Romney touts tourism in fire-ravaged Colorado
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has a message for what Americans can do to help a section of Colorado hit hard by recent wildfires – come to the state on vacation to help out the local economy.
Romney’s point, made during a visit to a food bank that has been supplying people uprooted by the wildfires, was that most of the region has been unaffected by the devastation and that the forests and lakes remain as beautiful as ever.
“What’s happened is people are staying away because they think the whole area has been burned out. It’s not. It’s as beautiful as it’s always been and tourists need to come back and stay in hotels, go to restaurants and purchase local merchandise,” he said.
Romney visited the Care and Share food bank and made a show of helping local volunteers sort through boxes of food and check to see if any of the food had expired.
The former Massachusetts governor spent all day in Colorado, hoping to convince enough voters to get behind him in a battleground state that President Barack Obama won in 2008.
Photo credit: Mitt Romney smiles before he speaks at a campaign event in Cornwall, Pennsylvania, June 16, 2012. REUTERS/Larry Downing
Republicans shoot for “Super Saturday”
Hoping to echo the Democratic Party’s successful use of volunteer armies to engage – and turn out – voters, Republicans are mounting their first “Super Saturday” volunteer day of the 2012 campaign this weekend. On July 7, the party says it will dispatch an army of volunteers to knock on doors and make telephone calls to voters in swing states across the country.
Kirsten Kukowski, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said the Romney/RNC operation would be in Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa.
President Barack Obama won all 12 of those states when he won the White House in 2008, aided by an army of volunteers. Romney will need to swing a large number of them back to the Republican column to defeat Obama on Nov. 6.
The RNC said its volunteers will use software to enter information into the mobile telephones on voters’ doorsteps. Information from telephone calls will also be recorded and campaign staff will monitor the results of their calls. The information will be used to inform decisions such as where to deploy volunteers or focus voter turnout efforts during the last months of the campaign.
Voters in swing states should get accustomed to regular visits from campaign volunteers, in addition to what has already become a blitz of television and radio advertising by the Obama and Romney campaigns and outside political organizations supporting or attacking the candidates or their policy positions.
Obama’s campaign has already opened dozens of offices and activated volunteers in swing states – and across the country. The Republicans say they will run their Saturday tests once a month.
2012 Election? In hot summer, it’s leaving Americans cold
A long spell of brutally hot weather is not the only thing making Americans cranky this summer.
With four months still to go before the presidential election on Nov. 6, Americans seem to be experiencing the 2012 campaign more like studying for a big math test than watching an exciting neck-and-neck horse race, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. More Republicans in particular are bored with the campaign.
The poll 0f 2,013 adults conducted June 7-17 found that most Americans find the presidential election campaign between Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney to be important and informative – but also exhausting, annoying, too negative, too long and dull.
More Republicans in particular find the campaign boring, and they were far more likely to feel so in June than in March, before Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, locked up their party’s presidential nomination.
In contrast, more Democrats are finding the campaign interesting now than in March, although comparable numbers of Democrats and Republicans say the contest has been too long and too negative.
The Pew survey found that 60 percent of Republicans found the campaign dull in June, up 18 percent from the 42 percent who said so three months earlier. Thirty-three percent of Republicans said the campaign was interesting in the most recent poll, down sharply from 52 percent in March. Forty-five percent of Democrats said in June that they find the campaign interesting, compared with 46 percent who think it is dull. In March, 36 percent of Democrats found it interesting, compared with 55 percent in the dull camp.
Christians won’t vote for a Mormon, and the Republicans won’t vote for an Obama Lite RINO.
Obama campaign goes on the attack ahead of bus tour
President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign used Tuesday to pave the rhetorical road for the president’s two-day trip through the swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania beginning on Thursday.
In a new television advertisement and during a conference call with reporters, the campaign and its allies tore into Republican challenger Mitt Romney for pushing policies and practices they say cost middle-class jobs and netted the former private equity executive millions.
The 30-second television advertisement, “Believes,” is airing in Ohio and Pennsylvania ahead of the President’s trip, as well as in several other states — such as Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, and Virginia — the campaign sees as crucial to winning another term in the White House.
An Obama campaign spokesman declined to comment on the cost of the “Believes” buy but called it “significant” in an email message.
The ad opens with a portrait of Obama and Romney side by side and a narrator declaring that “what a president believes matters.” Obama drops away and a narrator says that Romney embraces strategies that lead to the outsourcing of jobs. Obama, on the other hand, championed a government-led bailout that helped to save the American auto industry and along with it precious jobs in the nation’s beleaguered manufacturing heartland, the ad claims.
The campaign expounded upon this pitch — that given another term, Obama would push policies that “insourced” middle-class jobs and Romney would grease the rails for his corporate brethren who “outsource” — in a conference call with reporters on Tuesday. Citing an article in Vanity Fair, a campaign spokesman called on Romney to answer questions about his use of off-shore accounts in tax havens such as Bermuda.
