Money men: Who are top 5 donors to Romney?

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

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

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

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

No. 1

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

Total: $34.2 million

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

No. 2

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

Total: $16 million

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

No. 3

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

Total: $15.3 million

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

No. 4

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

Total: $4.1 million

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

No. 5

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

Total: $3 million

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

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

Posted

View the original article here

Kielsky takes on Montgomery

In the race for Maricopa County attorney, a heavily favored Republican incumbent is being challenged by a Libertarian who has run twice before for the office.

County Attorney Bill Montgomery, who took office after winning a special election in 2010, is facing Libertarian opponent Michael Kielsky. The Democratic Party did not slate a candidate in the race.

One of the sharpest contrasts between Montgomery and Kielsky is views on enforcing laws. Montgomery presents himself as a law-and-order stalwart who, in his career as a prosecutor, has pursued tough sentences. Kielsky's main campaign promise is that he will not prosecute victimless crimes such as marijuana possession and prostitution, using the slogan, "No victim, no crime, no time, no fine!"

Montgomery, 45, has done no television campaigning and bought no print ads. He and Kielsky will participate in a lunch forum tentatively set for Monday at the Phoenix School of Law.

Kielsky, 48, says, "It will be my most successful run yet" because the voters of Maricopa County will express their dissatisfaction with Montgomery's first two years as county attorney.

The last general election for Maricopa County attorney, in 2008, was a horse race in which then-incumbent Andrew Thomas edged out Democrat Tim Nelson.

But less than two years later, the Maricopa County Attorney's Office was thrown into turmoil because of Thomas' skirmishes with judges and county officials. Thomas resigned to run for Arizona attorney general.

Former County Attorney Rick Romley battled against Montgomery to replace Thomas, but Montgomery, the party's preferred candidate in the Republican primary, won and then rolled over Kielsky in the November 2010 special election.

Montgomery's tenure has been relatively uneventful compared with Thomas'; he has presented himself as a conservative lawman in contrast to Thomas' anti-corruption crusader. Montgomery has gotten criticism from political pundits for not pressing criminal charges against politicians who allegedly took favors from the Fiesta Bowl or against Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne for possible campaign-finance violations. Horne defeated Thomas in the 2010 GOP primary for attorney general.

Montgomery said that there was insufficient evidence to warrant criminal charges and that seeking indictments "opens me up to criticism that there was a political reason to get an indictment."

Tempe-based polling expert Michael O'Neil said he thinks a Democratic opponent could have capitalized to some degree on the lack of prosecutions.

"You could say he's protecting his cronies and build a campaign on that," O'Neil said. But "nobody is willing to step up for a race that they would definitely lose."

Montgomery moved to improve relations with county managers and the county Board of Supervisors, and his press conferences often focus on community activities such as shred-a-thons to combat ID theft or anti-drug programs.

On broader political issues, Montgomery has hewed to Republican Party positions, such as supporting Senate Bill 1070, the embattled Arizona immigration law. In addition, he will defend the state's ban on abortions beyond 20 weeks of pregnancy before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals next month.

He has been outspoken against Proposition 121, which would create an open primary system instead of separate primaries for each political party. He also has opposed the successful citizens' initiative that allows for legal medical use of marijuana. Kielsky supports decriminalization of marijuana.

Kielsky, a former head of the Arizona Libertarian Party, ran for a seat on the board of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District in 1992. He then ran for justice of the peace in 2002, Congress in 2004 and county attorney in 2008 and 2010.

As in his past campaigns, Kielsky, who has been an attorney since 2006, does not take stands on major political issues, instead focusing on not wasting resources by prosecuting victimless crimes, saying this will save money, lower the prison population and provide greater freedom and justice. He said he would not devote resources to prosecuting minor drug-possession charges, prostitution or immigration offenses.

"The job of the county attorney is to help protect individual rights by prosecuting those who harm other people," he said. "Bill Montgomery, like his predecessor, is spending a lot of resources on prosecuting people who aren't hurting anyone."

"How about if we just focus on the core issues of that office?" he said.

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.

Posted

View the original article here

Brewer PAC adds cash to help Flake campaign

Gov. Jan Brewer's federal political-action committee has poured $100,000 into Republican Jeff Flake's U.S. Senate campaign, new federal filings show.

Federal Election Commission records show that Jan PAC spent the money on mailers on Flake's behalf.

Flake faces Democrat Richard Carmona in a race that has become one of the most closely watched in the nation and could help decide which party controls the Senate.

This is the governor's latest foray into Arizona's tightly contested partisan races -- she also has sunk money into the campaigns of GOP candidates seeking office in three of the state's congressional districts.

Carmona's campaign decried Brewer's intervention in the race.

"Jan Brewer was once begging Rich Carmona to run for governor," said Andy Barr, Carmona's spokesman. "This shows how broken and absurd our politics have become, that these career politicians only care if you have an 'R' or 'D' next to your name, not what you'd do for Arizona."

Andrew Wilder, Flake's campaign spokesman, said Flake's team doesn't comment on outside spending by supporters as a matter of policy.

The Flake mailers come a day after Jan PAC spent money in eastern Arizona's newly drawn Congressional District 1, one of the most competitive races in the nation.

Jan PAC, according to the state Democratic Party, "has launched a full-scale attack" on Democratic congressional candidate Ann Kirkpatrick, who is battling Republican Jonathan Paton, a former state senator.

Records show Jan PAC on Tuesday spent $35,567 on a mailer to attack Kirkpatrick.

The buy comes on the heels of Jan PAC's recent attack mailer on Congressional District 9 Democratic candidate Kyrsten Sinema, a former state senator.

Sinema is in a heated battle with Republican Vernon Parker for the right to represent the newly drawn congressional district.

"I think it's unprecedented for a sitting governor to double down on negative attacks," said Luis Heredia, executive director of the Arizona Democratic Party. "And it does not create an environment of trying to solve problems facing Arizona voters if you have a governor who is extremely partisan. I don't go out on a limb by labeling her as the most partisan governor we've had in our state."

Paul Senseman, spokesman for Jan PAC, said the governor believes Flake is the better fit for the Senate post.

"The governor is very fond of Congressman Flake, and she believes he has the right temperament and leadership capabilities to best represent Arizona and hopefully find some new success and attention by the federal government," Senseman said.

Senseman described the Flake mailer as a "very positive piece."

Meanwhile, the committee on Tuesday spent an additional $29,651 on a mailer to support Republican Martha McSally, who faces Democratic U.S. Rep. Ron Barber in Arizona's Congressional District 2 race.

The governor created the committee last year and has said it would be dedicated to "securing the border and restoring integrity to our immigration system, fighting 'Obamacare,' creating jobs (getting Americans back to work) and reducing the sea of government."

The PAC has raised about $587,000.

Brewer is tentatively scheduled to head to Colorado today, where she will be raising money for Jan PAC, The Arizona Republic has learned.

Staff writer Dan Nowicki contributed to this article.

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.

Posted

View the original article here

3 names suggested for Arredondo seat

In less time than it takes to boil an egg, Legislative District 17 Democratic precinct committee members on Thursday nominated three party stalwarts to potentially fill the House seat left open when state Rep. Ben Arredondo resigned earlier this month.

