New England Public Radio

Republicans had reasons to cheer and Democrats to despair Wednesday with the upset special election victory in New York City of a Republican retired businessman who will complete the congressional term of Anthony Weiner, the Democrat who exited the U.S. House because of a sexting scandal.

Bob Turner, a 70-year old former cable television executive, beat David Weprin, a 55-year old, state assemblyman, in a district which had, until Tuesday, been reliably Democratic for nearly 100 years.

The election was being interpreted by both Democrats and Republicans as a fearful omen for Obama’s reelection chances. Republicans nationalized the race, making it a referendum on President Obama’s handling of the economy and Middle East policy.

In a statement, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) said:

“This clear rebuke of President Obama’s policies delivers a blow to Democrats’ goal of making Nancy Pelosi the Speaker again. New Yorkers put Washington Democrats on notice that voters are losing confidence in a President whose policies assault job-creators and affront Israel. An unpopular President Obama is now a liability for Democrats nationwide in a 2012 election that is a referendum on his economic policies.

While Democrats privately worried that much of what Sessions said might be true, senior party officials, at least publicly, downplayed what could only be seen as a psychically devastating loss for the party.

Following the loss, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schulz (D-FL), chair of the Democratic National Committee, demonstrated some of why President Obama chose her to hold that position. From The Wall Street Journal:

Democratic party leaders insisted the loss wasn’t a harbinger of things to come. “It’s a very difficult district for Democrats,” said Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, noting its Democratic margins there tend to be the second lowest of all the districts in New York City.

And that was despite Democrats having a 3-to-1 voter registration in the New York’s 9th Congressional District, which straddles the New York boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn. Also Weiner, who held the seat for seven terms, beat Turner by 20 percentage points last November.

It anything was capable of striking fear in the hearts of Democratic Party officials on Wednesday and in the days and weeks beyond, it was a sentiment expressed by a lifelong Democratic voter to a New York Times reporter:

“I am a registered Democrat, I have always been a registered Democrat, I come from a family of Democrats — and I hate to say this, I voted Republican,” said Linda Goldberg, 61, after casting her ballot in Queens. “I need to send a message to the president that he’s not doing a very good job. Our economy is horrible. People are scared.”

But special elections can have special dynamics which make such races harder to generalize from and this one surely had those. For instance, the district has a large number of orthodox Jews who apparently responded well to Turner’s charge that Obama was insufficiently supportive of Israel.

That Turner is a Roman Catholic and Weprin is an observant Jew apparently mattered less than perceptions of Obama’s Mideast policies, suggesting that religious identity was paradoxically and simultaneously less and more important in the race. Talk about your Talmudic riddles.

The Republican win in New York City came only months after Democrats celebrated an upset win of their own in western upstate New York. Democratic Rep. kathy Hochul defeated a Republican in what had been a reliably Republican district. That race was nationalized by Democrats to become a referendum on House Republicans’ controversial efforts to largely privatize Medicare.

Democrats may not have to worry about Turner for long. He immediately must start running for re-election. Also, his district is likely to be one of the two the state will lose as a result of the decennial reapportionment following the 2010 census.

While Republicans were able to score an upset in New York, Democrats were unable to pull their own upset in Nevada. As expected, Republican Mark Amodei easily beat Democrat Kate Marshall for the 2nd Congressional District seat vacated by U.S. Sen. Dean Heller when he was appointed to fill the seat left open when Jon Ensign resigned because of a sex scandal.

Copyright 2011 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry says he wants to be honest with the American people.

That now involves attempts to shelve the part of his presidential campaign playbook that had him just last week vigorously dismissing Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme.”

Good luck on changing that conversation, Republican presidential frontrunner Perry, what with seven opponents nipping at your heels.

The difficulty that Perry, and the party, face in trying to extricate their fortunes from his position on the 76-year-old program was on full display during Monday night’s Tea Party-sponsored GOP presidential debate in Florida.

When former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney pressed Perry on assertions in his recent book that the program benefiting more than 52 million old and disabled Americans is “unconstitutional,” the Texas governor insisted that he had no intentions of taking away an entitlement he once referred to as a “monstrosity.”

Romney took a few hits of his own for writing in his own recent book that a requirement that the program invest its surplus in U.S. Treasury securities is tantamount to defrauding Americans.

