Sarah Palin's attack on the GOP establishment

Sarah Palin's attack on the GOP establishment

By Jon Healey, Via:latimes.com.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin stirred the pot again in the GOP presidential campaign, using her Facebook account Friday to blast "the Republican establishment" for using "Alinsky tactics" against her favored candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. I'll leave it to Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic to critique the historical inaccuracies in Palin's rant; he also provides an intriguing but non-scientific sampling of the blowback from Palin's followers in the tea party. I'm more interested in two of Palin's bigger points, one of which is disingenuous, the other right on the money.

Taking the latter first, Palin rightly calls out the media for promoting what is a powerfully pro-Mitt Romney meme, namely, that the former Massachusetts governor can sew up the nomination just by winning (fill in the blank). I'll confess to engaging in some of this kind of punditry myself. It may be a realistic assessment of historical patterns, but it ignores the gyrations in this year's primaries. Those gyrations stem from many voters' deep-seated misgivings about putative front-runner Romney, their lack of familiarity with most of the candidates in the race and the differing priorities held by social conservatives, tea partyers and Main Street Republicans.

The conventional wisdom has been that Romney faced his biggest challenges in Iowa, South Carolina and Florida, three of the first four GOP contests. Social conservatives -- Romney's weak suit -- are a dominant voting bloc in Iowa and South Carolina, and they have a lot of clout in Florida. If Romney did well enough in those states to prevent any of his rivals from building up a head of steam, none of them would be able to raise the kind of money needed to overcome Romney's advantages in organization and money. Or so the theory goes.

And that may be true if Romney thumps Gingrich as badly in Florida as he appears poised to do. The relentlessness of the anti-Gingrich advertising by Romney and his backers appears to be taking its toll. But the televised debates in this campaign have played a much larger role than usual, with candidates rising or falling with their performance on stage. Gingrich was en fuego in the debates before the South Carolina primary, but he wasn't nearly as good in the ones since then. If he recovers his mojo, or if former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum continues to sound like a credible leader (most of the time) when he gets his infrequent turns at the microphone, fortunes could change again.

Besides, it's very much in the GOP's interests to have the contest continue. It means more attention to their candidates and more vetting. As the prolonged battle between then-Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton showed in 2008, it helps a candidate to have his (or her) dirty laundry aired early, rather than having the news media take an interest in it a few weeks before the general election.

As for the disingenous part, it's almost funny to have Palin suggest that Gingrich is somehow above "the politics of personal destruction." But then, she hasn't been in national politics long enough to remember the anti-Clinton rhetoric in the 1990s. If saying someone rewrote history is beyond the pale, what about accusing him of murder?

Palin was particularly peeved by Republican attacks on Gingrich's claim to be a true Reagan revolutionary. But the former president's mantle doesn't fit comfortably on Gingrich, who's never really seen himself as someone else's heir but rather as a historic and transformational figure in his own right. Besides, the best answer Gingrich can offer to the GOP criticisms isn't to silence them but to prove them wrong. That's what Gingrich was trying to do in Florida on Monday, hitting the stump with Reagan's son (and Gingrich backer) Michael Reagan.

The sad reality is that negative campaigns are a staple of democracy. It's how voters distinguish between candidates, especially when they all seem to be calling for the same things. Aside from Rep. Ron Paul's isolationist position on foreign policy and his aggressiveness in cutting federal spending, there aren't many clear differences among the candidates on big policy questions. They all say they're for reversing the course President Obama has set since 2009, lowering taxes, repealing regulations and shrinking the budget deficit.

The question for GOP voters isn't really which candidate's economic plan stands out from the others'. It's which candidate can a) beat Obama, and b) produce actual change in Washington. In trying to answer that two-pronged inquiry, it's entirely valid to scan each candidate's closet for skeletons and measure how well he responds to a challenge. Ronald Reagan's so-called 11th Commandment is a recipe for leaving front-runners in the front, then vetting them in the general election campaign. That doesn't seem like a path to victory -- not when the Democratic nominee is packing a billion-dollar war chest.