Randy Keating, District 26 Democratic chairman and formerly chairman for District 17; Juan Mendez, a District 26 House candidate; and Kristin Gwinn, a longtime activist and current District 26 Democratic treasurer, were nominated by a majority vote at a Tempe meeting that lasted about three minutes. Gwinn and Keating said they would be honored to serve, but that they would like to see Mendez appointed.

Arizona law requires the state Democratic Party chairman to forward the nominees' names to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which must appoint a representative from among the precinct members' three selections.

The appointee will complete the term for Arredondo, a Tempe Democrat, which ends in January.

The longtime Republican politician switched parties before seeking the House seat.

Keating said precinct members moved fast to schedule the vote because they are concerned about serving constituents.

"The district deserves the full representation at the state Legislature," Keating said, adding that he hopes the Board of Supervisors will make the appointment soon.

Arredondo, who served as a Tempe councilman before his election to the House, pleaded guilty Oct. 5 in federal court to two felonies.

He admitted soliciting and accepting a bribe and committing mail fraud when he misled donors about a college-scholarship fund that he secretly used to benefit his relatives.

Under the plea, he agreed to immediately resign from the Legislature, and federal prosecutors agreed to dismiss all other charges. He is scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 22.

He was indicted May 16 on charges of bribery, mail fraud, lying and extortion stemming from an FBI sting that took place from February 2009, when Arredondo was a councilman, to November 2010, shortly after he won the House seat.

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.

Posted

View the original article here

Presidential candidates seek votes from bloc of new American citizens

SAN FRANCISCO — SAN FRANCISCO From Florida to Virginia, Massachusetts to California, candidates and political parties seeking to squeeze every vote from a divided electorate are targeting America's newest citizens. It's a relatively small bloc but one that can be substantial enough to make a difference in razor-close races.

In Florida, which President Barack Obama won by less than 5 percentage points four years ago, a new analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data shows people who naturalized as Americans since 2000 make up 6 percent of the population of voting-age citizens. For months, the Obama campaign has been sending volunteers to citizenship ceremonies to register people and canvassing Miami-area neighborhoods where immigrant families live.

In California, where new citizens comprise nearly 9 percent of potential voters, Republicans hope House candidates Ricky Gill and Abel Maldonado can reach that group by highlighting their families' journeys from India and Mexico.

Georgina Castaneda, who grew up in Veracruz, Mexico, and now lives in Los Angeles, is the type of person the campaigns are targeting. After years of waiting for her citizenship application to go through, she passed the U.S. civics test and swore her allegiance to the flag along with thousands of others at a ceremony in March at Los Angeles' Staples Center.

Castaneda said Democratic Party workers walked down the aisles handing out brochures to the crowd. She filled one out while still seated.

"My idea was that one more vote could do something, so I registered at the ceremony," she said.

Political parties have tried to engage new arrivals since at least the 1790s, when New York City's fabled Tammany Hall political machine organized immigrants.

"The trick with politics is to get to people early, so what you want to do is make sure that your party gets in on the ground floor of any new citizen's thinking," said Stephen Farnsworth, a professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va.

First-generation citizens historically have leaned Democratic and registered at lower rates than U.S.-born voters. But during the past decade, the registration gap has narrowed, partly because the newest Americans have been motivated by the immigration debate, said Manuel Pastor, director of the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration at the University of Southern California.

Nationwide, there are 7.8 million people of voting age who naturalized since 2000, or 3.6 percent of all potential voters. Two swing states -- Florida, at 6 percent, and Nevada, at 5.1 percent -- have higher concentrations than the national average.

States like California, Massachusetts and Illinois that are considered likely to go for Obama have significant populations of new citizens who could decide congressional races.

In Massachusetts, where the newest Americans make up 5 percent of all potential voters, GOP Sen. Scott Brown often emphasizes his support for legal immigrants who have "played by the rules" as he competes with Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren for the swath of undecided voters.

In downtown Oakland, Calif., the Alameda County Republican Party has been erecting folding tables with voter registration forms in Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog and English outside naturalization ceremonies.

The success rate for Republicans in this traditionally Democratic stronghold is unclear -- local GOP Chairwoman Sue Caro noted sometimes new citizens pose with the party's cardboard cutouts of Mitt Romney and Ronald Reagan, then walk down the sidewalk to the Democratic Party's table and take family photos with likenesses of Michelle and Barack Obama.

In Florida, the Obama campaign for months has sent volunteers to the conference halls where the federal government holds its citizenship ceremonies.

"Our campaign is about inclusiveness, and to that end we encourage all citizens, including our newest citizens, to get involved in the democratic process," Obama campaign spokesman Adam Fetcher said.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

Posted

View the original article here

Clinton plans to stump for Carmona

Former President Bill Clinton, a Democratic Party superstar and the last Democrat to carry Arizona in a presidential election, is set to headline a Wednesday rally in Tempe for U.S. Senate candidate Richard Carmona.

The "Get Out The Vote" event is scheduled for 8 p.m. on Arizona State University's Sun Devil Performance Lawn, 650 S. Athletes Place, Carmona's campaign announced Saturday.

Early voting for the Nov. 6 election begins Thursday.

The rally is free but anybody wanting to attend must register online at carmonaforarizona.com/early-vote.

Carmona, a former U.S. surgeon general who is running as a Democrat, is locked in a tough fight against six-term Republican U.S. Rep. Jeff Flake for the retiring GOP U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl's seat.

An automated poll of 595 likely Arizona voters conducted last week by the Democratic company Public Policy Polling indicated the race is still close, but showed Carmona leading Flake for the first time, 45percent to 43percent, with 12percent undecided.

The poll's margin of error was plus or minus 4 percentage points.

The poll has energized the Carmona campaign and his supporters.

Clinton defeated Republican challenger Bob Dole in 1996 to become the only Democrat to carry Arizona since President Harry Truman did so in 1948.

Third-party candidate Ross Perot also was on the ballot in 1996.

In 2006, Clinton stumped in Arizona for Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Jim Pederson, who wound up losing his hard-fought battle to unseat Kyl.

In other developments:

Carmona and Flake are expected to square off several times in the next few weeks.

On Wednesday, the candidates will appear before The Arizona Republic's editorial board for a 1:30 p.m. meeting that will be live-streamed on azcentral.com.

At 5 p.m., they will debate Libertarian candidate Marc Victor on Channel 8's (KAET) "Arizona Horizon" program.

Flake and Carmona will meet again Oct. 15 for a 6 p.m. debate on Tucson's Channel 6 (KUAT); Oct. 17 for an 11 a.m. debate on KJZZ (91.5 FM) radio's "Here and Now" show; and Oct. 25 for a 12:30 p.m. debate in front of an audience at Arizona Western College in Yuma that will air later on local TV and radio.

U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, praised Republican Mitt Romney's performance in his Wednesday debate against President Barack Obama.

Four years ago, McCain, R-Ariz., debated Obama three times.

"The difference is this time he had a record that he had to defend," McCain told The Republic.

Nowicki is The Republic's national political reporter. Follow his blog at azdc.azcentral.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.

