GOP to keep focus on health-care law for 2014 races

WASHINGTON — one handed to them by the administration itself.

While Congress was arguing, Obama's plan to expand coverage for the uninsured suffered a self-inflicted wound. A computer system with design flaws gummed up the first open enrollment season. After nearly three weeks, it's still not fixed.

Republicans hope to ride that and other defects they see in the law into the 2014 congressional elections.

Four Democratic senators are facing re-election for the first time since they voted for the Affordable Care Act, and their defeat is critical to GOP aspirations for a Senate majority. Democrats say that's just more wishful thinking, if not obsession.

Although Obama's law remains divisive, only 29percent of the public favors its complete repeal, according to a recent Gallup poll.

The business-oriented wing of the Republican Party wants to move on to other issues. And Americans may be weary from the health-care fight.

'Stop the arguing'

"This is the law of the land at this point," said Michael Weaver, a self-employed photographer from rural southern Illinois who's been uninsured for about a year. "We need to stop the arguing and move forward to make it work."

It took him about a week and half, but Weaver kept going back to the healthcare.gov website until he was able to open an account and apply for a tax credit that will reduce his premiums. He's not completely finished because he hasn't selected an insurance plan, but he's been able to browse options.

It beats providing page after page of personal health information to insurance companies, Weaver said.

Under the new law, insurers have to accept people with health problems. Weaver is in his mid-50s, with high blood pressure and high cholesterol, but otherwise in good health. He says those common conditions made it hard for him to get coverage before.

Although Weaver seems to have gotten past the major website obstacles, he's still finding shortcomings.

There's no place to type in his medications and find out what plans cover them. "I wish there was more detail, so you could really figure it out," he said.

Congressional Republicans are favoring a less nuanced critique.

Criticism continues

"TrainWreck: Skyrocketing Prices, Blank Screens, & Error Messages," screamed the headline on a press release Friday from House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. A House hearing on the ACA rollout is scheduled for this week. GOP lawmakers want Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to resign.

Administration officials, in their most detailed accounting yet of the early rollout, said Saturday that about 476,000 health-insurance applications have been filed through federal and state exchanges. But the officials continue to refuse to say how many people have enrolled in the insurance markets.

Without enrollment figures, it's unclear whether the program is on track to reach the 7million people projected by the Congressional Budget Office to gain coverage during the six-month sign-up period.

The president was expected to address the problems today during a health-care event at the White House. The administration has yet to fully explain what has gone wrong with the online sign-up system.

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake says she doesn't see how going after the health-law rollout will help Republicans by the time of next year's election.

Fixing the website

"Americans are technology optimists," Lake said.

"You tell them the website has problems today, and they'll assume it will be better tomorrow. I mean, we're Americans. We can fix a website."

Republicans are intent on making the health law an uncomfortable anchor around the neck of four Democratic senators seeking re-election in GOP-leaning states, weighing them down as they try to unseat them. Republicans need to gain six seats to seize the majority in the Senate, and any formula for control includes flipping the four seats.

Sens. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Begich of Alaska and Kay Hagan of North Carolina will face voters for the first time since they were among the 60 Democrats who voted for the health law in 2009.

More than a year before the election, Republican Rep. Tom Cotton is airing an ad that criticizes Pryor for his vote, telling Arkansans that Pryor "cast the deciding vote to make you live under Obamacare." The commercial's final image shows Pryor with Obama, who took a drubbing in Arkansas last year.

"The bottom line is these candidates will have to answer for why they voted for this bill," said Rob Engstrom, senior vice president and national political director for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

If the website gets fixed, other problems may emerge. Republicans can still try linking 'Obamacare' to rising premiums, anemic job growth and broader economic worries.

Will criticism work?

The chamber spent millions on ads in 2012 criticizing Senate incumbents such as Jon Tester of Montana and Bill Nelson of Florida for their health-care votes, yet many of those candidates overcame the criticism and won re-election.

The economy, not health care, remains the top concern of voters. By putting opposition to the health-care law ahead of all other priorities, economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin says "tea party" conservatives may have overdone it.

