Only one state - Mississippi - explicitly bars same-sex adoption by statute. Miss. Code Sec. 93-17-3(b). Utah is frequently cited as another state that bars same-sex adoption, but that prohibition applies to any cohabitation relationship involving persons of any gender who are not married.  And, regardless, the point Gov. Romney is making is that this is a state issue, which is what he thinks it should be.

Democrats who already were queasy about the site of their national convention could be excused after Tuesday's election in North Carolina if they asked, "Tell me again just why we're going to Charlotte this year?" In fact, many Democrats privately are asking exactly that after the state's voters overwhelmingly approved a measure outlawing not just same-sex marriage -- which already was illegal in North Carolina -- but also any form of civil unions. Almost immediately after the vote, more than 20,000 people signed a "move the convention" petition being pushed by a New York group called Gay Marriage USA. And Twitter accounts lit up with hundreds of angry tweets demanding the party pull out of Charlotte.

For the second time in as many weeks, President Obama on Tuesday made an overt attempt to contrast his humble beginnings and real-world struggles against the privileged life of Mitt Romney -- without actually mentioning the Republican nominee-in-waiting by name.

Speaking to a boisterous throng of college students at the University of North Carolina, Obama argued for making college more affordable by extending a low interest rate on student loans set to expire this summer. Obama stressed that he understands the importance of the issue by reminding the collegiate crowd that he, too, needed federal loans to complete his higher education.

"I didn't just read about this," Obama said.

Vice President Joe Biden's speech in Iowa on Wednesday was more than a full-throated attack on Republican Mitt Romney's economic policies. It was also the latest indication that the Obama campaign intends to champion its manufacturing policies in battleground states in the Midwest, inviting voters, as Biden did Wednesday, to compare the president's program to what it casts as the likely Republican nominee's downplaying of manufacturing as a key part of America's economic recovery.

Biden pointedly quoted the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper rarely cited by Democrats, as stating, "Romney appeared to scoff, first in Detroit, then in Florida, at the notion of manufacturing as a job engine for the future." That, Biden said, sets up what he called the "choice in this election" between "our philosophy that believes manufacturing is central to our economy, and their philosophy that scoffs at it."

After a week of watching Rush Limbaugh under fire from both women and sponsors, conservatives are trying to change the subject. Or, at the least, make Democrats squirm and answer to the charge of hypocrisy. Their target is comedian Bill Maher, an outspoken liberal comedian who over the years has delighted in outrageous and controversial remarks about religion, politics and conservatives, particularly conservative women such as Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell.

Three senior administration officials just laughed when asked if they had decided to schedule a President Obama press conference for Tuesday to insert the White House into a busy news day that otherwise was guaranteed to be dominated by Republicans fighting for delegates in ten states. Noting - accurately - that reporters had been lobbying for an Obama press conference, they insisted that the scheduling just worked well for Tuesday.

Regardless of the motivation, putting the president out for a long give-and-take that will be carried live on multiple television channels does serve the purpose of pushing the Republicans aside, if only for an hour. This comes only a week after the White House worked to have the president break through the Republican news focus last Tuesday as well, with a fiery campaign-style speech to a gathering of United Auto Workers at the same time Republican voters were going to the polls in Michigan.

President Obama has been quite insistent that he is not ready to engage the Republican presidential candidates until the GOP settles on its nominee. "Once they narrow it down to one of two, I'll start paying attention," he said several times. And in his Super Bowl interview with NBC's Matt Lauer, he insisted he will hold his comments "until the Republicans decide who their nominee is going to be." He added, "I think most people are thinking the election is nine months away; the last thing we need is to start it right now when the other side hasn't determined its nominee."

But it's not too early to call attention to the success of one of his policies that was opposed by the leading Republican candidate. And as the good news keeps rolling in from the U.S. auto industry, the president has not been at all bashful about calling attention to what the White House sees as the politically unpalatable position taken on U.S. automakers by that Republican candidate - even if the president is always careful not to mention him by name.

One key reason why Democrats have grown more competitive in presidential elections since 1992 (after losing five of the previous six) is the steady growth in the minority share of the vote. In 1992, when Bill Clinton was first elected, non-whites cast 12 percent of the vote. When Barack Obama won in 2008, the minority share stood at 26 percent, more than double. How much more it grows, if at all, looms as one of the critical variables for 2012. The Obama camp is beginning to zero in on its projection.

A common misconception is that the minority share of the vote experienced an unsustainable surge in 2008 because of Obama's history-making status as the first African-American presidential nominee. In fact, the growth in the minority role has been steady over the past two decades, according to network exit polls. From 12 percent in 1992, the minority share of the vote increased to 17 percent in 1996, 21 percent in 2000, and 23 percent in 2004, before reaching its 26 percent level in 2008.

Under fire from Republicans for a promise he won't be keeping about cutting the deficit, President Obama might consider emulating Franklin D. Roosevelt, who found himself in a very similar bind eight decades ago. In October 1932, Roosevelt told a crowd in Pittsburgh that he would balance the budget and cut government spending by 25 percent in his first term. But when he got in office, the only way to combat the Depression was to increase spending.