Posted

View the original article here

George McGovern, Democratic Party icon, dies

George McGovern, the three-term senator from South Dakota who carried the Democratic Party's liberal banner in the Vietnam War era, launched a star-crossed bid for the presidency in 1972, and energized many of the leading Democrats of the past generation, died Sunday at a hospice in Sioux Falls, S.D. He was 90.

Family spokesman Steve Hildebrand confirmed the death to the Associated Press. The cause was not disclosed.

In a public career spanning more than five decades, McGovern may be best remembered as a presidential candidate of near-epic futility, in which he lost 49 of 50 states. The senator's liberal agenda -- supporting civil rights and anti-poverty programs and strongly denouncing the Vietnam War -- was critical to his landslide defeat to President Richard Nixon. But those views also helped define the future vision of the Democratic Party.

"In many ways, he revolutionized the Democratic Party," said Ross K. Baker, a Rutgers University political-science professor and an authority on congressional politics. "His followers drove out the old guard. Some would say it was the end of the old Democrats, but others would say, 'No, it opened up the party to women and others.'"

Among those who worked on McGovern's 1972 campaign were Bill Clinton, a future governor and president; Hillary Clinton, a future senator and secretary of State; and Gary Hart, a future senator and presidential candidate.

McGovern, a minister's son, was raised in a South Dakota farm community during the Depression and was a decorated bomber pilot in World War II. Both experiences -- seeing hobos begging for food at his family's doorstep and witnessing emaciated child beggars in wartime Italy -- molded his political career from the moment he was first elected to Congress in 1956.

In the early 1960s, he conceived the idea of the U.S. Food for Peace program, which gave foreign nations credit to buy surplus U.S. crops, and served under President John F. Kennedy as the program's first director. In that position, he played a central role building the United Nations World Food Program, a humanitarian organization that has provided food assistance to hundreds of millions of victims of war and natural disasters.

After winning his Senate seat in 1962, he spent much of his public life working on the expansion of food-stamp and school-lunch programs and championing civil rights and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in the Senate. After being defeated for re-election to the Senate in 1980, he served as the U.S. representative to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome and as a U.N. global ambassador on world hunger.

As part of his humanitarian interests, McGovern was synonymous with the anti-war movement. In September 1963, he became the first person to challenge the burgeoning Vietnam War on the Senate floor, with five paragraphs tucked into a speech about disarmament.

But McGovern voted for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964, giving President Lyndon Johnson almost blank-check authority to escalate the war. By the next year, McGovern joined a small group of senators who called U.S. involvement in Vietnam a mistake.

"We are fighting a determined army of guerrillas that seems to enjoy the cooperation of the countryside and that grow(s) stronger in the face of foreign intervention," he said in a Jan. 15, 1965, Senate speech that marked him as the leading Senate pacifist. "We are further away from victory over the guerrilla forces in Vietnam today than we were a decade ago." He then laid out a five-point program for withdrawal from the war.

With Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., McGovern proposed an end to the Vietnam War by Dec. 31, 1971. The McGovern-Hatfield Amendment failed on a Senate vote in 1970, but millions of Americans embraced McGovern as a prophet; millions of others considered him a traitor.

After being re-elected to the Senate in 1968, McGovern led a commission to overhaul the Democratic Party's nominating process. The experience proved crucial: McGovern entered the 1972 presidential race knowing the rules better than anyone else.

The race against Nixon was seen by most as a sure loss. The Nixon administration's involvement in the Watergate scandal -- which stemmed from a 1972 break-in of Democratic National Committee headquarters -- had not yet sunk into the public's consciousness.

McGovern offered the vice-presidential slot to several prominent Democratic lawmakers, but he was turned down. When Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri accepted the position, McGovern said he backed him "a thousand percent."

Within two weeks, Eagleton stepped down amid revelations that he had undergone psychiatric treatment.

McGovern replaced Eagleton with Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy in-law who was founding director of the Peace Corps and U.S. ambassador to France. But the campaign never recovered.

"I wish I had stayed with my initial judgment to keep Tom" on the ticket, he told the Washington Post in 2005. "I could have stood up for him had I known more about mental illness at the time."

The McGovern-Shriver ticket received only 38 percent of the popular vote, carrying just Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, for 17 electoral votes. Nixon won 520 electoral votes.

McGovern was born July 19, 1922, and grew up in Mitchell, S.D. He left Dakota Wesleyan University to serve as an Army bomber pilot during World War II. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross and several Air Medals.

After the war, McGovern graduated from Dakota Wesleyan in 1946. Torn between the ministry and the study of history, he attended the old Garrett Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill., then transferred to Northwestern University, where he received a master's in 1950 and a doctorate in 1953, both in U.S. history.

Survivors include three daughters, Ann McGovern Mead, Susan McGovern Rowen and Mary McGovern. His wife of 63 years, the former Eleanor Stegeberg, died in 2007 at 85.

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.

Posted

View the original article here

Barber, McSally make race for District 2 unpredictable

In Congressional District 2, tucked into Arizona's southeastern corner, Democratic U.S. Rep. Ron Barber has been considered the front-runner for the Nov. 6 election. But the race is shaping up to be tougher than some experts predicted.

GOP challenger Martha McSally is appealing to female voters, veterans and independents with her background of breaking barriers as a woman in the military and her measured approach to discussing issues.

District 2, which includes Tucson, Sierra Vista and Douglas, is considered a political toss-up district.

"Voters will not vote the party line," said David Steele, a Tucson Democratic political strategist.

Barber courted the Democratic base during a special election earlier this year to fill the rest of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' term in Congress, according to Steele, but also reached out to moderates.

"Now, he and McSally are fighting over those same voters," Steele said.

Two wildly divergent polls show it's tough to gauge exactly how voters are leaning.

Earlier this month, a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee poll indicated Barber was up by 14 percentage points.

McSally's campaign countered with a survey indicating the two were tied, each with 47 percent of the vote. Both polls had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.

Republicans say McSally is doing the unthinkable: gaining on Barber. The National Republican Congressional Committee, spurred by a belief in McSally's traction, recently put $330,000 into the party's first broadcast ads.

Democrats dispute that assessment, maintaining that Barber's campaign remains strong.

As evidence, they point to the national Democratic Party's decision to decrease spending on television ads in the district.

National firms that track House races have kept District 2 as leaning Democrat.

Barber well-known

At a veterans job fair in Tucson recently, Barber wandered through the crowd, talking with one veteran about his post-traumatic stress disorder, promising another he'd ask a company to consider the veteran's resume and stopping to poll employers on how to create more jobs.

A woman stopped Barber with arms outstretched. "Give me a hug. I'm so glad to see you," Air Force retiree Diane Kephart said.

She wanted to tell Barber about a new homeless-veterans program. But more than that, she was happy to see him healthy again.

Barber was shot in the leg and cheek alongside Giffords during an assassination attempt on the congresswoman that killed six people and wounded 11 others outside a Safeway last year.

Giffords resigned her congressional seat earlier this year to focus on recovery.

"After the shootings, he's more of a personal friend," said Kephart, 49. "To see him walking without a cane is just a blessing."

Many, like Kephart, have a soft spot for Barber because of his decades of public service in southern Arizona and his connection to Giffords and the shooting.