"Obamacare was an effective campaign weapon," said Holtz-Eakin, an adviser to Republicans. "The question is, have they damaged it beyond its political viability?"

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. 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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Strong races await in fall

(PNI) This week's primary election set up intriguing matchups and themes for November's general election.

The 9th Congressional District. Black Republican Vernon Parker and bisexual Democrat Kyrsten Sinema will face off. These two likely would not have been their parties' nominees a decade or two ago.

Both have compelling personal stories. Both grew up in humble circumstances that influenced, in diametrically different ways, their politics today. Both earned law degrees and a level of personal success.

Parker found his answers in the Republican Party, which led him to high positions in both Bush administrations. He returned to Arizona and won election as mayor of upscale, nearly all-White Paradise Valley.

Sinema entered politics through the fringes of the Green Party. She was elected as a Democrat to the Legislature, where she was a liberal bomb thrower early in her early career. But she matured, moderated some positions, learned to work across the aisle and moved into legislative leadership.

In both candidates' pasts is material for negative ads, but voters will be better served if the campaigns let it be.

These two candidates disagree on every significant issue facing America. They are articulate, forceful advocates for their views. This should be a debate about ideas, philosophy and the future of the country. Differences will be obvious without needing to twist the truth or engage in character assassination.

The U.S. Senate race between Rep. Jeff Flake and former Surgeon General Richard Carmona.

Flake, on the strength of his overwhelming victory in the Republican primary, begins the race as the front-runner. His record as a budget hawk puts him in a good position in a year when Rep. Paul Ryan is his party's vice-presidential nominee.

But he has a weakness: The state's business community has seen Flake do virtually nothing to support economic-development efforts and the creation of good Arizona jobs. Supporting business is not the same thing as dispensing pork. If Carmona can make the case that he would be better for job creation, this could be a closer race than pundits predict.

Arizona Senate races.

Primary results have nudged the legislative body in a more moderate direction, where debate can focus on issues that matter instead of unproductive saber rattling.

Bob Worsley's defeat of former Senate President Russell Pearce and Rich Crandall's victory over John Fillmore were wins for pragmatism. And, as a bonus, gun-packing, rumor-spreading Sen. Lori Klein is gone after a single term.

If several races around the state go the right way, the Senate will become the place where silly ideas go to die. It would be a welcome development.

Immigration. It's no longer a winning issue.

The appetite for anti-illegal-immigration legislation had already faded after the bad publicity and high legal bills from Senate Bill 1070. The defeat of five bills during Pearce's final year as Senate president was the first sign of immigration weariness.

Pearce's drubbing in his attempt to return to the Senate should be a warning to any legislator contemplating picking up his baton.

Arizonans are tired of this fight. They want a Legislature focused on the economy and basic state services. Those who won Tuesday and will win in November should give voters what they want.

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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Precinct races key to dekookification

Nominations are pouring in for Operation Dekookification. It seems readers see no shortage of qualified candidates in the Arizona Legislature.

One of the top nominees thus far is Sen. Judy Burges, a Sun City West Republican often on the front lines, battling national and global conspiracies. This four-term House member slid over to the Senate in January upon the departure of everybody's favorite freeway fighter, Scott Bundgaard. She has led the way in the quest for Barack Obama's birth certificate and in efforts to foil the United Nations' dastardly plot to interfere with our God-given right to pollute any darned corner of this country that we so desire.

Alas, Burges is unopposed. That's an electoral story that is repeated far too often around this state.

So, to the question. Where are the rest of the Republicans in this and many other GOP-dominated districts, the candidates less obsessed with one-world domination and more concerned with one state's well-being?

More to the point, what can people do to ensure that in 2014, the Burgeses of the state have solid competition?

Kathy Petsas would tell you that if you want to dekookify this state, it must start at ground zero of Crazytown -- 24th Street and Osborn, Republican Party headquarters, that would be, where the extremists are apparently running amok.

Petsas has been active in GOP circles for decades. Her uncle, Tom Pappas, was chairman of the Arizona Republican Party in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when legislators worked together to pass important laws that enabled this state to grow and (until recently) thrive.

