alley” and “Strivers Row.”

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Ye Olde Partisanship Is Nothing New

WASHINGTON — An American political system marked by partisanship and polarization engenders despair from both Republicans and Democrats.

Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, one of the few congressional Republicans who comfortably works with members of the other party, decided to retire last year lamenting “the sensible center has disappeared from American politics.”

Posts written by the IHT’s Page Two columnists.

Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat who heads the Senate Budget Committee, said he realized it was “time for me to leave” when a senior colleague told him, “Your problem, Conrad, is you’re too solutions-oriented. You’ve never understood this is political theater.’”

This is a periodic refrain. A generation ago it was even more pronounced and pessimistic, as I describe in my latest column.

Jimmy Carter was president. With his legislative agenda stalled, he faced a
challenge within his own party, a relentlessly hostile opposition Republican Party, a sluggish economy and runaway inflation. In the summer of 1979 the president gave a speech on America’s “crisis of confidence.” It often is labeled the “malaise” speech, though Carter never used that word.

Four months later, Iranian radicals stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for more than a year.

This exacerbated the despair, coming as it did on the heels of the American defeat in Vietnam.

“The last time we got involved with a two-bit country we lost 50,000 men,” lamented one of Washington’s wise men, the late Harry McPherson, who had been counsel to President Lyndon Johnson. “Now we were involved with another one, and there was nothing we could do about it.”

Another of the presidential wise men, Lloyd Cutler, then counsel to
Mr. Carter, wrote an article for Foreign Affairs suggesting that our
political system was broken and America should consider changing to a
parliamentary system.

Ronald Reagan was elected, he proved to be a forceful president, and talk about altering the system diminished.

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Impartial Justice at Risk

The success of right-wing forces two years ago in ousting three Iowa Supreme Court justices for participating in a unanimous ruling that allowed same-sex marriage has inspired similar efforts there and elsewhere in the country this fall.

In Iowa, the Republican Party is working hard to defeat another capable justice, David Wiggins, who participated in the same ruling and is facing a yes-or-no retention vote on November’s ballot. Last week, the socially conservative National Organization for Marriage, which played a large role in the outcome in 2010, began running television ads against the judge.

Unfortunately, Iowa is not alone. Another attempted hijacking of what are supposed to be nonpolitical retention elections — essentially referendums focused on a judge’s competence and honesty — is gathering steam in Florida. The state has not removed a sitting Supreme Court justice in 40 years, but this year three worthy justices standing for retention — Barbara Pariente, Peggy Quince and R. Fred Lewis — may not survive an onslaught from the political right.

The three judges, the only Democratic appointees on Florida’s seven-member top court, are being targeted for various rulings that have angered conservatives, among them a 2010 decision that quite rightly struck from the ballot a misleadingly worded constitutional amendment designed to allow the state to opt out of federal health care reform.

The barrage began in June when the state’s Republican governor, Rick Scott — who would name the judges’ replacements if they lost — ordered up a phony and politically motivated investigation into the judges’ innocuous use of court personnel to notarize required financial disclosure filings. Meanwhile, an advocacy group financed by the Koch brothers, Americans for Prosperity, has begun running television advertisements in several Florida cities criticizing the court’s ruling on the constitutional amendment. The group says it is planning new ads focusing on other cases, all with the goal of framing three judicial moderates as out-of-control “judicial activists.”

Piling on, the Florida Republican Party’s executive committee officially announced its opposition to the judges two weeks ago.

To justify its decision, the party dredged up a nine-year-old court order to retry a murder case on technical grounds — an order later rejected by the United States Supreme Court — as evidence that the justices are “too extreme.” An Orlando-based group with ties to the Tea Party, Restore Justice 2012, continuing a grass-roots campaign against the justices that began two years ago, released a video last week focusing on that same ruling.

The three Florida justices are mounting active campaigns. They have raised about $1 million collectively, a reluctant but realistic concession to the need to fight back. Even so, and despite the support of 23 past presidents of the Florida Bar Association, the fire and police unions, and some prominent state Democrats, their retention is by no means assured.

What is absolutely certain is the damaging message of intimidation that would flow from their removal.

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It Could Be His Party

Not so in the United States. Here, parties in their out-of-power years tend to slip into low-grade civil wars, with rival camps inside Washington and various warlords — er, governors — squabbling on the periphery. Not coincidentally, the parties tend to look their worst during these periods: fractious and solipsistic, intellectually confused or ideologically extreme, with opportunists grabbing for the megaphone at every opportunity.

The Republican Party has been effectively leaderless for almost six years, ever since the 2006 midterm elections made George W. Bush’s lame-duck status official. John McCain was so mistrusted by conservatives that he probably would have felt like an interim figure even if he hadn’t gone down to defeat in 2008, and after the general Republican rout that year, the party’s public image was suddenly defined more by media personalities — from Rush Limbaugh to Glenn Beck — than by any of its elected officials.

The Limbaugh-Beck moment passed, but the vacuum remained — and for most of his two years of campaigning, as a primary candidate and then as the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney conspicuously failed to fill it. He seemed content to take his party as he found it, and to conform rather than to lead: in the primaries because conformity was the safest way to reassure his critics, and in the general election because his campaign apparently believed that a generic Mr. Republican would be able to glide to victory in the fall.

That finally changed in the first presidential debate. In 90 prime-time minutes, the country had a glimpse of what our politics might look like if the Republican Party actually had a leader again.

