Tuesday 16 October 2012

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US election: October 15 at it happed

Live coverage as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney prepare for their second presidential debate in New York.

Barack Obama speaks at a campaign event at the University of Miami Photo: AP

By Raf Sanchez, Washington, with Charles Whitfield

2:42PM BST 15 Oct 2012

Comments

• Obama looks to avenge first debate defeat
• Romney and Republicans raise $170m
• President holds onto slim lead in Ohio
• Joe Kennedy looks to restore political dynasty
• Tweet your thoughts to @rafsanchez

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23.00 (18.00) We're going to leave it there for the night, please check our US Election page for the latest.

22.25 (17.25) Time Magazine has published the memorandum of understanding between the two campaigns over the formats of the four debates. It covers the timings, the rules and the role of the moderators in excruciating detail. Here's one snippet

Candidates may take notes during the debate on the size, colour and type of blank paper each prefers and using the type of pen or pencil that each prefers. The staff of the candidate will place papers, pens, and pencils on the podium.

The 2012 Debates - Memorandum of Understanding Between the Obama and Romney Campaigns

21.25 (16.25) The Obama campaign is falling back on its celebrity supporters in these final weeks (terrifyingly, the election is three weeks and one day away). Here's Jay-Z.

20.55 (15.55) Ann Romney is onstage in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, a state leaning towards Obama but which the Republicans insist they can win back. She tells the moving story of how Romney befriended a young man dying of leukemia and even helped him write his will. It's one of a small library of stories about Mitt's character that the campaign has begun telling in recent weeks, after months of urging from some advisers determined to present their candidate in a more human light.

20.20 (15.20) Update on those fundraising figures: the Romney campaign has confirmed the $170 million figure and says it has around $190 million in total in its accounts (including available funds from the Republican Party). The Obama campaign's latest cash-in-hand figure from the beginning of September was $130 million.

20.10 (15.10) Republican donors are descending on New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel, where they will meet both Paul Ryan and Donald Trump as the Romney campaign makes a final push to squeeze out any remaining donations. According to the New York Times, the campaign has told top supporters that it raised $170 million last month - almost as much as Obama's record-breaking $181 million - but needs more to finance a barrage of advertising in the election's final weeks.

19.50 (14.50) Team Obama is up with a new ad highlighting many of the conservative positions Romney took during the Republican primaries and daring him to repeat them during tomorrow night's town hall debate.

19.26 (13.26) Romney has cancelled a much-anticipated appearance on The View, an all-female chat show hosted by Barbara Walters. The former governor had been slated to make a humanising appearance alongside his wife Ann on Thursday but Walters announced today that he wasn't going to make it, according to the Washington Post.

Barack and Michelle Obama appeared on the show last month and it's curious to read into the tea leaves of the cancellation. When it was scheduled Romney was far behind in the polls and in desperate need of a pick-me-up. Now that he's running level it seems his aides have decided there's too much at stake to make an appearance.

Remember that on the same tape in which Romney made his 47 per cent comments he said an appearance was "high-risk, because, of the five women on it, only one is conservative, and four are sharp-tongued and not conservative". Here he is on his one previous appearance in 2010.

18.45 (13.45) New York magazine has an interesting article on where now for the Bush dynasty. Among the nuggets scattered through the piece is news that George W Bush has taken up painting.

George W Bush, now 66, has spent the past few years living as invisibly as possible, working diligently on his golf game at the Brook Hollow Golf Club in Dallas, showing up at a Rangers baseball game, or being spotted eating a steak in one of his favorite restaurants. While the rest of the world judges his years in office, he’s taken up painting, making portraits of dogs and arid Texas landscapes. “I find it stunning that he has the patience to sit and take instruction and paint,” says a former aide.

18.20 (13.20) Michelle Obama has taken advantage of Illinois's early voting programme and has already cast her ballot in the presidential election. Sources suggest she may be voting Democrat.

Update: After 11 seconds of relentless speculation, the First Lady has confirmed she's backing one Barack Obama in the election.

