White House adviser: Can Romney make tough calls? (AP)

WASHINGTON – A White House adviser say Mitt Romney has "moved all over the place" on issues from abortion to gay marriage over his career and might not have firm enough convictions to make the tough decisions as president.

David Plouffe (pluhf) jokes that if Romney thought "it was good to say the sky was green and the grass was blue to win an election, he'd say it."

Plouffe, who was Barack Obama's 2008 campaign manager, notes a new Iowa poll showing Herman Cain leading with 23 percent support, and Romney next at 22 percent.

Plouffe tells NBC's "Meet the Press" that Cain "seems to have tapped into something." Plouffe says lots of voters still are "looking somewhere else" beyond Romney and he wonders whether the early front-runner can turn that around.

View the original article here

Obama adviser: GOP will target middle class (AP)

WASHINGTON – A top White House adviser is laying out the theme of President Barack Obama's re-election campaign, saying the Republicans running for president would "take dead aim" at middle class Americans.

Obama's 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe (pluhf), says GOP candidates share the goal of loosening restrictions on Wall Street bankers and giving more tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. He says all of the benefits going to the rich would be paid for by seniors and the middle class.

Speaking Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union," Plouffe said the election will offer voters a "profound choice."

The race, he says, will be "a tough, close election" that Obama will narrowly win.

Plouffe says Obama will defend his record on health care and avoiding a depression.

View the original article here

Pawlenty chides top adviser over Bachmann comment (AP)

AMES, Iowa – Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty says a top campaign adviser was wrong to suggest GOP rival Michele Bachmann's popularity was due partly to her "sex appeal."

One of Pawlenty's senior campaign advisers, Vin Weber, made the comment during an interview with The Hill, a congressional newspaper. Weber was explaining why he thought the Minnesota congresswoman would be difficult to beat in Iowa's leadoff nominating caucuses in February.

Pawlenty, Minnesota's former governor, told The Associated Press during a campaign stop Wednesday in Iowa that Weber wasn't speaking for the campaign and "you shouldn't use sex appeal in evaluating a candidate's fitness for office." Weber has apologized for the remark.

Bachmann recently finished near the top in an Iowa poll. Pawlenty was campaigning in northern and central Iowa Wednesday.

View the original article here

Obama campaign adviser Axelrod needles GOP field (AP)

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama's chief campaign strategist is dismissive of the Republicans who want his boss' job, saying they are eager to criticize the Democratic incumbent without offering substantive ways to help the country.

David Axelrod says it's too early to start sizing up the competition, but he took on the emerging field of candidates when asked to assess the GOP's first major debate of the campaign season last Monday in New Hampshire. Republicans at that forum condemned Obama's handling of the economy and pledged to repeal his health care overhaul.

"There seemed to be a unanimity of antipathy toward the president," said Axelrod, who left the White House this year to return to Chicago to work on the re-election campaign. "I didn't hear a lot of ideas," but rather "a lot of pat partisan platitudes," he told CNN's "State of the Union."

Axelrod seemed intent on going after former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the perceived front-runner, and citing the support that former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, a Republican who was Obama's ambassador to China, had given the president.

Romney, who sought his party's presidential nomination in 2008, already faces questions from his rivals about his record of changing positions on social issues including abortion and gay rights, shifts that have left conservatives questioning his sincerity. In addition, Romney championed a health care law enacted in Massachusetts that's similar to Obama's national health overhaul, which conservatives loathe.

"It's not unusual in politics for people who are ambitious to change their points of views on fundamental things to try and win an election," Axelrod said in the broadcast interview. "But that's not what people want in the president of the United States."

By contrast, he said, Obama is "one of the most consistent people that I've ever met."

Huntsman's moderate stances on some issues and his service in the Obama administration could hurt him with the Republican Party's right-leaning base.

Axelrod said that when he was in China in the fall of 2009, he had a chance to talk with Huntsman. "He was very effusive about what the president was doing. He was encouraging on health care. He was encouraging on the whole range of issues. He was a little quizzical about what was going on in his own party. And you got the strong sense that he was going to wait until 2016 for the storm to blow over."

Axelrod said that "obviously circumstances change. So I was surprised when he emerged as a candidate. But certainly I take him seriously."

Later Sunday, Huntsman spokesman Tim Miller responded: "Axelrod's comments are absurd. Gov. Huntsman's record on health care and the economy (was) the opposite of President Obama's top-heavy, government-centric, failed approach. That is the record he will run on."

Assessing the GOP debate, Axelrod said Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, "who was relatively unknown, probably did herself some good there."

He noted that some politicians who weren't yet candidates may join the race. "That will add to the fun," he said.

View the original article here

Palin adviser slams Bachmann strategist Ed Rollins for dissing the ex-governor (The Ticket)

It looks like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann might genuinely be frenemies now.

A day after Ed Rollins, Bachmann's top political adviser, trashed Palin in a radio interview, a top adviser to the former Alaska governor slammed the longtime GOP strategist and called on the Bachmann camp to retract his statements.

"Beltway political strategist Ed Rollins has a long, long track record of taking high profile jobs and promptly sticking his foot in his mouth," Michael Glassner, Palin's chief of staff, said in a statement to Politico's Ben Smith. "To no one's surprise he has done it again, while also fueling a contrived narrative about the presidential race by the mainstream media. One would expect that his woodshed moment is coming and that a retraction will be issued soon."

As The Ticket previously reported, Rollins criticized Palin Tuesday, insisting she's not as qualified to be president as Bachmann and is a joke candidate.

"Sarah has not been serious over the last couple of years," Rollins said. "She got the vice presidential thing handed to her. She didn't go to work in the sense of trying to gain more substance. She gave up her governorship."

Rollins responded to Glassner's statement with a semi-apology, telling ABC his comments had nothing to do with "Michele, Michele's campaign or any of the rest of it." "This was my transition from being an analyst to a political strategist, and I missed a step," he said.

But Rollins declined to take back what he'd said about Palin. "What's the retraction?" Rollins asked. "I say she's serious?"

Rollins' comments fueled the storyline that Palin and Bachmann are on the brink of a political catfight over the 2012 nomination—a dynamic that political observers have been pressing for weeks, in spite of evidence to the contrary. But both sides added fuel to the fire today in a separate piece in Politico in which the Palin and Bachmann camps sniped at each other—mostly via advisers who declined to be named.

"The view in Iowa is that she's unstable," an unnamed Bachmann aide told Politico. "When she resigned her position as governor that whole event seemed odd, and people in Iowa saw that."

Meanwhile, "a Palin associate" told the paper that the ex-governor has expressed "disdain" for Bachmann--even though another top Palin aide denies that.

Glassner's comments are telling, as Palin aides often don't speak publicly without the explicit permission of the former governor herself.

But that's not the only faux controversy dogging Palin. As ABC News's Sheila Marikar reports, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat from Oregon, has launched in an inquiry into whether Palin's recent bus tour used excessive federal resources. He's calling into question the manpower the National Park Service offered to Palin on her tour of federal historic sites along the East Coast.

A Park Service spokesman tells ABC Palin did receive some special treatment—including early access to the Statue of Liberty—but it was no different from how any other "celebrity" would be treated.

"We treated her as any other celebrity that might come in," NPS spokesman David Barna told ABC, adding they'd do the same for "Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie."

(Photo of Palin: Steven Senne/AP)

View the original article here