It may be troubling to the party, but it’s no mystery how its presidential conversation, occurring in the midst of an economic crisis, became mired in bickering over a popular program that is projected to remain solvent until 2036.

When the leading presidential candidate has a record of incendiary comments about an entrenched program that not even Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) would touch in his controversial House budget plan, it’s catnip to opponents.

Particularly when a recent Pew Research Center survey found that 87 percent of Republicans (and 85 percent of independents) believe that Social Security “has been very good/good for the country.”

Perry’s historic take on the program has become such a problem for his nascent but rocket-like candidacy that he took to the opinion pages of USA Today before Monday’s debate to insist that he wants to fix the monstrosity. Though he didn’t use that word. He also avoided “Ponzi scheme.”

That Perry took that moderating tack in advance of a debate sponsored by small-government Tea Party enthusiasts, a number of whom in the past have called for abolishing Social Security, leaves little question as to the backlash he and the party are facing on the issue.

It’s not that voters out there are blind to future funding issues the program faces. The Pew Center found that a majority of high-earning Republicans and those who identify with the Tea Party movement favor “reducing the federal budget” over keeping Social Security and Medicare benefits as is.

So, where does the program stand? Is it “on its last legs,” as GOP candidate Ron Paul, a Texas congressman, suggested during Monday’s debate?

Craig Copeland, a senior research associate at the non-partisan Employee Benefits Research Institute, says funding fixes are needed. And the Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds say that the financial conditions of both “remain challenging.”

Last year, the trustees reported, was the first since 1983 that Social Security’s expenditures exceeded its “non-interest income.” That means the program has to begin redeeming its trust fund assets from the Treasury’s general fund — to the tune of about $5 billion — in 2012, Copeland says.

The trust fund is projected to be depleted in 2036, drained by a weakened economy and big aging population, if the program is left unchanged.

“Just because the trust fund is depleted, doesn’t mean the program will end,” Copeland says. “Without changes to the program, it could still go forward, paying out 75 percent” of what the legislation has required, he adds.

“The payroll tax still exists,” he says. “It will still be a typical pay-as-you-go system.”

The program’s trustees this year called for “legislative modifications if disruptive consequences for beneficiaries and taxpayers are to be avoided.”

Copeland says, for example, that a two-percentage-point increase now in Social Security taxes has been projected to cover the program fully for another 75 years.

Ponzi scheme? Not so much, he says.

“A Ponzi scheme doesn’t have the ability to tax the next group of participants,” he says, “or to force them to be participants.”

“In the case of Social Security, there is money coming in every year, and, by law, people can’t stop contributing,” Copeland says.

It is with keen interest that voters, politicians and influential Republicans will be watching another Republican presidential debate on tap next week. And just where Perry, and his opponents, take the Social Security issue just over three months out from the start of presidential primary-and-caucus season.

As he was pressed Monday by Romney about whether he still believes Social Security should be ended as a federal program, Perry responded: “I think we ought to have a conversation.”

Romney, mastering the obvious, replied: “We’re having that right now, governor.”

Whether the party likes it or not.

Copyright 2011 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Stop Rick Perry.

That was the goal of the other Republican presidential candidates who came to the CNN/Tea Party Express debate Monday evening, to make GOP voters see the Texas governor and frontrunner for their party’s presidential nomination as less of a shiny new object and more as damaged goods.

By the end of the two-hour debate in Tampa, Fl., his rivals may not have knocked him out of the lead but they gave any Republican voters with doubts about Perry plenty more to fuel their concerns.

From his hostility to Social Security to his mandating of HPV vaccinations of 12-year old girls in Texas to how much credit he really deserves for his state’s economic growth, Perry had to endure repeated thwacks to his 11-year record as governor.

And because it was a debate co-sponsored by a group whose members are among the most conservative Republicans, Perry even drew audience boos when the discussion turned to his support of in-state tuitions for young undocumented immigrants.

Still, his determination to appear unfazed and even-tempered amid all the incoming fire may have impressed some viewers trying to discern his temperament.

Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who lost his frontrunner status to Perry, continued to attack the Texan’s opposition to Social Security, a line of assault Romney started at last week’s debate.

ROMNEY: … The term “Ponzi scheme” I think is over the top and unnecessary, and frightful to many people. But the real issue is that in writing his book Governor Perry pointed out that, in his view, that Social Security is unconstitutional, that this is not something the federal government ought to be involved in, that instead it should be given back to the states…

But Romney’s criticism of Perry’s Social Security stance was just a warm-up for attacks to come.