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I-4 Corridor Is the Highway to Presidential Political Heaven

I-4 Corridor Is the Highway to Presidential Political Heaven

By Bobbie O'Brien, Via:wusf.usf.edu.

TAMPA (2012-1-30) -
Florida's primary is Tuesday and the Republican presidential candidates are focusing on the Interstate-4 corridor, called the "highway to presidential political heaven" because by some estimates, it's home to almost half of Florida's GOP voters.

The 132-mile ribbon of concrete links Florida's Atlantic Coast to the Gulf Coast and connects two of Florida's largest media markets, Tampa Bay and Orlando.

Just two blocks off I-4 in downtown Orlando is the Orange County Supervisor of Elections Office, This past week, it saw a steady stream of early voters and others dropping off absentee ballots like Hilda Kolb.

The retiree timed her trip to the elections headquarters with her volunteer day at the local hospital to save on gas. Formerly a registered Democrat, Kolb is not happy with either party.

"I changed to Republican temporarily last election because I am not an Obama person." Kolb said. The 82-year-old willingly gave her age, but wouldn't say who she voted for adding there are some things she prefers to keep to herself.

Yet, Kolb's frustration does not surprise Susan MacManus, a longtime political science professor at the University of South Florida.

"The dominate thing Floridians are looking for is someone who can win Florida," MacManus said. "Republican pride was greatly damaged when they lost the state and it turned blue in 2008. They don't want a repeat."

The highway in Orlando is lined with hotels and theme parks like Universal Studios and Disney World. Florida's tourism industry was hit hard by the recession, shedding thousands of jobs.

A short drive west, at a an airstrip near Polk City, Donald Coleman had just finished his first ride in a biplane. He and his wife Paula moved to Valrico, Florida from Ohio. Both have already voted for Newt Gingrich.

"He's just more forceful," Paula Coleman said. "We can't have a wimpy president again."

Her husband, Donald Coleman also wants a more decisive president, "If you're going to make a decision, make a decision, don't wait months."

But not all Florida Republicans have made up their minds. Cheryl Meeks, lifelong Republican and owner of the Parkesdale Farm Market in Plant City, has to do some more studying before she decides who will get her vote.

"Every time I read something, I say okay, I'm going to go that way and then I read something else and then I'm going to go that way," Meeks said.

The Parkesdale Market is popular because its fresh strawberry shortcake which draws residents and politicians alike. Meeks said in 2008 Barack Obama and John McCain bot visited with her customers.

The I-4 corridor that ends in Daytona Beach originates in Ybor City, Tampa's historic Hispanic neighborhood. Hispanics make up 11 percent of Republican voters but the majority are Cuban-American and live in Miami.

The Tampa Bay region had one of the state's biggest increases in registered Republicans. That includes 18-year-old Derek Enderlot who skipped high school last week to attend a Newt Gingrich rally in St. Petersburg with his parents.

"It makes sense just the way the Republicans, the conservatives think," Enderlot said. "It's cutting back on spending, saving money and doing what you can to keep your finances under control,"

With almost half of Florida's GOP voters living along Interstate-4, voters like Derek Enderlot may ultimately decide which Republican candidate will win Florida's primary.

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Super PAC takeover? Not so fast, campaigns say

Super PAC takeover? Not so fast, campaigns say

By KENNETH P. VOGEL and DAVE LEVINTHAL | 1/29/12 7:04 AM EST | Via:politico.com.

The big money outside groups best known for airing ruthless ads in the early state GOP primaries are elbowing their way onto the turf of presidential campaigns and parties - and some campaigns aren't happy.

In the last few weeks, super PACs and other outside groups supporting Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul and President Barack Obama launched activities in Florida, other key states, and nationally - including phone banking, field organizing, direct mail, polling, state-of-the-race memos and even surrogate operations - that were once left mostly to the campaigns and parties.

