CQ Roll Call Daily Briefing: Blue Booklet Value
THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama’s amped-up itinerary — rallies in three battleground states over 13 hours — illustrates just how frenetic the final fortnight of this way-too-close-to-call presidential race is going to be.
“You can take a videotape of things I said 10 or 12 years ago and I’m the same guy,” the president said a few minutes ago at his first stop, at the Mississippi Valley Fairgrounds in Davenport, where he posted one of his best showings when he carried Iowa last time. (The state is now a dead heat.) His second event is at 5 (D.C. time) in a park in downtown Denver, where he needs a big turnout (and a 3-to-1 margin like the one he had in 2008) if he’s going to carry Colorado’s 9 electoral votes. (It’s also a dead heat.) Obama’s next stop is Los Angeles, where he’ll stay just long enough to tape his third appearance as president on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.” After the third stump speech of the day — in a park well after dark in downtown Las Vegas — Air Force One will take off on a red-eye to Tampa. (Biden’s in Ohio for a third straight day, with a rally within the hour at the high school in up-for-grabs Marion, an aging industrial town.)
THE CHALLENGERS: The GOP ticket is shadowing its rivals in three of the same four battlegrounds. Although the state’s 6 EVs seem to be slipping from his can-get list, Romney is flying back to Nevada for his second rally in 20 hours — at 2:45 (D.C. time) in the 7,000-seat arena in Reno. Five hours later he’s due at an airport rally in Cedar Rapids, part of an effort to keep Iowa’s 6 EVs in play by holding down Democratic margins there. Then it’s off to another airport rally — in time for the late local news in Ohio’s biggest municipal battleground, Cincinnati. (Like the other ticket’s running mate, Ryan is spending all day in Ohio — with a mid-afternoon rally at Cleveland State.)
THE HOUSE AND SENATE: Neither is in session; the lame duck begins in 20 days.
NO AUDIENCE HERE: Congressional aides, corporate lobbyists and interest groups are hardly clamoring to get their hands on copies of the 20-page booklet being rushed into print by the Obama campaign, which is billed as the final pre-election word on the president’s plans for the next four years. That’s because almost no one on the Hill, on K Street or in the think tanks thinks there’s anything new to learn from the mini-manifesto — or that its bullet points really reveal which stymied policies from the past four years would be resurrected as part of a second-term legislative program.
The blue book — 3.5 million copies of which are supposed to be distributed by the weekend across the nine battleground states — is essentially a better-production-values recapitulation of the agenda Obama laid out in surprisingly exhaustive detail during his acceptance speech in Charlotte seven weeks ago. It calls for federal grants to help school districts hire 100,000 new teachers, an accelerated investment in roads and bridges and mass transit, tax breaks for families that create jobs, tax cuts to middle-class families and his prescriptions for a “balanced approach” (i.e. higher taxes for the rich) to reduce the deficit $4 trillion over the next decade.
But if the voters choose Obama and also to continue split control of the House and Senate — a congressional divide that looks more and more likely to be perpetuated by the day — then much of the plan may well be discarded relatively early on, as an acknowledgment that ideas he could not sell in the past two years probably aren’t worth pursuing at the Capitol in the next two years, either, especially because if the president wins it will be by a relatively narrow margin that will hardly shout out “mandate.” And so, as much as anything, the booklet — which is being totally derided today by Republicans — would probably end up being remembered in a second Obama administration as something of a head fake, a move designed more than anything to help get out the vote and to sway a relatively narrow group of voters who are undecided because they have not yet tuned in.
Instead, a president who hates to be pinned down (especially under duress from his persistent opponent) is likelier to come up with an alternative agenda that he would not roll out in detail before early in the new year — one designed to produce some sort of as-yet-unrevealed signature achievement (beyond a walk back from the fiscal cliff) in the relatively small window Obama has for legislative triumphs before the fall of next year, when the posturing for the 2014 midterm election will move into high gear.
THE ‘R’ WORD: The Senate Republican leadership raced to Richard Mourdock’s side this morning, while the Romney campaign gave him as wide a berth as possible.
The reasons, both for the approach and the avoidance, are easy to understand. McConnell has a much smaller chance of becoming majority leader, and John Cornyn has a slimmer shot at being labeled a campaign maestro, if the Indiana seat flips to the Democrats. And perhaps the only way to prevent that from happening is for the GOP to launch an immediate and all-out spin control effort to change the narrative about the state treasurer’s comments last night on rape, pregnancy and God’s omnipotence. The presidential candidate, by contrast, is absolutely counting on Indiana’s 11 electoral votes as part of his base — and on keeping his gender gap nationally in the single digits — and so it’s imperative that he disavow what Mourdock seemed to say and create as much distance from the going-viral contretemps as possible.