What Romney executed on Wednesday night was not just a simple pivot to the center, as much of the post-debate analysis suggested. Pivot he certainly did — stressing bipartisanship and touting his record as the moderate governor of a liberal state, backing away from the more implausible spending cuts implied by his budget promises, explicitly breaking with the idea that upper-bracket tax cuts can be a self-financing free lunch.

But this wasn’t some sort of Sister Souljah moment, where Romney called out his fellow conservatives in order to curry favor with the center. Rather, what he did was clarify, elevate and translate. He clarified what kind of tax reformer he would be, by promising that revenue neutrality would take priority over sweeping cuts for the rich — a premise that plenty of Republicans are already happy to accept. He elevated an argument that’s increasingly popular among conservative wonks — that the Dodd-Frank financial reform perpetuates “too big to fail” — and used it to make a populist case against the president. And he translated the basic free-market vision to a nonideological audience, by talking more about decent jobs than heroic job creators, and more about the struggling middle class than about the supposedly persecuted John Galts.

This is the role that an effective party leader ought to play. Media fantasies notwithstanding, you can’t lead a party by repudiating its base or campaigning against its reigning ideology. But you can lead by channeling the base’s passions in a constructive direction, and by reinterpreting the party’s ideology to meet the challenges of the present day.

One debate does not such a leader make. But at the very least, the fact that Romney’s strategy worked so effectively last Wednesday — that it made him seem mainstream and appealing while also winning him plaudits from almost every sort of conservative — suggests that the Republican Party can actually be led, and that its politicians don’t have to be prisoners of talking points and groupthink.

Indeed, the party may actually be ripe for such leadership. Cut through the Kabuki narratives on the contemporary right — the grass roots versus the establishment, the True Conservatives versus the RINOs — and you’ll find that what conservatism actually stands for, issue by issue and policy by policy, is more up for grabs than at any point since the Reagan revolution.

The Reagan nostalgia, the fears of looming socialism, the paranoia about a shiftless 47 percent: They are all symptomatic of a party on the brink of transition rather than one incapable of change. Republicans seem to be clinging to the past mostly because their leaders haven’t shown them what they should stand for in the present.

The only question, as we head into the final four weeks of the campaign, is whether Mitt Romney has realized this a little bit too late.

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Better News on Jobs

First, the report was stronger than expected, a development they are loath to acknowledge just four weeks before the election. Second, while the data suggests improvement, it also highlights the need for federal spending to maintain and create jobs, which Congressional Republicans have blocked and which Mitt Romney rejects.

Employers added 114,000 jobs last month, which would have been very disappointing but for upward revisions of employment growth for July and August, totaling another 86,000 jobs. The unemployment rate fell, from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent last month, a welcome drop, though it appears to be partly due to a statistical fluke and partly to more part-time employment, which is better than no work, but hardly the sign of a reliably robust job market.

What it does not reflect, as some conservative commentators have charged, is manipulation of the data by the Obama administration, an allegation that insults federal statisticians and only shows how desperately Republicans want bad economic numbers to use to attack the president. They seem to have little interest in promoting improvements that might actually help people.

There is one important number in the report that barely budged from previous months. The share of jobless workers out of work for six months or more remained extremely high, at 40 percent, or 4.8 million people, of which more than half had been out of work for more than year. And finding a job remains difficult: in July, the latest month for which data on job openings was available, nearly 13 million jobless workers were competing for 3.7 million openings.

Long-term joblessness is largely a measure of the depth of employment loss during the recession from the end of 2007 to mid-2009. Its persistence means that a top priority now is to extend federal jobless benefits, which kick in when state unemployment insurance benefits run out, generally after 26 weeks.

Federal benefits are now phasing out and are set to expire at the end of the year. If they are not extended, two million workers will be cut off during the holiday season. Anyone who became unemployed in July or later would be eligible for state benefits only. For many people, those benefits will run out before they find new work. In general, the federal benefits provide an additional 14 weeks of support, and up to 33 weeks beyond that in states with especially high unemployment.

President Obama strongly supports an extension, but Republicans have typically balked, and have pressed successfully for less generous benefits. And with so many controversial budget cuts scheduled to occur at the end of the year, including military spending reductions and the expiration of both the payroll tax cut and the Bush tax cuts, jobless benefits have come to be viewed as a bargaining chip in negotiations over those and other items.

But a delay in extending those benefits, or worse, allowing them to be cut off entirely, would be a mistake; it would remove crucial spending from the economy and cause real suffering for a vulnerable population.

It would also make the current Congress the most heartless in modern history: lawmakers have enacted emergency federal unemployment benefits in every major recession since 1958, and have never allowed the program to end when unemployment has been anywhere near as high as it is now.

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Can I Phone a Friend?

Maybe we should have seen this coming. For weeks, Romney had performed so badly and had fallen so far behind in swing states that if this campaign were a Ryder Cup singles match, you’d have said the president felt he had the match in the bag with just a few holes left to play. So he did the worst thing you can do in match play golf: he started playing not to lose. He continued with an uninspired, vague and cautious campaign and just waited for Romney to keep hitting balls out of bounds. Romney, his back to the wall, had no choice but to start aggressively playing to win.

