Steven Rattner, the former Obama administration official who criticized the president’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, clarifies his position in the New York Times:

“On Monday, Mr. Obama struck the right balance, emphasizing that he wasn’t attacking private equity but was questioning Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital credentials to be the job creator in chief. That’s fair, particularly because Mr. Romney himself has been foolishly reweaving history to claim, as recently as last week, that he helped create 100,000 jobs during his time at Bain. In fact, Bain Capital — like other private equity firms — was founded and managed for profit: ideally, huge amounts of gain earned legally and legitimately. Any job creation was a welcome but secondary byproduct.”

“Adding jobs was never Mitt Romney’s private sector agenda, and it’s appropriate to question his ability to do so.”

First Read: “One of the downsides to Republicans and the Romney campaign citing the
Cory Bookers, Steve Rattners, etc. when it comes to Bain Capital is
this: These folks are supporting Obama, not Romney.”

Donald Trump wants a big speaking slot at the Republican National Convention, BuzzFeed reports, asking his Twitter followers to “imagine him speaking at the RNC Convention.”

He added: “That’s a speech everyone would watch.”

One of Trump’s advisers told the Daily Caller that Trump’s “massive popularity is just one of the many reasons he is being sought as a keynote speaker at the Tampa RNC Convention.”

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) apparently sent Jewish voters campaign mail with a picture of his family including his mother, while other voters got the same picture without his mother, LA Observed reports.

When confronted, Sherman claimed it was actually a clever trick which forced the media to print pictures of his family.

[Read more…]

Jonathan Martin: “Margin-of-error polling, fundraising parity last month, conservative consolidation around Romney and a still-sluggish economy has senior GOP officials increasingly bullish about a nominee many winced over during a difficult primary process. Interviews with about two dozen Republican elected officials, aides, strategists and lobbyists reveal a newfound optimism that with a competent, on-message campaign, Romney will be at least competitive with a weakened incumbent. That’s a dramatic shift from the fatalistic view many party stalwarts shared mere weeks ago.”

President Obama’s re-election campaign will introduce a new online organizing tool today, the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The program, known as Dashboard, has been in development since last year and builds off technology used by the campaign in 2008. It is meant to replicate a campaign field office, allowing volunteers to do phone banking, organize events and talk to campaign leaders from their laptops or smartphones… The Dashboard aims to give supporters information about local efforts and let people see how their efforts compare with those of other volunteers.”

To explain President Obama’s dismal performance in the Kentucky and Arkansas primaries last night, Alec MacGillis points us to a map that shows the regions where Obama received a smaller percentage of the vote in 2008 than John Kerry did in 2004.

“It is a virtually contiguous band of territory stretching from southwestern Pennsylvania through Appalachia and across the Upland South, finally petering out in north-central Texas. It is, almost to a T, what Colin Woodard, in his fascinating new ethnographic history of North America, American Nations, defined as the territory of the ‘Borderlanders’ — the rough-hewn Scots-Irish who arrived in this country from the “borderlands” of northern Ireland and Scotland, and claimed for themselves the inland hill country, far from the snooty Northeastern elites and Southern gentry. And look more closely at the map — where was Obama’s 2008 dropoff particularly heavy? In eastern Kentucky and most of Arkansas.”

“Keep in mind: this was at the peak of Obama’s popularity. It was before he began his ‘war on coal,’ before Obamacare, before all the things that pundits will point to to explain why this part of the country is so dead set against the president.”

A new Quinnipiac poll in Florida finds that Mitt Romney leads President Obama by six points, 47% to 41%.

Adding Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) to the GOP ticket would give Republicans an eight point lead, 49% to 41%.

Said pollster Peter Brown: “Mitt Romney has slipped into the lead in Florida and that standing is confirmed by his much better numbers than the president when voters are asked whether they view the candidates favorably or unfavorably. They view Romney favorably 44% to 35%, while Obama gets a negative 45% to 50% favorability.”

President Obama barely eked out Democratic primary wins in Kentucky and Arkansas, Politico reports.

The president didn’t even have an opponent in Kentucky, but took just 57.9% of the vote, with the remaining more than 42 percent of ballots cast for “uncommitted.”

In Arkansas, his unknown opponent, John Wolfe (D), won 41% of the vote.

Washington Post: “Although the results haven’t stopped Obama’s march to renomination — he officially clinched the Democratic nod on April 3 — they remain an indicator of not-insignificant pockets of unrest within his party.”

Former Reagan budget director David Stockman went off message on Fox News while commenting about Mitt Romney’s business experience.

Said Stockman: “I don’t think that Mitt Romney can legitimately say that he learned anything about how to create jobs in the LBO business. The LBO business is about how to strip cash out of old, long-in-the-tooth companies and how to make short-term profits…All the jobs that he talks about came from Staples. That was a very early venture stage deal. That, you know they got out of long before it got to its current size.”

[Read more…]

A new SurveyUSA poll in North Carolina finds Mitt Romney barely edging President Obama, 45% to 44%.

Bloomberg reports the geography of the U.S. economic rebound is providing an edge to President Obama’s re-election.

“The unemployment rates in a majority of the 2012 battleground states are lower than the national average as those economies improve… Those eight states — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia — have a combined 101 electoral votes. Romney must win at least 79 of those electoral votes to prevail if all other states run true to their 2004 and 2008 partisan preferences.”

“A projection Moody’s made May 21 based on the model predicts an Obama victory with 303 electoral voters, with the Democrat carrying Ohio and Virginia and the Republican winning Florida.”

A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds President Obama leading Mitt Romney by four points nationally, 47% to 43%.

“But the poll found much to stir concern within the burgeoning Obama re-election campaign. Despite signs of economic recovery, nearly half of Americans said the country is at the start of a long-term decline. Americans by a sizable plurality said Mr. Obama’s approach has worsened the nation’s budget deficit and health-care problems, and increased its partisan divide.”

Key finding: 63% say they are not confident their children’s lives will be better than theirs.

A new Greenberg Quinlan Rosner (D) poll in Wisconsin shows Gov. Scott Walker (R) leading Tom Barrett (D) in the recall race, 50% to 47% — within the poll’s four-point margin of error.

Several other recent polls have show Walker opening up a larger lead.

Republicans drag Cory Booker’s walk-back of his weekend comments out for another day by alleging in a new video that President Obama’s re-election campaign is engaged in a cover up.

[Read more…]

A new Castleton State College poll in Vermont finds Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) headed for a landslide re-election.

Shumlin leads challenger Randy Brock (R), 60% to 27%.