It was the right course for governing. But it presented Roosevelt with a real political challenge when he was running for a second term and returning to Pennsylvania. He asked speechwriter Sam Rosenman how to handle questions about the broken promise.

The national Pew Research Center poll released Monday confirms that President Obama, at least for now, is reassembling the coalition that powered him to his 2008 victory.

The Pew survey, closely tracking last week's ABC News/Washington Post poll, shows that in a potential general election match-up against Mitt Romney, Obama's support among many of the electorate's key groups has converged with his 2008 showing against John McCain. In almost all cases, that represents gains for Obama since polls from last year.

President Obama's about-face on soliciting donations under a Supreme Court ruling he denounced is another reminder that we're living in times not unlike Teddy Roosevelt's -- and that Obama is no TR.

This isn't the first time Obama has defied TR's legacy.

President Obama's ad-makers may have to pay royalties to Clint Eastwood after a remarkable two-minute Chrysler commercial that aired on the biggest of all stages - the Super Bowl - and gave a pretty good preview of what the president's reelection commercials might look like. At the very least, the ad and Eastwood's powerful narration make it much, much more difficult for Republican front-runner Mitt Romney to keep pushing his line that Washington should have let the automakers go into bankruptcy.

And don't think that Team Obama wasn't watching the Super Bowl along with millions of other Americans and immediately grasped the boost they could get from the commercial. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer quickly tweeted "Saving the America auto industry: something Eminem and Clint Eastwood can agree on." Senior strategist David Axelrod tweeted "Powerful spot. Did Clint shoot that, or just narrate it?"  Former White House aide Bill Burton tweeted, "Clinton Eastwood #winning."

Of course, this isn't the first time Eastwood has been identified with cars -- he starred in Pink Cadillac in 1989 and Gran Torino in 2008. But those weren't in the Super Bowl with a bigger audience than probably saw both those movies combined.

RELATED: Chrysler Super Bowl Ad Removed From YouTube

With 30 second spots selling for $3.5 million, the commercial cost Chrysler an estimated $14 million and was kept under wraps by the automaker, which, with the help of the Obama administration, has come back from the dead after being counted out in 2009. And one can only guess what the automaker paid Eastwood. Whatever, it was worth it for it was a master stroke. The 81-year-old actor has told interviewers he has always voted Republican for president, though he has endorsed some Democrats in California and has praised libertarians.

The commercial itself was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" commercials, though with the famous Clint Eastwood tough guy touch. Shown shortly after Madonna's halftime performance, it began with the silhouette of Eastwood, walking in the dark and recognizable only for his gravelly voice. "It's halftime. Both teams are in their locker room discussing what they can do to win this game," he says. "It's halftime in America, too." With scenes of an iconic front porch and a city skyline," he continues, "People are out of work and they are hurting. They are all wondering what they are going to do to make a comeback. And we're all scared because this isn't a game."

With more every day scenes flashing on the screen, Eastwood adds, "The people in Detroit know a little something about this. They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together. Now Motor City is fighting again." With the music punctuating his remarks, Eastwood goes on: "I've seen a lot of tough eras, a lot of downturns in my life. Times when we didn't understand each other. It seems that we've lost our heart at times. The fog of division, discord and blame, made it hard to see what lies ahead." As scenes of protesters give way to black and white photos of kids and firefighters, Eastwood builds, "But after those trials, we all rallied around what was right and acted as one. Because that's what we do. We find a way through tough times. If we can't find a way then we'll make one. All that matters now is what's ahead. How do we come from behind? How do we come together?

At this point, viewers see Eastwood in the light. "And how do we win? Detroit is showing us it can be done,. And what's true about them is true about all of us. This country can't be knocked out with one punch." To conclude, a close-up of Eastwood fills the screen. "We get right back up again and when we do the world is going to hear the roar of our engines. Yeah, its halftime America and our second half is about to begin."

All that was missing was him turning to Mitt Romney and challenging him to "make my day."

The Gallup state-by-state average approval numbers for 2011 released this week don't necessarily predict where President Obama will finish on Election Day, but they do measure the hill he must climb to win re-election.

The most important number in presidential elections, of course, is 270 - the number of Electoral College votes it takes to win. The best way to examine the Gallup numbers is to measure them against that yardstick.

In 2010, if you sorted down from Obama's highest approval rating to his lowest, he could reach 270 Electoral College votes by carrying the 22 states plus the District of Columbia where his approval rating stood at 46.9 percent or more. Since one of the states above that line was Mississippi, a state Obama has almost no chance of carrying in practice, a more realistic scenario was that to reach an Electoral College majority he would have to carry those 21 states plus Virginia, where his approval rating stood at 46.6 percent.

"Angry Newt" took the night off. In a striking role reversal, Newt Gingrich looked more like a firefly than a firebrand in a high-stakes debate Monday night, while rival Mitt Romney called the surging former House Speaker a disgraced, influence-peddling, Washington insider.