<noframe>Twitter: Michelle Obama - Hey, <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20121016111026/http://www.twitter.com/BarackObama" target="_blank">@BarackObama</a>, I just dropped my absentee ballot in the mail – I couldn’t wait for Election Day! Love you! –mo</noframe>

18.10 (13.10) I mentioned earlier that Obama needs to keep Big Dog Clinton on speed dial. Peter Foster agrees, saying the President has a lot to learn about passion from his Democrat predecessor.

Barack Obama is probably sick of taking lessons in political persuasion from Bill Clinton, but when he meets Mitt Romney in the second presidential debate on Tuesday he must take another leaf out of the Clinton playbook – he must make ordinary people believe again.

After an inexplicably herbivorous performance in Denver, the pundits and campaign aides have been promising that Mr Obama will draw blood in New York, however the problem now confronting the president after four difficult years in office cannot be solved by aggression alone.

Certainly Mr Obama must combat Mr Romney; he must be quicker on his feet and sharper in his ripostes (it’s no good rebutting claims in speeches and adverts the day after) but, most importantly, the President needs to show he still has something to sell – even if he doesn’t really.

And that’s where Mr Clinton come in: just recall that mesmerising speech to the Democratic Convention in Charlotte last September, when the former president spoke of the economic mess that Mr Obama inherited after the 2008 financial crisis.

“No President – not me or any of my predecessors could have repaired all the damage in just four years. But conditions are improving and if you'll renew the President's contract you will feel it,” he said, before staring directly into the eyes of America, and solemnly adding: “I believe that with all my heart.”

That last line was delivered with the fervor of a master political preacher-man: “I believe”, he said, as an invitation to weary voters to share his faith that after four years of rising net unemployment and falling incomes, a shining city really did lie over the brow of the next hill.

17.40 (12.40) Michelle Obama may have put a rare political foot wrong by saying the US is in the "midst of a huge recovery" and it's thanks to her husband's policies. True - the US is stumbling back after a devastating recession but the unemployment rate is high and the growth rate is not. Here's the quote:

I mean, we are seeing right now that we are in the midst of a huge recovery. Right? Because of what this president has done.

Romney's campaign has long claimed this is not "a real recovery" and it will be interesting to see if they're bold enough to attack the First Lady.

16.55 (11.55) Oh, the old ones are the best ones. Jason Thompson, the son of Wisconsin Republican Senate candidate Tommy Thompson, told an audience at a fundraiser for his father that they had an opportunity to send Obama back "to Kenya".

The ill-advised revival of the birther trope was predictably filmed by a Democratic operative, predictably posted on Buzzfeed and predictably led to a withdrawal and apology.

The campaign said that Thompson senior "has addressed this with his son, just like any father would do. Jason Thompson said something he should not have, and he apologises."

16.50 (11.50) I spent the weekend on the campaign trail in Massachusetts's Fourth Congressional District, where Joe Kennedy III, the grandson of RFK, is making his first run for office. I wanted to find out whether there was more to the 32-year-old than just his famous last name and his resemblance to Bobby.

The moment Joe Kennedy III steps into the church hall he is thronged by jubilant elderly women and the ghosts of his family.

Their spirits appear in different forms - one woman produces a lovingly-preserved photograph of Senator Ted Kennedy in his prime, another offers a half-remembered childhood memory about an early JFK election rally - but they travel with the young congressional candidate everywhere he goes.

"The Kennedys still just means so much to people here," says Arlene Silvia, a 61-year-old nurse, as she watches Robert Kennedy's grandson shake hands and laugh off-well intentioned suggestions that he begin running for president.

"And he looks just like them. Well, except for the red hair."

Mr Kennedy, still only 32, is running for Congress in Massachusetts's Fourth district and is determined to prove he has more to offer than just his famous name and his striking resemblance to some of the best-known figures in American politics.

"It's important for me that people understand that I'm running - it's not my grandfather, it's not my father it's not either one of my grandfather's brothers or or anyone else in my family," he told The Daily Telegraph at the end of his fourth campaign event of the day.

"It's my name on the ballot and I have got to go out there and let people know who I am and what I stand for."

16.25 (11.25) Better news for Team Romney in Virginia - according to Real Clear Politics, Romney has cut Obama's once-substantial lead to 0.8 per cent, a statistical tie. Talking Points Memo actually points him two points ahead, although their tracker isn't considered as good.