"The Republican Party that my uncle was chairman of years ago, this is not that party," Petsas told me. "It has become this platform for people to discuss moral social issues and make judgments and to condemn people for differing views instead of it being about job creation, free enterprise and small business."

Petsas says the party used to recruit strong Republican candidates, raising money to help them get elected. These days, she says, party leaders -- the people elected by precinct committeemen -- are interested only in promoting ideologues over pragmatic Republicans.

The big tent, it seems, has become more like a mud hut.

"The party's been hijacked by these self-interests and social interests," she said.

So how to become once more the party of big ideas? Petsas would tell you that begins with pragmatic Republicans reclaiming the party's leadership from ideologues, which means filling those precinct committee spots.

Which must be done by Wednesday.

There are 6,383 Republican precinct committee spots in Maricopa County alone, according to Maricopa County Elections Director Karen Osborne.

These are the people who will elect new state and county leadership in January. Yet 3,467 of those slots are vacant, with no one running to fill them in the Aug. 28 election.

Put another way, of Maricopa County's 724 voting precincts, 235 have no one running to be a GOP precinct committeeman. Presumably, it's the same all over the state.

There is a chance to change that. The deadline for filing as a write-in candidate for a precinct committee spot is 5 p.m. Wednesday.

Petsas is looking for people to fill those vacant spots. If you're a Republican and you're interested in getting in on the ground floor of Operation Dekookification, here's what you need to do:

Go to the Maricopa County Recorder's Office website (recorder.maricopa.gov) and click on "elections" at the top. From the drop-down menu, choose "district locator" to find out what precinct you're in.

Then e-mail Petsas at info@reclaimRparty.org. Send her your name, address and precinct, and she will let you know if there are open spots that you could fill by becoming a write-in candidate.

If so, she'll send you the one-page application that must be filled out, notarized and returned to the Recorder's Office by 5 p.m. Wednesday. You can take it to either Recorder's Office location: 111 S. Third Ave. in Phoenix or 222 E. Javelina in Mesa.

If you're the only write-in candidate for a vacant spot, you'll be deemed elected on June 20.

It may sound like a small thing, but it's something you can do to begin the dekookification of our beloved state.

"This really effects change," Petsas said. "Responsible, pragmatic party leadership is going to evolve more pragmatic and responsible candidates. ? When it's run by mean-spirited ideologues, everyone's turned off. It doesn't help anybody. It doesn't help our state. The Republican Party needs to be working to get this state back on track."

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic

.com or 602-444-8635.

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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After Paul Falters, Backers Push Agenda in Party and Other Races

More than $560,000 later, Mr. Ramsey’s chosen standard-bearer, Thomas H. Massie, a Republican, cruised to victory Tuesday in the race to select a successor to Representative Geoff Davis, a Republican who is retiring.

The saturation advertising campaign waged by Mr. Ramsey’s “super PAC,” Liberty for All, may be the most visible manifestation of a phenomenon catching the attention of Republicans from Maine to Nevada.

With their favorite having lost the nomination for president, Mr. Paul’s dedicated band of youthful supporters is looking down-ballot and swarming lightly guarded Republican redoubts like state party conventions in an attempt to infiltrate the top echelons of the party.

“Karl Rove’s fear-and-smear-style Republicans are going to wake up at the end of the year and realize we are now in control of the Republican Party,” said Preston Bates, a Democrat-turned-Paulite who is running Liberty for All for Mr. Ramsey.

In Minnesota, Paulites stormed the Republican gathering in St. Cloud last weekend, bumping aside two conventional Republican candidates to choose one of their own, Kurt P. Bills, a high school economics teacher, to challenge Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, this fall.

Backers of Mr. Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas, crashed Republican conventions in Iowa, Maine, Minnesota and Nevada in recent weeks, snatching up the lion’s share of delegate slots for the Republican National Convention in Tampa this August, a potential headache for the national party and its presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney.

And Paulite candidates for Congress are sprouting up from Florida to Virginia to Colorado, challenging sitting Republicans and preaching the gospel of radically smaller government, an end to the Federal Reserve, restraints on Bush-era antiterrorism laws and a pullback from foreign military adventures.