The Romney camp may have the tougher task. “Gov. Romney disagrees with Richard Mourdock’s comments, and they do not reflect his views,” spokeswoman Andrea Saul said last night. But just last week, he agreed to put his Hoosier coattails (he’s performing about 10 points better than Mourdock in state polls) to work for the Senate candidate, and this week the airwaves have been filled with Romney offering a strong endorsement of Mourdock. The spot is all about his fiscal conservatism, however. (Obama campaign spokesman Jen Psaki derided Mourdock’s comments today as “outrageous and demeaning to women,” and said it was “perplexing” Romney hasn’t demanded the ad be taken down.)
Even if Romney agrees to pull the spot, it will live on forever in cyberspace — and independent groups backing Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly have already begun splicing the governor’s testimonial with what Mourdock said last night near the end of their final debate: “I’ve struggled with it myself for a long time,” he said, his voice cracking as he discussed his view that abortion should be permitted only to save the pregnant woman’s life. “But I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And, I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”
The remark immediately drew comparisons to the comments Rep. Todd Akin made about pregnancies resulting from “legitimate rape” at the outset of his general election Senate campaign in Missouri — remarks that have turned him from front-runner to underdog against Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill. But unlike Akin — who has apologized for but never fully disavowed what he said and has continued to run an unabashedly hard-right campaign — Mourdock sought to clarify his comments as soon as the debate ended. And in the days ahead, he plans to continue his strategy of abandoning the tea-party posturing that propelled him past Dick Lugar in the primary and embracing a much more centrist and conciliatory tone. “Are you trying to suggest that somehow I think God ordained or pre-ordained rape?” he said at a news conference. “No, I don’t believe that. Anyone who would suggest that is, that’s a sick and twisted; no, no that’s not even close to what I said. What I said is God creates life.”
Cornyn, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, came to his not-my-first-choice candidate’s defense in a statement this morning (which also noted that Donnelly generally opposes abortion rights). “Life is a gift from God,” he said. “To try and construe his words as anything other than a restatement of that belief is irresponsible and ridiculous.”
MOVING UNITS: Sales of new homes jumped 5.7 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted 389,000, which was 21,000 more houses and condos than in August and the highest level since April 2010, when sales were pumped up by a short-lived federal homebuyer tax credit. Today’s Commerce Department report offers more evidence that the housing recovery is for real, which would mean a lackluster economy may be becoming less so. Other recent reports have shown a steady and consistent increase in home prices, monthly housing starts at their fastest pace in more than four years and an increase in sales of previously occupied homes. All those positive indicators are related to the existence of the lowest mortgage prices in decades; the average rate on a 30-year fixed has been below 4 percent all year.
FOR THE LOVE OF IT: Congressional aides love their work and think what they do is important. They just wish they could spend a few hours less each week in their Hill cubicles, because they fear burnout and the temptations of what they view as a cushier life in the private sector.
That’s the bottom line of a new study out today by the nonpartisan Congressional Management Foundation, based on a survey of more than 1,400 House and Senate aides during the August recess. It found that 53 hours is the average workweek for a congressional staffer in Washington, and almost three in five of those polled said they believed they’d have to put in less time at the office in a comparable job outside government. Only one in four staffers said they were satisfied with the work-life balance their jobs allowed, but only two in five said they were ready to leave the Hill in search of a better balance. While three-quarters said the “meaningfulness of their job” was important to them, a minority 47 percent said they were “very satisfied” with their office environments.
CMF executive director Brad Fitch said the numbers were not all that different from past surveys — suggesting that efforts to create more flexible hours and telecommuting options for staffers haven’t made the Hill work culture fundamentally better, but deepening gridlock and intensifying partisanship haven’t necessarily made the situation worse, either. “Congress is a difficult place, with an expectation that you have to always be at your desk,” he said. “Nothing’s really changed.”
HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Two Californians in tough fights for re-election to the House, Democrat Brad Sherman (58) and Republican Mary Bono Mack (51), and two Democrats without political worry this fall: Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon (56) and Rep. José Serrano of the Bronx (69).
— David Hawkings, editor
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