A new Majority Opinion Research poll finds Newt Gingrich leading Mitt Romney, 32% to 23%, followed by Herman Cain at 14%, Ron Paul at 6%, Rick Perry 5%, Michele Bachmann 4%, Jon Huntsman 3%, “someone else” at 4%, and no opinion at 11%.
Frank Will Not Run Again
Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) will not run for re-election for a 17th term. He’ll hold a press conference at 1 pm ET to discuss his decision.
A close adviser tells the Boston Globe that “the new district in which Frank would have had to run next year was a major factor in his decision. While it retained his Newton stronghold, it was revised to encompass more conservative towns while Frank also lost New Bedford, a blue-collar city where had invested a lot of time and become a leading figure in the region’s fisheries debate.”
Roll Call: “Some possible candidates for his newly redrawn seat include City Year
co-founder Alan Khazei, who recently dropped his Senate primary bid, and
former Chairwoman of the Brookline Board of Selectman Deborah Goldberg.”
Why the Gingrich Surge is Different
Charles Franklin notes that Newt Gingrich’s rise in the polls is quite different than the surges experienced by Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain.
“His recognition levels have remained at the top of the field, along with Romney’s, at 80-90% with only the slightest of upward trends. This means none of the Gingrich favorability trend is due to new-found visibility, as it is for all the rest save Romney and (to a lesser degree) Paul. Rather Gingrich’s trends show that even as a well known figure public affect for him is uniquely variable.”
“While others rose and fell, since his nadir in early July Gingrich has slowly but steadily rebuilt his support among Republican voters. From his low of +10 Gingrich has now risen to just a shade under +40, a whisker ahead of Romney for best net favorability among the field. And for the mercurial Gingrich it is notable that this success was achieved through steady progress rather than a sudden bounce.”
Five Weeks to Go
With just 36 days until the Iowa caucuses, First Read sums up the state of the Republican presidential race:
“1) Mitt Romney remains the overall favorite — with his money, campaign staff, and poll position — but he hasn’t been able to pull away from the field, and he’s a TV ad away from being all-in in Iowa; 2) Newt Gingrich, fresh off from his New Hampshire Union Leader endorsement, has emerged as the latest Romney alternative, but the question is whether he can survive the next 36 days; (none of the OTHER anti-Romneys has lasted longer); 3) Rick Perry’s campaign appears stuck in neutral, though he did receive an endorsement from controversial Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio; 4) Ron Paul keeps on doing his thing, and is enlisting college students to help out his Iowa ground game; 5) Herman Cain is trying to bounce back from his foreign-policy stumbles and those sexual-harassment allegations; and 6) with all the twists and turns that we’ve seen so far, the next five weeks (and beyond) promise to be a wild ride.”
“Bottom line: We don’t know how Romney is denied the nomination, but we also don’t know how he gets there, yet.
Fed Gave Big Banks $13 Billion in Secret Funding
The Federal Reserve and the nation’s largest banks “fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing,” Bloomberg reports.
“The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates.”
“A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger. ”
Obama Sets Swing State Travel Record
When President Obama visits Pennsylvania this week to promote his jobs package, “he’ll log his 56th event in a presidential battleground state this year, putting him well ahead of President George W. Bush’s record-breaking swing-state travel in 2003,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Mr. Obama’s extensive travels this year have opened the president to criticism from Republicans that he is intertwining campaigning and governing at a time when he has called for bipartisanship on intractable national problems. Most of the cost is typically born by taxpayers.”
It’s another sign the permanent campaign continues.
Mitt vs. Mitt
The DNC released a brutally tough ad further defining Mitt Romney as a flip-flopper. It’s running on cable and broadcast stations in Virginia, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pittsburgh and Wisconsin.
An extended web-only version of the ad is equally brutal.
Quote of the Day
“I don’t claim to be the perfect candidate. I just claim to be a lot more conservative than Mitt Romney.”
— Newt Gingrich, on the radio in South Carolina.
Romney Once Proposed Amnesty Too
Bloomberg reports that Mitt Romney, who claimed Newt Gingrich proposed “amnesty” for certain illegal immigrants, “took a nearly identical position in a 2006 Bloomberg interview, saying some foreigners who entered the U.S. illegally should be allowed to remain and gain legal status.”
Romney “told reporters and editors in Bloomberg News’s Washington bureau that the 11 million immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally ‘are not going to be rounded up and box-carred out.’ Law-abiding people who pay taxes, learn English and don’t rely on government benefits should be allowed to ‘get in line’ to apply for citizenship, he said.”
Said Romney: “We need to begin a process of registering those people, some being returned, and some beginning the process of applying for citizenship and establishing legal status.”
An Endorsement That Keeps Giving
While the yesterday’s endorsement of Newt Gingrich by the New Hampshire Union Leader made no mention of Mitt Romney and allowed that Gingrich was not perfect, publisher Joe McQuaid told Politico that they “would reprise their tradition of near-daily editorials that reiterate full-throated support for their favored candidate and equally robust opposition toward his challengers.”
