Injustice in the U.S. Justice System

posted by JasperC on Feb 21

Story By: by Alan Greenblatt

Rick Santorum stops to sign a photograph after speaking at the Economic Club of Detroit on Thursday. It marked one of Santorum’s first campaign events in Michigan, which holds its Republican primary Feb. 28.

“The truth is, Newt Gingrich would have been out of it a long time ago, were it not for Sheldon Adelson,” says Mark Mellman, a Democratic consultant. “One person has the ability to prop up a candidate, and that hasn’t been the case since we had the post-Watergate reforms.”

Media-Based Campaign

If having your own “sugar daddy” is helpful, as Abramowitz suggests, then candidates running this year have had to adapt to a changed media environment.

Even in states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, the old emphasis on one-on-one campaigning has given way to a singular focus on candidate debates.

“In the early states, we still had a lot of retail politics, but maybe not as much as we used to,” says former New Hampshire Attorney General Tom Rath, a Romney supporter. “Having four or five months of nearly weekly nationally televised debates — in effect, these were the retail politics, having them come into your living room every week.”

The debates have provided crucial platforms for underfunded candidates — widely credited, for instance, with propelling Gingrich to victory in the South Carolina primary last month.

There, says veteran Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who worked last year for Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann’s campaign, “Gingrich was getting 49 percent of the vote among those who saw all the debates, 34 percent among those who watched most of them, 21 percent of those who saw some, and 8 percent of those who had seen none of the debates.”

One reason Gingrich is struggling, Goeas suggests, is that February’s sole debate has yet to occur. Poor debate performances have also broken candidates, notably Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

The point is, debates have been a primary avenue of exposure, with their key moments replayed over and over again on cable news channels and those clips endlessly forwarded through social media (and by the campaigns themselves).

“It gets worse,” Rath says. “You’re getting into the part of the process where the primaries come in such rapid succession that you can’t do the grass-roots things. It has to be all media and mail and social media.”

Nationalized Campaigns

Even before the field spreads out — with 10 states set to vote on March 6 — the primary process has already been nationalized to a large extent.

It has long been the case that the winners of early contests could count on a great deal of momentum. But the dynamics haven’t been so linear this time around. The Republican race has had a frequently used reset button.

A candidate such as Santorum, who had been a nonfactor in the early races outside of Iowa, can suddenly sweep a series of states, as he did last week in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado. Those contests — in which no delegates were awarded — have been enough to land him on top of the polls in Michigan.

After each primary, the national polls have followed that state’s results, while the next state to vote appears to be bending the same way as national opinion.

Instead of hearing fresh messages from candidates campaigning in their states, the next round of voters has already received basically the same set of information, through media coverage.

“The idea that we have these separate and distinct state contests has been seriously undermined,” says Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist who worked for former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman. “The primaries have been much more nationalized.”

The Fundamental Things Apply

None of this is to suggest that the old playbook has been totally abandoned. Romney, in particular, has engaged in all the traditional modes of campaigning — marching in parades, holding town hall meetings, making nice with local officials.

For all his stumbles, Romney has been able to regain the upper hand — at least temporarily — with victories in states such as New Hampshire and Florida. His ability to run ads and enlist supporters to get out the vote may be especially helpful as the campaign covers several states at once over the coming couple of months.

And he has already engaged in the same type of newfangled tactics as the so-called insurgent candidates, benefiting from superPAC ads attacking Gingrich in Iowa and Florida and regaining his own footing in the latter state through improved debate performances.

“Romney’s superPAC was able to go into Iowa and spend a couple of million attacking Newt Gingrich,” says Abramowitz, the Emory professor. “That’s different from the type of campaigning we’re used to seeing in Iowa, which had been a grass-roots, door-to-door campaign.”

Brand New Ballgame

Romney may squelch Santorum using similar tactics. On the other hand, Santorum could conceivably convert a victory in Michigan into unstoppable momentum, carried to victory on the wings of media coverage, as opposed to anything resembling a traditional campaign structure and strategy.

All the support lent to Romney by traditional Republican power brokers hasn’t been enough, as yet, to convince the majority of GOP primary voters that he’s the one best suited to defeat President Obama in the fall.

Even if Santorum doesn’t win the nomination, registering even a couple more primary victories would create a new playbook — one that isn’t going to go away.

posted by JasperC on Jan 24

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The 12 members of a congressional “super committee” laid out competing visions on Tuesday for how to solve the country’s budget ills during the panel’s first negotiating session.

“Different members have their ideas of what success looks like. Part of the exchange today was fleshing out some of those opinions,” Republican co-chairman Jeb Hensarling told Reuters in an interview following the three-hour meeting.

The six Republicans and six Democrats sequestered themselves in the ornate Library of Congress, across the street from the U.S. Capitol, where they were less likely to be snared into detailed conversations with journalists.

Most of the members refused to talk in detail publicly following Tuesday’s meeting. “We’re making progress,” quipped Democratic Senator Max Baucus.

But progress seemed more difficult with each day amid new warnings that the U.S. economic recovery could be stalling, which could result in a worsening budget deficit picture.

As the talks intensified, the super committee reached out to heads of the regular congressional panels that oversee everything from farm programs to transportation.

“I think that both the Democrats and Republicans are hearing from their committee chairmen and will most likely continue to do so,” Hensarling said.

Those panels have until mid-October to present firm ideas to the super committee for spending cuts. The super committee members then will have a couple weeks to put ideas into specific enough form for the Congressional Budget Office to analyze some time in early November.

The bipartisan super committee has a final deadline of November 23 to try for a majority vote in favor of a plan saving at least $1.2 trillion over 10 years.

The bipartisan special committee was born out of an August deal to raise the U.S. borrowing authority. If it fails to agree on a minimum of $1.2 trillion in savings, a similar amount of automatic spending cuts would be triggered beginning in 2013. Those savings would be divided evenly between domestic and military programs.

The panel is walking a tightrope as it deliberates.

There are deep party divisions over the best way to reduce budget deficits, raising questions over whether it will be able to cut a deal by its Thanksgiving deadline.

Hensarling said the super committee members could find the $1.2 trillion in savings “in our sleep individually, but (it) is quite a challenge to do in a collective bipartisan basis.”

There is plenty of pressure to produce, however.

IMF WARNING

The International Monetary Fund on Tuesday revised downward its forecast for U.S. economic growth to 1.5 percent this year and 1.8 percent next year, down from June forecasts of 2.5 percent and 2.7 percent respectively.

The IMF warned that a painfully slow U.S. economic recovery could be threatened if Washington failed to produce a credible plan to cut government borrowing in the medium term.

If it was not enough to have hordes of journalists dogging their every move, lobbyists calling them and the IMF piling on pressure, politicians no less prominent than President Barack Obama and House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner are trying to influence them.

On Monday, Obama delivered to the super committee his own, ideas for cutting deficits — about $3 trillion in savings through a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts. The plan was accompanied by a warning: Obama said he would veto any deficit reduction bill that cuts the Medicare healthcare program for the elderly without increasing taxes on wealthier Americans and corporations.

Boehner, the top U.S. Republican, last week drew his own line in the sand: No tax increases.

The super committee is being watched by credit ratings agencies, such as Standard and Poor’s, which last month cut the government’s coveted AAA bond rating and voiced concern Washington was too divided to tackle its deficit problem.

The agencies want the super committee to go way beyond its minimum requirement of $1.2 trillion in new savings.

Amid all these external pressures, super committee members say they have agreed that clamming up and not negotiating a budget deal in public is the only way to move forward.

(Additional reporting by Charles Abbott; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)