Somebody must have awakened the cool-and-nonchalant Romney out of his debate slumber and told him the GOP nomination was slipping away. Gingrich stunned the political world -- and frightened much of the GOP establishment -- with a landslide victory in South Carolina on Saturday night that erased Romney's lead in national and Florida polls.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich finished an astonishing comeback Saturday night to defeat front-runner Mitt Romney in South Carolina, plunging the Republican Party into a wrenching and potentially lengthy period of soul-searching: Can either of these jokers beat President Obama?

Mitt Romney employed some of the toughest rhetoric of his campaign in Thursday's South Carolina debate, ripping into President Obama as a job-destroying disaster who practices "crony capitalism," listens to labor "stooges," and so misunderstands capitalism that Romney will have to "stuff it down his throat" in the fall campaign.

And that was just in Romney's first response in a debate he clearly wanted to serve as a preview for how he'd go after Obama.

The GOP front-runner was also the first in the debate to attack the president for his decision this week to kill the Keystone pipeline. "Because he has to bow to the most extreme members of the environmental movement, he turned down the Keystone pipeline, which would bring energy and jobs to America," said Romney. "This president is the biggest impediment to job growth in this country. And we have to replace Barack Obama to get America working again."

Romney also raised the Obama administration's $535 million loan to Solyndra, the California solar company that went bankrupt last year, accusing the president of "practicing crony capitalism." He added, "He stacks the labor stooges on the NRB so they can say no to Boeing and take care of their friends in the labor movement."

Romney also turned an attack on his work for Bain Capital into another attack on Obama. "There's nothing wrong with profit," he said, adding that much of Bain's profits went to pension funds and charities and hired more people. "I'm going to stand and defend capitalists across this country. I know we're going to get it hard from President Obama. But we'll stuff it down his throat."

Jay Carney could be excused for his incredulity at Wednesday's White House briefing. To his surprise, he found himself on the defensive amid suggestions that somehow President Obama should not be traveling to Florida on Thursday. The criticism is that because Republicans are about to descend on the state prior to the Jan. 31 primary, the Democratic president should somehow leave them free to attack him uncontested.

Four years after it was trendy in Democratic circles to liken Barack Obama to Franklin D. Roosevelt, it is safe to conclude that no one in the Obama re-election campaign will be borrowing FDR's "Happy Days are Here Again" as the theme song for 2012. Judging by recent speeches by the president and the first lady, a much likelier choice is the 2009 tune by He is We, "A Mess it Grows." Or maybe Avril Lavigne's "I'm With You," with its line, "'Cause nothing's going right. And everything's a mess."

Both Obamas left little doubt this week that things are still a mess even after three years of Obama rule. In a speech in Richmond, the first lady talked about "this mess." But she struck the right campaign theme, adding ,"Fortunately, over the past three years, we've worked very hard to dig ourselves out of this mess. Your president has worked very hard. And there's been a lot of wonderful progress made."

Then on Friday, the president pitched his government reorganization plan, even making rare use of a colorful chart. "I don't usually use props in my speeches," he acknowledged to laughter. But he wanted to show how complicated the current government makes things. "This is the system that small business owners face.  This is what they have to deal with if they want even the most basic answers to the most basic questions like how to export to a new country or whether they qualify for a loan."  Reflecting on the way, government treats businesses, he concluded, "It's a mess."

Ever since April, people have been speculating that President Obama's campaign may shatter all fund-raising records and may even become the first-ever billion-dollar campaign.. But in the last month, campaign officials have struggled to knock down that notion -- sometimes very colorfully -- because they realize that the perception the president's campaign coffers are overflowing actually hurts fund-raising.

Campaign manager Jim Messina on Thursday tried again to rebut the billion-dollar notion, at least his third such attempt in the last month. This time, it was a video sent to supporters. After boasting of "a pretty good quarter" in which the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee raised $68 million, Messina praised the enthusiasm of the president's supporters, calling it "in stark contrast to what we've seen on the other side."

But, somewhat ominously, he complained of "a challenge that keeps coming up -- too many Obama supporters think we don't need their money. Or they don't need to give now."  He spoke of recent emails that said the campaign is going to raise $1 billion, so more contributions aren't needed. "Look," responded an exasperated Messina, "I totally get why people would think that. But they are completely wrong." He said the $1 billion speculation "is completely untrue."

Messina made the same point in an end-of-the-year email in which he wrote that such speculation "turns people off from politics." He added, "We do not and will not have a billion-dollar war chest." The campaign manager was even more colorful in a December video to supporters. "People have speculated this is a billion dollar campaign," he said. "That's bullshit."

MANCHESTER -- Before tonight's debate, expectations were running high for a giant pile-on, with frontrunner Mitt Romney at the bottom of the pile. Yet about a half hour into the debate, most of the backbiting has occurred over Romney's untouched head.

