MyCar: An Electric Runabout With Bipartisan Support

GreenTech AutomotiveThe MyCar, which is to be produced initially in Mississippi.

If a start-up car company’s chances for success were correlated to the enthusiasm of its chief executive, then an electric-vehicle venture led by Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic National Committee chairman, would be a sure thing. It takes more than charisma to attract buyers, though, and while the enterprise in question enjoys support from prominent politicians in the Republican and Democratic parties, it also engenders skepticism from some analysts.

Mr. McAuliffe’s GreenTech Automotive will unveil the two-seat, low-speed, Smart-size MyCar on Friday at a new plant in Mississippi. The event, he said in a telephone interview, would feature a barbecue and an appearance by the former president Bill Clinton, Mr. McAuliffe’s longtime friend.

GreenTech AutomotiveTerry McAuliffe.

Mr. McAuliffe is a possible candidate for the Virginia governorship in 2013 — he lost a three-way Democratic primary for the post in 2009 — but he says he has a good reason for choosing to manufacture the MyCar in Mississippi.

“Haley Barbour put the most aggressive package on the table for us,” he said, referencing the state’s former governor, a Republican. “No one else’s offer was even close to Governor Barbour’s. We can disagree on political issues, but this is two people from different parties coming together. He’s been very aggressive in bringing in the carmakers, so now he’s saying, ‘Let’s try an electric.’ It’s a win-win for everybody.”

Toyota and Nissan also operate plants in the state.

In a separate telephone interview, Mr. Barbour said he and Mr. McAuliffe had reached across the aisle before, since both were involved in the opening of the bipartisan Caucus Room restaurant in Washington in 2000. He said GreenTech received an “off-the-shelf package of incentives” to locate its plants in Mississippi. “It’s not about politics,” he said. “It’s about economic development and higher-paying, higher-skilled job creation in my state. We have not, by a long shot, given up on manufacturing in Mississippi.”

Mr. McAuliffe said the venture would employ 900 workers in Mississippi by the end of the year, as well as create many jobs indirectly. With an initial focus on fleet sales and the European market, he says he believes the company can produce 10,000 cars in 2013. GreenTech described its first Mississippi plant, a leased 400,000-square-foot former elevator factory in Horn Lake, as a pilot facility. A second plant, in Tunica, is expected to open in 2013.

Mr. McAuliffe quoted a price of $18,000 for a MyCar with an included lithium-ion battery pack, and $10,000 for the basic car, presuming a battery lease from the company. A version of the car with lead-acid batteries and 51 miles of range will sell in the mid-$15,000 range, according to Marianne McInerney, a GreenTech sales and marketing spokeswoman.

But prices and performance may vary. Chris Anthony, chief executive of Flux Power, said in a telephone interview that his California-based company had worked with GreenTech “for well over a year” on lithium batteries for the car and had developed 7-, 15- and 23-kilowatt-hour packs, the largest of which would give the car more than 100 miles of range. He also said several hundred packs had been delivered to GreenTech.

The MyCar is hardly a slam dunk for Western buyers. It is a neighborhood electric vehicle, or N.E.V., which means it is not allowed on interstates and is legally limited to 25 miles per hour in most states. In a majority of markets, statutes limit the cars to roads with posted top speeds of 35 m.p.h. or lower. Although it was designed by the noted Italian stylist Giorgetto Giugiaro, the MyCar was originally the product of a Hong Kong-based venture bought by Mr. McAuliffe and his partners for $20 million in 2010.

Mr. McAuliffe said in May that an early MyCar produced in Mississippi was delivered to Denmark, where the company has a relationship with an electric car distributor, Greenabout A/S. Last year, GreenTech said Greenabout would “purchase a sizeble percentage of production through 2014.”

GreenTech is also building a factory in China to produce cars for that market. According to Mr. McAuliffe, he negotiated a contract requiring that core components for those vehicles be built at the plants in Mississippi. “The powertrain and guts of the car will be made in the United States,” he said. “If we allow one more technology to escape overseas, shame on us.”

There’s some skepticism over the market for speed-limited cars. “It’s a niche vehicle, and historically niche vehicles haven’t done particularly well,” Michelle Krebs, a senior analyst at Edmunds.com, said in a telephone interview. She also noted that pricing for the soon-to-be-delivered Chevrolet Spark minicar would start at about $13,000, “and you can take it on the highway.”

But Jay Friedland, legislative director of the advocacy group Plug In America, was more supportive. “It makes sense in some ways,” he wrote in an e-mail. “The export market for these, as medium-speed vehicles, is pretty good. There is also a big market for neighborhood vehicles in Florida.” He described annual sales of 5,000 to 10,000 N.E.V.’s as “probably doable.” Anything beyond that, however, “is dreaming,” he said.

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A Carbon Tax, Sensible for All

This was good news not only for the environment but for nearly everyone who pays taxes in British Columbia, because the carbon tax is used to reduce taxes for individuals and businesses. Thanks to this tax swap, British Columbia has lowered its corporate income tax rate to 10 percent from 12 percent, a rate that is among the lowest in the Group of 8 wealthy nations. Personal income taxes for people earning less than $119,000 per year are now the lowest in Canada, and there are targeted rebates for low-income and rural households.

The only bad news is that this is the last increase scheduled in British Columbia. In our view, the reason is simple: the province is waiting for the rest of North America to catch up so that its tax system will not become unbalanced or put energy-intensive industries at a competitive disadvantage.

The United States should jump at the chance to adopt a similar revenue-neutral tax swap. It’s an opportunity to reduce existing taxes, clean up the environment and increase personal freedom and energy security.

Let’s start with the economics. Substituting a carbon tax for some of our current taxes — on payroll, on investment, on businesses and on workers — is a no-brainer. Why tax good things when you can tax bad things, like emissions? The idea has support from economists across the political spectrum, from Arthur B. Laffer and N. Gregory Mankiw on the right to Peter Orszag and Joseph E. Stiglitz on the left. That’s because economists know that a carbon tax swap can reduce the economic drag created by our current tax system and increase long-run growth by nudging the economy away from consumption and borrowing and toward saving and investment.

Of course, carbon taxes also lower carbon emissions. Economic theory suggests that putting a price on pollution reduces emissions more affordably and more effectively than any other measure. This conclusion is supported by empirical evidence from previous market-based policies, like those in the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act that targeted sulfur dioxide emissions. British Columbia’s carbon tax is only four years old, but preliminary data show that greenhouse gas emissions are down 4.5 percent even as population and gross domestic product have been growing. Sales of motor gasoline have fallen by 2 percent since 2007, compared with a 5 percent increase for Canada as a whole.

What would a British Columbia-style carbon tax look like in the United States? According to our calculations, a British Columbia-style $30 carbon tax would generate about $145 billion a year in the United States. That could be used to reduce individual and corporate income taxes by 10 percent, and afterward there would still be $35 billion left over. If recent budget deals are any guide, Congress might choose to set aside half of that remainder to reduce estate taxes (to please Republicans) and the other half to offset the impacts of higher fuel and electricity prices resulting from the carbon tax on low-income households through refundable tax credits or a targeted reduction in payroll taxes (to please Democrats).

Revenue from a carbon tax would most likely decline over time as Americans reduce their carbon emissions, but for many years to come it could pay for big reductions in existing taxes. It would also promote energy conservation and steer investment into clean technology and other productive economic activities.

Lastly, the carbon tax would actually give Americans more control over how much they pay in taxes. Households and businesses could reduce their carbon tax payments simply by reducing their use of fossil fuels. Americans would trim their carbon footprints — and their tax burdens — by investing in energy efficiency at home and at work, switching to less-polluting vehicles and pursuing countless other innovations. All of this would be driven not by government mandates but by Adam Smith’s invisible hand.

A carbon tax makes sense whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, a climate change skeptic or a believer, a conservative or a conservationist (or both). We can move past the partisan fireworks over global warming by turning British Columbia’s carbon tax into a made-in-America solution.

Yoram Bauman, an environmental economist, is a fellow at Sightline Institute in Seattle. Shi-Ling Hsu, a law professor at Florida State University, is the author of “The Case for a Carbon Tax.”

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Obama Spends the Most in June, but Romney Raises More

Mr. Obama and the Democratic National Committee spent $70.8 million in June, including about $38 million on television advertising, as the president’s campaign sought to batter Mr. Romney over his ties to Bain Capital, the private equity firm.

Mr. Romney and the Republican National Committee spent $38.8 million, including about $11 million on television advertising — more than double what Mr. Romney’s campaign spent in May but far less than Mr. Obama.

But because money raised for the election cannot be spent until after the two parties hold their nominating conventions at the end of the summer, Mr. Obama appears to have far more money available to spend in the critical weeks ahead, when each candidate seeks to define the other.

Mr. Obama had an estimated $72 million in primary cash available at the end of June, thanks to a vast army of small donors who can give again and again without hitting the $2,500 contribution limit for primary season. Half of Mr. Obama’s money in June came in checks of less than $200. Mr. Romney has an estimated $20 million in primary money. Many of his early donors gave the maximum contribution while he was still spending heavily to fend off his Republican rivals in the first half of the year.

But Mr. Romney sharply improved his take from small donors in June, with checks of under $200 accounting for about a third of his fund-raising, suggesting that Mr. Obama’s advantage might not persist.

The primary cash for the candidates does not include money not yet transferred to their campaigns from the fund-raising accounts each candidate shares with his party.

