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.

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.

[Read more…]

“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.

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.”

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.”

“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.”

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?”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

Alex Castellanos: “Month after month, dollar after dollar, debate after debate, we’ve seen we’ve Mitt Romney at his best, yet failing to pull away from the field. Romney is still leaving the door open to those who have fallen to the ‘B’ tier. He is giving all his opponents the opportunity to get back into this contest. If Romney doesn’t energize his campaign soon, somebody might actually try to win this race besides him.”

“That might not be hard to do. His competitors are about 10 minutes away from figuring out it is in all their interest to go negative on Romney and drag him down to their level. If they test Romney and fail, nothing is lost. In fact, they’ll strengthen Romney and probably make him President. But if any candidate effectively cuts Romney, others will see blood in the water. The sharks will circle…”

“Somewhere Barack Obama is smiling. If they bring Mitt Romney down, it’s jump ball for the GOP.”

Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson — “left out of all but two of the seemingly endless Republican presidential debates” — tells the Santa Fe New Mexican that he’s seriously considering running for the Libertarian Party nomination for president.

Said Johnson: “I feel abandoned by the Republican Party. The Republican Party has left me by the wayside. If I’d have been included in 16 of the last debates we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

Rep. Charlie Gonzalez (D-TX) said he won’t seek re-election, the San Antonio Express-News reports, “a decision that will end the congressional tenure of a Democratic family whose name has been synonymous with the city of San Antonio for more than half a century.”

“Gonzalez, who sued the state over a redistricting plan that carved downtown out of his central San Antonio congressional district, said it was not reapportionment, but the need to provide financial stability for his family that’s forcing him to seek a new career.”

Said Gonzalez: “I still find the job hugely rewarding, but the demands pull me somewhere else. I’ve been in Congress for 14 years and I want to do something else — what that is, I really don’t know. But financially, I would like to be productive and have the resources to make a better life.”