He did so by repositioning himself as a center-right Republican moderate. Yes, this required him to mischaracterize and disguise key aspects of his platform on taxes and health care. But because Obama did not pounce on that abrupt Romney shift to the center, Romney’s arguments were allowed to be presented without any counter and, as I said, scored a direct hit on Obama’s two greatest vulnerabilities.

The first, and the most dangerous threat to Obama’s re-election, is a critical mass of voters saying this: “Barack Obama, nice man, good father, great that we finally elected an African-American. He tried hard. But you know what? I just want to try something new, even if I don’t know it will work.”

That sentiment is deadly for Obama. As long as Romney didn’t seem like a credible alternative, Obama kept it at bay, even though the economy has stagnated. But Romney reawakened that mood by the confident and crisp way he talked about the mechanics of how jobs are created — through start-ups, small businesses and entrepreneurship — and the catalytic power of markets. His presentation crackled with a freshness and a sense of possibility that was completely missing in Obama’s monotone discussion of health care, deficits and government programs. And where Obama had a chance to talk about how his own green jobs initiative has actually spurred all kinds of innovations and start-ups, he whiffed. (As some have noted, it is too bad the debate rules didn’t allow him to phone a friend.)

I confess, spending time with inventors, social entrepreneurs and people who start companies really floats my boat — and I am not alone. If there has been one consistent weakness to this president’s public messaging, it is that it is often lacking in any excitement about innovation and entrepreneurship — the real drivers of our economy. In recent years, all net new jobs in America have come from start-ups.

Obama knows this, and, in his convention speech, at least he actually spoke to it eloquently, saying: “We honor the strivers, the dreamers, the risk-takers, the entrepreneurs who have always been the driving force behind our free enterprise system.”

Yes! Yes! Yes! Mr. President. And. in the next debate, look into the camera and tell us what you are going to do in a second term to multiply the number of those risk-takers by 10. Give those people who are saying, “Nice guy, but I just want to try something new,” a real reason to be excited that you not only want to deliver national health insurance but also an innovation economy that will ensure we can afford it.

Your closing statement was awful: If you re-elect me, I will “fight every single day on behalf of the American people and the middle class.” That’s a given! What great inspiring journey are you going to take the whole country on to invent the future and spark more good jobs?

The other Obama weakness exploited by Romney was the country’s political paralysis. Obama is right — most of that gridlock was orchestrated by the Republicans to make him fail. But the fact is, a lot of Americans today look at our politicians and feel as though we’re the children of permanently divorcing parents — and they are sick of it. There is a longing to see our politicians working together again. So when Romney spoke about how he met with Democrats once a week as Massachusetts governor to get stuff done, that surely touched a hopeful chord with some voters. Obama needs to stress that he, from his side, aspires to restore bipartisanship and has a plan to overcome paralysis and pull the country together in a second term.

The weakness Romney overcame was the notion that he didn’t care about or know how to talk to 47 percent of the country. This was the first time Romney addressed the whole country directly, rather than a purely Republican audience. He didn’t have to worry about the nut balls he was running against in the G.O.P. primary and was not forced to cater just to the Tea Party base. So he finally took out the Etch A Sketch and moved to the center.

Is this how he would really govern? I wouldn’t trust it — not with all his voodoo math — but it was a lot more effective messaging than that by the Romney of old. This new Romney sounded like a man applying to be the C.E.O. of a country that needs a turnaround. Obama sounded like a man who forgot — or resented — that he needed to reapply for his job at all.

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Leading Maryland and Virginia, With Stars on the Rise

Both Martin O’Malley, the Democrat who leads Maryland, and Bob McDonnell, his Republican counterpart in Virginia, are rising political stars. Each is chairman of his party’s national governors’ association, and each is a standard-bearer for his party’s presidential nominee. Each is also mentioned as a possible 2016 presidential candidate.

Some people say that much of the talk about a Maryland-Virginia face-off is overblown. As for the governors, each says that if there is in fact a rivalry, his state is winning it.

“I’m just trying to do what is right for Virginia, and I’m sure Governor O’Malley is trying to do the same, but we have different philosophies and different outcomes,” said Mr. McDonnell, a former member of the Virginia House of Delegates and a former state attorney general.

Much of that difference has to do with taxes. Mr. McDonnell, elected in 2009 and limited by law to one term, takes pride in his efforts to burnish Virginia’s reputation as a low-tax, business-friendly state. Sales tax is 5 percent in Virginia and 6 percent in Maryland. Top-bracket income-tax payers pay 5.75 percent in Virginia while those in Maryland pay 9 percent. Virginia’s corporate tax rate is 6 percent and Maryland’s is 8.25 percent. Virginia’s unemployment rate is 5.9 percent, compared with 7.1 percent in Maryland — both lower than the national average.

Working with Republican majorities in both chambers of the state legislature, Mr. McDonnell has been able to balance the state’s budget without raising taxes, though critics have derided some of his solutions as gimmicks, notably some approaches to financing future state pensions. And, like other Virginia governors from both parties, he has been chided for putting off long-term investments in highways and mass transit.

Mr. O’Malley, a former Baltimore mayor, has a reputation, for better or for worse, of raising taxes — more than 20 separate increases since becoming governor in 2008. It is a legacy that a Republican opponent might find an irresistible target if Mr. O’Malley ever runs for president.