The deficit in available money leaves Mr. Romney dependent on the Republican-leaning outside groups that have spent heavily in recent months to keep Mr. Obama on the defensive. American Crossroads, the leading Republican “super PAC,” this week announced a new $9 million campaign against Mr. Obama that criticizes the president for what the group says are unfair attacks on Mr. Romney. Restore Our Future, a super PAC backing Mr. Romney, spent about $15 million between April and June, including $7.6 million in June, a month when it raised $20 million.

Donations to Restore Our Future included $10 million from the casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson and his wife, $1 million from the real estate developer Harlan Crow, and $2 million from the Texas homebuilder Bob Perry, according to commission reports.

Tax-exempt “issue groups” that do not report their donors have spent millions more against Mr. Obama.

Mr. Romney has used that breathing room to crisscross the country attending fund-raisers to fill his war chest, exploiting his joint committee with the R.N.C. to bring in checks far in excess of what he could accept for his campaign. The committee, Romney Victory, brought in $140 million in the three months through June.

With the primary behind him, Mr. Romney has also begun building out his campaign staff and infrastructure, investments Mr. Obama and the Democrats made months ago. The Romney campaign’s payroll more than doubled between April and June, while his spending on direct mail has more than tripled. He spent close to a half-million dollars on office equipment in May and June. Mr. Romney’s campaign also spent $559,689 in June on “campaign promotional items,” according to election commission reports.

Mr. Obama substantially increased his expenditures on polling, spending $2.6 million in June, a fivefold increase over May. He continued to spend heavily on online advertising, with bills of about $4.4 million in June, and data mining, continuing a yearlong effort by Mr. Obama’s campaign to refine its attack on Mr. Romney and reconstitute the vast army of grass-roots supporters that helped power his 2008 victory. Mr. Obama’s spending on events — including stages, sound and lighting — also jumped in June, as he began hitting the campaign trail more intensively.

Both candidates are relying heavily on “bundlers,” supporters who gather checks from friends and business associates and help host fund-raisers. A list of bundlers posted by Mr. Obama’s campaign on Friday named individuals and couples. The top rank of bundlers, who have raised at least $500,000 each, included roughly 200 individuals accounting for at least $100 million of Mr. Obama’s haul.

Such disclosures are not required, and Mr. Romney has refused to name his fund-raisers. An analysis published this month by USA Today found that Mr. Romney has close to 1,200 bundlers, hundreds of them executives in the financial industry.

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Campaign Videos Turn to Mocking Candidates

If you’re a talented video producer with a tendency toward scathing, sarcastic attacks, this appears to be your year.

The 2012 presidential campaign has become a battlefield of mocking, rhetorical missiles, many of them delivered in the form of cheap, quickly produced videos posted to the Internet and publicized by the campaigns on Twitter and Facebook.

But do they go too far, risking a backlash even as they go viral?

President Obama’s campaign and his Democratic allies are testing that thesis with a series of videos and TV ads that have made fun of Mitt Romney’s off-key singing, his awkward lapses into corporate-speak and even his wife’s beloved dancing Olympic horse.

That last one has already blown up in their faces.

In two videos produced by the Democratic National Committee, Mr. Romney’s words were juxtaposed with images of Ann Romney’s horse, Rafalca, performing the Olympic sport of dressage, or horse ballet, with a top-hatted man in the saddle.

“Do we really want a president who dances around the issues?” asks the video — which has been viewed 61,440 times.

Mr. Obama’s supporters clearly thought the video was funny. Mrs. Romney apparently thought otherwise. And it turns out that mocking the very serious hobby of a candidate’s wife — especially one who is extremely popular — is not a particularly good strategy.

The Democratic National Committee quickly apologized, saying that the “use of the Romneys’ dressage horse was not meant to offend Mrs. Romney in any way, and we regret it if it did.”

Perhaps the committee should have listened to Mr. Obama’s own advice, delivered earlier this year after a Democratic strategist criticized Mrs. Romney as never having worked a day in her life. In a television interview soon after, Mr. Obama suggested staying away from spouses.

“I haven’t met Mrs. Romney, but she seems like a very nice woman who is supportive of her family and supportive of her husband. I don’t know if she necessarily volunteered for this job so, you know, we don’t need to be directing comments at them,” he said.

But if Democrats are backing away from the horse images, they are by no means abandoning the posting of biting videos to drive home their message.

In a video released by Mr. Obama this week, a handful of people can be seen reading a transcript of Mr. Romney’s answer to questions about when he left Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded two decades ago. The voters trip over his awkward phrasing, making the video seem more like a segment on “The Daily Show” than a campaign ad.

“He says ‘entity’ a lot,” one person says, looking a bit confused.

Mr. Obama’s campaign also produced a television ad shown in nine battleground states that shows Mr. Romney singing “America the Beautiful” — badly. The idea was to contrast the song with images of the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, where Mr. Romney reportedly kept money in offshore accounts.

Senior advisers to Mr. Obama said they believed the ad did not go too far. They said they were confident that voters would see it as a lighthearted way to make a point about Mr. Romney’s finances.

The Romney campaign disagreed, and quickly issued a statement accusing Mr. Obama of making fun of a great American song. “It is sad and shameful that President Obama would mock ‘America The Beautiful,’” the statement said.

The use of sarcastic videos is not limited to Mr. Obama’s campaign. Mr. Romney and his Republican allies have produced their fair share of attacks intended to become sensations on the Internet.

One recent video by the Republican National Committee shows Jay Carney, Mr. Obama’s press secretary, saying that the president has “a lot on his plate.” The video then goes on to show that Mr. Obama has golfed 10 times and held 106 fund-raisers in the last six months, while his jobs council has not met once.

The video then shows a fancy-looking dinner plate with $100 bills and golf balls on it.

In another golf-themed video (lest people forget that Mr. Obama plays a lot of golf), the Republican National Committee shows a golfer repeatedly missing the final put, while showing headlines about Mr. Obama’s economic policies.

This is not the first election to feature snarky videos. In 1988, video of Michael Dukakis wearing a helmet as he rode in a tank came to epitomize his awkwardness. And in 2004, an ad of John Kerry windsurfing was used by Republicans as a metaphor for his flip-flopping.

But it does seem as if a cadre of Democratic and Republican video producers have been busy for months creating a mountain of these attack videos, just waiting for the moment to unload them on the voters.

That moment seems to be now.

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Barrier to Romney Tax Disclosure Is the Candidate Himself

10:11 p.m. | Updated A revised version of this post is available here.

Mitt Romney has said it every way he can: He is not releasing any more of his tax returns.

Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, is facing millions of dollars in searing ads from President Obama and a rising chorus of puzzled Republicans, all urging him to reveal more of his financial history.

But with each answer he gives, Mr. Romney seems more determined than ever that voters will not see any of his tax history before 2010.

“In the political environment that exists today, the opposition research of the Obama campaign is looking for anything they can use to distract from the failure of the president to reignite our economy,” Mr. Romney told National Review on Tuesday, explaining his opposition to a broader release of his personal tax data.

“I’m simply not enthusiastic about giving them hundreds or thousands of more pages to pick through, distort and lie about,” he said.

That follows an equally emphatic statement last Friday, when Mr. Romney brushed aside calls for him to make public more than the 2010 returns he has released and the 2011 documents he has said are coming soon.

“Those are the two years people are going to have, and that’s all that’s necessary for people to understand something about my finances,” Mr. Romney said in an interview on CNN.

The definitive nature of Mr. Romney’s statements appears to have all but shut down any public contemplation from his close advisers that he might reconsider. Kevin Madden, a senior adviser to Mr. Romney, declined to talk about internal discussions on the issue, but made clear who was in charge.

“I would point you to the governor’s statements,” Mr. Madden said. “That guides the campaign’s position.”

Another senior adviser to the campaign said Wednesday that he had “heard of no division in the inner circle on this.”

“He is determined not to release more, and they support him,” the adviser said of Mr. Romney and his aides. “Plus, there is no evidence that voters care about this. They think they know enough about Mitt Romney’s finances.”

But that answer has not satisfied a growing number of Republicans who have said that Mr. Romney’s refusal to release more of his tax returns threatens to do him lasting political damage as he nears the final stage of the presidential campaign.

On Tuesday, the editors of National Review wrote that the Republican campaign was “playing into the president’s hands” by refusing to release the tax returns. They predicted that Mr. Romney would eventually have to cave in to the demands.

“The only question is whether he releases more returns now, or later — after playing more defense on the issue and sustaining more hits,” they wrote. “There will surely be a press feeding frenzy over new returns, but better to weather it in the middle of July.”

In the last several days, similar calls have come from Republican pundits and governors, and from some of Mr. Romney’s former rivals for the party’s nomination.

“Politically, I think that would help him,” Representative Ron Paul of Texas told Politico. “In the scheme of things politically, you know, it looks like releasing tax returns is what the people want.”

George Will, the conservative commentator, said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that Mr. Romney should release more tax returns quickly.

“If something’s going to come out, get it out in a hurry,” Mr. Will said. “I do not know why, given that Mitt Romney knew the day that McCain lost in 2008 that he was going to run for president again that he didn’t get all of this out and tidy up some of his offshore accounts and all the rest.”

Mr. Romney’s hard-and-fast refusals have also energized the Democratic attacks. Mr. Obama’s Chicago-based campaign is continuing to hammer him with new television ads, web videos and commentary from surrogates.

The Democratic National Committee on Wednesday released a video making fun of Mr. Romney by juxtaposing his statements on his tax returns with images of a man in a top hat doing a horse ballet.