“I’d call it a strict constitutional approach,” said Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky and Ron Paul’s son. “And I think it’s spreading.”

Republican Party officials say they are in daily contact with Representative Paul, in a delicate effort to harness the energy around him without inciting his supporters. “We have had open dialogue with Dr. Paul and his campaign to ensure we are all focused on winning in November,” said Sean Spicer, the Republican National Committee’s communications director.

Mr. Ramsey said that other Paul supporters had brought the Kentucky race to his attention and that he would spend whatever it takes “to get this country moving in a freer direction.” “How much money would you spend for freedom?” he asked Tuesday, after buying airtime from Lexington to Louisville with money he inherited from his grandfather in 2010 as he was being pulled into the libertarian orbit of Mr. Paul.

He met Mr. Bates on the Paul campaign, and in March they incorporated Liberty for All with nearly $1 million of Mr. Ramsey’s money. More than half of it went into Kentucky’s Fourth District in a whoosh of advertising. The impact has been significant.

Mr. Massie, the Lewis County judge executive and an engineer trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he opened the seven-way Republican primary with a lead. But he lost it after Mr. Davis and former Senator Jim Bunning backed one of his rivals, Alecia Webb-Edgington. Then small advertising buys from two other candidates pummeled him with negative accusations.

The sprawling Fourth District of Kentucky presents competitors with a challenge. To reach all its voters, a candidate must advertise in four media markets in Kentucky and Ohio. Mr. Massie acknowledged that he could not do that, but that Liberty for All could. Soon, the advertising for his rivals was drowned out by attacks on his behalf.

“They owned the airwaves, everything from the Food Channel to Court TV,” he said of the PAC.

The Ramsey money does not have a clear path from Kentucky, but Liberty for All appears to have a taste for the obscure. Its next candidate is Michael D. Cargill, a gay, black gun store owner running for constable in Travis County, Tex.

But the political action committee will have money to spend. Mr. Ramsey said that between his wallet and a fund-raising push, the PAC expected to have $10 million this summer.

As they were nominating Mr. Bills at the Minnesota Republican Convention, the Paul forces also seized 12 of the state’s 13 Republican National Convention delegate slots. In Maine, they took 21 of the 24 slots. In Nevada, they grabbed 22 of the 28.

The strategy of crashing state conventions has secured Mr. Paul large slates of delegates in Alaska, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana and Missouri, as well.

Such delegates are not considered a threat to the Romney nomination. But they could be vocal advocates for Mr. Paul’s libertarian views on issues like the war in Afghanistan, the Patriot Act and terrorist detainee policies, which overlap some with Tea Party views but do not mirror them.

And lightly regarded Paulites running for Congress could become forces with the right amount of money. Tisha Casida, an independent in Colorado, is running against Representative Scott Tipton. Calen Fretts is chipping away at Representative Jeff Miller in Florida’s Panhandle, and Karen Kwiatkowski is challenging Representative Robert W. Goodlatte in Virginia.

“I think there’s a great movement going on in this country,” said Ms. Casida, who said she was pulled into politics by Mr. Paul’s message and the red tape she faced trying to open a local farmer’s market.

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In House Races, Redistricting a Hurdle for New York Democrats

The Democratic Party suddenly faces the prospect of having to play defense in pockets around the state this fall, as Congressional districts once considered safe for the party have become more vulnerable, partly as a result of new Congressional maps put in place by a federal court.

For months, national Democrats had been counting on gains in New York to help the party pick up a few of the 25 additional seats it needs to reclaim the House. The situation developing in New York could undermine that strategy. But top Democrats insist that their incumbents are in strong positions and that the party will pick up seats, particularly since President Obama is at the top of the ticket and remains popular throughout the state.

House Republicans face their own challenges in the state, as top Democrats in Washington point out. Several Republican incumbents — most of them freshmen who took office in 2010 with the Tea Party support — must defend their seats against potentially strong Democratic challengers.

The Democrats

Representative Kathy Hochul, District 27

A first-term Democrat, Ms. Hochul is considered among the most vulnerable Democratic incumbents in New York. She achieved national prominence last year when she won a special election in a conservative district in the Buffalo area by turning the race into a referendum on a Republican proposal in Washington to overhaul Medicare.

