After supporting Rick Perry and attending rallies for Ron Paul and Rick Santorum during the GOP primaries, Gov. Sam Brownback engaged in more presidential politics Tuesday by campaigning for Mitt Romney in northeast Ohio. Brownback told a Youngstown crowd that at Monday’s debate, Romney “looked like the president much more than the president.” Brownback said he saw Romney’s main message during the debate as: “You can’t have a strong foreign policy without a strong economy.”
Though polling after Monday night’s presidential debate showed President Obama as the clear winner, the debate is unlikely to make a significant difference in the election. An average of “snap polls” of debate viewers had Obama winning by some 17 percentage points (including a 30-point win in a CBS News poll). But the topic of the debate – foreign policy – is not a priority for most voters, and Mitt Romney was able to meet the basic test of the debate: appearing as a credible commander in chief.
Former Gov. Bill Graves topped the list of lobbyist bundlers of campaign contributions for Mitt Romney during the third quarter. Graves raised nearly $1.1 million for the GOP nominee in his role as CEO of the American Trucking Associations. From July through September, 42 lobbyists raised nearly $9 million for Romney. Other pro-Romney lobbyists on the list represent defense contractors, energy companies, financial firms, and pharmaceutical and health-related businesses. According to the Center for Public Integrity, Graves has now raised more than $1.6 million for Romney — delivering more money than any of the 62 other lobbyists named in federal filings. In a related story reported by Politico, some expect a Romney White House to rescind current rules preventing lobbyists from taking top administration jobs.
Mitt Romney surged ahead of President Obama by 6 percentage points in the latest Gallup poll, though other polls show the race as tied. Gallup has Romney up 51 to 45 percent among likely voters. Real Clear Politics’ average of eight polls (including Gallup) had Obama slightly ahead Friday, by 0.1 percent.
President Obama and Mitt Romney took a welcome break from the campaign bickering and had fun teasing each other and themselves Thursday at the 67th annual Al Smith dinner, a fund-raiser for Catholic charitable work.
Among Obama’s jokes:
“I had a lot more energy in our second debate. I felt really well-rested after the nice long nap I had in first debate.”
“After my foreign trip in 2008, I was attacked as a celebrity because I was so popular with our allies overseas. I have to say, I’m impressed by how well Gov. Romney has avoided that problem.”
“The next debate is on foreign policy. Spoiler alert: We got bin Laden.”
Romney’s jokes included:
“As President Obama surveys the Waldorf banquet room, with everyone in white tie and finery, you have to wonder what he’s thinking: ‘So little time. So much to redistribute.’”
”I was actually hoping the president would bring Joe Biden along this evening, cause he’ll laugh at anything.”
“In the spirit of ‘Sesame Street’ tonight, the president’s remarks tonight are brought to you by the letter ‘O’ and the number 16 trillion.”
Mitt Romney has said that he will cut taxes by 20 percent without increasing the deficit, because he will take away or cap some tax deductions for the wealthy. When pressed during Tuesday’s debate to explain how the numbers add up, he responded, “Of course they add up.” The only thing specific that he said was that he might limit total itemized deductions to $25,000. But such a cap would raise about $1.3 trillion over 10 years, far less than the estimated $5 trillion cost of his tax plan. “The math is the math,” Jonathan Bernstein wrote in the Washington Post. “There just aren’t enough tax expenditures that the wealthy use to allow Romney to cut tax rates by 20 percent without either reducing revenue or by making it up with tax increases on everyone else.”
President Obama criticized Mitt Romney during Tuesday’s debate for supporting “self-deportation” of illegal immigrants, a policy pushed by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (in photo). Obama also tried to link Romney to Kobach and Arizona’s controversial anti-immigration law by noting that Romney’s “top adviser on immigration” wrote the law. Romney has tried to distance himself from Kobach since embracing him during the GOP primaries. But Kobach isn’t backing away. He told the Washington Times after the debate that “Obama is completely out of step with the American public on the immigration issue,” and he predicted that Obama’s statements in the debate about immigration “will further alienate independent voters who are concerned about the millions of Americans who have lost jobs to illegal aliens.”