“Do we really want a president who dances around the issues?” the video asks.

The horse featured in the video is Rafalca, and is owned by Ann Romney, who took some offense to the video in an appearance on ABC on Wednesday. By late Wednesday, the D.N.C. apologized and said it would no longer use the horse in videos or ads.

“Our use of the Romneys’ dressage horse was not meant to offend Mrs. Romney in any way, and we regret it if it did,” said Brad Woodhouse, the communications director for the D.N.C. “We were simply making a point about Governor Romney’s failure to give straight answers on a variety of issues in this race. We have no plans to invoke the horse any further to avoid misinterpretation.”

Mr. Woodhouse said the existing video, and a second similar one also released earlier Wednesday, will remain available online.

A television ad by Mr. Obama’s campaign went up in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, just as Mr. Romney held an event in the state. Titled “Makes you Wonder,” the ad raises the possibilities that Mr. Romney has additional overseas tax havens that would be revealed by releasing his tax returns.

“Makes you wonder if some years he paid any taxes at all,” the ad says. “We don’t know because Romney has released just one full year of his tax returns.”

Mr. Romney’s campaign has sought to change the subject, accusing the Democrats of going on the attack because of what they say are the failed economic policies of Mr. Obama’s administration.

Mr. Madden said that Mr. Romney had disclosed personal financial information “beyond what the law requires” and said that should be enough.

“What’s important to voters is the state of the economy and who’s going to fix it,” he said. “What they really want is a focus on the issues. That’s where the governor is focused.”

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Terry McAuliffe and the Other Green Party

By Ben Werschkul and Mac William BishopTimesCast Politics: Terry MacAuliffe: Mark Leibovich on ‘The Macker.’

Terry McAuliffe, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is starting a company that makes little electric cars. On a sweltering Friday in early July, GreenTech Automotive unveiled its signature vehicle — the MyCar — at a plant opening in the North Mississippi town of Horn Lake. McAuliffe was puttering backstage before the event with his pals Bill Clinton and Haley Barbour, the former governor of Mississippi and archetypal Republican lobbyist.

McAuliffe the Democrat (left) and Barbour the Republican, share a laugh.

The holding area was crowded and somewhat frenzied. People designated as V.I.P.’s kept streaming through, many in from China, where GreenTech is building an 18-million-square-foot facility. They arrived, dozens of them, via a Harrah’s shuttle bus with a big “Fun in Store for Those Who Ride” painted on the side. As Clinton prepared to go onstage, I asked him if he would ever consider buying a car from McAuliffe, who he once marveled could “talk an owl out of a tree.” “Absolutely, I would buy a new car from Terry,” he told me. “But a used car? I am not so sure about a used car.” He laughed and wheeled around and repeated the line to Barbour (“Listen to what I just told him . . . ”), while slapping his fleshy back.

McAuliffe, 55, is eager to be known, foremost, as a businessman and an entrepreneur, and not so much as a political moneyman. That will take some doing. He is “the greatest fund-raiser in the history of the universe,” Al Gore once said, in keeping with the hyperbole often heaped on McAuliffe, known widely as the Macker, by the politicians who love/need him. McAuliffe, who is in fact quite hard to dislike and is himself a peerless exaggerator, has collected legions of friends over the years. “There are 18,000 names in my Rolodex,” he boasted to me earlier that morning over coffee. When I pressed him, he revised the number upward, to 18, 632. The acknowledgments section of his memoir, “What a Party!” runs six single-spaced pages and includes the names of every member of the Democratic National Committee during his time as the party chairman. In a five-minute span of conversation, McAuliffe distilled for me the extent of his psychological complexity: 1) He pinches himself all the time because he’s so lucky. 2) He likes to think out of the box. 3) He swings for the fences every day. 4) At the end of the day, it is what it is.

If McAuliffe’s trademark is fund-raising, his principal identity is as a Professional Best Friend to Bill Clinton. The subtitle of “What a Party!” might as well be “Let Me Tell You Another Story About Me and Bill Clinton.” (One involved South Korean Intelligence agents thinking McAuliffe and Clinton were more than just friends.) If he is not dropping the name of the 42nd president, the Macker is telling you that he just got off the phone with Bill Clinton, or that, what do you know, President Clinton is actually on the phone right now, and can you please excuse him for just a second (“Hello, Mr. President”). And if Mr. President is not on the phone, there is a good chance he is, as today, close by.

Clinton’s voice is softer and throatier than you remember. He has lost considerable weight, evident to anyone who has seen him in photographs (once known as the “Big Dog,” he’s now more “Vegan Dog”). But it is jarring nonetheless to see the svelte version of the former president up close, especially since his head is as big as it ever was — a fact accentuated by the ruddy brightness of his face and pronounced cheekbones. Encountering Clinton these days is like meeting a skinny older guy who is wearing a Bill Clinton mask.

McAuliffe’s MyCar debut is the culmination of years of planning for a firm that is trying to reinvent the automobile. Unsaid was that he also hoped it would reinvent Terry McAuliffe as he approaches his own probable run for governor of Virginia in 2013 — something he tried in 2009, losing in the primary to a relative political unknown named Creigh Deeds. GreenTech could be the vehicle, so to speak, for McAuliffe to escape his lane as a political rainmaker, carnival barker and Clinton appendage and reposition himself as “a Virginia businessman fighting for Democratic causes and creating jobs,” as his Web site says. It hardly mattered that a lot of these jobs would be in Mississippi, not Virginia, because of a package of tax and infrastructure incentives McAuliffe was able to secure from Barbour, who himself made the successful transition from operative-businessman to public office when he was elected governor of Mississippi in 2003.

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Mixed Message as Republicans Claim Health Law Cuts Medicare

Yet since the Supreme Court upheld the Democrats’ 2010 health care law, Republicans, led by Mitt Romney, have reversed tactics and attacked the president and Democrats in Congress by saying that Medicare will be cut too much as part of that law. Republicans plan to hold another vote to repeal the law in the House next week, though any such measure would die in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

“Obamacare cuts Medicare — cuts Medicare — by approximately $500 billion,” Mr. Romney has told audiences.

That is a reprise of Republicans’ mantra of the 2010 midterm elections, which gave them big gains at both the state and federal levels and a majority in the House. Yet the message conflicts not only with their past complaint that Democrats opposed reining in Medicare spending, but also with the fact that House Republicans have voted twice since 2010 for the same 10-year, $500 billion savings in supporting Mr. Ryan’s annual budgets.

The result is a messaging mess, even by the standards of each party’s usual election-year attacks that the other is being insufficiently supportive of older people’s benefits.

And in this year’s contests, which both parties describe as a referendum on who can best correct the nation’s economic course, such talk underscores how far Republicans and Democrats are from truly squaring with the public about curbing the growth of the major entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid and, to a lesser extent, Social Security. That growth is driving the projections of a federal debt that is mounting unsustainably as the population ages and health care costs rise.

“A pox on both their houses,” said Ron Haskins, a former Congressional staff member who is now a scholar of social programs and budgeting at the Brookings Institution. Democrats and Republicans “know they have to do something about Medicare, and then they harass each other about cutting Medicare. It’s so discouraging to me, but I’m a Republican, so I’m much more distraught about Republicans.”

And, Mr. Haskins added, “$500 billion is modest compared to what Ryan would do.”

Under Mr. Ryan’s budget, which Mr. Romney has supported but which has been blocked each year in the Senate, Medicare would not pay for the medical fees of future beneficiaries, as it currently does. Instead it would provide “premium support,” limited payments — vouchers, Democrats say — that beneficiaries could use to buy insurance policies in the private sector. And Medicaid, which increasingly goes toward nursing home care for older people, would become a capped block grant to states, forcing them to make significant cuts.

In their attacks, Republicans have said in speeches and in television advertisements that the Democrats’ projected $500 billion in Medicare savings will “strip,” “gut,” “rob” or “raid” older people’s benefits.

“Ron Barber will hurt Arizona seniors,” said an ad this spring from the House Republicans’ campaign committee in support of the Republican who ultimately lost to Mr. Barber, a Democrat, in a special election to replace Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

Objecting to such attacks, Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said in an interview: “There are two issues here: One, there were no cuts to Medicare benefits. And in fact, benefits were strengthened.”

Independent fact-checking groups have repeatedly knocked down the Republicans’ claims. “A discredited claim is making a comeback following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding most of the national health care reform law,” PolitiFact recently wrote in one such analysis.

Republicans stand by their attack. They say the problem with the Democratic approach is that the reductions do little to bolster Medicare’s stability, with the money diverted to initiatives in the health care law.

“Democrats are still the only party in Washington to cut $500 billion from Medicare in order to help pay for Obamacare,” said Paul Lindsay, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “It’s a fact that did not go unnoticed among seniors in 2010, and one that we will continue holding Democrats accountable for in our ads this fall.”

But the $500 billion in reductions would come through cuts in the projected growth of Medicare and would mainly affect hospitals and other providers of medical care, some of whom supported the health care measure nonetheless because it would extend coverage to up to 30 million uninsured Americans, raising the number of paying customers. Other savings would result from lower subsidies for private insurers selling Medicare Advantage plans, which offer older people extra features like vision care and gym memberships. The insurers could not cut basic Medicare benefits.

Democrats used the projected $500 billion in savings to help pay for expanding older people’s benefits. The health care law says that some preventive care services like mammograms must be free to patients, and it closed the “doughnut hole” in the Medicare prescription drug program, which had left many older people paying full price for prescriptions above a certain level.

