The Week: “Gun lobbyists say Obama would dismantle the right to bear arms if he’s re-elected, failing to note that the past four years have been great for their industry.”
The Hidden Mitt Romney
Politico: “The presumptive GOP nominee is known for his abilities as a salesman. But Romney has made a calculation against selling three major elements of his background to voters. To some degree, the Republican’s campaign has walled off three critical aspects of what makes Mitt Mitt — his Mormon faith and good deeds, details of his experience running Bain Capital and his signature achievement as Massachusetts governor.”
“The result: a kind of self-imposed paralysis on biographical messaging that some observers, including Republicans, say may wound his campaign in an era in which voters want to achieve a kind of unprecedented intimacy with their candidates. Right at the moment voters are starting to get to know him, he isn’t telling them his story.”
Romney Foreign Policy Challenge
As Mitt Romney prepares to give a big foreign policy speech today and begin a five-stop trip abroad tomorrow, a new USA Today/Gallup poll finds he faces challenges in convincing Americans he is the best candidate to handle foreign affairs.
“More than half of Americans, or 52%, say Obama can better handle foreign policy concerns compared with 40% who choose the presumptive Republican nominee. The numbers are closer among registered voters, who give Obama a 4-point advantage.”
First Read notes foreign policy “is a big strength for Obama heading into the fall. Almost every poll shows that. And that’s the context for Romney’s overseas trip — for this former one-term governor to demonstrate his foreign-policy chops and put more meat on bone. So far, Romney’s foreign-policy statements have seemed more like a political strategy (to sound strong and to outflank Obama) rather a clear foreign-policy outlook.”
Changing the Tone
First Read on President Obama’s latest ad:
“This is the kind of TV ad you’d expect to see at the end of a campaign or the beginning. So why now? One obvious explanation is that the race has become negative, and this ad is an effort to seize a higher ground and maybe repair the collateral damage from his own negative ads. Another explanation is that the TV ad market in battleground states has become SO saturated that this is an attempt — by having the president speak directly to the camera in a 60-second spot — to break through the clutter.”
Legislator Pulled Gun During Road Incident
Washington Rep. Matt Shea (R) “pulled a gun during a confrontation with another motorist last November in what police reports describe as a road rage incident,” the Spokane Review reports.
“Shea eventually was charged with a single firearm count — having a loaded handgun in a vehicle without a concealed weapons permit — which will be dismissed next January if he has no further criminal violations before then.”
RNC Says Obama Gaffes Weren’t Gaffes
A new RNC video blasts President Obama’s economic record using his own words, such as “the private sector is doing fine” and “you didn’t build that.”
Avoiding an Eagleton Surprise
The New York Times reports that one of the lasting legacies of Sen. George McGovern’s (D-SD) choice of Sen. Thomas Eagleton (D-MO) as his vice presidential running mate in 1972 — without knowing that he had been hospitalized for mental health issues — “is the microscopic examination of the lives and records of potential vice-presidential candidates, a ritual involving teams of lawyers and consultants and reams of medical and financial records that the candidates are obligated to produce.”
“McGovern, who had pledged to ‘avoid the messy way vice presidents had been picked in the past,’ chose Mr. Eagleton after considering him for less than an hour. The conversation in which Mr. McGovern offered Mr. Eagleton the nomination lasted precisely 67 seconds, and there was no mention of Mr. Eagleton’s three hospitalizations for depression or the electroshock therapy during two of the stays.”
“Eighteen days later, Mr. Eagleton was forced to resign from the ticket in a debacle that culminated with Mr. McGovern’s enduring the worst defeat in presidential history.”
The New New Deal
A must-read book out next month: The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era by Michael Grunwald.
Cuomo Scrubs Record as Attorney General
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) administration, “already drawing attention for its focus on secrecy, has now begun editing his record as New York attorney general, sending aides to the state archives to remove key documents from public view,” the New York Times reports.
“The review of the archived material comes at a time when Mr. Cuomo is being much discussed as a 2016 presidential candidate. Many public figures with national ambitions have been concerned about being tripped up by old documents; when Mitt Romney left the governorship in Massachusetts, his administration wiped all e-mail from the government server and allowed his top aides to buy their work hard drives, so no electronic record remained.”