Jimmy Carter should monitor the election in Chicago.
MA governor puts Romney in healthcare bear hug
Before there was Obamacare with its controversial individual mandate on health insurance, there was Romneycare in Massachusetts…with a similar mandate that all residents of the state obtain health insurance or pay a penalty. And Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick was happy to remind Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican candidate for president, of that fact on Thursday.
After the Supreme Court ruling that upheld the centerpiece of Obama’s signature healthcare overhaul, Patrick – a key Obama surrogate – met with reporters and expressed shock at the negative spin that Romney, his predecessor in the Massachusetts governor’s mansion, continues to put on federal legislation that is similar to the state law he once championed.
Patrick said that the motivations of Congress in taking up healthcare legislation in 2009 were “the same reasons our legislature and Governor Romney acted in 2006.”
“Since Governor Romney signed healthcare reform here in Massachusetts, more private companies are offering healthcare to their employees, fewer people are getting primary care in an expensive emergency room setting and hundreds of thousands of our friends and neighbors have access to care they didn’t have before. We’re seeing improvements in health, especially among women and poor people. It has not busted the state budget,” Patrick said.
Romney has promised to immediately start a process to repeal the national law should he win the November election against Obama. On Thursday he linked the program to “larger and larger government” that separates citizens from their doctors and adds “trillions” of dollars to the deficit.
Au contraire, said Patrick: “Every one of the list of horrors Governor Romney now says will happen in America because of Obamacare did not happen in Massachusetts because of Romneycare,” said the Democrat, noting that 99.8 percent of the state’s children, for example, have access to quality care. Overall, more than 98 percent of state residents have insurance coverage, far above the national rate.
While Romney proclaimed the national law a “job killer,” Patrick said the certainty of health insurance coverage in Massachusetts is “attracting young people and entrepreneurs who know they can come here and take a chance on a new company and still have access to the best care in the world.”
Completely irresponsible article Ros…another media story FAIL.
You’ve created an “argument” article between Patrick and Romney but have failed to point our Romney’s main defense of Romneycare and his argument against Obamacare.
He believes in a “States solution” not a “National, one size fits all” approach. What works in MA might not work in say Texas or vice versa. Government closest to the people is the most accountable.
Obamacare and Romneycare are completely different in their approach, so why do you and other media-types keep trying to make them synonymous?
I don’t believe Patrick is fooling you here, so obviously you’re pushing his agenda on purpose.
If I were you, I would stop underestimating and insulting your readers. That’s going to backfire in November if you keep it up.
Watch live: Obama delivers remarks on the Supreme Court’s healthcare ruling
President Obama will deliver a response to the Supreme Court’s healthcare verdict at 12:15pm ET.
Watch live:
Pelosi boils down winning back the House to A-B-C
Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, says her party can take a strategy to regaining a House majority that is as simple as A-B-C.
At the Reuters Washington Summit on Wednesday, Pelosi, the Minority Leader in the House, repeated her optimistic contention that her party has a 50/50 chance of winning back control, two years after a crushing defeat in the 2010 mid-term elections.
According to Pelosi’s 2012 campaign aphorism, “A” stands for American made and promoting policies to help reignite manufacturing in the United States. “B” is to build American infrastructure, including a focus on broadband, water systems and high-speed rail. “C” is for a sense of community, including a focus on police officers, firefighters and public safety.
“Right now the momentum is with us,” Pelosi said of the November elections, where her party needs a net gain of 25 seats to win back the majority. “It’s easier to win 25 seats than to hold 63,” she declared. “We have out-recruited the Republicans and we have fabulous candidates. This time we will be ready.”
Never one to mince words, Pelosi, who for two terms was the first woman Speaker of the House until her party was dumped from power in 2010, bemoaned many of the current Republicans in the House as “a rabid band of anti-government ideologues.”
“There are some words that have taken a beating under the Republicans, and one of them is compromise,” said Pelosi. “Obstruction is not just a tactic, it’s an agenda for them. “
Photo credit: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) speaks during the Reuters Washington Summit in Washington, June 27, 2012. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
Two keys to winning back the House by the Dems are women’s issues and senior’s issues. Pelosi’s ABC can be a sidebar.
Focus on the GOP funding student loans by cutting ACA funding mammograms, pap smears, contraceptives. Win their vote with life at conception ends birth control pill use. The idea a man can get between you and your doctor forcing invasive transvaginal ultrasounds is bad enough, having women pay for their own violation insult to injury.
Repeal of ACA is taking $600 from every senior with it’s help closing the doughnut hole. Future seniors will lose every penny they put into medicare, pay $6000 more out of pocket to buy private insurance that is nonexistent today for seniors. Not a single plan for seniors in the entire world covers half of what medicare does. With hundreds of millions of seniors in the world with some means, there is no health insurance for seniors available in private markets. Too much risk, too little return. To make returns viable the average cost would beyond reach for most seniors.