While Republicans have backed the spending reductions, even as they have attacked Mr. Obama and the Democrats for enacting them, they would end the new benefits.

Mr. Ryan, of Wisconsin, was unavailable for comment, but, pressed on the issue on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, he said: “Well, our budget keeps that money for Medicare to extend its solvency. What Obamacare does is it takes that money from Medicare to spend on Obamacare.”

Robert Greenstein, the executive director of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, called Mr. Ryan’s claim “somewhere between a misstatement and a flat-out untruth.”

Mr. Greenstein, among others, said that Democrats were not double-counting the $500 billion in savings — by claiming that it both improves Medicare’s financial outlook and helps finance new benefits — any more than were the Republicans, who say they would use the savings both to shore up the Medicare trust funds and to reduce the federal debt.

The Congressional Budget Office and the chief actuary for the Medicare and Medicaid programs, Richard S. Foster, have concluded that the $500 billion in savings would extend the solvency of Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund. Since the passage of the health care law, known as the Affordable Care Act, the Medicare trustees have shifted the projected date of insolvency to 2024 from 2016.

Mr. Foster, in this year’s report by the trustees, wrote that “the Affordable Care Act makes important changes to the Medicare program and substantially improves its financial outlook.”

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On the Trail, Romney Runs Into Some Opposition

Evan McGlinn for The New York TimesMitt Romney at the Middlesex Truck & Coach factory on Thursday in Roxbury, Mass.

BOSTON — On the campaign trail it is known as “bracketing” — when a representative of the opposition tries to sully the message of a stage-managed rally.

Mitt Romney’s staff members proved masters of the practice during the Republican primary race, lurking to speak with reporters after speeches by Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

On Thursday, Mr. Romney got the same treatment when two Democratic politicians from Boston tried to counter his visit to a small business here, where he attacked President Obama once again for his “you didn’t build it” remark.

“When the president said if you’ve got a business you didn’t build it,” Mr. Romney said, standing beside Brian Maloney, 69, who runs a bus and truck repair shop in the Roxbury neighborhood, “come here and talk to Brian.”

On the sidewalk, Tito Jackson, a city councilman representing Roxbury, said that as Massachusetts governor, Mr. Romney had done little to help businesses in the area, which is largely black and Hispanic.

“I’m very happy that former Governor Romney found his way here,’’ Mr. Jackson said. “But you know what, he didn’t create jobs when he was governor. He didn’t find himself in this community that often. And now we as people — Roxbury — we know you, Mitt Romney. We know you.’’

Mr. Romney, of course, was not making a serious play to win deep-blue Massachusetts in November. He was using the backdrop of a successful small business, Middlesex Trucking & Coach, to hammer Mr. Obama on the economy.

“This is a day where we received some news that is not encouraging,’’ Mr. Romney said. “Jobless claims are up in this country again and consumer confidence has now shown the third straight month of decline. That is a record that has not been matched since 2008.’’

And for a third straight day, Mr. Romney attacked the president for remarks he made about the debt that entrepreneurs owe to government for investments in education and roads.

“Now I know that some people think what the president said was just a gaffe,’’ Mr. Romney said. “It wasn’t a gaffe. It was instead his ideology.’’

He seemed to be responding to a statement by the Obama campaign earlier in the day that Mr. Romney had taken the president’s comment out of context. Speaking at a firehouse in Virginia last week about the support that entrepreneurs receive from society, Mr. Obama said: “Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.’’

It is unclear if the president’s “that” referred to roads and bridges, or to businesses. But to Mr. Romney there was no doubt the phrase revealed a basic difference in their philosophies: rugged individualism vs. mutual dependence.

“The president does, in fact, believe that people who build enterprises like this really aren’t responsible for it,’’ he said, standing in a truck bay and using a Craftsman tool box for a lectern. “That, in fact, it’s a collective success of the whole society that someone builds enterprises like this.’’

Mr. Maloney, in business since 1980, was an ideal embodiment of Mr. Romney’s message. “I take umbrage at the suggestion that people don’t start and build businesses,’’ he said. “I started out with 50 bucks and worked with my hands to afford grad school at night. My wife supported me.’’

He said government had not helped, and only brought complicated regulations. “It’s overbearing,” he said.

But Felix G. Arroyo, an at-large member of the Boston City Council, speaking in front of several dozen chanting demonstrators, cited Mr. Romney’s record of job creation as governor, when Massachusetts ranked 47th in the nation over his four years in office.

“The facts of his leadership of our state do not speak to him as a job creator,’’ he said.

Mr. Jackson, the councilman, cited a remark of Mr. Romney’s reported by The Boston Herald in 1994, that private investors do not think of backing businesses in inner-city Roxbury or nearby Dorchester. “Why do we never think about it? Crime,’’ Mr. Romney was quoted saying.

(On the defensive about it the next day, he said he would encourage investors to seek out the neighborhoods).

“If he didn’t have the vision for turning around Roxbury then,’’ Mr. Jackson said, “how is he going to have that vision when he’s president?’’

While showing Mr. Romney around his company, Mr. Maloney looked out a window at the protesters and said: “We’ve done a lot for the neighborhood. It’s a shame those people are out there.’’

“Oh, that’s the nature of politics,’’ Mr. Romney responded, according to a pool reporter. “There are always two teams. We’re always bothering each other’s teams.’’

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At Barney Frank's Wedding, Vegan Soba and Pelosi on the Dance Floor

Gretchen Ertl for The New York TimesRepresentative Barney Frank, left, with his husband, Jim Ready, during their wedding reception in Newton, Mass.

NEWTON, Mass. — Senator John Kerry and Gov. Deval L. Patrick left early. But Representative Nancy Pelosi stayed late — and swayed on the dance floor to “It’s Raining Men.”

Elizabeth Kucinich snapped photographs, as her husband, Dennis, chatted up Representative Steny H. Hoyer by the hors d’oeuvres. And Terrence McNally, the playwright, joined in the hora and a group singalong of “Low Rider” by War, with President Obama-themed lyrics written for the occasion.

There was no shortage of boldface public servants here on Saturday, when Representative Barney Frank was married in what one guest described as “the wedding of the century for liberal gay Democratic politics.” And the reception, with music, vegan dishes and general sentimental gushing, offered its own display of the liberal Democrat establishment celebrating the first-ever same-sex wedding of a congressman.

Eschewing more glamorous locales, Mr. Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, and his husband, Jim Ready, chose a nondescript Marriott in his Congressional district to host the occasion. The hotel overlooks a bend of the Charles River — and a busy, honking intersection of two major highways. (Mr. Frank said he liked the convenience for out-of-town guests.)

The ceremony, which began at 6 p.m., took place in a garden outside the hotel’s first floor. Mr. Kerry sat by Ms. Pelosi, the House minority leader, in the first few rows.

Gretchen Ertl for The New York TimesRepresentative Nancy Pelosi congratulated Mr. Frank.

Mr. Frank, famous for his tirades, appeared close to tears as his sister, Ann Lewis, walked him down the aisle. He was trailed by a few hired photographers and by Ms. Kucinich, who leapt with joy as the bridegrooms appeared and snapped dozens of photos for an album that she planned to present as a gift to the couple.

“You could see the joy on their faces,” Ms. Kucinich said. She and Mr. Ready had become close friends at Congressional retreats and picnics. “He’s humble, and at the same time, he carries a sense of joy about himself,” she said.

Later, at an outdoor cocktail reception after the ceremony, Ms. Kucinich ran up to a reporter and gestured toward a nearby meadow.

“Did you see all the rabbits?” Ms. Kucinich asked. “It’s a sign of fertility for their marriage.”

Senator Kerry and Governor Patrick, who officiated, were nowhere to be found by the time the party moved indoors, to the Marriott’s grand ballroom. There, guests dined on a four-course meal that included New England clam chowder, vegan soba noodles and a vegetable strudel.

Ms. Pelosi, in pearls and a pantsuit, sat next to Representative Rosa L. DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut. The groomsmen wore brand-new Joseph Abboud suits, gifts from the couple from the Massachusetts-based manufacturer. (The wool, however, was by Loro Piana, a premium Italian mill.) The dark floral ties were designed by Baruch Shemtov, a close friend of the couple.

After cake, a lyrics sheet was passed out to the guests. It was a reworked version of the 1970s hit “Low Rider,” with politically themed lyrics co-written by Mr. Ready. Excerpts:

“All. My. Friends. Are voting O-ba-ma. … Take a little trip. Take a little trip. To help the e-con-o-mee. / Take a little trip. Take a little trip. To help beat the G-O-P.”

The gift bags included salt-water taffy from Maine, where Mr. Ready lives, and Necco wafers from Mr. Frank’s Bay State district.

Representative Hoyer, the Maryland Democrat, said he and Mr. Frank had been elected to Congress within a year of each other. Asked if he thought Mr. Frank would be the last member of his Congressional class to get married, Mr. Hoyer laughed.

“If I had been betting, I’d have bet yes,” he said.

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The Politics of Anything Goes

Barack Obama first captured the national spotlight with a speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston in which he called for an end to the politics of division. The audience roared back its applause at the end of almost every line:

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

Americans, Obama declared, are

one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America. In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?

Now, faced with a tough re-election fight, President Obama has, in fundamental respects, adopted the strategy he denounced eight years ago.

He is running a two-track campaign. One track of his re-election drive seeks to boost turnout among core liberal groups; the other aims to suppress turnout and minimize his margin of defeat in the most hostile segment of the electorate, whites without college degrees.