Virginia, the former home of the Confederacy, was once one of the reddest of red states but has turned increasingly "purple" in the last eight years. Charles Whitfield has this profile of Old Dominion:

VIRGINIA

Electoral votes: 13
Population: 8 million
2008: McCain - 46 per cent / Obama - 53 per cent

In 2008 Virginia supported a Democrat for the first time since 1964, becoming a symbol for the unique wave of enthusiasm that swept Obama to victory. Three and a half years later, the state has not yet settled into either camp. An unpopular Republican governor and a rapidly growing urban area in the northern part of the state should help Obama. However, the state’s southern portions are still solidly conservative, and unemployment has not budged much in recent months. A local Republican plan to divert funding from public schools towards road maintenance has become a surprising hot button election issue.

16.05 (11.05) Speaking at a town hall meeting in his home state of Wisconsin, Paul Ryan just said he agreed that members of the House of Representatives should should only be allowed to serve six terms i.e. 12 years in office.

<noframe>Twitter: Rebecca Kaplan - During Ryan's town hall in Waukesha, WI, he says he has always backed term limits in the Senate and Congress.</noframe>

Which is odd, because as well as running for Vice President, Ryan is also seeking his eighth term in Congress.

15.50 (10.50) In the wake of the first debate, Obama slipped behind Romney in the highly-respected Real Clear Politics average. But there are some signs now that Romney's post-debate bounce is fading and the two men are level on 47.3 per cent.

As my colleague Peter Foster reports, however, the President still has the edge in the critical swing state of Ohio.

Barack Obama's hopes of reviving his flagging re-election campaign received a much-needed boost after a series of polls showed the President leading in the must-win battleground state of Ohio.

As both Mr Obama and his Republican opponent Mitt Romney prepared for two crunch debates in New York and Florida in the coming week, a Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey found Mr Obama with a five-point lead in Ohio, backing up polls last week from CNN and NBC that showed a similar lead.

Mr Romney has seen a surge in the polls in recent weeks, but without Ohio he would need to win Florida and in all likelihood several up-for-grabs states such as Virginia, Iowa, Colorado, New Hampshire and Nevada to take the White House.

"He can probably win the presidency without Ohio, but I wouldn't want to take the risk. No Republican has," the Ohio Senator Rob Portman, who has been campaigning frantically for Mr Romney in the state, told ABC News.

The Ohio polls make encouraging reading for Mr Obama who faces one of the sternest tests of his political career on Tuesday at the second presidential debate, when he will try to make up for his disastrous performance in the first contest in Denver ten days ago.

15.30 (10.30) Politico has a little more detail on how the audience for tomorrow night will be picked:

Depending on the final studio configuration, 80 to 84 voters will join the town-hall format presidential debate, at 9:30 p.m. at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY, on Long Island. The Commission on Presidential Debates is once again using Dr. Frank Newport and the Gallup Organization to pick the audience: All will be uncommitted, registered voters from Nassau County who say that they plan to vote, and that there is a chance they could vote for either candidate. The sample, reached using both landlines and cellphones, will include a variety of incomes, races and political persuasions. (Although Republicans aren't sure how many evangelical hunters will turn up in Nassau County.) A few extra are picked to account for no-shows.

14.52 (09.52) Get Bill Clinton on speed dial: this is how you win a town hall debate:

14.45 (09.45) Meanwhile, Mitt Romney is back in Massachusetts deep in his own preparations. Romney was clearly far better prepared than the President in the last debate but the meeting in New York will be a very different format. In Denver, the two men stood at opposing podiums and went back and forth with minimal interaction from the moderator.

Tomorrow, they will be competing in a town hall format in front of around registered voters who have yet to make up their minds and will get a chance to put their questions directly to the candidates. While substance will be important, the two contenders will also be judged on how they interact with the audience.

14.40 (09.40) We are T-minus one day to probably the most important moment of Barack Obama's effort to secure a second term. After a disastrous first debate in Denver two weeks ago, can the President pull it back in New York tomorrow night? He is head down in Williamsburg, Virginia, running endless rehearsal and practicing the attack lines his aides are crafting to tear down Mitt Romney.

During his Denver prep, he slacked off repeatedly and at one point went to visit the Hoover Dam. This time it's all business, though he did find a couple of minutes to drop pizza off to local volunteers.