When the conversation turned to Perry’s controversial executive order mandating the HPV vaccine be administered to adolescent girls in Texas to protect them from the cervical-cancer causing virus spread by sexual activity, Perry was battered by Rep. Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum, the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania.

Family values voters are particularly hostile to the HPV vaccine which many argue sends young people the wrong message about premarital sex.

Bachmann and Santorum appeal to those voters, as does Perry on many other issues.

Indeed, Perry’s official entry into the race in August on the same day that Bachmann won the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa drained away much of Bachmann’s prior support from evangelicals and Tea Party activists.

The HPV discussion gave Bachmann, especially, a much-needed prybar to try and peel away some of those conservatives the GOP refers to as values voters away from Perry and back towards her candidacy.

Perry admitted his vaccine executive order was a mistake. But that wasn’t enough to placate Bachmann who was a more aggressive presence than she was at last week’s debate.

BACHMANN: I’m a mom, and I’m a mom of three children. And to have innocent little 12-year-old girls be forced to have a government injection through an executive order is just flat-out wrong. (Cheers, applause.) That should never be done. That’s a violation of a liberty interest. That’s — little girls who have a negative reaction to this potentially dangerous drug don’t get a mulligan. They don’t get a do-over. The parents don’t get a do-over.

But more than this, Bachmann made a point that others have also made, one that could be even more damning in the eyes of many voters than the mandate itself. She noted that the vaccine, Gardasil, was made by a company, Merck, who Perry’s former chief of staff served as a lobbyist.

She suggested the existence of a quid pro quo, saying the pharmaceutical company had given Perry thousands of dollars in campaign contributions.

To which Perry responded:

I raise about $30 million, and if you’re saying that I can be bought for 5,000 (dollars), I’m offended. (Applause.)

To some wags, this response had the unintentional effect of making it sound like the Texas governor actually had a price at which he could be bought, something north of $5,000.

Perry then tried to fuzz up the issue by saying that he saw the vaccine as part of the seamless culture of life he’s been trying to promote in Texas. It was a stretch. But matters were getting a little desperate at that point.

PERRY: Look, I think we’ve made decisions in Texas. We’ve
put a $3 billion effort in to find the cure for cancer. There are a
lot of different cancers out there. Texas, I think, day in and day
out is a place that protects life. I have passed parental
notification pieces of legislation. I’ve been the most pro-life
governor in the state of Texas. And what we were all about was trying to save young people’s lives in Texas. (Applause.)

Rep. Ron Paul got his licks in on Perry, too. During a part of the debate when Perry’s claims to have overseen significant growth of Texas’ economy were under heavy scrutiniy, Paul said his own Texas tax bill had doubled under Perry.

And not just that. He got off one of the evening’s best zingers.

Of the Texas economic miracle, he said:

So I would put a little damper on this, but I don’t want to offend the governor, because he might raise my taxes or something. (Laughter, applause.)

But even though Paul is often viewed as one of the spiritual fathers of the Tea Party movement, he wasn’t immune to being booed for his own unpopular views.

When he repeated a frequent Paul trope that the U.S. has invited terrorist attacks on itself as blowback to its actions overseas, some audience members lustily booed.

The stretch when Perry defended his record on immigration may have been one of the better moments of the evening for him.

True, he was booed by some audience members for being insufficiently tough on illegal immigrants by not wanting to build a fence and not taking a hard line against young illegal residents of Texas who seek in-state tuition rates at Texas’ public universities. Still, he didn’t waver.

PERRY: We were clearly sending a message to young people regardless of what the sound of their last name is that we believe in you, that if you want to live in the state of Texas and you want to pursue citizenship that we’re going to allow you the opportunity to be contributing members in the state of Texas and not be a drag on our state.

For the Obama White House, this may have been one of the most ominous moments of the debate. While Perry’s views on Social Security make him a dream candidate for President Obama to run against, the governor’s less punitive approach to young illegal immigrants differs from much of the rest of his party.

Democrats have counted on the general Republican hard-heartedness towards young undocumented immigrants to increase the Democratic Party’s appeal to Latino voters in 2012, helping to provide Obama the support he needs to win states like Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and re-election. Perry’s position on this issue, at least, complicates that calculation.