The new Congressional map has made her district even more Republican, making her re-election prospects more difficult. Two Republicans are seeking the nomination to run against her: Chris Collins, the former Erie County executive; and David Bellavia, a veteran of the Iraq war and a Tea Party activist.

Representative Louise Slaughter, District 25

After serving nearly 25 years in Congress, Ms. Slaughter may be facing the most difficult challenge of her career. As a result of the new Congressional map, her district was consolidated into Monroe County, becoming slightly more Republican but still predominantly Democratic.

Now, Maggie A. Brooks, the popular Republican county executive in Monroe, has entered the race to unseat Ms. Slaughter, buoyed by the fact that her political base is in the heart of the congresswoman’s new district.

Representative Bill Owens, District 21

Mr. Owens, who represents this conservative district in northernmost upstate New York, initially won his seat in a 2009 special election and was re-elected the next year. In both instances, Mr. Owens won with less than 50 percent of the vote. And in both instances, his candidacy was helped by a third-party Conservative candidate who undercut the Republicans.

But that is unlikely to happen this year because Republicans and Conservatives appear to be coalescing behind Matthew A. Doheny, the Republican candidate who lost to Mr. Owens in 2010. Another Republican, Kellie Greene, is also seeking to run against Mr. Owens.

Representative Timothy H. Bishop, District 1

On Long Island, Mr. Bishop, a five-term Democrat, is girding for a rematch with Randy Altschuler, a successful Republican businessman who nearly defeated the congressman in 2010. Mr. Altschuler is an aggressive campaigner, having spent $2.9 million of his own money in 2010.

Mr. Altschuler got a lift recently when he received the endorsement of the Independence Party. That could make a difference, Republicans say, given that Mr. Altschuler lost to Mr. Bishop by a slim margin in the moderate district, which stretches across the eastern half of Long Island.

The Republicans

Representative Ann Marie Buerkle, District 24

Ms. Buerkle, a Republican, who won her seat in the Syracuse area in a big upset in 2010, is hoping to prove that her election was no fluke. But Republicans and Democrats alike say Ms. Buerkle, a Tea Party favorite, faces an uphill battle in the new district, which analysts say leans Democratic.

Ms. Buerkle is going up against the man she defeated in 2010, Dan Maffei, an aggressive campaigner who has already amassed about as much money as she has.

Representative Chris Gibson, District 19

The new Congressional map severely undercut Mr. Gibson, a first-term Republican who won in 2010. Mr. Gibson’s district went from being a Republican-leaning district to a swing district that Democrats believe they have a strong shot at picking up.

Mr. Gibson is facing a challenge by a political newcomer, Julian Schriebman, a former chairman of the Ulster County Democratic Party who is running on his experience as a federal prosecutor who tried terrorists.

Representative Nan Hayworth, District 18

In 2010, Ms. Hayworth, a first-term Republican from the suburbs north of New York City, won her seat with strong Tea Party support against a Democratic incumbent who fellow Democrats say underestimated her. But Democrats and independent analysts say she is vulnerable this year.

No fewer than four Democrats have lined up to run against her, including Sean Patrick Maloney, an aide to former Gov. Eliot Spitzer; Tom Wilson, the mayor of Tuxedo Park; Rich Becker, a town councilman in Cortlandt; and Matt Alexander, the mayor of Wappingers Falls.

Representative Michael G. Grimm, District 11

Mr. Grimm, a Republican who captured his seat in 2010 with strong support from the Tea Party, has found himself enmeshed in a controversy that Democrats say makes him vulnerable.

Mr. Grimm, who represents a district that includes Staten Island and part of western Brooklyn, has been facing intense scrutiny after The New York Times reported in January that his lead fund-raiser in the 2010 campaign was under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Some donors said Mr. Grimm and the fund-raiser indicated that they would accept illegal donations. Republicans have stood behind Mr. Grimm, who has denied any wrongdoing.

Democrats, in the meantime, are getting behind Mark Murphy, the son of a former congressman, after failing to recruit Michael E. McMahon, the candidate who lost to Mr. Grimm in 2010.

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