Early in his first term he called a special session in the General Assembly that resulted in $1.4 billion in increases in taxes on sales, tobacco, personal income and corporations. He also levied a temporary tax on millionaires. More recently, with the state facing a $1 billion budget deficit in 2013, he signed a tax increase on Maryland’s top earners that ensured them one of the highest income tax rates in the country.

Mr. O’Malley argues that tax rates are just one measure of a state’s standing.

“On the other side of the river, especially under Governor McDonnell, they would have you believe that it all begins and ends with tax rate,” Mr. O’Malley said. “We all strive to be competitive on that score.” He added, “But there are other things that determine whether or not your state is well-equipped and whether your children are more likely to be winners or losers in a changing economy.”

He mentioned that Maryland is first in median income, while Virginia is eighth, and that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ranks Maryland first in innovation and entrepreneurship, while  Virginia again ranks eighth. He also noted that Maryland had the fourth-highest percentage of workers in “green jobs,” in 2010, compared with Virginia at 20th, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Green Goods and Services Survey released in March.

Mr. O’Malley noted that Education Week ranks his state as No. 1 in K-12 public education. He also argued that he has been more committed to investing in public education than has Mr. McDonnell. For the 2012-13 school year, Virginia’s financing for K-12 education decreased by 10 percent compared with 2008 levels, while Maryland’s investment increased 7.4 percent.

Mr. O’Malley says he has invested in human capital to urge Maryland toward “building an economy for the future that will last,” through maximizing educational attainment, developing worker skills and focusing on emerging sectors including life sciences and biotechnology.

The roles of Mr. O’Malley and Mr. McDonnell as leaders of their governors’ associations put them on a national stage as stewards of their parties’ message and approach to governance. There are now 29 states with Republican governors, 20 headed by Democrats and one with an independent. Eleven states have governors’ elections this year.

“Yeah, I want to win as many governors’ races as I can,” Mr. McDonnell said. “But not because I’m in competition with Governor O’Malley, but because I really do believe the 29 Republican governors are doing some unique things in reforming government in their states and giving new birth to federalism. Because they focus on fiscal responsibility and low taxes and limited government they are getting better results for their people.”

He added, “I say this not just about Virginia and Maryland, but I could say it about Wisconsin and Illinois or other Republican governors.”

Mr. O’Malley, of course, is not so upbeat about the impact of Republican governors.

“Some of these newly elected governors who were elected in 2010 or even 2009 promised they would restore the economy,” Mr. O’Malley said. “Instead when they got in, they governed by rolling back individual rights — rolling back women’s rights, rolling back voters’ rights, rolling back workers’ rights. The people in a lot of the states — Ohio, Florida and others — are scratching their heads and feeling a bit of buyer’s remorse for putting in people with such a narrow right-wing ideology.”

Despite their differences, Mr. O’Malley, 49, and Mr. O’Donnell, 58, are friendly on the regional level and have more in common than just their Irish-Catholic backgrounds and rising fame. They have worked together on regional issues, including the cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay, public safety in the capital region and transportation issues. By most accounts, the men and their staffs have a good working relationship with each other.

Both men said they would be open to a different type of partnership: “I understand he is a pretty good guitar player,” Mr. McDonnell said of Mr. O’Malley, who plays and sings in an Irish rock band. “We ought to get together; I play the drums, although I don’t play them well.”

Mr. O’Malley sounded intrigued by the prospect.

“Does he have a practice tape or anything he can send us?” he asked. “I’d love to jam with him, it’d be fun. I’m totally open — music is nonpartisan.”

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In Congress, a Shrinking Pool of Moderates

A potent combination of Congressional redistricting, retirements of fed-up lawmakers and campaign spending by special interests is pushing out moderate members of both parties, leaving a shrinking corps of consensus builders.

Middle-of-the-road Democrats, known as Blue Dogs, have been all but eviscerated from the House over the last few elections, and now three who have been in the Republicans’ cross hairs for years are fighting uphill battles for re-election.

Among Republicans, Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and Representative Steven C. LaTourette of Ohio, weary of partisan battles, chose to retire this year, and some, like Representative Charles Bass of New Hampshire, have found themselves moving away from the center to survive, a technique employed by Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, who found it was too little too late and lost his primary campaign.

“We don’t have a Congress anymore, we have a parliament,” said Representative Jim Cooper of Tennessee, one of the last Blue Dogs. “We moderates are an endangered species, but we are also a necessary ingredient for any problem solving.”

The House is more polarized than at any time in the last century, according to models built by Keith Poole, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Rochester, and Howard Rosenthal, professor emeritus of social sciences at Princeton University. The last time the Senate was this divided, according to the joint research, was a century ago.

While Americans say they want an end to partisan bickering in Washington, Mr. Cooper said, they vote to maintain the system that has created it. “It’s like Hollywood movies,” he said. “Most people say there is too much violence and sex, but those are the only tickets that sell.”

Representatives Larry Kissell of North Carolina, John Barrow of Georgia and Jim Matheson of Utah, all Blue Dogs, appear to be losing ground in their races for re-election. Because of redistricting, their constituencies have become less familiar with them, making them easier targets for outside groups that have been spending heavily on ads to unseat them. Their poll numbers have been dropping throughout this cycle.

Many other more moderate Democrats, including Representatives Dan Boren of Oklahoma and Mike Ross of Arkansas, and Senators Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Kent Conrad of North Dakota, chose to hand over their member pins rather than seek re-election.