Barber, 67, managed state programs for the disabled in southern Arizona for three decades. In 2007, he joined Giffords' staff as district director. He solved problems for constituents, met ranchers along the U.S.-Mexican border and worked on issues at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and Fort Huachuca Army Base.

After the shooting, Barber helped form an advocacy group for civility.

Barber has made military affairs and border security a mainstay of his work since joining Congress in June, introducing five bipartisan bills and amendments related to those topics and serving on the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees.

He has also drawn criticism from both sides -- Democrats when he supported suspending environmental regulations to allow Border Patrol agents to chase smugglers on federal land and Republicans when he opposed a vote to repeal President Barack Obama's health-care overhaul.

McSally has support

A political newcomer, McSally, 46, has gained support in large part because of her background and energy on the campaign trail. When quizzed on her knowledge of the district or policy details, she is generally perceived as weaker than Barber.

McSally moved to Tucson in 1994 on military assignment. She was the first female Air Force pilot and squadron commander to serve in combat and retired in 2010 as a colonel after more than 20 years.

While in the military, McSally sued the Department of Defense to overturn a requirement that female personnel in Saudi Arabia wear Muslim clothing off base.

She holds two master's degrees, taught national- security studies in Germany and served a year in Washington, D.C., as a legislative aide to Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl.

McSally's challenges are steep. She is running in a district that has sent Democrats to Congress in the past four elections, despite having more registered Republicans than Democrats.

And now, with the redrawn districts this year, District 2's slight Republican-voter-registration edge has shrunk.

She was behind Barber in the most recent financial reports, although Republicans say McSally's fundraising has gained steam.

Barber brought in more than $330,000 while McSally raised nearly $270,000 from April 1 to June 30. The next quarterly financial reports are due Monday.

Yet McSally appears to be making strides with voters, including the all-important independents.

Martha Conyne, a 54-year-old University of Arizona administrative assistant, eagerly approached McSally at a recent campaign rally at a Tucson restaurant.

"I am an independent, pro-choice person who will work as hard as I can for you. I really believe in what you're doing," Conyne told her.

Conyne said McSally's anti-abortion stance is not a deal breaker. She said she will vote for McSally because of her military experience, "firecracker" attitude and emphasis on the economy.

"The most important issue is economic security," Conyne said. "Chaos ensues when people don't have jobs and businesses can't function."

Among McSally's economic proposals are cutting federal regulations and lowering taxes.

Democrats' main attacks on McSally center on her stances on Social Security and Medicare.

McSally promises to maintain both programs for current seniors. But on Social Security, she has said she supports "gradually increasing the retirement age for younger workers" and allowing beneficiaries "to invest part of their benefits for higher returns."

Race is hard to call

Gender issues have become key in this District 2 race.

Barber makes it a point to criticize Arizona's new law to allow some religious employers to drop insurance coverage for women's prescription contraceptives. He also praises the Affordable Care Act for prohibiting insurance companies from charging women for preventive care.

Some of his comments have backfired. Criticizing a lack of gender, ethnic and religious diversity among Republicans in Congress, Barber called GOP lawmakers in an interview with the Arizona Daily Star "a bunch of White guys."

McSally said the remark was "divisive."

McSally also cried foul over an outside Democratic group's ad against her. The House Majority PAC, a political action committee, ran a television spot featuring cooking images and called her platform a "recipe for disaster." McSally called it sexist.

Barber's campaign, which did not have a role in the ad, distanced itself from it. The political action group replaced it a few days later with a different ad.

And as Election Day looms closer, political strategists continue to disagree over the outcome of the race.

"Things look good for him," said Democratic political strategist Steele, who has donated to Barber's campaign. "By any objective standards (McSally is) a strong candidate. … But even before Ron worked for Gabby, he was well-known throughout southern Arizona. He's built a reputation as honest and fair- dealing."

Republicans disagree.

"(It) is now a very close battle," said Deputy Political and Polling Director Brock McCleary of the National Republican Congressional Committeee. "I really attribute that to Martha McSally."

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.

Posted

View the original article here

Leading Maryland and Virginia, With Stars on the Rise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. O’Malley sounded intrigued by the prospect.

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

View the original article here

Democrats Bet on Shift in Hispanic Numbers to Win Arizona Race

Mr. Carmona, 62, is an untested candidate of vast experiences with a made-for-Hollywood biography. He was a high school dropout, born into poverty in New York City to Puerto Rican parents who struggled with alcoholism and drug abuse. He served in Vietnam, earning Bronze Stars, Purple Hearts and other combat decorations, and attended medical school before his eventual rise to surgeon general under President George W. Bush.

He is running for public office for the first time, challenging a six-term congressman, Jeff Flake, 49, a Republican. Both are vying for the seat held by another Republican, Senator Jon Kyl, who is retiring. Though there is little reliable polling in the contest, both camps acknowledged that the race is closer than they expected in such a heavily Republican state.

Beyond the balance of power in the Senate — enough states are in play that Republicans could regain the majority — the race carries enormous significance for Arizona, whose shifts in demographics threaten to upend its role as a Republican stronghold.

Mr. Carmona was handpicked by President Obama to run for the Senate because of his résumé and his ethnicity, which could help galvanize the state’s Latino voters. The Democratic Party then cleared the field for him, sparing him primary attacks but depriving him of the chance to test his skills before the big fight.

Mr. Flake, in the meantime, waged a feisty primary contest against Wil Cardon, a wealthy businessman who spent a small fortune on his campaign but lost by a considerable margin. Unlike Mr. Carmona, who often refers to himself as a “street kid,” Mr. Flake was raised on a ranch in Snowflake, a northern Arizona town named in part for his great-great-grandfather, the Mormon pioneer William J. Flake.

Mr. Flake says he is “for limited government, economic freedom, individual responsibility and free trade,” tenets that have earned him staunch support from the Tea Party movement. He has also embraced issues of particular significance to rural voters, like environmental rules that he says have curbed the operation of coal plants, leaving many people unemployed and “devastating small-town economies.”

From his campaign headquarters in Phoenix on Tuesday, where he was surrounded by young volunteers polling voters on the phone, Mr. Flake said, “I’m fighting to have some rational policy,” singling out the Forest Service and the Environmental Protection Agency as agencies that “need to be reined in.”

Outside groups have been pouring money and resources into the state as the race has tightened. On Wednesday, FreedomWorks for America, a “super PAC” linked to the Tea Party, opened an office in Mesa. The operation at the heart of Mr. Flake’s base in suburban Phoenix will organize volunteers to solicit votes, said its executive director, Russell Walker, who flew in from Washington.

On Tuesday, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee bought $526,000 in airtime on behalf of Mr. Carmona, its first direct expenditure in the contest. (The committee had previously given $500,000 to the state’s Democratic Party to help pay for the campaign’s field offices, among other things.) The National Republican Senatorial Committee has donated $500,000 worth of ads to the Flake effort.

Mr. Carmona, a longtime independent, is running as a Democrat. That is not because the party is “a perfect fit,” he said, but because “I was forced to pick a position, and when I looked at where the Republicans were, especially in this state — immigration, women’s issues — I chose the Democratic Party.”