The Obama re-election campaign is marking Iowa caucus day by releasing a video of candidate Obama on caucus night four years ago, when he pulled off his upset victory over Hillary Clinton. With the spotlight at its brightest, all eyes and TV cameras upon him, a very young-looking Barack Obama gave a substantive victory speech outlining what he wanted to do as president.

The 2-minute video, called "2008 Iowa Caucus Victory Speech: Promises Kept," consists of speech excerpts and captions explaining what Obama has accomplished in each area. Leaving aside for a moment the question of how this will play with a depressed nation, it's hard to argue with most of the specifics. Obama promised to end the Iraq war and he did; he promised to cut middle-class taxes and he did; he promised to reform the health care system and he did.

Newt Gingrich has finally found a politician he considers even worse than the president he calls socialist, anti-colonialist and radical. That would be his fellow Republican Ron Paul.

"I think Barack Obama is very destructive to the future of the United States. I think Ron Paul's views are totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American," Gingrich said Tuesday in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer.

Could he vote for Paul? "No." If it came down to Paul vs. Obama? "You'd have a very hard choice at that point."

The new Quinnipiac University survey out this morning in Virginia spotlights the delicate tightrope President Obama must walk to retain many of the fast-growing, new battleground states that he captured in 2008 - and why Mitt Romney may be better positioned than Newt Gingrich to snatch those prizes from the president.

In 2008, Obama became the first Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to carry Virginia, attracting nearly 53 percent of its vote. In that election, Virginia was a luxury for the president because he also swept the table of Rust Belt swing states like Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Michigan and Minnesota that have often decided presidential elections. But given his difficulties with blue-collar white workers, it will be difficult for Obama to repeat that performance in the Heartland. That could make it a necessity for him in 2012 to carry many of the emerging Sun Belt swing states defined by rapid growth, increasing racial diversity and (generally) high levels of white education - a list that includes Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico in the Southwest and North Carolina, Florida and Virginia in the Southeast. Of all those places, Virginia may be the closest to a tipping point state most likely to decide a close race.

Demography should help the president in these new Sun Belt battlegrounds: given the steady growth of the minority community in those places, the non-white share of the vote in them should be slightly higher in 2012 than 2008. That will likely reduce the share of whites he needs to win those states, even if economic discontent slightly erodes the preponderant share of the minority vote he captured in all of them three years ago. His problem is the share of the white vote he can attract may be declining even faster than the share that he needs - especially in the white working class.

The bump recorded for President Obama's approval rating in two national surveys released Tuesday captures his success in framing the debate against congressional Republicans on extending the payroll tax cut. But over the long term, Obama's ability to sustain those gains (which pushed his approval rating to 49 percent in both the ABC/Washington Post and the CNN/ORC survey) will probably turn on the trajectory of Americans' attitudes about the economy.

The latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor survey, released last week, captures a paradox: groups that supported Obama in the 2008 election are generally more negative in describing their current economic situation than groups that resisted him. But the supportive groups are much more optimistic than the critical groups about where the economy is headed - and generally, though not uniformly, more positive on the impact of Obama's agenda on their economic prospects.

The table below looks at economic attitudes among nine groups that Obama carried in 2008, and nine that preferred Republican nominee John McCain, according to the 2008 exit polls. The results are taken from the most recent Heartland Monitor, conducted by FTI Strategic Communications, a communications-strategy consulting firm; the poll surveyed 1,200 adults by landline telephone and cell phone from November 30 to December 4 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points

There's an ominous trend for President Obama in the latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll: not only is his overall approval rating lagging, but he's lost as much (or even more) ground among groups that favored him in 2008 as among those who resisted him last time.

The chart at left compares Obama's vote among key groups in 2008, according to exit polls, and his job approval rating among them in the latest Heartland Monitor released Thursday morning. (The survey, conducted by FTI Strategic Communications, polled 1200 adults by landline telephone and cell phone from November 30 to December 4 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.)

Overall, Obama has slipped from 52.8 percent of the vote in 2008 to 44 percent approval in the new survey with 49 percent disapproving. As the chart shows, Obama has declined not only in the groups that were always dubious of him, but also with several that enthusiastically joined his winning 2008 majority.

One Obama campaign adviser who followed Obama to the White House displays his hand - five digits, representing percentage points of the electorate and folds each one down.  "We were at 52... 51,50,49,48,47.  We can go no lower than 47.  How do we get to 50?  We find people we missed last time or find new people who fit the profile," says this adviser.

"Our base is not necessarily the Democratic base,"  campaign manager Jim Messina said in a November interview.  "Obama's base is Obama's base."

This strategy mimics the way that George W. Bush won re-election in 2004. Campaign manager Ken Mehlman and senior strategist Karl Rove divided the electorate into affinity groups, worked to inflate the size of each, and used their communication resources to disqualify their opponent, John Kerry, among demographic groups that overlay both candidates. 