In theory, the dearth of moderates means it will be even harder next year for Congress — which failed to put together even mundane measures like farm and highway legislation without a massive fight this session — to pass bills.

But Congress is facing so many potentially calamitous tax and budget issues that another theory is brewing: a combination of Democrats, once adverse to changes to entitlements, and senior Republicans may form some sort of new deal-making consensus through sheer necessity to avoid large tax increases and massive military cuts.

“If Republicans think by embracing the Tea Party it is a loser politically,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat. “it may strengthen the hands of the mainstream conservatives” to make deals with the 10 or so moderate Democrats in the Senate who are interested in reforming the Medicare program and other entitlements.

Further,  there is an emerging push on the Democratic side toward the center among many of their Senate candidates, like  Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, Joe Donnelly in Indiana, Tim Kaine in Virginia and Richard Carmona in Arizona, who all are  running as pragmatic centrists willing to work with Republicans

For this to happen, according to moderates from both parties and several Congressional experts, the next president will have to make conciliation a top priority.

“The next president has to channel Lyndon Johnson and seize the levels of power and make Congress work,” said former Representative Jane Harman, a moderate Democrat from California who resigned last year to become the director of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. “Obama talked about it and tried it briefly, but would sustained effort have helped with this Congress? I think so.”

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Easier Access to Ballot Is Pushed by Democrats

In the last few weeks, potential voters in California have been able to register online for the first time, and Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that will allow residents to register and vote on Election Day. Connecticut passed similar legislation this year, and voting rights advocacy groups hope as many as five states might join them next year.

Democratic lawmakers here described the legislation as a potential counterweight to Republican-backed laws in other parts of the country requiring photo identification to vote and making it more difficult to register.

“It’s extremely important that as some states in the nation are moving to suppress voter turnout, California is moving forward to expand voter participation,” said Mike Feuer, a Democratic state assemblyman who sponsored the Election Day registration law. “I hope California is the catalyst for other states to encourage civic engagement and participation.”

The changes in California are hardly revolutionary. Election Day registration, which is already in effect in eight states, began in the early 1970s in states like Maine and Wisconsin. Online registration has now expanded to more than a dozen states since it was first established, in Arizona in 2002.

But conservative efforts to require people to show photo ID, a step they say is necessary to prevent voter fraud, seem to have galvanized some Democrats to try to expand ballot access — long an item on the party’s agenda, but one that had not been a top priority in recent years in many states.

In May, Connecticut became the first state in five years to approve Election Day registration. When he signed the bill into law, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said in a statement, “Despite the pervasive climate across the U.S. to restrict voting rights, Connecticut has moved in the opposite direction.”

Demos, a nonprofit organization that has worked to expand ballot access since the contested 2000 presidential election, has identified five additional states — Colorado, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts and West Virginia — where they hope to pass Election Day registration laws next year.

In each of those states, Democrats control the governorship and at least one chamber of the legislature.

Voter registration laws were not always so infused with partisan politics.

In the 1990s, Republican strongholds like Idaho and Wyoming instituted Election Day registration. The National Conference of State Legislatures says that while little evidence of in-person voter fraud has been found, voter turnout in states with Election Day registration has been at least 10 percent higher than in states without it.

“Historically, this kind of work has been supported by Republican and Democratic states,” said Steven Carbó, state advocacy director for Demos. “There is no objective reason why we can’t be back at that point.”

Online registration has retained some measure of bipartisan support. The South Carolina Legislature unanimously approved it this year (although, in California, the vote broke along strict party lines).

But Election Day registration has become the exclusive province of Democrats. Since 1996, only four states have approved Election Day registration, and in each case it was a Democratic governor who signed the bill into law. Republican lawmakers in Maine and Montana have tried unsuccessfully to repeal their longstanding Election Day registration laws.

Mr. Feuer’s bill passed through the State Assembly with no Republican support.

“I think this really leaves the California voting system wide open to fraud,” said Connie Conway, the Republican leader in the State Assembly.

Mr. Feuer argued that both the online and Election Day registration laws included strong safeguards against voter fraud. Online registration will be an option only for residents who already have a California ID, and the Election Day registration law enhances penalties for fraud, and allows those who register that day to cast only provisional ballots.

Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “The Voting Wars,” said that neither side’s ostensible rationale for pushing changes to voting laws should be taken entirely at face value.

Republicans, he said, have advocated for ID requirements in part to restrict the number of voters from the other party, since many population groups whose members tend to lack photo IDs also tend to vote Democratic. Democrats, meanwhile, have opposed all efforts to purge noncitizens from the voter rolls, which he called “a relatively small problem, but a real problem, and one that in the off-season needs to be corrected.”

“On both sides there is the official story, and then the realpolitik,” Mr. Hasen said.

That is the one thing that just about everyone agrees on. “Has it gotten more politicized?” Ms. Conway said. “Oh yeah.”

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Romney, Buoyed by Debate, Shows Off His Softer Side

Facing off against President Obama in Denver, Mr. Romney had been the candidate they had longed to see all year: funny (joking about the “romantic” evening he and Mr. Obama were spending on the president’s 20th wedding anniversary), commanding (challenging Mr. Obama on taxes and government spending) and even warm (placing his right hand over his heart at the end of the debate, in an homage to his supporters in the crowd).

On Friday night, at a rally here, his campaign seemed determined not to let that more emotive, three-dimensional Mitt Romney slip away. Before the crowd of several thousand, Mr. Romney shared stories of friends who had died.