Jon Huntsman, who has been mired in the low end of the polls, tried to make the point whenever he had the chance, that he was actually a truer conservative than Perry or Romney on immigration and mandates, respectively. He repeatedly referred to his experience as Utah’s governor.

But he often came across more as gratuitously snarky than anything else. As when after Perry said, among other things, that he opposed a border fence, Huntsman said:

Well, first of all, let me — let me say for Rick to say that you can’t secure the border I think is pretty much a treasonous comment.

It was an allusion to Perry’s controversial comments about Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that came across as ill-placed swaggering Texas macho when the governor said it and a cheap shot coming from Huntsman.

Nothing that happened during the debate appeared to shift the dynamics of the race which still appeared to be a two-person contest between Perry and Romney.

In other words, nothing happened to set either Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, or Herman Cain, the one-time pizza company chief executive, on the path to the GOP nomination.

But these debates are participated in by those with an actual chance to get the nomination and those who see no downside to the kind of free publicity that comes from being on the debate stage, the sort of exposure that can’t hurt when it comes to selling books or speaking fees.

So as long as they continue to garner enough support in the polls to appear on the stage with Perry and Romney, Gingrich and Cain are also debate winners.

Copyright 2011 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Hard on the heels of last week’s Republican presidential candidate in which Texas Gov. Rick Perry made his first appearance, comes another gathering, this one hosted by the Tea Party Express and carried by CNN Monday night at 8 pm ET.

The debate from Tampa, Fl. will be going up against what many Americans consider a far more important event on the other side of the state, — the opening game in the Monday Night Football season which finds the New England Patriots squaring off against the Miami Dolphins at Sun Life Stadium.

The Patriots, led by the aging Tom Brady (he’s 34) are heavy favorites to beat the Dolphins whose quarterback, Chad Henne, had a habit last year of throwing the ball to players in the opposing teams’ uniform.

Not everyone has written Henne off yet. ESPN sports analyst Rivers McCown writes:

We’re not saying the Henne tale ends with him being an elite quarterback, but there is more bounce-back potential than you might think.

The notion of “bounce-back potential” actually has much bearing on the GOP’s Tea Party sponsored debate Monday, too. Because whether Mitt Romney and Rep. Michele Bachmann can rebound and by how much are critical questions for their political futures.

In a CNN/Opinion Research poll, Perry maintained frontrunner status, with a 12 percentage point lead over Romney, the prior frontrunner.

So one question going into tonight’s debate was, would Romney be able to change the race’s dynamic’s enough to regain the lead, to rebound, in other words?

Romney clearly believes Perry has left him an opening, with the Texas governor’s intemperate remarks about Social Security being a “Ponzi scheme” that make it far easier for his rivals to brand him an extremist.

That the debate is taking place in Florida, a political battleground state with the second largest number of Social Security beneficiaries, 3.7 million as of December 2009, behind California and ahead of New York, is one of those delightful ironies that makes politics so much fun to follow.

Because Florida has so many retirees and is a much sought after prize in the contest for Electoral College votes, Romney will have a strong backdrop for his argument that Perry’s beyond-the-mainstream views on Social Security make the Texan unelectable in a general election.

Perry won’t likely turn the other cheek to such an attack, however. One of his best lines to criticize Romney in a Tea Party-sponsored debate would arguably be to home in on the former Massachusetts governor’s health care law which, with its individual mandate, was the template for the federal legislation President Obama signed into law last year.

The Tea Party gained much of its momentum from its members opposition to the Obama law so attacking Romney on this would be in keeping with that recent history.

Meanwhile, Rep. Michele Bachmann’s fortunes, at least in terms of public opinion, have declined so precipitously that she was polling in the same range as Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain.

She’s at four percent while the CNN/Opinion Research poll placed both the former House speaker and erstwhile pizza executive, respectively, at five percent.

A few months ago Bachmann, a Tea Party darling, rode a strong performance at an earlier debate to strong double digit support that placed her right behind Romney in national polls and helped her win the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa.

But that was then. Much of her support has gone to Perry whose appeal to Tea Party activists has outdone hers.

So if she is to rebound, the question for her to be what can she possibly do or say? The answer appears to be that there’s very little she can do now that Perry and, to a degree, Romney are splitting her supporters.

Still, unless she has totally given up any hope of a comeback, she can be expected to be more aggressive than she was last week for which she was partly blameless since she wasn’t asked a question until about 15 minutes into the debate.

Copyright 2011 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.