Bush lost among self-identified independents in both 2000 and 2004, but he managed to grow the share of conservatives across the electorate by three percentage points.  Obama's approval rating among pure independents dropped to a low of 30 percent before Thanksgiving, and though that number will need to rise, in the eyes of Obama's strategists, it's not the metric they obsess about.

Messina has a theory of the case that tracks Rove's view of political demography:  It's as if the election will be decided by the size of your team's crowd in a football stadium, only there are no limits to the amount of tickets you can buy.  And form follows function: the campaign is set up to make sure the Obama brand is a magnet for as many voters as possible. 

These are the metrics Messina cares about:

"There are 8 million millennials who need to be registered and persuaded to vote for Obama."

"Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer and Michael Bennett all got a larger number of Latino voters than Barack Obama did because that's how fast the Latino vote is growing.  That is going to be hard for our opponent to deal with."

And then there's unmarried women, who gave 7 in ten votes to Obama in 2008, making up 27 percent of Obama's total.  The campaign wants to increase their share of the electorate by several percentage points.

How Obama finds these voters will require a significant investment in resources and a modification of tactics.  The campaign in 2008 prided itself on communicating directly with voters, so that, by the day of the election, more than 15 million people had had some form of personal contact with the campaign.  What's not usually noted is that several million of those contacted didn't vote for either candidate.  Indeed, on the fabled Obama e-mail list, a not-insignificant minority of recipients didn't vote.  There are also donors to the 2008 and 2012 campaigns who didn't vote.  So job one will be to take a flashlight into the corners of the existing Obama world and find the stragglers.

A number of Democratic strategists think that Obama is in over his head, and that his economic credibility challenges are the main problem his campaign must confront.  William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings and a former aide to President Bill Clinton, posits that Obama's record has reduced his level of potential support across the board, that it is too late to reverse even many liberals' perception that Obama is inept when it comes to fixing the economy, that Latinos will not show up in large numbers because the President failed to push immigration reform through Congress, and because in times of distress, they are more likely to be skeptical of the in-party.  Attitudes, he believes, matter more than demography, and judging by attitudinal factors, Obama is in trouble.

So which theory is right?  Is Obama going to lose because he's lost the confidence of the people who elected him?  Or will he win because he has so much room to grow?   That's both the "demography is destiny" camp and the "economy is dispositive" camp who agree that Obama is right now not activating his base in nearly the numbers he needs to.  He needs to increase his share of the votes among those under 30 and among Latinos by at least double-digits.  That's where Messina and the campaign come in.  Closing this gap - between his demographic reality and his demographic potential - is the reason they exist. 

Working people deserve a candidate that represents their interests, not just Wall Street's.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The 2.1 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU) voted last night to withdraw its endorsement of President Barack Obama for re-election in 2012.

The vote by SEIU's Committee on Political Education (COPE) came after rank-and-file members of the nation's fastest growing union expressed concerns it was much too early to be endorsing any candidate in the 2012 race. It does not mean SEIU is endorsing any of President Obama's rivals

"We remain hopeful that President Obama will do more than just talk about standing up for the interests of hard-working Americans," said SEIU International President Mary Kay Henry. "Our members gave $60.7 million dollars to the Obama campaign in 2008 and fought hard for his election because we were promised change. We're still waiting."

"The Republican Party is in shambles because voters are tired of politicians putting the interests of Wall Street ahead of the working class," added Henry. "President Obama still needs to show he is different."

President Obama's "fair shot" address Tuesday may be remembered as one of his best, a searing and historically poignant account of the greatest challenge of the American experiment: How do we give every citizen, rich or poor, a path to the good life?

But his speech in Osawatomie, Kan., with its echoes of Theodore Roosevelt's appearance in the same city a century ago, also exposed the limits of Obama's presidency and personality. Obama is a man of his times, and this is a lousy time to command what TR called the "bully pulpit."

OYSTER BAY, N.Y. -- In a display case at Sagamore Hill, the historic estate of President Theodore Roosevelt, a polished blue tablet reads, "By the turn of the century, business trusts controlled 65 percent of American wealth and Wall Street dictated the course of the American economy." A century-old editorial cartoon depicts the president firing a gun at a portly man with "The Trusts" scrawled upon the man's ample belly.

In a display case at Sagamore Hill, the historic estate of President Theodore Roosevelt, a polished blue tablet reads, "By the turn of the century, business trusts controlled 65 percent of American wealth and Wall Street dictated the course of the American economy." A century-old editorial cartoon depicts the president firing a gun at a portly man with "The Trusts" scrawled upon the man's ample belly.

My 14-year-old son soaked this in with a laugh during a Thanksgiving weekend visit to the national park. "TR rocked," Tyler said. "Can Obama be the next TR?"

That is a question I've been asking myself since 2008 when I did a series of stories with a colleague of mine at The Associated Press about the presidency and the role of that office in these times of immense change. One of the series' shorter pieces, written in March 2008, suggested that Obama and GOP candidate John McCain had the potential to be "TR 2.0."

"We're living in an era of brutal transition not unlike the turn of the last century, when Teddy Roosevelt and fellow Progressive reformers helped lead an anxious nation from the agriculture era to the industrial age," I wrote at the time.