He has nonetheless tried to stitch together what he has taken to calling “a coalition of reasonable people” to carry him to victory. He has focused on constituencies long believed to be Republican stalwarts, like veterans, who make up roughly 15 percent of eligible voters in the state, and seniors, many of whom dislike the Medicare plan proposed by Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Mr. Carmona has also appealed to women who are unhappy about the state’s attempts to curb reproductive rights.

All along, though, Mr. Carmona has courted Latino voters. He released his second Spanish-language commercial on Tuesday, which introduces him as “uno de nosotros” — one of us — while highlighting Mr. Flake’s vote against the Dream Act, which would have given certain immigrants brought to the country illegally as children a path to legalization.

Mr. Flake has begun to make his case to Latinos as well. He has started running his first Spanish-language ad on television and radio, trying to tap into whatever anti-Obama sentiment there is in that community by referring to Mr. Carmona as “el hombre de Obama” — Obama’s man.

A combination of factors, including the state’s legislative push to curb illegal immigration and the presence of a Hispanic candidate like Mr. Carmona in the race, — have been galvanizing among advocacy groups in Arizona, triggering the largest Latino voter registration efforts in memory.

Still, Tara Blanc, a lecturer at the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University who has studied Latino voting patterns in the state, said Latinos tended to be poorer, younger and less educated than the rest of the population. Those factors generally contribute to low turnouts, she said, so “whether they’ll go to the polls is anybody’s guess.”

Their transformative power lies, most likely, in the future. By 2030, Latinos are expected to make up 25 percent of all registered voters in Arizona, up from 15 percent in 2010, according to an analysis by the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State.

Chip Scutari, who runs a bipartisan political consulting firm in Phoenix, said a Latino on the ballot could be “the tipping point for the Latino vote.” But, he added, the state has “a lot of conservative, pro-life Latinos,” who are more likely to vote Republican.

“To say the Latino vote will automatically go to Democrats,” Mr. Scutari said, “is oversimplifying the situation.”

View the original article here

September Is the Best Fund-Raising Month for Obama in 2012

President Obama’s campaign raised more money in September than any candidate has raised in a previous month this year, according to several Democrats familiar with the campaign’s money-raising operation.

Several sources said the president’s haul last month exceeded the $114 million he raised in August, in part on the strength of donations that flowed in after the Democratic National Convention and former president Bill Clinton’s well-received speech.

One Democrat familiar with the fund-raising effort said Mr. Obama and his allies at the Democratic National Committee raised more than $150 million in September.

Officials with the campaign declined to comment on the news, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. One Democratic source said aides were still tallying the funds raised in September ahead of the official report they must submit later this month.

Mr. Obama edged out Mitt Romney’s $112 million in August. In 2008, Mr. Obama had the biggest month ever for any presidential candidate, raising $193 million that September.

This year’s haul signals a boost in financial support for Mr. Obama as he nears the conclusion of his battle with Mr. Romney in a little over a month. It ensures that Mr. Obama will have plenty of money for the balance of the campaign despite having been outraised by his Republican rival throughout the summer.

And it comes as Mr. Obama’s campaign confronts the president’s lackluster performance at the first presidential debate Wednesday night.

Mr. Romney’s campaign did not release any information about its fund-raising on Thursday.

Mr. Obama’s advisers have long warned that Mr. Romney’s fund-raising prowess and the success of Republican “super PACs” that are backing him threatened to put the president at a financial disadvantage going into the final stretch.

In fact, it appears to be Mr. Romney who has struggled to keep up. Mr. Obama’s campaign has run far more ads than Mr. Romney in the last several weeks. And the president’s ground operation — which was built over the course of several years — is far larger than Mr. Romney’s.

The never-ending money chase is largely Mr. Obama’s own doing. By choosing to reject federal campaign funds in 2008, Mr. Obama effectively condemned himself — and his future rival — to a continuing need to raise money all the way to election day. (Senator John McCain of Arizona chose to take the federal money in 2008 and was vastly outspent.)

Now, both Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney have continued to hold fund-raisers and make appeals to their supporters for cash even as they hold big rallies in battleground states across the country.

Mr. Obama’s apparent success in September may be a result of a surge in small donors, who have long been a vital part of the president’s financial base. The campaign said on Monday that it had collected money in more than 10 million individual donations, a record.

By contrast, Mr. Romney has tended to rely more on fewer — but wealthier — donors. That has meant that more of Mr. Romney’s money is housed at the Republican National Committee, which, by law, can accept much larger contributions from individuals.

Follow Michael D. Shear on Twitter at @shearm.

View the original article here

‘North Dakota Nice’ Plays Well in Senate Race

Dan Koeck for The New York TimesHeidi Heitkamp, the Democratic Senate candidate in North Dakota, visited Perry Benton of Minot while campaigning last week.

MINOT, N.D. — Heidi Heitkamp, a Democratic Senate candidate, called Leonard Rademacher a few weeks ago looking for his vote, but Mr. Rademacher, a 74-year-old retiree, was feeling ill, so Ms. Heitkamp called him back.

A one-stop destination for the latest political news — from The Times and other top sources. Plus opinion, polls, campaign data and video.

Representative Rick Berg, the Republican candidate, campaigning at a business in Fargo.

“I said: ‘Heidi, save your breath. I’m voting for you,’ ” Mr. Rademacher recalled, marveling at her personal attention. “I don’t necessarily agree with her, but I trust her.”

Gary Volk backed Ms. Heitkamp, a former state attorney general, after she sat for four hours on a slab of concrete next to what was once his house, listening to his struggles to recover from catastrophic flooding last year. Larry Windus’s mind was made up by an encounter with her opponent, Representative Rick Berg, a Republican, that ended with the candidate turning his back on him.

“He’s not very personable,” said Mr. Windus, 55, a dishwasher at Charlie’s Main Street Cafe here.

Senate Republicans considered the state in their column when Senator Kent Conrad, a veteran Democrat, announced his retirement last year. But with shoe leather, calibrated attacks and likability — an intangible that goes far in North Dakota — Ms. Heitkamp has made this a real fight. Though North Dakota is deeply conservative and is on no one’s presidential map as a question mark, this race could be one of the biggest surprises of the 2012 contests. And, like all close races this year, it could help decide control of the Senate.

Even the National Republican Senatorial Committee conceded in its most recent attack ad here that Ms. Heitkamp is making headway. “Heidi Heitkamp: You might like her, but on the issues she’s wrong for North Dakota,” it said.

The contest — the state’s first competitive one since 1986 and probably its nastiest in modern history — features two very different politicians with very different styles: the rumpled Democrat against the well-turned-out Republican, the longtime denizen of state government against the affluent businessman. Ms. Heitkamp hugs her way through a room. Mr. Berg approached a table of women in Fargo on Wednesday and then sheepishly backed off, saying: “We won’t bug you. We’ll just keep going.”

Ms. Heitkamp sees the Senate as a platform to help North Dakotans, with air service, veterans’ health care, flood control, wind energy production and agricultural assistance. Mr. Berg wants North Dakota to help the nation.