Perhaps his most moving anecdote — about David Oparowski, a 14-year-old boy with leukemia to whom Mr. Romney had ministered — first made an appearance at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, when David’s parents talked about how Mr. Romney had tended to their son, a member of his church ward in Belmont, Mass. But Mr. Romney had never before mentioned the experience on the stump.

Mr. Romney recounted how, as he sat in David’s hospital room, the teenager called him “Brother Romney” and asked him about “what’s next.”

“I talked to him about what I believe is next,” said Mr. Romney, recalling that a few days later he got a call from David asking if he would help write his will.

“So I went to David’s bedside and got a piece of legal paper, made it look very official,” he continued. “And then David proceeded to tell me what he wanted to give his friends. Talked about his fishing rod, and who would get that. He talked about his skateboard, who’d get that. And his rifle, that went to his brother.”

He concluded: “I loved that young man.”

Mr. Romney also talked about the recent death of a graduate school friend who had become a quadriplegic, and a sharpshooter killed in Afghanistan.

He repeated two of the stories on Saturday night in Apopka, Fla., north of Orlando, suggesting that the effort to connect emotionally would become part of how he presents himself to voters.

An adviser said that Mr. Romney decided on his own that he wanted to tell those stories onstage. But the move was also couched in a broader campaign strategy to encourage Mr. Romney to reveal a more caring, personal side of himself, a counter to his reputation as a data-driven technocrat.

To that end, on Thursday, Mr. Romney also appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, where he seemed to repudiate his own comments about “47 percent” of Americans who, he said at a secretly recorded fund-raiser in May, considered themselves “victims” and were dependent on the government.

“I said something that’s just completely wrong,” Mr. Romney said, referring to the comments. “My life has shown that I care about 100 percent.”

The campaign has begun showing a 10-minute biographical video before rallies and speeches. Mr. Romney is shown roughhousing with his sons when they were youngsters, encouraging his wife and following the public service footsteps of his father, George W. Romney, the former governor of Michigan. In one scene, Mr. Romney begins talking about his wife, gushing, “Ahh, she’s gorgeous.” Russ Schriefer, the senior strategist charged with making the film, said he got that footage by showing Mr. Romney a picture of Ann as a teenager and asking him to reflect.

Mrs. Romney, who has privately argued that the campaign should display the empathetic man she loves, has also become a public advocate for her husband’s “extraordinary compassion for others,” as she said Friday night.

Appearing buoyed by his widely acclaimed debate performance, the Romney on display this week was a looser, more relaxed one. The day after the debate, he could be seen joking with aides on his charter plane, and he made two unscheduled stops: one Thursday morning to address the Conservative Political Action Conference in Denver, and another Friday evening, when he and Mrs. Romney stopped at La Teresita, a Cuban restaurant in Tampa, to greet diners.

At his rally here on Friday, Mr. Romney’s first story involved a friend named Billy, a quadriplegic who had come to one of his rallies about three weeks ago and, with the help of his wife, made his way through the crowd.

“I reached down and I put my hand on Billy’s shoulder and I whispered into his ear, and I said, ‘Billy, God bless you, I love you,’ ” Mr. Romney said. “And he whispered right back to me — and I couldn’t quite hear what he said.”

Billy, he said, “died the next day.”

The crowd became hushed, seemingly as moved by listening to the tale as Mr. Romney was by telling it.

Trip Gabriel contributed reporting from Apopka, Fla.

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Jobs Report: Cooked or Correct?

The jobs numbers, unquestionably, gave a boost to the Obama campaign, still reeling from the president’s poor debate performance. While the bureau’s survey of businesses showed a ho-hum rise of 114,000 in nonfarm employment, the unemployment rate had somehow dropped from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent, far exceeding expectations. Thus, a month before the election, and for the first time in Obama’s presidency, unemployment was under 8 percent.

Welch smelled conspiracy. And he wasn’t alone. “Total data manipulation,” tweeted a writer at Zerohedge, a financial news blog. “Such a farce.” Fox News spent much of Friday morning piling on.

It’s worth pointing out that the last time anyone accused the Bureau of Labor Statistics of being politically motivated was when Richard Nixon did so in 1971. Upset that the bureau was releasing figures showing higher unemployment during his re-election campaign, he asked his hatchet man, Charles Colson, to investigate the bureau’s top officials, including its chief, Geoffrey Moore.

So Point No. 1: the idea that a handful of career bureaucrats, their jobs secure no matter who is in the White House, would manipulate the unemployment data to help President Obama, is ludicrous. Jack Welch knows it, too; when I called him Friday afternoon, he quickly backpedaled. “I’m not accusing anybody of anything,” he protested. But he went on to add that everything he’s seen suggests that the economy remains in the doldrums, and it just didn’t seem possible that the unemployment rate could have dropped so drastically, and so quickly.

Hence, Point No. 2: there is, indeed, something a little strange about the way the country derives its employment statistics. It turns out that the statistics the bureau releases each month are generated by two different reports. One, called the establishment report, is a survey of businesses. That’s where the 114,000 additional jobs comes from.

The second is a survey of 55,000 households, where people are asked about their employment status. Extrapolating from the survey, the bureau concluded that an additional 873,000 people had found work in September. It is that number that brought the unemployment rate from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent.