The transition from an industrial economy to the information age and a global economy is creating problems that TR would recognize: A widening gap between the rich and poor, decreased social mobility and a loss of faith in social institutions, particularly politics. Into that breach stepped Obama, a transitional figure who promised a new breed of  leadership that was bigger than partisanship.

He helped lead the country out of a financial crisis, ordered the assassination of Osama bin Laden and pushed through landmark health care reforms (with echoes of TR's agenda), but Obama's presidency is not nearly as transformational as Roosevelt's. At least not yet.

With voters as anxious and angry as they were at the dawn of the 20th century, it makes sense that Obama would travel to Osawatomie, Kansas, this week to draw a line from TR's presidency to his. On Aug. 31, 1910, Roosevelt delivered his New Nationalism address in Osawatomie, where he argued on behalf of a government powerful enough to regulate the economy and guarantee social justice.

"I stand for the square deal," Roosevelt said. "But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service."

Roosevelt called for a broad range of social and political reforms including a national health service, social insurance for the elderly, a minimum wage, an eight-hour workday, workers' compensation for work-related injuries, a federal income tax and the right for women to vote.

He railed against the influence of special interests on politics, calling for strict limits and disclosure of campaign donations and the registration of lobbyists.

Roosevelt lost the 1912 election after he bolted the GOP and created the so-called Bull Moose Party, running second to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. But many of the reforms he laid out in Kansas were adopted by Wilson and Roosevelt's cousin, Franklin Roosevelt.

TR thought and acted boldly. He was bigger than any party, a sturdy bridge to the new century. His policies were right for his troubled times.

The question today is whether Obama and his policies are right for these.

My post yesterday on the so-called super committee's so-real failure ("Shame On Us, Washington") drew criticism from the White House, its Democratic allies and some journalists.

Shame.

Shame on Republicans for a stubborn unwillingness to seriously consider tax increases.

Shame on Democrats for keeping a closed mind to significant benefit cuts.

"I would have anticipated that the president of the United States would have spent every day and many nights working with members of the Super Committee trying to find a way to bridge the gap, but instead he's been out doing other things. Campaigning and blaming and traveling. This is in my view inexcusable."

It might be, but here's guessing that Romney wasn't really hoping the committee succeeded.  Imagine if Republicans on the committee had agreed to raise revenue of any sort. It would bind the party to tax increases, forcing the Republican nominee to run against his own party and inking up a clear contrast with President Obama, who most certainly would close the deficit with tax increases and spending cuts. 

That's also why Obama, assuming he doesn't get the blame for the super committee failure, relishes the chance to cleanly say to the 67% of Americans who favor tax increases as part of a balanced approach to the deficit that Romney is too beholden to the wealthiest 1% of Americans to ask for more sacrifice from them.

Electoral analysts Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin of the liberal Center for American Progress will publish tomorrow a comprehensive demographic and geographic roadmap to the 2012 presidential campaign that political junkies of all ideological stripes will want to keep close at hand.

In their new paper, The Path to 270, the two correctly lay out, I believe, the critical dynamics that will likely tip the balance in both the Electoral College and popular vote next year. President Obama's biggest headwind, they argue, will be disappointment in his handling of the economy; his biggest tailwind will be ongoing demographic change that continues to bend the electorate in his direction.

After Obama's victory in 2008, I argued that he had assembled a "coalition of the ascendant": that is, he ran best among groups that were themselves growing in society, like minorities, the Millennial generation and college-educated whites, especially women.

Teixeira and Halpin draw on that concept to argue that the unbroken wave of demographic change makes it likely that these groups, which remain the most favorable to Obama, will constitute an even larger share of the vote in 2012 than they did last time. They project that the minority share of the vote will rise from 26 percent in 2008 to 28 percent in 2012, an increase commensurate with the average election to election rise since 1992 (National Journal reached a similar conclusion in its analysis, The Next America). And they project that college-educated whites will increase their share of the vote from 35 percent in 2008 to 36 percent in 2012. (Overlapping with both those trends, they calculate that 16 million more Millennials will be eligible to vote in 2012 than in 2008.) Whites without a college degree, the most solidly Republican component of the electorate, they expect to continue their generation-long decline, from 39 percent of the vote last time to 36 percent in 2012. (In 1992, when Bill Clinton was first elected, those non-college whites alone constituted an absolute majority of the electorate, 53 percent.)

Patches of blue sky are breaking out for President Obama in the true blue states.

Three surveys out this week show Obama opening substantial leads over Republican front-runner Mitt Romney in several of the mega-states at the foundation of the "blue wall": the 18 states (plus the District of Columbia) that have voted Democratic in at least the past five consecutive presidential elections. This continues a largely overlooked pattern evident in polling in several other "blue wall" states since mid-October - and suggests that it may be more difficult for the GOP to vastly expand the Electoral College map than the weakness of Obama's national approval ratings might suggest.