This approach assumes a highly polarized electorate and tries to make the best of it.

On his campaign web site, Obama singles out 16 specific target constituencies under “groups.” Some are listed because it would be politically damaging to fail to include them: People of Faith; Veterans and Military Families; Rural Americans; Seniors; and Small Business Owners.

Others make up the heart of the liberal-left coalition: African Americans, Environmentalists, Latinos, Young Americans, LGBT Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, Educators, Jewish Americans, Nurses and Women.

Obama is actively courting all of these constituencies: ending the deportation of many young workers who are in the United States illegally; endorsing same-sex marriage; loosening work requirements for welfare recipients; pressing Congress to keep student loan rates low; rejecting the proposal to build the northern portion of the 1,700 mile Keystone pipeline from Canada to Texas; and promoting health-care reform that requires insurance plans to fully cover birth control without co-pays or deductibles.

Interestingly, the Obama campaign is not spending the lion’s share of its money on these groups. Instead, Obama’s television ads, at $65.6 million the biggest cost of his re-election bid so far, are overwhelmingly aimed at discrediting Mitt Romney.

The negative ads run by the Obama campaign and its allied “super PAC,” Priorities USA — ads demonizing Romney — target not only whites without college degrees, but in particular white men without degrees, a constituency Obama has no hope of winning.

The two anti-Romney commercials that appear to have resonated most powerfully, according to measures of YouTube views, are explicitly aimed at these voters.

Romney is particularly vulnerable to a campaign designed to suppress turnout because his support is more tepid than Obama’s.

The Priorities USA ad titled “Stage” — with over 1.4 million views — is narrated by Mike Earnest, a middle-aged white working-class man. He describes building a stage at a paper plant in Marion, Ind., that was in operation 24 hours a day. Shortly afterward, workers from all three shifts were called in. “A group of people walked out on that stage and told us that the plant is now closed and all of you are fired,” Earnest says. “Mitt Romney made over $100 million by shutting down our plant and devastated our lives. Turns out when we build that stage it was like building our own coffin, and it just makes me sick.”

An Obama ad, “Firms” with over 1.9 million views, shows Romney singing “America the Beautiful” at The Villages, a Florida retirement community. The screen shifts from Romney to images of shuttered factories and empty office rooms, overlaid with a series of headlines, “In Business, Mitt Romney’s Firms Shipped Jobs to Mexico and China,” “He Had Millions in a Swiss Bank Account,” “Tax Havens Like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.”

Obama’s current level of support from white men without college degrees is so low that “if sustained through Election Day,” it “would represent a modern nadir for Democrats,” Ron Brownstein pointed out earlier this month in the National Journal. Brownstein cited a Quinnipiac poll showing Romney beating Obama 56-29 and a Washington Post/ABC survey putting the contest at 65 for Romney, 28 for Obama among these voters.

A central goal of the anti-Romney commercials is to cross-pressure these whites. Persuading more than 28 percent of them to vote for Obama is a tough sell, but the Obama campaign can try to make the alternative, voting for Romney, equally unacceptable. Conflicted voters, especially those holding negative views of both candidates, are likely to skip voting altogether.

In 2004, for example, in a tactic designed to decrease black turnout, the Bush campaign sent deeply religious black voters mail and email noting Democratic support for same-sex civil unions, with the goal of creating ambivalence toward Senator John F. Kerry. Over the past two years, Republican-controlled state legislatures have been conducting an aggressive vote-suppression strategy of their own through the passage of voter identification laws and laws imposing harsh restrictions on voter registration drives.

When a top Pennsylvania Republican remarked last month that the state’s new voter ID law would help Mitt Romney win Pennsylvania in November, which no Republican presidential candidate has done since 1988, he reignited a debate over whether the law is intended to curb fraud, as Republicans say, or to depress Democratic turnout, as critics charge.

Mike Turzai, the House majority leader in Pennsylvania, made the remark when he spoke to a meeting of the Republican State Committee. He ticked off a number of recent conservative achievements by the Republican-led legislature, including, as Turzai put it, “Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”

Arthur Lupia, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, has demonstrated that in 2008, even if Obama had failed to boost turnout among key Democratic groups, he would have won because of the failure of many 2004 George W. Bush supporters to vote for John McCain. “Bush voters’ decisions not to vote or to support Obama were a sufficient condition for Obama’s victory,” Lupia wrote in “Did Bush Voters Cause Obama’s Victory?” a paper published in PS, the journal of the American Political Science Association.

Romney and the Republican Party must achieve the highest possible turnout level among whites. Republicans, including Romney, have adopted anti-immigration stands that have extinguished the possibility of boosting margins among Hispanics. Asian Americans have become increasingly Democratic, self-identifying in public opinion surveys as Democratic rather than Republican by a 52-32 margin. African Americans remain reliably loyal to the Democratic Party by an 86 to 8 percent margin.

Romney is particularly vulnerable to a campaign designed to suppress turnout because his support is more tepid than Obama’s.

A New York Times/CBS poll released on Wednesday found that 52 percent of Obama voters back their candidate strongly, compared to 29 percent of Romney voters. In addition, a third of Romney’s voters say they are voting for him because of their dislike of Obama, while only 8 percent of Obama voters are primarily motivated by their hostility to Romney.

Vote suppression is important for Obama because his numbers among whites without degrees are worsening, despite the omnipresence of anti-Romney ads in the battleground states. Obama’s 29 percent level of support among non-college white men in the Quinnipiac poll cited above is a drop from 32 percent in its April survey, and the 28 percent level in the ABC/Washington Post poll is a drop from 34 percent in their May survey.

With his margins in this group falling, Obama directly benefits from every white non-college voter who stays home and does not vote for Romney. The importance of vote suppression in a close contest can be seen in the following hypothetical: say there are 1,000 voters evenly split, 500 to 500. Candidate A persuades just one of the voters backing his opponent to fail to go to the polls. Candidate A wins 500 to 499.

For Obama, hurdles in recruiting whites without a college degree are particularly high because of the employment patterns illustrated in this chart produced by RBC Capital Markets, which shows the devastating consequences of the 2008 financial collapse for non-college workers.

Voters of all races and ethnicities without college have taken a hit in the job market; politically, however, the drop in employment is most damaging to Obama among whites. African Americans without college degrees are not only loyal to the Democratic Party, but the election puts at risk a second term for the nation’s first black president. Hispanics without college have a president who has taken a liberal stand on immigration reform, backed the DREAM Act and appointed the first Hispanic justice, Sonia Sotomayor, to the Supreme Court.

The problems Obama and the Democratic Party face with white non-college voters have deep roots. A study conducted by political consulting firm CRG Communications for the Democratic National Committee in 1985 reached conclusions about the defection of working class whites to the Republican Party that remain relevant in 2012. CRG reported that these defectors believed that:

the Democratic Party has not stood with them as they moved from the working to the middle class. They have a whole set of middle class economic problems today, and the Democratic Party is not helping them. Instead it is helping the blacks, Hispanics and the poor. They feel betrayed.

Looked at this way, CRG reported, key Democratic constituencies — affluent liberals, gay rights activists, ethnic and racial minorities — were “leaving the ‘common man’ out of the picture.”

Demographic trends — the steady decline of the share of the population made up of non-college whites, from 86 percent in 1940 to 48 percent in 2007 – have made winning these voters by increasingly large margins crucial to the Republican Party, while diminishing the Democratic Party’s need for their support.

The 2012 election will be another test of strength in the decade-long competition between this white voting bloc — which dominated in 2002, 2004 and 2010 — and such ascendant Democratic constituencies as Hispanics, college-educated women and young voters, who flexed their muscles in 2006 and 2008.

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

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The Transportation Bill

Re “At Last, a Transportation Bill” (editorial, July 2):

The bipartisan surface transportation bill will finance highway, bridge and public transportation projects for 27 months, saving and creating close to three million jobs a year.

This bill includes significant reforms to modernize federal transportation programs, including eliminating earmarks, introducing performance measures and targets to improve accountability, expanding innovative financing programs to leverage limited federal resources, and consolidating programs by two-thirds to increase efficiency and flexibility for states and cities.

This legislation actually increases the amount of financing that “transportation alternative” projects like bicycle and pedestrian pathways are eligible for, although in some cases these projects must compete for money.

The bill expedites project delivery. Projects with less than $5 million in federal money are categorically excluded from reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, but they must still comply with other environmental laws and federal permitting requirements.

(Senator) BARBARA BOXER
Washington, July 2, 2012

The writer, a California Democrat, is chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee.

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How the Poll Was Conducted

The sample of land-line telephone exchanges called was randomly selected by a computer from a complete list of more than 72,000 active residential exchanges across the country. The exchanges were chosen so as to ensure that each region of the country was represented in proportion to its share of all telephone numbers.

Within each exchange, random digits were added to form a complete telephone number, thus permitting access to listed and unlisted numbers alike. Within each household, one adult was designated by a random procedure to be the respondent for the survey.

To increase coverage, this land-line sample was supplemented by respondents reached through random dialing of cellphone numbers. The two samples were then combined and adjusted to ensure the proper ratio of land-line-only, cellphone-only and dual phone users.

Interviewers made multiple attempts to reach every phone number in the survey, calling back unanswered numbers on different days at different times of both day and evening.

The combined results have been weighted to adjust for variation in the sample relating to geographic region, sex, race, Hispanic origin, marital status, age, education and number of adults in the household. Respondents in the land-line sample were also weighted to take account of the number of telephone lines into the residence. Self-identified Republicans, Democrats and independents were also adjusted to their average proportion in the most recent seven polls by The Times and CBS News.