When I asked a bureau spokeswoman why there was such divergence between the two numbers, she said she had no idea. “The reports are totally separate,” she said.

When I put the same question to economists, they shrugged. Maybe it was because an additional 582,000 Americans were working part time, which doesn’t show up in payroll statistics. Maybe it was because of increased government employment. For some unexplained reason, there is always an uptick in September. (“Maybe it has something to do with going back to school,” said Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics, who quickly added, “I’m just guessing here.”) In any case, it wasn’t anything economists hadn’t seen before. Sometimes the two surveys delink, though over the long term they tend to reinforce each other. In the short term, however, the household survey is considered the more volatile — and less reliable — of the two numbers.

Which leads to Point No. 3: there is something truly absurd about having the presidential race hinge on the unemployment rate. Even putting aside the reliability of the short-term numbers, the harsh reality is that no president has much control over the economy. That is especially true of President Obama, whose every effort to boost the economy these past two years has been stymied by Republicans. Again and again, they have shown that they would rather see the country suffer than do anything that might help Obama’s re-election.

There is rough justice in the way things are playing out. Having spent the last year wrongly blaming the president for high unemployment, Republicans can only stand by helplessly as the unemployment rate goes down at the worst possible moment for them. Fox News scoured the data Friday, looking for signs that the economy wasn’t improving. They found some: high unemployment for African-Americans, for instance, and fewer manufacturing jobs.

But the data were largely overwhelmed by positive signals. In its revised figures for July and August, for instance, the bureau said that more jobs had been created than it originally estimated. People with only high school degrees were finding jobs. The number of people who had been out of work for six months or more was at its lowest point in three years.

Whether the Republicans like it or not, the economy is slowly getting better.

Awful, isn’t it?

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 8, 2012

An earlier version of this column misidentified the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1971. It was Geoffrey Moore, not Julius Shiskin.

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Whose Sacrifice?

Mitt Romney needs to be more than a George W. Bush retread when it comes to foreign policy.

Federal District Court in Manhattan scrutinizes police patrols in public housing.

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Romney Strives to Stand Apart in Global Policy

In a speech he gave at the Virginia Military Institute, Mr. Romney declared that “hope is not a strategy” for dealing with the rise of Islamist governments in the Middle East or an Iran racing toward the capability to build a nuclear weapon, according to excerpts released by his campaign.

The essence of Mr. Romney’s argument is that he would take the United States back to an earlier era, one that would result, as his young foreign policy director, Alex Wong, told reporters on Sunday, in “the restoration of a strategy that served us well for 70 years.”

But beyond his critique of Mr. Obama as failing to project American strength abroad, Mr. Romney has yet to fill in many of the details of how he would conduct policy toward the rest of the world, or to resolve deep ideological rifts within the Republican Party and his own foreign policy team. It is a disparate and politely fractious team of advisers that includes warring tribes of neoconservatives, traditional strong-defense conservatives and a band of self-described “realists” who believe there are limits to the degree the United States can impose its will.

Each group is vying to shape Mr. Romney’s views, usually through policy papers that many of the advisers wonder if he is reading. Indeed, in a campaign that has been so intensely focused on economic issues, some of these advisers, in interviews over the past two weeks in which most insisted on anonymity, say they have engaged with him so little on issues of national security that they are uncertain what camp he would fall into, and are uncertain themselves about how he would govern.

“Would he take the lead in bombing Iran if the mullahs were getting too close to a bomb, or just back up the Israelis?” one of his senior advisers asked last week. “Would he push for peace with the Palestinians, or just live with the status quo? He’s left himself a lot of wiggle room.”

In his remarks, Mr. Romney addressed the Palestinian issue, saying, “I will recommit America to the goal of a democratic, prosperous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with the Jewish state of Israel.” And he faulted Mr. Obama for failing to deliver on that front.

But while the theme Mr. Romney hit the hardest in his speech at V.M.I. — that the Obama era has been one marked by “weakness” and the abandonment of allies — has political appeal, the specific descriptions of what Mr. Romney would do, on issues like drawing red lines for Iran’s nuclear program and threatening to cut off military aid to difficult allies like Pakistan or Egypt if they veer away from American interests, sound at times quite close to Mr. Obama’s approach.

And the speech appeared to glide past positions Mr. Romney himself took more than a year ago, when he voiced opposition to expanding the intervention in Libya to hunt down Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with what he termed insufficient resources. He called it “mission creep and mission muddle,” though within months Mr. Qaddafi was gone. And last spring, Mr. Romney was caught on tape telling donors he believed there was “just no way” a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could work.

Mr. Romney’s Monday speech called vaguely for support of Libya’s “efforts to forge a lasting government” and to pursue the “terrorists who attacked our consulate in Benghazi and killed Americans.” And he said he would “recommit America to the goal of a democratic, prosperous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security” with Israel. But he did not say what resources he would devote to those tasks.

The shifts, a half dozen of Mr. Romney’s advisers said in interviews, partly reflect the fact that the candidate himself has not deeply engaged in these issues for most of the campaign, certainly not with the enthusiasm, and instincts, he has on domestic economic issues. But they also represent continuing divisions.

Some are on the way to resolution. Over the summer, an “inner circle” of foreign policy advisers emerged, with Richard S. Williamson, a former Reagan administration official who briefly returned to government to serve President George W. Bush, playing a leading role. Another central player is Mitchell B. Reiss, the president of Washington College in Maryland and a veteran of Mr. Romney’s 2008 campaign. And Jim Talent, the former Missouri senator, has taken a major role in defense strategy.