In this week's magazine, Ron Fournier and I write about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's counteroffensive to the flip-flop line of attack by President Obama's campaign. Romney's team believes it can make a credible argument that Obama is not a man of his word. It's an uphill slog, but it could diffuse some of the sting of the attack against Romney.

So here's Exhibit A: Yesterday, the Boston Globe published a big story that says Romney's aides purchased the computer hard drives when he left the Massachusetts governor's office and the server was wiped clean, making it impossible retrieve e-mail records from his administration. By 9:22 a.m., Romney's campaign had fired off a press releases with a headline accusing Obama of being "obsessed with secrecy.''  It charged: "From the very beginning, President Obama's administration has turned its back on his promises of openness and transparency.'' Four hours later, the Romney campaign was demanding its own set of email records -- any correspondence between Obama's top advisers and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick -- and accusing them of colluding on a "dirty tricks shop'' that produced the Boston Globe story.
 
Who you calling secretive now?

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this blog post misstated the newspaper that Jim Rutenberg works for. He works for The New York Times.

Oops. For the second day in a row, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is getting a harsh reminder that his post-Congress career as an influence peddler is a drag on his GOP presidential campaign. 

The administration's decision to cater to environmentalists by postponing construction of the Keystone XL pipeline is a clear sign of the dilemma. The president decided to punt on a job stimulus measure in order to placate parts of the coalition that elected him in 2008. Environmental sensitivities took precedence over job creation.

"Sometimes, when I brought friends home after school, my mother would overhear them remark about the lack of food in the fridge or the less-than-perfect housekeeping, and she would pull me aside and let me know that she was a single mother going to school again and raising two kids, so that baking cookies wasn't exactly at the top of her priority list, and while she appreciated the fine education I was receiving at Punahou, she wasn't planning on putting up with any snotty attitudes from me or anyone else, was that understood?"

President Obama's approval ratings are subterranean, his policies are anathema to a sizeable segment of the electorate, and personality-wise, he is so brainy and tempermentally reserved - the much-analyzed "coolness" factor - that he finds it difficult to connect with voters in the feel-your-pain way that Bill Clinton did.

There would seem to be no limit to the slices of the president that a clever Republican opponent could sink his teeth into. But his "privileged" upbringing? As someone in Texas Gov. Rick Perry's inner circle should have told him yesterday, that dog won't hunt.

Instead, the presidential contender went on Fox News' Sean Hannity Show and mused that Obama "grew up in a privileged way ... He never had to really work for anything. He never had to through what Americans are going through."

Survey results in New Jersey released Wednesday show both President Obama's residual strength in a classic coastal suburban state at the core of the new Democratic electoral map -- and why Mitt Romney may offer Republicans a better chance than his rivals of denting that fortress.

The Quinnipiac University survey showed that although New Jersey voters split only evenly on Obama's job performance, he led all four of the top GOP presidential contenders by substantial margins. In a potential 2012 matchup, the poll showed Obama leading both Rick Perry and Herman Cain by 23 percentage points and Newt Gingrich by 19 points. Only Mitt Romney held Obama to a single-digit advantage, and he just barely: Obama led him 49 percent to 40 percent. 

Romney, though, was the lone GOP candidate to hold Obama under 50 percent in New Jersey, and he did so by leapfrogging the president among college-educated white voters while the other Republican competitors lost that category by gaping margins. In 2008, Obama narrowly topped John McCain among New Jersey's college-educated whites, 51 percent to 49 percent, according to exit polls.

One of the most important moments of Mitt Romney's campaign came weeks before he announced his candidacy. In a gathering of political advisers and the once-and-future GOP presidential candidate, one of the consultants cleared his throat and said, "Governor, you can't win until you're not afraid to lose."

New polls released late last week in three behemoth swing states underscore a central opportunity Mitt Romney could provide Republicans in the general election-and the threat he could pose to President Obama.

In the Quinnipiac University surveys in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania released on November 10, Romney ran more strongly against President Obama than Rick Perry, Herman Cain or Newt Gingrich. One key reason: Romney performed much better than his rivals among college-educated white voters.

SPARTANBURG, S.C. -- Herman Cain sums up his world view in an all-too-simple phrase: "Peace through strength and clarity," he tells adoring audiences. "Clarify who our friends are and clarify who our enemies are."

Easy for Cain to say until faced at Saturday night's foreign policy debate with a question about Pakistan: Friend or enemy, Mr. Cain?

"Number one, he hasn't asked for it,'' said Jones, chancellor of the fundamentalist Christian university named after his family. "I had a reason for doing it the first time. I don't have that same reason this time.''

In a wide-ranging interview Friday afternoon in his stately office replete with mounted game, a bear rug, dark wood furniture and stained glass windows, Jones recalled why he backed Romney in 2007.

It's always hazardous to analogize too aggressively from one election to another. But the scale of the union-led victory Tuesday in the drive to repeal Republican Gov. John Kasich's anti-collective bargaining legislation in Ohio is bound to encourage Democrats who want President Obama to pursue a class-conscious populist appeal in 2012.