In theory, in 19 cases out of 20, overall results based on such samples will differ by no more than 3 percentage points in either direction from what would have been obtained by seeking to interview all American adults. For smaller subgroups, the margin of sampling error is larger. Shifts in results between polls over time also have a larger sampling error.

In addition to sampling error, the practical difficulties of conducting any survey of public opinion may introduce other sources of error into the poll. Variation in the wording and order of questions, for example, may lead to somewhat different results.

Michael R. Kagay of Princeton, N.J., assisted The Times in its polling analysis. Complete questions and results are available at nytimes.com/polls.

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Obama's Campaign Zeroes In on Romney's Wealth

3:46 p.m. | Updated Is Mitt Romney too rich to be president?

President Obama’s push on Monday to extend tax cuts for the middle class — but not for the rich — is being joined by a new, all-out effort from his allies to portray Mr. Romney as out of touch with average Americans.

On Sunday, Democrats seized on new reports about Mr. Romney’s offshore bank accounts to hammer the presumptive Republican nominee, accusing him of not being forthcoming about the sources of his multimillion dollar fortune.

By Monday, more of Mr. Obama’s surrogates were hitting the airwaves to mock Mr. Romney’s day of high-dollar fund-raisers at estates in the Hamptons. The Democratic National Committee created a video highlighting reports of bank accounts in offshore institutions.

Brad Woodhouse, the communications director for the Democratic National Committee e-mailed the video to reporters with the subject line: “Sunday Blood Sunday.”

Appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program on Monday, Robert Gibbs, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama’s campaign, bluntly accused the Republican candidate of not giving voters the information they need to make a decision about his wealth.

“Release the tax returns,” Mr. Gibbs said. “Put all this to rest. If Mitt Romney is not hiding something in Bermuda and Switzerland and the Caymans, it will be in the tax returns.”

Mr. Romney’s allies hit back furiously against the suggestion that he was hiding anything. Dan Señor, an adviser to Mr. Romney, said on “Morning Joe” that Mr. Gibbs was being “stunningly dishonest” in his attacks.

“The reason we know about these accounts, as Robert knows, is because they are in the tax returns that Mitt Romney released,” Mr. Señor said. “We know this because he submitted this information.”

A statement from the Republican campaign called questions about Mr. Romney’s wealth an “unfounded character assault” and said it was “unseemly and disgusting.”

Mr. Romney’s personal wealth became a serious issue during the Republican primary campaign when his rivals demanded to see his tax returns. Mr. Romney eventually released two years of his returns.

But since then, Mr. Obama’s campaign has focused more directly on Mr. Romney’s role as a business executive, suggesting that his career was a boon to the wealthy and that he did not have the interests of workers at heart.

The campaign first attacked Mr. Romney’s former company, Bain Capital, for shutting down factories and laying people off. Then it turned to the issue of outsourcing, describing Mr. Romney’s company as a “pioneer” in moving jobs overseas.

Now, it looks as if Mr. Obama’s strategists are ready to focus once again more directly on Mr. Romney’s wealth.

Will it work?

Democrats are hoping to find the right mix of policy and politics by offering voters a striking contrast between Mr. Obama’s refusal to extend tax cuts for the wealthy and Mr. Romney’s desire to cut taxes for people like himself.

Last week, Democratic allies of the president’s repeatedly pointed to Mr. Romney’s vacation at his lakeside estate in New Hampshire of evidence of his being out-of-touch.

In the East Room on Monday, Mr. Obama drew the line just that sharply, saying that under the economic ideas of Republicans, “the wealthy got wealthier, but most Americans struggled.”

He did not mention Mr. Romney by name, but predicted that the fight over tax cuts for the wealthy would be resolved by the choice that voters make in the presidential election this November.

“My opponent will fight to keep them in place,” he said. “I will fight to end them.”

Mr. Romney’s advisers believe the effort to focus voters on Mr. Romney’s wealth will misfire. They argue that voters want the candidates to talk about how they will turn around an economy that has battered middle class people.

Polling suggests they may be right. A Washington Post / ABC News survey in April found that 71 percent of those surveyed did not believe that Mr. Romney’s wealth would be a major reason to support or oppose him.

The polling did suggest that for those who said it was a major factor in the decision, it was more likely to be a negative. But Mr. Romney’s advisers argue that the facts about his offshore accounts will make that less likely.

Kevin Madden, a spokesman for Mr. Romney’s campaign, said on Fox News Sunday that the Republican candidate “hasn’t paid a penny less in taxes by virtue of where these funds are domiciled.” he said, “His liability is exactly the same as if he held the fund investments directly in the U.S.”

But for the most part, Mr. Romney’s advisers intend to try and ignore the attacks on his personal wealth. On Monday, they focused their responses on Mr. Obama’s renewed call to let the tax cuts for the wealthy expire.

“Americans are struggling in a ‘zombie economy’ and President Obama’s only answer is to pass one of the largest tax hikes in history,” said Amanda Henneberg, a spokeswoman. “President Obama’s tax increases on families and job creators will create more economic uncertainty and fewer opportunities for struggling middle-class families.”

UPDATE: Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for Mr. Obama’s campaign, emailed Monday afternoon to say that the president is not targeting Mr. Romney because he is a wealthy individual.

“This is not our intention. It’s not about wealth,” Mr. LaBolt wrote. “There have been other wealthy candidates, nobody is out to demonize wealth.”

Instead, Mr. LaBolt drew a distintion between Mr. Romney’s wealth and what the Democratic spokesman called Mr. Romney’s lack of “transparency” when it comes to disclosing information about his financial situation.

“It’s about the fact that Governor Romney, who could be the first President in history to keep his finances offshore, has defied precedent and kept his tax returns secret even though they could prove whether or not he avoided paying taxes,” Mr. LaBolt said.

Follow Michael D. Shear on Twitter at @shearm.

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It's Dems who have branding problem

From the political notebook:

It is axiomatic in some circles that the Republican kooks in the Arizona Legislature and, to a lesser extent, the hard-line "tea party" conservatives in Congress, have tarnished and trashed the Republican brand.

The most recent voter-registration figures suggest there is a major political party in Arizona with a brand problem. But it's not the Republicans.

The big story in voter registration in Arizona is, of course, the rise of independents. There are 217,000 more registered independents in the state today than for the presidential election in 2008.

Republicans have increased their ranks very modestly, adding about 11,500 voters since the past presidential election.

Democratic registration has plummeted since then. Today, there are 75,000 fewer Democrats than there were in 2008.

Nor does the trend seem to be abating. Since January of this election year, the Democrats have lost nearly 11,000 voters. Republicans seem to be doing OK, having added roughly as many voters as the Democrats lost. In fact, since January, Republicans have actually outpaced the increase in independent registration.

These numbers provide a reality test for other political claims and suppositions floating about. Every election, we are told that the rise in Latino voters will begin to transform Arizona politics. And, periodically, some organization will issue a press release claiming impressive results from a voter-registration drive among Latinos.

Perhaps all these new Latino voters are registering independent. If so, that also flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which holds that hard-edged Republican rhetoric and action on immigration is driving Latinos into the arms of the Democratic Party.

Regardless, the hard reality is that Democrats in Arizona are hemorrhaging voters. In 2008, their registration disadvantage to the Republicans was about 96,000 voters. Going into this presidential election, it has nearly doubled to 183,000 voters.

It would appear that Democrats in Arizona have a brand problem.

Democratic prospects in Arizona would dim even further if the top-two primary initiative passed. The initiative aims to dilute the influence of conservative Republicans, and Republicans are the ones organizing the inchoate opposition. But Democrats will be the big losers if it passes.

That's because the Republican registration and turnout advantage means that Democrats face a real risk of their candidates not even making it to the general-election ballot for statewide offices.

In 2010, the last primary for the full array of statewide offices, Republican turnout was 47 percent, Democratic turnout was 29 percent and independent turnout was 12 percent.

In the GOP primary for attorney general, Tom Horne got slightly more than 276,000 votes and Andrew Thomas got slightly fewer than 276,000. The winner of the Democratic primary, Felecia Rotellini, got only about 120,000 votes. In other words, the winner of the Democratic primary got considerably less than half of the votes of the loser of the GOP primary. If independent turnout had doubled and Rotellini got 100 percent of it, she still would have ended up well behind Thomas.

There's little question that under a top-two primary system, in which the two candidates with the most votes go on to the general election irrespective of party, the general election would have been a rematch between Horne and Thomas. (And wouldn't that have been a treat.)

The high point of recent Democratic politics was the governorship of Janet Napolitano. Under the top-two primary system, it might never have happened. Napolitano might not have made it to the general election in 2002.

In that election, there were three Republican candidates for governor in the primary (Matt Salmon, Betsey Bayless and Carol Springer) and four Democratic candidates (Napolitano, Alfredo Gutierrez, Mike Newcomb and Mark Osterloh). In the primary, Napolitano received a comfortable margin of 36,000 votes more than the second-place Republican, Bayless.

However, there was an independent in the race who wasn't on the primary-election ballot, Richard Mahoney. Mahoney was a former elected secretary of state and came within an eyelash of winning the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in 1994. He wasn't a political lightweight.

Under the current system, independents go directly to the general-election ballot. Mahoney imploded during the general-election campaign and ended up not being much of a factor. Napolitano defeated GOP nominee Salmon by about 12,000 votes.