Big Majority Says Campaigns are More Negative
A new Marist poll finds 78% of Americans say they are “frustrated” by the tone of political campaigns and 74% believe that the tone of political campaigns has “gotten more negative” than in past election years.
In addition, 66% believe candidates spend more time criticizing their opponents than addressing the issues, while almost as many (64%) say negative campaign ads “harm the political process” either “a great deal” or “a significant amount.”
And by a nearly 20 point margin (56% to 37%), the public says the tone of political campaigns is “mostly uncivil and disrespectful.”
Debt Ceiling Battle Cost Taxpayers $1.3 Billion
A new GAO study finds the 2011 debt ceiling fight in Congress cost the federal government about $1.3 billion in extra borrowing costs.
Huffington Post: “And that’s just the costs that the GAO bothered to count. There are also probably extra borrowing costs that the government is still paying this year and in future years because of the debt-ceiling debacle, but the GAO’s computer was too tired and/or depressed to try to figure those out.”
Red Ink
In the mail: Red Ink: Inside the High-Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget by David Wessel.
Star of Romney Ad Did Receive Government Assistance
In a Mitt Romney ad last week, a stern Jack Gilchrist of Gilchrist Metal Fabricating tells President Obama that his family — and not the government — built his company.
But John DiStaso reports Gilchrist “did receive some government help for his business” in 1999 when the company received $800,000 in tax-exempt revenue bonds “to set up a second manufacturing plant and purchase equipment to produce high definition television broadcasting equipment.”
In addition, Gilchrist Metal received a U.S. Small Business Administration loan of around $500,000 in the 1980s and has received several sub-contracts from the U.S. Navy.
Bonus Quote of the Day
“Even if you lose running for office you actually win, because you get tons of free PR.”
— Rhode Island U.S. Senate candidate Barry Hinckley (R), quoted by WPRI-TV, giving a motivational speech in 2009.
The Choice
The latest Obama campaign ad makes clear the president wants the presidential election to be a choice and not a referendum on his first term.
Romney Thanked Albright for “Keeping My Mouth Shut”
Maggie Haberman finds an interesting anecdote from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s book, Memo to the President Elect, about the 2002 Olympics uniforms:
“This episode is worth recounting because every prospective torch carrier was given, courtesy of the U.S. Olympic Committee, a special uniform consisting of a nylon sports jacket and matching pants. When my uniform arrived, I glanced at the label, which read ‘Made in Myanmar,’ that is, Burma, a country that suffers under one of the most repressive governments on Earth. It was not yet illegal to import clothing from Burma, but public pressure had induced most U.S. retailers to stop doing business there. I had my own grounds for revulsion, having visited the country to pledge support for its courageous democratic leader, the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. I was furious about the uniform but knew it was too late to reorder all the clothing, though I did go out and buy my own shirt and pants (Made in America). When I arrived in Salt Lake City, I informed Mitt Romney, head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, about the gaffe; he thanked me kindly for keeping my mouth shut. The following year, Congress approved a ban on all imports from Burma.”
Is Romney Hiding His Mormon Church Donations?
John Heilemann: “The depth to which Romney has dug in his heels has naturally provoked a welter of speculation about what in God’s name is in the returns — and just how bad it could be. That the levels of income will be stratospherically (some would say obscenely) high is taken as a given. That there are some years in which Romney paid an extremely low effective tax rate — lower, maybe much lower, than the 13.9 percent rate he paid in 2010 — is quite likely. And then there is the most problematic possibility: that the Swiss and Cayman accounts that we already know about are just the tip of an iceberg, one that would suggest an aggressive, arguably unpatriotic pattern of tax-avoidance.”
“My own guess, however, is that apart from one or more of these elements, what the Romney tax returns would lay bare is the extent of his donations to his church. In this case and all others, charitable donations are something to be proud of, an entirely honorable thing. But for a candidate who has taken extravagant pains to avoid discussion of his supremely prominent role in contemporary Mormonism, the idea of a wave of news stories detailing the tens of millions of dollars that he has given to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — surely making him among its most generous funders in the modern era — must be a kind of nightmare”
Ron Paul’s Last Shot at Legalizing Pot
Businessweek:
“Apparently, retiring 12-term Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) is trying to go out not with a bang — but in a cloud of smoke.”