Said McQuaid: “I think we will be sticking with our traditional approach.”
Anti-Romney Effort in Iowa Stalls
“An apparent effort to craft a unified Republican caucus endorsement among several of Iowa’s social-conservative advocacy groups and evangelical pastors began last Monday, but its prospects already appear uncertain,” the Des Moines Register reports.
“A follow-up meeting initially scheduled for today has been postponed, with no indication of when it will be rescheduled, according to a meeting participant.”
Which Senate Election Records Will Be Broken in 2012?
The Hotline:
“Senate Democrats are clearly more exposed than Republicans this cycle,
but it’s easy to forget how historic some of these GOP pick-ups would
have to be. For instance, Republicans haven’t controlled both Nebraska
Senate seats since 1976, nor both in North Dakota since 1960, nor both
in Wisconsin since Joe McCarthydied in 1957. On the other hand, no
Democratic senator has been successfully re-elected in Missouri since
1980 or Pennsylvania since 1962. How many of these records will be
broken next year?”
Arizona’s Controversial Sheriff to Endorse Perry
NBC News has confirmed that Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, will endorse Rick Perry this week.
The Arizona sheriff is known as a vehement backer of tough immigration laws and was a vocal supporter of his own state’s controversial enforcement laws.
Will Newspaper Endorsement Boost Gingrich?
Nate Silver looks at Newt Gingrich’s endorsement by the New Hampshire Union Leader and notes that past candidates endorsed by the newspaper finished with an 11-percentage-point improvement from what they averaged in the polls when the endorsement was made.
“If you do take the results of the regression analysis to be tantamount
to a prediction, they imply that New Hampshire could be quite close,
with Mr. Romney finishing with 36 percent of the vote and Mr. Gingrich
at 30 percent. What I think is fair to say is that Mr. Gingrich would at
least have a shot at winning New Hampshire if he also wins Iowa, a
result that could be devastating to Mr. Romney’s campaign.”
Best Political Books of the Year
The Financial Times picks the best political books of the year:
Cables from Kabul by Sherard Cowper-Coles.
A Contest for Supremacy by Aaron L Friedberg.
That Used To be Us, by Thomas L Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum.
George F Kennan: An American Life, by John Lewis Gaddis.
DarkMarket: CyberThieves, CyberCops and You, by Misha Glenny.
The End of the West: The Once and Future Europe, by David Marquand.
Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia, by Thant Myint-U.
Can Intervention Work?, by Rory Stewart and Gerald Knaus.
The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev, by Daniel Triesman.
Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, by Ezra F Vogel.
The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World, by Daniel Yergin.
New Perry Ad Features Super PAC Footage
Ben Smith: “The last shred of regulation preventing unlimited money from flowing into presidential campaigns is the requirement that campaigns not ‘coordinate’ their communications with Super PACs and the other independent groups pouring money into that race. Rick Perry’s campaign for president appears to be testing the limits of that regulation: In its Thanksgiving video, the campaign uses two clips from an slickly produced advertisement aired on Perry’s behalf by Make Us Great Again, a SuperPAC run by a longtime Perry associate, Mike Toomey.”
Gingrich Endorsed by Key New Hampshire Newspaper
The New Hampshire Union Leader endorses Newt Gingrich in the New Hampshire primary.
“America is at a crucial crossroads. It is not going to be enough to
merely replace Barack Obama next year. We are in critical need of the
innovative, forward-looking strategy and positive leadership that
Gingrich has shown he is capable of providing.”
“We sympathize with the many people we have heard from, both here and across the country, who remain unsure of their choice this close to the primary. It is understandable. Our nation is in peril, yet much of the attention has been focused on fluff, silliness and each candidate’s minor miscues. Truth be known, many in the liberal media are belittling the Republican candidates because they don’t want any of them to be taken as a serious challenger to their man, Obama.”
Will the Euro Collapse?
The Economist: “Even as the euro zone hurtles towards a crash, most people are
assuming that, in the end, European leaders will do whatever it takes to
save the single currency. That is because the consequences of the
euro’s destruction are so catastrophic that no sensible policymaker
could stand by and let it happen.”
A euro break-up would cause a global bust worse even than the one in 2008-09. The world’s most financially integrated region would be ripped apart by defaults, bank failures and the imposition of capital controls… The euro zone could shatter into different pieces, or a large block in the north and a fragmented south. Amid the recriminations and broken treaties after the failure of the European Union’s biggest economic project, wild currency swings between those in the core and those in the periphery would almost certainly bring the single market to a shuddering halt.”
“Yet the threat of a disaster does not always stop it from happening. The chances of the euro zone being smashed apart have risen alarmingly, thanks to financial panic, a rapidly weakening economic outlook and pigheaded brinkmanship. The odds of a safe landing are dwindling fast.”