Under the top-two primary system, independents are on the primary-election ballot, along with everyone else. Mahoney would have been less likely to implode during a primary election. He very well could have attracted enough Democratic votes, and Bayless enough independent votes, to erase Napolitano's lead over Bayless. The general election could very well have been Salmon vs. Bayless.

Something for Democrats to ponder. Sometimes, the enemy of your enemy isn't your friend.

Reach Robb at robert.robb@arizonarepublic.com.

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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Toss-ups could create Dem-majority delegation

Could the red state of Arizona send a blue delegation to Washington?

The Arizona congressional delegation could conceivably swing to a 5-4 Democratic majority this election season. The potential reversal of fortune for Democrats in Arizona stems from a combination of factors tied to redistricting: Two incumbent Republican congressmen switched to safer districts; an open ninth seat was created because of Arizona's population gains; and other districts became more competitive in terms of voter makeup.

If dynamics in the congressional campaigns continue, it's possible that voters could elect five Democrats and four Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives this November.

Arizona is expected to maintain four reliably Republican House seats and two Democratic strongholds. Three newly drawn competitive districts -- the 1st District in rural eastern Arizona, the 2nd District in southern Arizona and the urban 9th District in the Phoenix metro area -- appear to lean Democratic, according to national political analysts, though the races are far from slam dunks.

A Democratic-majority House delegation would be a rarity in the past several decades of Arizona history.

And while Democrats say it's a sign of the growing independent nature of Arizona's voters, Republicans say that if they lose the majority of the House delegation, it will confirm what they contend was a biased redistricting process.

If the delegation does swing from the current 5-3 GOP majority, it would be the result of a combination of factors tied to redistricting: Two incumbent Republican congressmen switched to safer districts; an open ninth seat was created because of Arizona's population gains; and several districts became more competitive in terms of voter makeup.

The potential for a shake-up in Arizona bucks national expectations. The GOP appears set to keep its majority in the House and possibly even take the Senate.

"Arizona's a critical state for Democrats as they put together how to get to the majority (in the House)," said Jessica Taylor, House editor for the Rothenberg Political Report, a nationwide nonpartisan campaign tracker.

"They see very good opportunities for the state, but ? Arizona is still seen as a state that leans Republican. We're still expecting it to go Republican in the presidential race," she added.

Gerrymandering alleged

Republicans hold the voter- registration edge in Arizona, about 1.2million to 1million Democratic voters. Independents make up roughly another 1.2 million.

If the state's delegation ends up with a Democratic majority despite the larger Republican voter base, it would confirm Republican complaints of gerrymandering, said Cook Political Report analyst David Wasserman. The nonpartisan firm, along with others, forecasts that Democrats could win at least four and possibly five Arizona seats.

Wasserman said the way the political map is drawn, Republicans will waste votes in stacked GOP districts like the 4th, which includes Prescott, Yuma and Lake Havasu City and faithfully elects Republicans.

GOP strategists, meanwhile, point to steep challenges for Democrats to pull off a coup.

Tim LaSota, a Phoenix-based Republican elections attorney who was active in the recent redistricting process, said the last time that Democrats made up a majority of the delegation, it was driven by a national wave in the elections of 2006 and 2008. The gains were short-lived. Two years ago, Republicans won big, and the GOP reclaimed a majority of Arizona's House delegation.

"In a state like Arizona, in high-watermark years, it's possible for Democrats to achieve a majority of the congressional delegation," said LaSota, of Tiffany and Bosco. "Nonetheless, I think with (President Barack) Obama's unpopularity, the Democratic Party isn't particularly strong, and I see a heavy Republican turnout."

LaSota said if Democrats prevail, it will show that the state's independent redistricting commission "put their thumb on the scale heavily for Democrats."

Daniel Scarpinato, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, also criticized redistricting but said the contested districts are winnable for the GOP. Voters are turning against Democrats and "there are no signs of a rekindling," he said. "Democrats have about as much chance of running the table in Arizona as Tom Cruise has at getting Katie Holmes back."

Scarpinato said Democrats will lose because their slate of candidates is "D-list" and their issues represent a "failed agenda."

Luis Heredia, executive director of the Arizona Democratic Party, said Republicans' bellyaching over redistricting is unfounded. He argued that the district demographics back that up.

"The redistricting commission created competitive districts to give Arizona voters a choice," Heredia said. "There's finally a level-playing field, (and Republicans complain) all of a sudden it's tilted toward the Democrats."

He said chances are just as good that Democrats gain the delegation majority as remain in the minority. But he is cautiously optimistic.

"We have great candidates in all three of these competitive districts that are going to have strong messages of solving problems," Heredia said.

Democrats are on the offensive in Arizona, according to Rep. Steve Israel, a New York Democrat and chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

"A deep sense of buyer's remorse has set in with voters over the extreme Republican agenda that puts millionaires, Big Oil corporations and insurance companies over the middle class," he said. "Arizona voters know they can do better than these out-of-touch Republican plans."

Toss-up in 3 districts

Both parties point to variations in voter registration, voting patterns and candidate matchups to argue how they could win swing Districts 1, 2 and 9.

District 1:

Democrats in this rural northeastern district, which includes Flagstaff, Globe and several tribal reservations, have about 30,000 more active voters than Republicans. Former Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick was elected here in 2008 but was ousted during the 2010 "tea party" wave by Republican Rep. Paul Gosar.

Gosar left the seat open this year by switching to run in the safer conservative District 4. Democrats believe Kirkpatrick can retake the newly open seat because of an impressive fundraising advantage and an increased Democratic voting edge.

But Republicans point to factors in their favor. The district supported Republican presidential candidates Sen. John McCain and George W. Bush, and the area's large Mormon population could increase this year's Republican turnout for Mitt Romney.

Plus, Kirkpatrick -- if she wins her primary -- will be defending her vote for Obama's health-care program, which was unpopular among many voters and hurt her campaign in the last round. The likely Republican nominee, Jonathan Paton, a former state legislator, lost a previous run for Congress. Republicans contend that his fundraising has increased and that he can beat Kirkpatrick.

District 2:

Republicans in this southern Arizona district, which is anchored by Tucson and runs along the U.S.-Mexican border, have about 6,500 more active voters than Democrats. Voting patterns show the district chose McCain and Bush for president.

But Republicans are more hard-pressed to describe a victory scenario.

Democrats won the past four congressional elections, including the recent special election to fill Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' open seat. She resigned in January to focus on recovery from her injuries in a 2011 shooting.

Giffords' former top aide, Ron Barber, won by a surprising margin in June, drawing a large independent vote as well as Republican support, and will have the advantage of incumbency if he cleans up in the Democratic primary against state Rep. Matt Heinz.

However, Republicans likely have a better chance at giving Barber a run for his money than in the special election. Former Barber opponent Jesse Kelly, who was criticized as being too conservative for the toss-up district, decided not to run again, paving the way for Republican Martha McSally, a charismatic former Air Force pilot who appeals to many independents.

District 9:

Perhaps the greatest wild card in the state, District 9, covers parts of Phoenix, Paradise Valley, Scottsdale, Tempe, Chandler, Mesa and Ahwatukee.

Republicans have about 12,500 more active voters than Democrats. Yet independents make up more votes than either party, the only district in the state with that makeup, adding an extra level of uncertainty. It's the only swing district whose voters went for Obama in 2008 and against Republican Gov. Jan Brewer two years later.

The seat is open after freshman Rep. Ben Quayle chose to switch to a solidly Republican district. The well-funded son of former Vice President Dan Quayle could have given Democrats a pitched battle. Instead, he now is taking on fellow GOP freshman Rep. David Schweikert in the northeast Valley's 6th Congressional District.

Quayle notes that he is justified in running in the new district because it includes about two-thirds of his current constituents. Still, that matchup will ensure that at least one of the state's Republican House incumbents is defeated in the Aug. 28 primary.

Democrats have fielded three strong candidates: state Sen. David Schapira, former Arizona Democratic Party Chairman Andrei Cherny and former state Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. But their attacks on each other are expected to grow even nastier as the election approaches, potentially depleting the Democrats' campaigns of money and momentum. On the Republican side, there's a free-for-all with seven candidates fighting to take a commanding lead.

Democrats cite positives

The last time Arizona had a Democratic majority in its House delegation was actually not long ago. The 2008 election delivered Kirkpatrick into the Republican-held seat in northern Arizona, adding her to the ranks of Giffords, Raúl Grijalva, Harry Mitchell and Ed Pastor. Before that, Arizona's delegation had been split five times and led by Republicans every other cycle since 1967.

Grijalva, who represents one of the states' solidly Democratic districts, said regaining the delegation majority would encourage bipartisanship.

"It happened before. That wasn't an aberration," said Grijalva, a five-term southern Arizona representative. "If you're in the distinct minority in our delegation, like I and Ed Pastor are, there's not much consultation. … A 5-4 split kind of forces the issue that people have to talk. And that's the healthy part."

Pastor, who represents the other solidly Democratic district, predicted a swing would bring Arizona attention: "That would be very unusual for a Republican-leaning state to contribute two Democratic votes in trying to win the majority in the House of Representatives."

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Letters: Democrats hinder progress in education

In the piece about why schools in poor neighborhoods fail, commentary writer Richard Whitmire attempts to push the blame on to someone or something else ("Column: Poverty not all to blame for lousy school outcomes").

By Tony Dejak, AP

Computer class: Trevon Davis, 9, in Pepper Pike, Ohio.