The ambitious expansion is another example of a shift in political power away from the major parties and their candidates to deep-pocketed outsiders. But it's left campaign operatives and even candidates grumbling about whether the super PACs are actually helping their favored candidates.

Campaigns generally are happy to let super PACs carpet bomb opponents with attack ads, but when it comes to direct-contact with voters and sensitive messaging, they fear that super PACs will muddle their framing, create confusion in the field and duplicate efforts - wasting cash rather than complementing their campaigns.

"It would be much better for the super PACs to just focus on running ads and not try to get into the ground game because that can get really confusing and reduplicative, and I think there can be some headaches," said Jesse Benton, Ron Paul's campaign manager.

While a handful of pro-Paul outside groups have spent about $3.4 million on television and internet ads boosting Paul's insurgent campaign, Benton said their organizing efforts have sometimes conflicted with the campaign's.

There have been complaints from voters who are getting duplicate calls - first from a PAC, then the campaign.

There's also been some confusion on-the-ground at pivotal moments, like during the Iowa caucuses, where at least a couple campaign representatives dispatched to speak at targeted precincts on Paul's behalf arrived to find PAC representatives who also wanted to address voters.

"Luckily, everybody was friendly and there wasn't any friction, and they allowed the campaign's reps to be the official speaker for Ron." But, Benton said, "it just shows that when every single ounce of energy counts … phones and grassroots organizing is really best left to the campaign and the people that Ron's picked to do that."

Increasingly, though, outside groups are not always heeding that advice. And there's not much the campaigns can do about it, because – even though the super PACs often are run by close allies of the candidate – outside groups and campaigns are legally barred from strategic coordination.

Since last week, Federal Election Commission records show, the super PAC supporting Romney's presidential campaign, Restore Our Future, has spent about $215,000 on phone banking in Florida. That's a departure for the juggernaut group, which has devoted the overwhelmingly majority of its $17 million (and counting) of spending to massive airtime buys for brutal negative ads like those that sunk Gingrich in Iowa.

The super PAC backing Santorum's presidential campaign, Red White and Blue Fund, has reported spending more than $340,000 on a phone-banking operation it started during the South Carolina primary. It's placed 1.5 million so-called "voter identification" calls in Florida, and is also targeting Florida voters with three direct mail pieces, touting him as – among other things – "the right choice for Florida Republicans." And it's planning to release a memo this week laying out a path through which Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator who's trailing Romney and Gingrich in polls, can compete for the nomination - precisely the kind of thing that campaigns often do to try to influence media coverage.

But the super PAC supporting Gingrich, Winning Our Future, has perhaps the most ambitious organizing plans. While it's only reported spending about $240,000 on phone banking – a tiny fraction of the $6 million it's spent mostly on ads attacking Romney – it has trumpeted its intention to build a shadow campaign of sorts to boost the former House Speaker. It plans to set up field operations and hire state directors in Florida, Nevada, Minnesota, Arizona and California, and has begun purchasing voter files and courting the state operations built by the now-aborted presidential campaign of Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

The idea is to fill a void in those states, where Gingrich's campaign has very little in the way of on-the-ground organization, because it was focusing on South Carolina as a firewall and has struggled to raise cash, at least compared to Romney, a former Massachusetts governor. Winning Our Future, on the other hand, got a second $5 million check from Las Vegas casino mogul and longtime booster Sheldon Adelson after Gingrich's surprisingly strong win in South Carolina.

"We're prepared to do what's necessary and do what it takes to achieve our goal, which is to get Newt Gingrich elected," said Rick Tyler, a top Winning Our Future strategist, explaining the group is hiring grassroots organizers and planning more phone-banking in upcoming states. "We're not going to leave any aspect, any tool of campaigning, on the shelf."

But Dave Carney, who served as a top strategist for Gingrich's campaign before jumping to Perry's, said super PACs lack both the lead time and organizational muscle to build effective ground organizations. That's in contrast to unions, which have worked for years to build and hone effective third party operations that are deployed for Democratic candidates.