“We’ve gone from a state that has kind of been in the bottom half of the country in terms of our economics and business to really the envy of the nation,” he said at Butler Industries, a heavy-equipment dealer in Fargo that is booming along with North Dakota’s energy and agriculture sectors. “My passion is taking what we’ve done in North Dakota — if you will, the North Dakota way — and applying it nationally. If we do that, we can reignite America’s economic engine.”

Ms. Heitkamp, surveying the slow rebuilding after the flooding in Minot, offered a different sentiment. “You stand here, and you say this should not be,” she said.

In short, the campaign is a contest between North Dakota Nice and the national strategy of the Republican Party.

“Everyone’s pretty likable,” Mr. Berg said with a shrug. “The issue is not about a personality contest. This whole thing kind of boils down to, do you want someone who’s going to fight against President Obama.”

Tight Senate races in Arizona, Connecticut, Indiana, Massachusetts and North Dakota all feature one candidate who must count on voters going one way in the presidential race and another down the ballot to prevail. But in North Dakota, voters have been splitting their tickets for decades. The seat up for grabs here has been in Democratic hands for 52 years. Only once in that span, in 1964, has the state voted for a Democratic presidential candidate.

View the original article here

Romney Ad Says Obama Distorts Tax Cut Plan

In a television ad released Sunday, the Romney campaign returned to one of the most contentious issues of the presidential debate, accusing President Obama of falsely claiming that Mitt Romney would cut $5 trillion in taxes.

Mr. Obama repeated the accusation several times in the debate last Wednesday and that assertion has been a staple of Democrats’ accusations that Mr. Romney’s economic plans favor the rich.

“President Obama continues to distort Mitt Romney’s economic plan,’’ the narrator of the ad says. “The latest? Not telling the truth about Mitt Romney’s tax plan.’’

The ad cites an independent fact-check by The Associated Press and even includes a sound bite of Stephanie Cutter, Mr. Obama’s deputy campaign manager, telling CNN, “Well, O.K., stipulated, it won’t be near $5 trillion.”

The issue turns on semantics as much as math. Mr. Romney has proposed a package of tax cuts, including a 20 percent reduction in marginal income tax rates and zeroing out estate taxes, as well as making permanent the Bush-era tax cuts. Add everything up and the theoretical loss of federal revenue over 10 years is $5 trillion, according to the independent Tax Policy Center.

But that is only half of the story. Mr. Romney describes his proposal as “revenue neutral’’ – any hole punched in the annual deficit would be filled by eliminating tax deductions on high earners and closing other loopholes.

“I’m not looking for a $5 trillion tax cut,’’ Mr. Romney insisted in the debate. “What I’ve said is I won’t put in place a tax cut that adds to the deficit. That’s part one. So there’s no economist that can say Mitt Romney’s tax plan adds $5 trillion if I say I will not add to the deficit with my tax plan.’’

Mr. Romney has left himself open to the Democrats’ attacks by not specifying how he would make up the loss in revenue, specifically which tax deductions he would eliminate. And he also counts on his plan to spur economic growth and add to tax collections, a proposition that federal budget experts have difficulty factoring into their estimates.

The issue is hardly going away.

The Obama campaign released its own video on Sunday accusing Mr. Romney of rewriting his earlier proposals during the debates, including the $5 trillion reduction in taxes. “When the cameras rolled, a performance began,’’ the video says. “But the problem is, that’s all it was.’’

And on Thursday Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who will face Representative Paul D. Ryan in a vice presidential debate this week, mocked Mr. Romney’s claims about his tax proposals. “Last night we found out he doesn’t have a $5 trillion tax cut,’’ he said. “I guess he outsourced that to China or something.’’

View the original article here

Republicans Seize On Biden's 'Middle Class' Remark

James Hill for The New York Times Supporters waited to greet Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at a campaign rally on Tuesday in Charlotte, N.C.

A stray sentence by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Tuesday became the latest remark seized by the opposition and turned into a blistering line of attack against him.

After Mr. Biden described the middle class as having “been buried the last four years,’’ Republicans pounced, treating it as an unwitting admission of President Obama’s failures.

The vice president was criticizing the Republican ticket for pursuing a tax overhaul that would raise taxes on the middle class, he said.

“How can they justify raising taxes on the middle class that’s been buried the last four years?’’ Mr. Biden said at a campaign rally in Charlotte, N.C.

The Republican barrage came fast and furious by Twitter message, news release and campaign conference call. It began with a Twitter message from Mitt Romney’s account:

Agree with @joebiden, the middle class has been buried the last 4 years, which is why we need a change in November #CantAfford4More

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) October 2, 2012

Campaigning in Iowa, Representative Paul D. Ryan reinforced the message. “Of course the middle class has been buried,’’ he said. “They’re being buried by regulations; they’re being buried by taxes; they’re being buried by borrowing. They’re being buried by the Obama administration’s economic failures.”

The Romney-Ryan campaign even held an afternoon press call with one of its fiercest surrogates, John Sununu, the former New Hampshire governor, to drive home the theme.

Republicans seemed to seize on the remark with special fervor, coming as it did one day before the first debate between Mr. Romney and President Obama, in which the cost of Mr. Romney’s proposed tax cuts for the rich and his disparagement of 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay income taxes are sure to be topics of discussion.

In response, the Obama campaign called the attacks “desperate and out of context.’’

“As the vice president has been saying all year and again in his remarks today, the middle class was punished by the failed Bush policies that crashed our economy,’’ a spokeswoman, Lis Smith, said.

In his North Carolina remarks, Mr. Biden was citing, as the Democrats have for months, an independent study that found that cutting tax rates by 20 percent and closing loopholes to avoid increasing the deficit, as Mr. Romney proposes, could be done only by raising taxes on households earning less than $200,000.

The audience booed.

“No, no – all kidding aside,’’ Mr. Biden said. “With all the boos – I mean, we can stop all that malarkey. Look, guys, this is deadly earnest, man. This is deadly earnest. How can they justify raising taxes on the middle class that’s been buried the last four years? How in the Lord’s name can they justify raising their taxes with these tax cuts?’’

Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan dispute the accuracy of the study, by the Tax Policy Center, and they have cited studies of their own showing their tax plan will not hit the middle class.

The maladroit sentence was the latest in a long series this year that have been yanked from context and used by the opposition, including Mr. Romney’s remark that he “liked to fire people” and Mr. Obama’s comment that “you didn’t build that.”

Later in the day, Mr. Biden clarified his meaning. “The middle class was buried by the policies that Romney and Ryan have supported,” he told a crowd in Asheville, N.C.

View the original article here

Easier Access to Ballot Is Pushed by Democrats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

View the original article here

Ye Olde Partisanship Is Nothing New

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

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

Posts written by the IHT’s Page Two columnists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

View the original article here

A Familiar Face Returns, Heating Up the Sheriff’s Race in Webb County

As recently as 2007, Mr. Flores, the former Webb County sheriff, was sounding the alarm over possible spillover violence from Mexico’s drug war. That year, Mr. Flores went head to head with Representative Henry Cuellar, Democrat of Laredo, on CNN, questioning the congressman’s loyalty to the United States and suggesting that Mr. Cuellar was more dedicated to Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, than to his own constituents.

The move angered local lawmakers and business leaders, who said Mr. Flores was using the carnage in Mexico — and specifically in Laredo’s sister city, Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas — to paint the entire region as a hyperviolent war zone.