By Tony Dejak, AP

Computer class: Trevon Davis, 9, in Pepper Pike, Ohio.

One group that appeared to be missing is the Democratic Party. It controls the majority of inner-city neighborhoods and has for many years. The fault of our education system rests on the shoulders of the education unions, whose political contributions fall almost solely into the hands of Democratic politicians. Charter schools have proved to be a way out and are supported by the GOP (another tidbit left out of the article) and are a step in the right direction.

For me, it is plain to see that Democrats want to keep minorities and the poor in their place.

Randy Lampe; Mason, Ohio

Focus on effectiveness

Focusing on how students perceive the challenge of their curricula obscures the real issue: stagnant student achievement. The problem with American education is not that it's easy, but that it's ineffective ("School is too easy, students report").

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By framing the discussion around perceived challenge, educators can point to regulations that supposedly make schools more difficult when they should be looking for reforms that can make schools better. Further, there is no conclusive evidence that nationalized standards do anything to remedy the serious issue of flatlining achievement. Federal spending on education per pupil has almost tripled since 1970, with no significant gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress standardized assessment. Is it worth it?

Matt Pawlowski; Washington, D.C.

Challenging vs. harder work

It's unfortunate that only 37% of fourth-graders find their math homework "often" or "always" easy. In fourth grade, it's supposed to be easy. Students are supposed to be learning the basics, the foundation for more advanced math in high school and college.

It's interesting that in the Forum piece "Why our kids hate math" the issue presented is we start kids too quickly with "advanced" mathematics. I agree. Cognitive and abstract brain processes don't develop until later in adolescence to enable kids to process the advanced topics.

As for history or English classes not being challenging, let's not confuse the word "challenging" with "harder." Often, the response is to give a greater volume of work, not necessarily more intellectually challenging work, to high-achievers.

It's no wonder we're falling behind the rest of the world in education. We expect kids to perform more complex math before they know their multiplication tables, and then punish the high-achievers by making them do even more mind-numbing work.

Kevin Stout; Franklin, Tenn.

How much do students know?

If American teens think their classes are too easy, how can we explain how little they actually know? For instance, three-fourths of them failed to reach proficiency in knowledge of U.S. history on the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress. As for civics, close to one-half of black and Hispanic teens could not name a single right protected by the First Amendment.

Proponents of the Common Core national standards contend that instilling more "critical thinking" skills will make everything fine and dandy. More likely, the latest cycle of progressive education will result merely in further spikes in unmerited self-esteem.

Robert Holland, senior fellow for education policy, The Heartland Institute; Chicago

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South Carolina House Panel to Hear Ethics Complaints Against Governor

Thursday, she faces a State House ethics hearing over whether she blurred the lines between her work as a legislator and her work as a hospital fund-raiser and a business development consultant with an engineering firm.

From the Republican governor’s perspective, the hearing is just more of the same: attacks by Democrats and the Republican Party old guard who resent her Tea Party-style efforts to change government and the fact that she is a woman and a minority in a state that has had relatively few of either in positions of power.

For those who pushed for the hearing — most notably John Rainey, one of the most powerful Republican fund-raisers in South Carolina — it is a step in a long-fought battle to prove that the governor has been less than transparent and improperly mixed her governing duties and her business enterprises.

For many voters in South Carolina, however, the hearing is not much more than another twist in the state’s bare-knuckled brand of politics based on personal grudges and its history of conflict between governors and legislators.

“Unfortunately, it is being perceived as politics as usual,” said Robert W. Oldendick, a professor at the University of South Carolina who is director of the Institute for Public Service and Policy Research. “Unless there’s a smoking gun that hasn’t been revealed, a week from now we’ll say there was a little damage done to the governor.”

The Republican-heavy House Ethics Committee will not call Ms. Haley to testify during the two days it examines the issues, but her lawyer will present her case.

On the committee’s witness list are business executives and lobbyists for companies including the Lexington Medical Center and BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina, as well as governmental affairs experts.

They are expected to describe Ms. Haley’s role in two business deals when she was a state representative from Lexington County from 2005 until she became governor.

South Carolina lawmakers serve part-time, and most hold other jobs. One of Ms. Haley’s was to raise money for the medical center’s foundation, at a salary of $110,000 a year. The hospital wanted to open a new heart center and needed governmental approval as part of the process.

Ms. Haley maintains that her legislative efforts to support the heart center were because the hospital, which was in her district, was part of her constituency. Her other efforts to raise money for the foundation did not fall under lobbying rules, her lawyer, Butch Bowers, said.

The other issue centers on part-time consulting Ms. Haley did for Wilbur Smith Associates, an engineering firm in Columbia that paid her a total of $42,000 to help develop business. The firm had worked on a project to create a state farmers’ market.

Ms. Haley would not discuss the hearing directly, but Mr. Bowers and members of her staff have characterized it as a political witch hunt led by a man angry that Ms. Haley did not try to curry his favor to win the governorship.

In her recent memoir, Ms. Haley describes seeking Mr. Rainey’s support when she was planning her campaign. He asked to see her tax records to make sure, she said he told her, that she did not have any connections to terrorists in her background — a comment he said in later interviews that he did not recall, but dismissed as most likely a joke.

Ms. Haley, who is of Indian descent, went on to win without the support of Mr. Rainey, long an important figure in helping to bankroll political candidates in South Carolina.

“This a complaint brought by an old Republican crank who called her a terrorist and the chairman of the Democratic State Party, so it’s pretty clear,” said Tim Pearson, her chief of staff.

That Democratic chairman is Richard A. Harpootlian. He said Ms. Haley was using that explanation to present herself as the victim of political scoundrels who do not want things to change.

The political alliance might seem unlikely, but Mr. Harpootlian said he and Mr. Rainey were united in trying to hold accountable a governor they see as secretive and ethically compromised.

“Both of us have a sense that justice, no matter what the political affiliation, should prevail,” he said. “What’s clear is this governor has avoided answering the questions and has deflected every allegation as politics.”

The men filed a lawsuit last year over the same assertions. In March, a Circuit Court judge dismissed it, saying the court was not the proper venue to examine legislative ethical issues.

If the committee decides the governor did violate ethics, it could issue a reprimand or refer the case to the attorney general for criminal investigation. Most likely, Mr. Oldendick said, the hearing will only underscore what is becoming obvious to many in the state.

“For as good of a job as she did campaigning and getting elected,” he said, “her inability to relate to members of her own party in the General Assembly has been frankly surprising.”

Robbie Brown contributed reporting.

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Column: Artur Davis shows hypocrisy in switching parties

Every time the political pendulum makes a big shift, there are politicians who go over to the other side.

AP

Davis: Ex-congressman of Alabama.

AP

Davis: Ex-congressman of Alabama.

DeWayne Wickham USATODAY columnist

Back in the 1960s, after President Johnson signed a series of civil rights laws into effect that ended the Jim Crow era, a legion of Southern Democrats switched to the Republican Party. When the 2008 election gave Democrats control of the White House and veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress, then-Sen. Arlen Specter, a moderate Pennsylvania Republican, returned to the Democratic Party that he had deserted in 1966.

So, it came as no surprise to me when Artur Davis, a former Democratic congressman from Alabama, announced that he was switching to the GOP. His decision comes as Republicans enjoy a sizable majority in the House and threaten to seize control of the Senate and the Oval Office in November.

Davis' stroll over to the GOP side was a pretty short trip, given the position he has occupied along this nation's ideological spectrum. He was a right-of-center Democrat who, for example, voted against the Affordable Care Act, which the Supreme Court upheld last Thursday.

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

Failed race for governor

In his 2010 bid to become Alabama's first black governor, Davis refused to openly court the state's top African-American political organizations and ended up losing the Democratic primary in a landslide to Ron Sparks, the state's agriculture secretary. Sparks, who is white, even won the overwhelmingly black 7th congressional district that Davis represented at the time.

So when Davis — who attended Harvard Law School with Barack Obama and seconded his nomination at the 2008 Democratic convention — announced that he was cutting his ties to the Democratic Party, it was not a surprising move for someone who had rolled the political dice — and lost badly.

But the thing that distinguishes Davis from so many others who have changed party labels is the level of his hypocrisy.

Criticized a colleague

Back in 2009, when Rep. Parker Griffith, D-Ala., defected to the Republican Party, Davis could hardly contain his contempt for his old colleague.

"He leaves a party where differences of opinion are tolerated and respected to join a party that in Washington, marches in lockstep, demands the most rigid unity, and articulates no governing philosophy beyond the forceful use of the word 'no,' " Davis said.

Instead of bolting, Davis said, Griffith should have remained in the Democratic Party, just as Sen. Howell Heflin and Rep. Bud Cramer, two of Alabama's more prominent conservative Democrats, had done. (Heflin retired in 1997, and Cramer stepped down in 2009.)

At the time, Davis said those two Democrats understood that "fiscal conservatism, robust advocacy for our fighting forces, and a defense of our best national values are not partisan principles."

But now, after the folly of his gubernatorial campaign, Davis sees a different political landscape. "Wearing a Democratic label no longer matches what I know about my country and its possibilities," he said.

Davis talks of resurrecting his political career by moving to Virginia and possibly running as a Republican for the state senate, or competing for one of the Old Dominion's seats in the House.

"If that sounds imprecise, it's a function of how uncertain political opportunities can be," he wrote in a May blog posting.

What it sounds like to me is the double talk of a man who's trying to convince himself that he has made the right decision.

DeWayne Wickham writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.

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