"I just can't see how that's a very efficient use of resources, but it's the Wild Wild West out there right now and these super PACs are raising lots of money and experimenting with new things," said Carney.

The biggest of the super PACs that supported Perry, Make Us Great Again, which was run by a close Carney associate, spent nearly $4 million on ads and direct mail supporting Perry.

"I don't think they made much difference one way or another," he said. "We asked [big donors] not to give to any of the super PACs. We felt they would be a distraction," pointing out that GOP presidential candidates have been asked to answer for controversial tactics from the super PACs supporting them.

Romney, in the days before the South Carolina primary, said "the whole idea of the PACs becoming larger than the campaigns themselves is a very bad idea." And he and Gingrich have both distanced themselves from super PAC ads attacking the other, even as both have clearly benefited.

But the same plausible deniability actually hurts outside groups' ability to set up ground operations, said a GOP super PAC operative who ran a group in 2010 that tried – and failed – to supplement its ads with robust grassroots organizing.

"No one is going to volunteer for you. They volunteer for candidates. They don't volunteer for third party groups," said the operative, who is active in the presidential race. "That means that you have to hire a lot of people, or, in the case of door to door stuff, you have to contract with a firm that hires a bunch of temp workers to go out and do it. I can tell you from my own experience that attempting to executive on-the-ground organizing is incredibly difficult as a third party group."

It's complicated further by the election rules barring coordination between the campaigns and outside groups, said Jason Torchinsky, a GOP election lawyer who was general counsel for Rudy Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign and is advising a super PAC backing a 2012 presidential candidate.

With advertising, campaigns and outside groups can figure out what one another are doing by consulting spending reports with details of buys that each is required to disclose in close to real time. With on-the-ground organizing, it's tougher to determine quickly who's doing what, while staying within the bounds of the rules, said Torchinsky.

And, he said "the lawyers have scared everybody into understanding the potential problems the coordination rules pose for the campaigns and the super PACs, and the donors. And I think they've done a pretty good job of getting everybody to respect the boundaries and the rules."

Some campaign committees may be "frustrated" by super PACs "because they can't control them or tell them what to do, conceded Abe Niederhauser, an official with Endorse Liberty, the biggest of the super PACs boosting Paul.

While Niederhauser said his group has tried to avoid stepping on the campaign's toes "by occupying the digital space where they haven't done a whole lot," he conceded there's no way to know if "we're being complementary" to the Paul campaign's strategy.

"I hope so," Niederhauser said.

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'Obamacare' shreds social safety net

'Obamacare' shreds social safety net

By FRANK DONATELLI | 1/26/12 10:26 PM EST | Via:politico.com.

Coming soon to a polling place near you: "Republicans are undermining Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Vote Democratic to stop them." This has become a staple of liberal Democratic campaigns. Count on the Obama 'reelection express' to pound this message home.

President Barack Obama continues to score political points in the battle over extending the payroll tax cut. Yet this fight underlines a key part of his legacy: He has weakened, perhaps fatally, the "social safety net" of entitlement programs, to which liberals claim such devotion and routinely attack conservatives for wanting to undermine.

It's a Democratic campaign staple to attack Republicans for wanting to "destroy" Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but Obama has done a better job of that than anyone. Syrupy rhetoric is no antidote for his terrible economic policies.

Start with Medicare. The trustees who run the program have been telling us for some time that the current benefit and financing system is unsustainable. Indeed, its 2010 report notes that the Medicare "trust fund" will be exhausted five years sooner than previous estimates.

The passage of "Obamacare" has made this deplorable situation worse. This law does increase various Medicare taxes and includes some cost-containment features. However, as Medicare's own actuary has pointed out, "Obamacare" uses the savings not to strengthen Medicare but to start another unfunded entitlement. The changes - a $500 billion cut in the program - do nothing to shore up the existing Medicare trust fund.