In 2008, Mr. Flores lost his bid for re-election by fewer than 50 votes out of more than 26,000 votes cast, following a primary, a runoff, a recount and a theatrical election contest in which lawyers subpoenaed voters and asked them how they had cast their ballots. The victor was the congressman’s younger brother, Martin Cuellar, a former lieutenant with the Texas Department of Public Safety.

The Cuellar family’s power made the city a tough place for Mr. Flores to live, he said. He moved to Arizona and worked briefly as the police chief in San Luis, then he failed to pass that state’s peace officer licensing exams. He made his way back to Laredo, where he is now running to reclaim his old job.

Gone are the legions of support and the six-digit campaign coffers Mr. Flores had in the past. But the sound and the fury of old-school, border-style politics remain intact.

“I am a person who’s relentless, and I don’t give up easily,” Mr. Flores said. “For me to just pack up my bags and leave like a coward, it’s just not my style, so I decided to come back and fight for what I left behind.”

The Cuellar campaign says it is not worried about the November election. Mr. Flores is running as an independent in a Democratic stronghold, the result of the Webb County Democratic Party’s ruling that Mr. Flores had violated residency requirements and could not run as a Democrat. Mr. Flores said the ruling was an effort to squash the competition, and he blames the current sheriff for that.

“What is he scared of?” Mr. Flores asked.

In an affluent neighborhood next to the Laredo Country Club on a recent afternoon, Sheriff Cuellar sat under studio lights blotting his forehead while his campaign manager, Colin Strother, who also works for Henry Cuellar, coached the sheriff on how to deliver lines for a television ad.

“Again, talk about the helicopter. Talk about how it is not costing taxpayers money,” Mr. Strother said. As the camera crew finished up, the mere mention of Mr. Flores sent the mild-mannered sheriff into attack mode.

“He is such an idiot, man. And you can put that on the record,” Sheriff Cuellar said.

Sheriff Cuellar said he had had nothing to do with Mr. Flores not being able to run as a Democrat. “I don’t make the rules. Especially election rules,” he said.

Mr. Strother added that in order to be on the ballot, a candidate had to live in the county for a full year ahead of an election, and that Mr. Flores’s own interviews with the Arizona news media suggested that he had not made it back to Texas in time.

Mr. Flores’s placement on the ballot as an independent was also a matter of contention. County officials in late August granted him permission to run, but only after roughly 300 of the 861 signatures on his petition were deemed ineligible. At least 500 valid signatures are required to get on the ballot as an independent.

“I have always been a Democrat,” Mr. Flores said. “What I feel is that my party pretty much abandoned me.”

View the original article here

Romney Takes Liberties With Claims About a Bipartisan Past

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr Romney proposed the latter, and the legislature agreed.

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

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

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

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

View the original article here

In Congress, a Shrinking Pool of Moderates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

View the original article here

After a New-Look Debate, a Harsh Light Falls on the Moderator

Mr. Lehrer’s light touch was widely criticized during and after the debate on Wednesday night, particularly by Democrats who felt that President Obama’s Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, effectively moderated the debate himself. Speaking to CNN after the debate, Stephanie Cutter, the president’s deputy campaign manager, said, “I sometimes wondered if we even needed a moderator because we had Mitt Romney. We should rethink that for the next debate.”

But conservatives suggested that critiques of Mr. Lehrer were just excuses for Mr. Obama’s own poor performance in the debate.

Mr. Lehrer, 78, the former anchor of the “NewsHour” on PBS, moderated 11 presidential debates between 1988 and 2008. He had decided to do no more, but the Commission on Presidential Debates persuaded him to come back this year.

He said he was persuaded by the potential of the new format: it allowed for six 15-minute conversations, each starting with a question and two-minute answers from each candidate. The format was appealing to Mr. Lehrer, who has consistently said that his job as moderator is to get out of the way and get the candidates talking.

He succeeded in getting out of the candidates’ way in Wednesday night’s debate, and when he did speak, it was often in phrases like “excuse me,” “wait” and “please.” Throughout the evening, he strained to interrupt when the candidates went over their allotted time. And at one point he faced a testy Mr. Obama, who complained that the moderator had cut him off by saying that time was up. “I had five seconds before you interrupted me,” Mr. Obama said.

At other times, both candidates seemed to completely ignore Mr. Lehrer. When Mr. Obama criticized Mr. Romney as failing to provide more specifics about his economic plans, Mr. Romney insisted on responding. “No, but,” Mr. Lehrer said as Mr. Romney kept on going. He spoke for a minute, completing his entire thought without interruption from the moderator.

Because the first five topic areas took up more than 15 minutes each, the candidates only had three minutes to talk about the sixth topic, cures for partisan gridlock in Washington.

In an e-mailed statement Thursday afternoon, Mr. Lehrer said he thought the new format accomplished its purpose, “which was to facilitate direct, extended exchanges between the candidates about issues of substance.” He continued, “Part of my moderator mission was to stay out of the way of the flow, and I had no problems with doing so. My only real personal frustration was discovering that 90 minutes was not enough time in that more open format to cover every issue that deserved attention.”

The critiques came from several sides of the media spectrum.

“Boy, Jim Lehrer got rolled over,” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said on “Morning Joe” on Thursday morning. “You could see an exasperated look on Jim’s face when they would just keep plowing right over him,” said Gretchen Carlson on “Fox & Friends” on Fox News. Speaking on CNBC Thursday morning, Steve Liesman offered up what he called a “private-sector solution” to the moderator dilemma: “Why can’t the two guys take care of themselves?”

The complaints about Mr. Lehrer seemed loudest from the left. Bill Press, whose liberal radio program is simulcast on Current TV, started on Thursday by saying Mr. Lehrer “lost control of the debate, and Mitt Romney ran all over him like a truck crushing a bug.” The liberal media monitoring group Media Matters said Mr. Lehrer had “lost the debate” by missing “repeated opportunities to press Mitt Romney into offering specifics on his policy proposals.” Richard Kim, a writer for The Nation, concluded that Mr. Lehrer’s version of moderation “is fundamentally unequipped to deal with the era of post-truth, asymmetric polarization politics — and it should be retired.”

The six-topic format for a debate primarily about domestic policy also drew complaints that many issues — gun control, abortion, reproductive rights, gay rights, the environment — were not addressed.

Alan Schroeder, a Northeastern University professor who has written books about debates, said that “in Jim Lehrer’s defense, this was an untested format.”

Mr. Schroeder said Wednesday’s session reminded him of televised debates he has studied in France and Spain, where “the role of the moderator is to set up the topics, then hang back and let the candidates go at it.”

The next debate between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney will be moderated by Candy Crowley of CNN, who notably did not join the chorus of complainers about Mr. Lehrer’s performance on Wednesday night. She credited Mr. Lehrer for trying throughout his moderating career to get candidates to engage with each other.

“In the end, this debate is, you know, brought to you by these candidates,” she said on CNN after the debate, “and to me, it’s better to hear from the candidates than to hear from the moderator.”

Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.