Liz Cheney, who served in the State Department during the Bush administration and is the daughter of Mr. Bush’s vice president, has begun to join a weekly conference call that sporadically includes Dan Senor, who served as spokesman for the American occupation government in Iraq. Since the Republican National Convention, Mr. Senor has been assigned to the staff of Mr. Romney’s running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, who in recent weeks has made Mr. Obama’s foreign policy a particular target.

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Romney Takes Liberties With Claims About a Bipartisan Past

When Mitt Romney accused President Obama in their debate Wednesday night of refusing to work with Republicans, he held up his own record as the Massachusetts governor as an example of what political cooperation can achieve.

As a Republican governor whose legislature was 87 percent Democrats, he said, “I figured out from Day 1 I had to get along, and I had to work across the aisle to get anything done.” The result, he said, was that “we drove our schools to be No. 1 in the nation. We cut taxes 19 times.”

Mr. Romney and the legislature did at times get along, Massachusetts schools were often top-rated, and some taxes did drop during Mr. Romney’s four years as governor, from 2003 through 2006. But a comparison of his claims to the factual record suggests that all three take liberties with the truth.

While the governor and the legislature came together to produce balanced budgets and enact a signature health care reform bill, much of those four years were characterized by conflict and tensions. In the opening months of his tenure, Mr. Romney vetoed a Massachusetts House plan to create new committees and raise staff members’ pay, and the legislators rejected his flagship proposal, a nearly 600-page plan to overhaul the state bureaucracy.

Mr. Romney proved to have a taste for vetoes, killing legislative initiatives in his first two years at more than twice the rate of his more popular Republican predecessor, William F. Weld, The Boston Globe reported in 2004. The lawmakers responded in kind by overriding his vetoes at a rapid pace.

By 2004, the second year of his term, Mr. Romney was provoked enough to mount an unprecedented campaign to unseat Democratic legislators, spending $3 million in Republican party money and hiring a nationally known political strategist, Michael Murphy.

The effort failed spectacularly. Republicans lost seats, leaving them with their smallest legislative delegation since 1867. Democratic legislators were reported at the time to have been deeply angered by the campaign’s tactics.

“They had a deteriorating relationship during the first two years,” Jeffrey Berry, a political science professor and expert on state politics at Tufts University, said in an interview. The campaign “was designed to demonstrate that he could make life difficult for them if he chose to do so. It did not endear him to them.”

Mr. Romney quickly initiated a charm offensive, inviting Democratic leaders to dinners at his home for the first time since taking office two years earlier. But the legislators were soon “infuriated,” Mr. Berry said, when Mr. Romney, testing the presidential waters, began traveling outside the state and casting brickbats at Massachusetts’s traditionally liberal values before crowds of potential supporters.

On education, Mr. Romney was factually correct in stating that Massachusetts students were ranked first in the nation during his tenure. Massachusetts students in grades four and eight took top honors or tied for first in reading and mathematics on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal Department of Education test often called the nation’s report card.

However, educators largely agree that the state’s rise to first place was a result of a wholesale reform of state schools enacted 10 years earlier under Governor Weld. The reforms, carried out over eight years, doubled state spending on schools and brought standards and accountability to both administrators and students.

“Governor Romney does not get to take the credit for achieving that No. 1 ranking,” said Mike Gilbert, the field director for the nonprofit Massachusetts Association of School Committees, “but it did happen while he was in office.”

Under Mr. Romney, neither the governor nor the legislature enjoyed notable successes in education, although Mr. Romney is credited with battling successfully against efforts to dismantle some of the 1993 reforms.

Mr. Romney and the legislature cut deeply into state grants to local governments in 2003 amid a state budget crisis, forcing many school districts to raise property taxes. In 2006, Mr Romney vetoed a bill passed unanimously by the legislature that established standards for preschool education and set long-term plans to make it universal. He said the programs would cost too much at a time of budget austerity.

Mr. Romney’s claim that he was responsible for 19 separate tax cuts is also technically accurate. But here, too, the complete story paints a very different picture.

Perhaps the most substantial tax reduction occurred in 2005, when Mr. Romney’s administration wrote legislation refunding $250 million in capital gains taxes to 145,000 investors. But the legislation carried out a court ruling finding that the taxes had been illegally withheld in 2002; the court gave the state the option of refunding the taxes or rewriting the law to correct the illegality.

Mr Romney proposed the latter, and the legislature agreed.

Of the remaining 18 tax cuts, many were proposed by the legislature, not Mr. Romney, and others were routine extensions of existing tax reductions that were due to expire. One was a change in the Massachusetts tax code to make it conform to changes in the federal code. Two were one-day sales-tax holidays.

Mr. Romney’s critics note that his administration was also responsible for revenue-raising measures which, under that loose definition, might well be called tax increases. In his first year, Mr. Romney closed business tax loopholes and increased fees on an array of services, from marriage licenses to home purchases.

“Our numbers on revenue are that he raised about $750 million annually — $375 million from fees and $375 million from corporate taxes,” said Michael Widmer, president of the nonpartisan Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation.

In 2004, Mr. Romney signed legislation allowing local officials to collect an additional $100 million in commercial property taxes from businesses.

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