Worse, "Obamacare" radically cuts federal support and seniors' access to Medicare Advantage plans. This popular program offers subsidized insurance so seniors can design plans more suited to individual needs. As usual, Obama harshly attacks the program as a subsidy for the insurance industry. But it is undeniable that these plans will very likely be unavailable to millions of seniors in the coming years, forcing more reliance on Medicare's fee-for-service core program - where costs are growing most rapidly.

House Republicans, led by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), courageously proposed a long-term shift from fee for service to a "premium support" program, emphasizing private insurance options as a way to slow Medicare's growth while saving the program. Obama derides the plan as "ending Medicare as we know it." He apparently prefers rationing health care - which is where his policies are leading us.

That's not all. "Obamacare" also dramatically increased eligibility for Medicaid, the state-federal program that provides medical care for the poor. Neither the hard-pressed states nor the virtually bankrupt federal government has a long-term funding source in place. So this program is destined to deteriorate financially even more in the future.

The easy way for future savings is to further cut payments to doctors and hospitals, thus limiting even more the number of medical providers likely to participate in the program. This can only be described as health care rationing - resulting in longer wait times and poorer quality care. Exactly the result the administration envisions for Medicare.

Obama's Google Plus hangout: Send me the resume

By JENNIFER EPSTEIN | 1/30/12 7:57 PM EST Updated: 1/30/12 9:05 PM EST | Via:politico.com.

President Barack Obama on Monday made his first foray into Google Plus, trying to stay on message during the social media session as he faced an unexpected twist from a woman with an out-of-work engineer husband.

Obama began answering a jobs question from Jennifer Wedel, of Fort Worth, Texas, with a stock answer, telling her, "I don't know your husband's specialty, but there's a huge demand around the country for engineers," especially in high-tech fields. But Wedel persisted, telling Obama that her husband is a semi-conductor engineer.

"I meant what I said, if you send me your husband's resume, I'd be interested in finding out exactly what's happening right there," Obama responded, saying it seems to him based on industry reports that Wedel's husband "should be able to find something right away."

"I'll have to take you up on that," Wedel said of the president's offer.

The Republican National Committee quickly seized on Obama's response, sending multiple email messages about the incident to its mailing lists, including one with a note from communications director Kirsten Kukowski: "a little out of touch?"

During the 45-minute interactive video session, Obama also fielded questions from a homeless veteran skeptical of foreign aid and an Obama impersonator curious to know what the president thinks of the parodies of him.

Though Obama described Google Plus - the medium he used to chat while viewers watched on the White House website and YouTube - as "some newfangled thing," this was not his first foray into online question-and-answer sessions. In 2011, he participated in conversations with users of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Obama also took questions via YouTube for post-State of the Union interviews in 2010 and 2011, but the difference this time is the extra interactivity that comes with the Google Plus platform. Some questions he got were culled from the more than 130,000 posted on YouTube, voted on by users and selected by Google staff. But others were spur-of-the-moment queries from the five people chosen to be part of the "Hangout," Google's term for the chat room where the video discussion took place.

"Participants in this have a chance to talk about what they want," said Macon Phillips, the White House director of new media. "We need to be able to give people a chance to speak."

Obama was adamant in defending foreign aid, even after a homeless veteran asked how the United States could justify sending money abroad to countries such as Pakistan while people who have served this country live on the streets. The president also pushed back against a question about a report that drones are upsetting Iraqi leaders, saying the program is "kept on a very tight leash" to root out terrorists trying to attack U.S. targets.

Steve Grove, head of community partnerships at Google Plus, said that the five people selected for "Hangout" were chosen from among the top question vote-getters, and selected with an eye toward diversity in geography and questions asked.

Though most of the questions fit into predictable categories such as jobs, the economy and education, a few strayed into other areas. The issues that the president didn't address in his State of the Union but did have users abuzz "give you a sense of what people are thinking about and talking about," Grove said. Obama got two questions on the Stop Online Piracy Act and one asking him to dance and, when he demurred, to sing.

"In some future Google Plus I may sing another tune," Obama said, referring to his performance of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" at the Apollo Theater in New York earlier this month.

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