DNC to GOP on healthcare: Bring it on
The Democrats have an answer for the Republicans if the Supreme Court throws out President Barack Obama’s healthcare law on Thursday: Good luck with that.
It may be bravado in the face of what would seem to be huge disappointment, but some Democrats insist they relish the prospect of watching congressional Republicans grapple with how to deal with the massive and troubled industry. Annual U.S. spending on healthcare already totals $2.6 trillion a year. Skyrocketing costs are expected to make spending balloon to $4.8 trillion, or one-fifth of U.S. gross domestic product over the coming decade, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
“It will be time for the Republicans to say what they are going to do. This is on them,” Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, said on Wednesday at the Reuters Washington Summit.
“We’re already made our proposal. In my mind, the ball will be in their court,” she said. “They’re the ones that opposed this from the beginning, they’re the one that never proposed anything to ensure that you can cover every American. Never proposed anything to ensure that healthcare coverage will be affordable and accessible. … They’re the ones who are going to have to step up and say, ‘What are we going to do now?’ [Democrats] are not the majority in Congress.”
The Supreme Court is due to issue a landmark ruling on Thursday that will determine whether Obama’s healthcare law is constitutional. The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the most sweeping healthcare legislation since Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s. As Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement, its fate also has broad implications for consumers, employers, the healthcare industry and – potentially – the Nov. 6 election.
Fierce opposition to the healthcare law helped propel Republicans to big victories in the 2010 mid-term elections, when they won a majority of seats in the House of Representatives and cut into the Democratic majority in the Senate. But this time, more Democrats are embracing at least the aspects of the law that polls show consumers favor, such as barring insurance companies from refusing coverage for people with pre-existing conditions.
Why are we polarized over the insurance mandate when it actually makes us pay our debts; and gives help and dignity to millions of uninsured Americans?
“The insurance mandate is socialism, plain and simple.”
If it’s socialism, you’d have to buy it from the government, which would also tell you what doctor or hospital to go to. But you can buy health insurance from anybody, and you can get treated by the doctor and hospital you want. What’s socialist about that?
“Can’t you see, the government is making us buy insurance. We have no choice in the matter.”
Do you have a choice not to get hurt, or not to get sick? Why then do you want a choice not to have insurance to pay for it when you do?
States in fact already have an individual mandate for car insurance, and they have been putting uninsured drivers in jail for years.
“That’s different. Driving is a privilege.”
Then free health care must be a right in your book. Maybe this idea came from hospitals continuing to treat the uninsured the last half century.
The trade off to us living in a civilized society is that we have to follow rules we don’t agree with. In return, we get great many things, including goods and services that otherwise would be unavailable. But, we still have to pay for them. The mandate makes sure that we do.
What’s wrong with that?
Mitt Romney still a blank slate, Democrat says
Americans don’t know much about Mitt Romney, except that he’s rich and once offered to make a $10,000 bet in a Republican debate, former White House spokesman Bill Burton said at the Reuters Washington Summit on Wednesday.
Burton, who left the White House to co-found a Super PAC to raise money and create ads aimed at making sure Romney doesn’t defeat President Barack Obama in November, said people need to learn more about the presumptive Republican nominee.
“He’s a blank slate to the American people. People know very little about him - to the extent that they know anything it’s what they’ve heard on Saturday Night Live or Jon Stewart or the things that they pass around on Facebook,” he said.
“What people know about Mitt Romney is that he’s rich. And that’s kind of it,” Burton said. “That’s why I think it’s important that people understand how it is that he made millions and millions of dollars. Because it’s not like he’s Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or somebody who had this great idea and was an entrepreneur and able to sell it to the American people.”
Photo credit: Bill Burton, senior strategist of Priorities USA Action, speaks during the Reuters Washington Summit in Washington, June 27, 2012. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
Lead a Super PAC, lose your friends
It’s not like the old days with his former colleagues at the White House and friends from the Barack Obama campaign anymore for Bill Burton.
The co-founder of the Priorities USA Action Super PAC, which is prevented by campaign finance rules from collaborating with the Obama campaign, told the Reuters Washington Summit he may spend his days raising money to get Obama re-elected, but he has very little contact with his old friends who are actually working in the administration or the re-election campaign.
Asked if he and White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer were limited to talking about sports if they get together for a beer, Burton just laughed.
“We keep our communications very much in line with the rules and regulations that are laid out,” he said.
But in a hint that it may be a bit more lonely now that he’s out of the White House, Burton added: “For a lot of my very close friends who work at the White House and on the campaign, I haven’t seen or talked to them in a long time.”
“It came with starting this group,” he said. “But there are rules in place and we make sure we adhere to them.”
As for the president, Burton hasn’t spoken to him since he left the White House in February, 2011.