The referendum repealed legislation that the Republican State House and Senate approved without a single Democratic vote and that Kasich signed last March; the bill sharply curtailed the collective bargaining rights of public employees (including police officers and fire fighters, who are often exempted from similar Republican bills), and imposed cutbacks on pay and benefits. Overall, just over three-fifths of voters on Tuesday backed the repeal, in a prototypical swing state where Republicans swept in 2010.

On the day after Barack Obama's sweeping victory in 2008, veteran Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg described the modern Democratic coalition as diverse America and the whites who are comfortable with diverse America.

From National Journal:

CONNECTIONS POLL: Public Doubts Congress Will Aid Economy

ANALYSISThis Time Cain's Accuser Has a Name and a Face

That appears to be even more true today. The line between whites who are comfortable with the racial and ethnic change transforming America into a "world nation" and those uneasy about it increasingly looks like one of the most important boundaries of the 2012 campaign.

The big Pew Center for the People and the Press generational survey released last week offers powerful evidence on that point.  Overall, in the Pew survey, 47 percent of non-Hispanic whites agreed with the statement that "the growing number of newcomers from other countries are a threat to traditional American customs and values." Exactly 50 percent of whites disagreed.

Like an Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor survey released earlier this summer, Pew found that whites comfortable with the demographic changes now underway express very different attitudes than those uneasy about it on President Obama, the role of government, and the choices in the 2012 election.

Another ugly jobs report. More lousy poll numbers. This must be a depressing day for President Obama and his reelection team.

Well, not if they're taking the long view.

In my National Journal column this week, I touch on the debate among Democrats about whether President Obama's increasingly populist message - particularly his emphasis on asking wealthy Americans to pay more in taxes, both to reduce the deficit and to fund his jobs program - risks the party's support with white-collar white voters who have become increasingly critical to its electoral coalition.

In the column, Mark Penn, the initial chief strategist for Hillary Clinton's 2008 primary campaign and pollster for Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection, expressed the fears of those who worry that Obama will drive away upper white-collar whites who have moved toward the Democrats over the past two decades. By making higher taxes on the wealthy "such a big part of his solution, [Obama] is in fact just splitting his coalition," Penn insisted.

At a National Journal conference this week previewing the 2012 election, Geoff Garin, who succeeded Penn atop Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2008, expressed the opposite view during a panel I moderated. "This label of populism ignores the reality of the conversation that's going on and the positions that President Obama represents in the debate," Garin said. "You know, it's only about 75 percent of the public that supports a millionaire's tax. The Republicans can have the other 25 percent. We'll take the 75."

This dispute marks one of the critical strategic decisions Obama faces. It revolves around a straightforward question: will upper middle-class voters believe that Obama is targeting them when he talks about asking more from the rich, or will they share the sense that people on the very top rungs of the economic ladder have gotten off too easy and need to contribute more? Recent volumes of the United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection poll published in National Journal Daily offer some insight on the dispute-and some support for each side's argument.

There's a growing sense among strategists in both parties that two distinct, even inverse, sets of swing states now hold the key to close presidential elections.

One set includes the traditional battlegrounds of American politics: the metal-bending behemoths of the Rust Belt like Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. These states tend to be older, preponderantly white, and stagnant or declining in population.

The emerging battlegrounds are their opposite: fast growing, diverse, generally younger states across the Sun Belt. Many of these states were solidly Republican in the 1990s, but have grown more competitive as their population has tilted more toward racial minorities and socially-moderate college-educated whites.

President Obama won most of both groups of states in 2008, but his path in 2012 looks much more challenging.

• Oct. 3: University of Denver, Denver, Colo.
• Oct. 11 (vice presidential debate): Centre College, Danville, Ky.
• Oct. 16: Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y.
• Oct. 22: Lynn University, Boca Raton, Fla

The Des Moines Register's new poll showing Mitt Romney and Herman Cain tied for first place in Iowa confirms what the CBS/National Journal reporters embedded with the campaigns have been hearing on the ground for a couple of weeks now: Iowa Republicans are giving former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney a chance to win their hearts, even though the religious conservatives who dominate the state's first-in-the-nation caucus don't care for him on the issues and may not be entirely comfortable with his Mormonism. The reason?  Romney's electability argument is resonating.

More than ideological purity, it seems, many Iowa Republicans want someone who can beat President Obama, and Romney so far has made the most plausible argument for why he is that guy. Until recently, Romney spent little of his time or his considerable financial resources in Iowa, figuring that his best shot at an early-primary victory was with New Hampshire's more moderate and independent voters.

But the poll also contains some political intelligence that bodes poorly for a Romney win in Iowa.

I'm hearing echoes of Bill Clinton, circa 1996, in President Obama's relection rhetoric.

It starts with the fact that Clinton faced a skeptical electorate toward the end of his first term. Like Obama, voters trusted the incumbent -- even liked him -- but they felt that Clinton was ineffective. A bit over his head.