View the original article here

Ads Attack Wall Street Ties, No Matter How Flimsy

Jeff Swensen for The New York TimesKeith Rothfus, a Republican, said his opponent’s commercial was “deceitful.”

Wall Street has taken a beating this election season. Yet what is considered to be Wall Street may be surprising.

Take Keith J. Rothfus, a Republican candidate for Congress in Pennsylvania. A lawyer at a small firm, he specializes in drafting software-licensing agreements. While unglamorous, it helps pay the bills.

Among the clients he has represented is Bank of New York Mellon, which has a large presence in western Pennsylvania. Two commercials backed by Democratic groups are attacking Mr. Rothfus’s relationship with his banking client.

“Millionaire Wall Street lawyer Keith Rothfus will fit right in in Washington,” said the narrator of one of the ads. The spot shows a plunging stock market and a grim-looking Mr. Rothfus entering what looks to be a bank. Over ominous music, the narrator goes on: “As a wealthy attorney, Keith Rothfus represented a Wall Street bank that received a bailout from taxpayers.”

In an interview, Mr. Rothfus called the ad “deceitful, shameful and outrageous.” He said that while BNY Mellon took bailout funds, his work for the company — most of which predates Bank of New York’s 2006 takeover of Mellon Financial of Pittsburgh — had no connection to the financial crisis.

Jeff Swensen for The New York TimesKeith Rothfus, on phone, said his legal specialty was drafting software licensing agreements.

“I’m a Stanwix Street lawyer, not a Wall Street lawyer,” Mr. Rothfus said, referring to his firm’s downtown Pittsburgh address. “I visited Wall Street once, in 1980, as a tourist at the New York Stock Exchange. If I’m a Wall Street lawyer, then the 7,500 people that work for Mellon bank in western Pennsylvania are fast-money traders who charter private jets to the Hamptons on weekends.”

As campaigns enter their final month, a number of candidates are flooding the airwaves with advertisements demonizing Wall Street. From the presidential race to local Congressional contests, from Montana to New Mexico, candidates — both Democrats and Republicans — are relentlessly attacking their opponents by linking them to bankers and bailouts, no matter how tenuous the connection.

“Candidates are bashing each other over the heads for being in Wall Street’s back pocket,” said Elizabeth Wilner of Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. “Wall Street is this campaign season’s punching bag, and it’s bipartisan and it’s escalating.”

In the turmoil of the 2008 financial crisis, Heather A. Wilson, then a Republican congresswoman from New Mexico, voted in favor of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which provided rescue funds to banks. Four years later, Ms. Wilson — a former Air Force officer — is running for the United States Senate. An opponent’s ad assails what it characterizes as her deep ties to Wall Street.

“As a congresswoman from New Mexico, it wasn’t Heather Wilson’s job to represent Wall Street banks,” said the narrator in a spot paid for by a liberal super PAC. The ad shows a series of dark, shadowy Manhattan office towers — those of Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup. “But she voted time and again to give them special tax breaks, and then voted to bail them out.”

In Montana, the incumbent, Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat, is facing a fierce challenge from the state’s sole congressman, Denny Rehberg. Mr. Tester, who has received substantial money from executives in the financial industry, has boasted in television spots that he “opposed all of those Wall Street bailouts.” Mr. Rehberg also voted against the bank bailout. So instead of focusing on TARP, ads pummel Mr. Rehberg for his longtime support for privatizing Social Security — in other words, putting retirement funds in the hands of Wall Street money managers.

One of the ads features the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and an electronic ticker showing shares in a nose dive. The narration features voices of market commentators: “A wild ride on Wall Street … the biggest point drop … a precipitous fall … these guys have been gambling … gambling … bad bets … they didn’t know when to back away. A gamble. That’s Congressman Denny Rehberg’s plan for Social Security.”

Josh Mandel, the Republican Ohio state treasurer running for United State Senate as a Washington outsider, has an ad that goes after members of Congress on both sides of the aisle for supporting the bailout.

“Every Democrat and every Republican who took our tax dollars and used them to bail out Wall Street banks was dead wrong,” Mr. Mandel says in the spot, speaking in an angry tone to a group of factory workers. “It was fiscally irresponsible. It was morally wrong.”

The presidential candidates have also criticized one another for their Wall Street ties. Ads for President Obama have homed in on Mr. Romney’s leadership of Bain Capital, the private equity firm he started. By focusing on private equity — a specific pocket of the financial industry — Mr. Obama has largely avoided a broader critique of Wall Street, where he has raised millions of dollars. On Monday, the Obama campaign announced a new ad that links Bain to a company outsourced American jobs.

Republicans, meanwhile, depict Mr. Obama as a pawn of the financial services industry. One advertisement from the conservative organization American Future Fund titled “Obama’s Wall Street” highlights Mr. Obama’s vote in favor of TARP when he was a United States senator running for president and says that his cabinet is full of financiers. Another, called “Justice for Sale,” suggests that campaign contributions from the banking industry explain why the administration has not prosecuted more executives relating to their conduct during the financial crisis.

“Under Obama, Wall Street keeps winning, and Obama keeps taking their cash,” the narrator says. “Tell Obama to stop protecting his Wall Street donors.”

Mr. Rothfus, the Republican candidate in Pennsylvania, is locked in a tight race with his opponent, the Democratic incumbent Mark S. Critz. He has countered the attack ads with humorous “Keith Rothfus is a regular guy” 30-second spots. In one, he is shown gardening in his modest front yard, driving his kids around town and repairing his daughter’s bicycle.

In response, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees has produced an ad that starts, “Regular guy? Hardly. Keith Rothfus is a millionaire attorney for a Wall Street bank.” Banner headlines of the BNY Mellon’s $3 billion bailout run across the screen.

Mr. Rothfus, who lives in Sewickley, Pa., with his wife and six children, has worked as a corporate lawyer since graduating from Notre Dame Law School in 1980. For the last 15 years he has practiced on and off at Yukevich, Marchetti, Liekar & Zangrilli, a 12-lawyer firm. He earned about $125,000 last year. His assignments for BNY Mellon constitute a tiny portion of his overall practice, which focuses on small- and medium-size businesses.

“I’ve never done anything close to securities work for Mellon, never came close to those C.D.O.’s,” said Mr. Rothfus, referring to collateralized debt obligations, the complex mortgage instruments that contributed to the near collapse of the financial system. “I’ve never even done an I.P.O.”

Spokesmen for organizations behind the attack ads against Mr. Rothfus — the Democratic House Majority PAC and Afscme — said that they stood behind the ads.

Despite Mr. Rothfus’s modest salary — top Wall Street lawyers earn substantial seven-figure salaries — the millionaire epithet is accurate. That comes courtesy of his wife, the daughter of a successful Pittsburgh businessman. Based on his most recent financial disclosure, Mr. Rothfus’s total assets, including those of his wife, range from $5.1 million to $13.9 million.

With clean-cut looks and wire-rimmed glasses, Mr. Rothfus does look the part of a button-down Wall Street lawyer. But he is quick to point out that he favors Brooks Brothers off-the-rack suits instead of the bespoke variety and prefers Land’s End neckwear to Hermès ties.

“There were certain individuals on Wall Street who were reckless and betrayed our trust,” he said. “But I wasn’t one of them.”

View the original article here