The second presidential debate was not one for the conflict-averse. President Obama was awake and aggressive this time, likely regaining some of the campaign momentum he lost in his first debate against Mitt Romney. But the GOP nominee came on strong anytime he listed the nation’s economic woes and laid them at Obama’s door. Both men had some trouble with the facts. Washington Post blogger Chris Cillizza named the president, the questions and partisans among the winners and Romney, bickering about the rules, and undecided voters among the losers. “The argumentative tone from both candidates is the sort of stuff undecideds and independents voters don’t like a bit – and affirms for them why politics is broken,” Cillizza wrote.
On the same day last week that Americans for Prosperity hosted a rally in Wichita for its “Obama’s Failing Agenda” bus tour, a group called Patriot Majority USA made its own bus stop in Topeka. The group opposes policies pushed by Charles and David Koch, who back AFP, and delivered a letter Friday to Gov. Sam Brownback’s office urging him to denounce the “greed agenda.” “It’s not too late to change course – to work for a vision that benefits Kansans instead of draining it in favor of a few,” the letter said. AFP says the purpose of its coast-to-coast bus tour is to “educate Americans about President Obama and his failing agenda and to put grassroots pressure on him.”
Whatever the reason, it’s a serious concern that the number of absentee ballots requested by military service members is much lower this year than in 2008. Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., brought welcome attention to the issue last week, accusing the Defense Department of failing to adequately assist service members in voting. “The Department of Defense has an obligation under federal law to assist those voting on military installations overseas. No effort should be spared to make certain the men and women serving our country in uniform – and the families by their side – can exercise their right to choose the leaders responsible for sending them into harm’s way in defense of our democracy,” Moran said in a statement. According to an August inspector general’s report, the Pentagon hadn’t set up on-base voter-assistance offices, as required by the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act of 2009.
Joe Biden and Paul Ryan went after each other in their vice presidential debate Thursday. It made for good TV, though 90 minutes seemed a long time for such a contentious exchange. Conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer observed: “If you read the transcript, I think it’s dead even. If you heard it on radio, Biden won. If you watched on television, he lost.” That’s because, as many others also concluded, Biden’s sarcastic smiling and laughing and frequent interruptions made him appear to viewers not just aggressive but obnoxious and bullying. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza even concluded that “Ryan was largely a bystander,” including among the debate’s winners Biden’s last 15 minutes, moderator Martha Raddatz, political junkies/party bases and the term “my friend.” Cillizza’s losers list included Biden’s first 75 minutes, nonverbal communication, the unmentioned Big Bird and undecided voters. “The bickering that dominated the middle section of the debate – OK, the whole debate – is just the sort of stuff independents/undecideds don’t like. It’s easy to imagine they simply turned off the debate – if they were watching it at all,” Cillizza wrote. Both candidates also had trouble with the facts.
After being strongly pro-choice when he ran for governor of Massachusetts, then saying he was pro-life during the GOP presidential primary, Mitt Romney said this week that “there’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda.” But later that day a Romney spokeswoman issued a statement saying that “Gov. Romney would of course support legislation aimed at providing greater protections for life.” Romney’s campaign also contacted pro-life leaders to assure them that he really is anti-abortion.
Last week’s debate was a huge boost for Mitt Romney, who now leads President Obama 49 to 45 percent among likely voters in a new poll from the Pew Research Center. The same poll last month had Obama ahead by 8 percentage points. An aggregation of six different national polls has Romney just slightly ahead among likely voters, 48 to 47.2 percent.
PBS anchor and Wichita native Jim Lehrer has taken a lot of grief for losing control of last week’s presidential debate. So what did he think of the debate and its new format? “All of the discussion, it seemed to me, was about things that mattered,” he told the Washington Post. “They weren’t talking about things off in the margins. They were talking about things that truly divide them.” Lehrer said he was initially frustrated when the candidates ignored him, but then decided that wasn’t important. “It isn’t about my power, my control or whatever,” he said. “It was about what the candidates were doing, what they were talking about and what impression they were leaving with the voters. That’s what this is about.”
Mitt Romney put a target on the back of federal funding for public broadcasting and radio in Wednesday’s debate, saying he likes debate moderator Jim Lehrer of PBS and Big Bird but he’s “gonna stop the subsidy to PBS.” That prompted official and unofficial responses Thursday on Twitter. Big Bird tweeted via @SesameStreet: “My bed time is usually 7:45, but I was really tired yesterday and fell asleep at 7! Did I miss anything last night?” A parody account, @FireMeElmo, tweeted, “Elmo need help filing unemployment form – no thumbs” and “Exit interview confuse Elmo. Why name continuing health care after scary Cobra.” Actor Zach Braff tweeted: “Just saw Big Bird turning tricks by the Lincoln Tunnel.” In response to the response, David Burge (aka @iowahawkblog) tweeted: “No wonder lefties identify with Big Bird. A 43-year-old welfare layabout with imaginary friends.”
It’s good that Mitt Romney finally acknowledged this week that his secretly recorded comments about how 47 percent of Americans are dependent on government were “just completely wrong.” After the tape surfaced a couple weeks ago, Romney said that his comments were “not elegantly stated,” but not that his claims were wrong. Though it is true that 47 percent of American households don’t pay income tax, that doesn’t mean these Americans think they are victims, are dependent on government, and will vote for President Obama no matter what, as Romney said on the tape. Most of that 47 percent are retirees, people who are disabled, college students, people in the military and people who are working (often more than one job) but don’t make much money. Is Romney’s admission part of his move to the middle, as seen during Wednesday’s debate?
President Obama got some needed good news Friday after his flat and ineffective debate performance Wednesday. The U.S. jobless rate fell below 8 percent, declining from 8.1 to 7.8 percent. Republicans responded that 7.8 percent isn’t good enough. “This is not what a real recovery looks like,” Mitt Romney said in a statement.
During Wednesday’s debate, President Obama again felt the need to single out the owners of corporate jets as worthy of higher taxes – a contention that mischaracterizes the role of business jets in the economy and understandably pains planemakers and their employees in Wichita. The president asked: “Why wouldn’t we eliminate tax breaks for corporate jets? My attitude is, if you got a corporate jet, you can probably afford to pay full freight, not get a special break for it.” That’s a reference to the accelerated depreciation of business jets that was part of Obama’s own 2009 stimulus package. Increasing the depreciation life from five years to seven years would increase tax revenue by about $3 billion over 10 years, having little impact on the federal deficit. Obama’s comment drew this response Wednesday night from Ed Bolen, president and CEO of the National Business Aviation Association: “At a time when both candidates claim to be putting job creation at the top of their agenda, it’s unfortunate that the president tonight denigrated the business aviation industry, which is responsible for 1.2 million American jobs and $150 billion in economic impact.”
The Fix blogger Chris Cillizza summarized Wednesday’s presidential debate by declaring the winners to be Mitt Romney, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, the split screen and studies (“The first 45 minutes of the debate felt like a conversation between the heads of two opposing think tanks,” Cillizza wrote). And the losers? President Obama, the format, zingers and Big Bird (“Romney may love the big yellow bird, but he told America he would get rid of funding for PBS if he was president. Whither Elmo?”).
The fact-checkers were busy after Wednesday’s presidential debate. Among the conclusions by the Washington Post: Mitt Romney’s math is wrong on his tax-cut plan (eliminating tax loopholes and deductions would not cover its cost); President Obama exaggerated his spending cuts; businesses can get a tax break for shipping jobs overseas (though the break is relatively small); the estimated $712 billion reduction in the growth of Medicare spending over 10 years doesn’t reduce benefits (and was included in the GOP budget plan approved by the House); the 50-year decline in health care costs cited by Obama is likely due to the bad economy rather than to his health care plan.
Another hurdle for Mitt Romney this election is the public’s unfavorable view of the Republican Party. According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 53 percent of voters view the GOP unfavorably, which is even worse than four years ago. However, the Democratic Party isn’t that well-liked either, with 46 percent of voters having an unfavorable view. And Republicans had great success in the 2010 election despite their party label.
