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| Obama's campaign troubles concern Democrats - the day in US politics | |
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| 11am ET: Good morning and welcome to today's live blog politics coverage. Tom McCarthy here in New York, and the political winds this morning are carrying unease among Democrats about the Obama campaign: unease that the president's campaign is not recovering after two tough weeks, unease that the campaign message is muddled. Driving the conversation are a Washington Post piece, "Obama campaign rough patch concerns some Democrats," and an LA Times piece, "Obama's complex campaign message poses a challenge." | |
| We wonder how much anxious energy need be expended about the fitness of a campaign machine that roared past the Clintons. It's true that the president has stumbled on the trail recently, from David Axelrod getting shouted down by Mitt Romney supporters at an event outside the Massachusetts state house to the president telling reporters "the private sector is doing fine." | |
| But by far the most damaging news of the past two weeks for the Obama camp was the release of figures showing paltry job creation in May and unemployment notching back up to 8.2%. The numbers directly contradict the message Obama is seeking to convey, that he is leading an economic recovery. | |
| The numbers are also beyond the president's control. And this, perhaps, should be of the greatest concern to Democrats: the campaign can be as efficient and on-topic as it pleases, but in the end (all together now), it's the economy, stupid. | |
| Why are many small things sticking to Obama? Bad economy makes any POTUS=Velcro. Good economy turns Velcro to Teflon. | |
| — Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) June 13, 2012 | |
(h/t: @GrahamDavidA) | |
Alas, no gift ideas for the procrastinators out there. (PSA: Father's Day is June 17.) | |
| 11.55am: You know what's fun? Buying a president. Don't think it can be done? You don't have $20 billion. | 11.55am: You know what's fun? Buying a president. Don't think it can be done? You don't have $20 billion. |
| If you did have $20 billion, you could take the slightest fingernail of your net worth – one-half of one-tenth of 1 percent, say – and have a decent shot at making a difference in the presidential race. | If you did have $20 billion, you could take the slightest fingernail of your net worth – one-half of one-tenth of 1 percent, say – and have a decent shot at making a difference in the presidential race. |
| That's what casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who earlier poured $21 million into the campaign of Newt Gingrich, has now done for Mitt Romney. Adelson has given $10 million to Restore Our Future, Romney's Super PAC, according to the Wall Street Journal. | That's what casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who earlier poured $21 million into the campaign of Newt Gingrich, has now done for Mitt Romney. Adelson has given $10 million to Restore Our Future, Romney's Super PAC, according to the Wall Street Journal. |
| The moment has arrived: Just as America puts the finishing touches on a financial system in which a very small number of people get wildly rich while a very large number of people struggle to make ends meet, the Supreme Court has relaxed limits on who can give money to political candidates and how much they can give. | The moment has arrived: Just as America puts the finishing touches on a financial system in which a very small number of people get wildly rich while a very large number of people struggle to make ends meet, the Supreme Court has relaxed limits on who can give money to political candidates and how much they can give. |
| should we just start calling him President Adelson? | should we just start calling him President Adelson? |
| — Sam Youngman (@samyoungman) June 13, 2012 | — Sam Youngman (@samyoungman) June 13, 2012 |
| Not that Sheldon Adelson makes his money in the United States these days. His main moneymakers are his casinos in Macau. Evan Osnos sketched an Adelson profile in an April piece on Macau in the New Yorker: | Not that Sheldon Adelson makes his money in the United States these days. His main moneymakers are his casinos in Macau. Evan Osnos sketched an Adelson profile in an April piece on Macau in the New Yorker: |
| The son of a cabdriver from Lithuania, Adelson grew up in the Boston suburb of Dorchester, and ran a spate of businesses with erratic success—packaging toiletries for hotels, selling a chemical spray to clear ice from windshields—before his break, in 1979, when he launched Comdex, a computer trade show. He later bought the old Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, created America's largest privately owned convention center, and enriched himself with a signature strategy of pairing casinos with exhibition centers. | The son of a cabdriver from Lithuania, Adelson grew up in the Boston suburb of Dorchester, and ran a spate of businesses with erratic success—packaging toiletries for hotels, selling a chemical spray to clear ice from windshields—before his break, in 1979, when he launched Comdex, a computer trade show. He later bought the old Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, created America's largest privately owned convention center, and enriched himself with a signature strategy of pairing casinos with exhibition centers. |
| More than a decade ago, he coveted Macau as a gateway to 1.3 billion Chinese nationals, and he successfully courted Chinese leaders in Beijing by emphasizing his influence in Republican politics. (He is a frequent donor to right-wing causes in the United States and Israel. He and his relatives drew attention in the Republican Presidential contest this year by giving $16.5 million to a Super PAC that supported Newt Gingrich, representing all but five per cent of the money that the group raised.) He told people that Macau would someday help him overtake Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in wealth. | More than a decade ago, he coveted Macau as a gateway to 1.3 billion Chinese nationals, and he successfully courted Chinese leaders in Beijing by emphasizing his influence in Republican politics. (He is a frequent donor to right-wing causes in the United States and Israel. He and his relatives drew attention in the Republican Presidential contest this year by giving $16.5 million to a Super PAC that supported Newt Gingrich, representing all but five per cent of the money that the group raised.) He told people that Macau would someday help him overtake Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in wealth. |
| Last year the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department began investigating Adelson's Macau operation for possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The casinos are suspected of being centers for money laundering, drug and gang activity. Osnos writes: | Last year the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department began investigating Adelson's Macau operation for possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The casinos are suspected of being centers for money laundering, drug and gang activity. Osnos writes: |
| In recent years, U.S. federal agencies, including the F.B.I., the Secret Service, and the Internal Revenue Service, have become increasingly familiar with Macau. In an elaborate smuggling investigation that ended in 2005, undercover F.B.I. agents infiltrated a ring that included a Macau citizen named Jyimin Horng, who was accused of importing into the U.S. millions of dollars' worth of counterfeit cigarettes, methamphetamines, and high-quality fake currency known as "supernotes," believed to originate in North Korea. Undercover agents wired Horng payments in Macau in exchange for fake bills at a rate of thirty cents for each phony dollar, smuggled in large bolts of fabric and boxes of toys. | In recent years, U.S. federal agencies, including the F.B.I., the Secret Service, and the Internal Revenue Service, have become increasingly familiar with Macau. In an elaborate smuggling investigation that ended in 2005, undercover F.B.I. agents infiltrated a ring that included a Macau citizen named Jyimin Horng, who was accused of importing into the U.S. millions of dollars' worth of counterfeit cigarettes, methamphetamines, and high-quality fake currency known as "supernotes," believed to originate in North Korea. Undercover agents wired Horng payments in Macau in exchange for fake bills at a rate of thirty cents for each phony dollar, smuggled in large bolts of fabric and boxes of toys. |
| Adelson has denied any wrongdoing in Macau or elsewhere, and neither he nor his surrogates have been charged in the federal investigation. | Adelson has denied any wrongdoing in Macau or elsewhere, and neither he nor his surrogates have been charged in the federal investigation. |
| He has just given Mitt Romney $10 million, which doesn't seem like so much, when you look at those Macau casinoes. Then again, it's only June. | He has just given Mitt Romney $10 million, which doesn't seem like so much, when you look at those Macau casinoes. Then again, it's only June. |
| 12.11pm: With his gleaming Macau casinos, Sheldon Adelson has billions of reasons to maintain good relations with the Chinese government. It's good business to be on good terms. | |
| Will the $10m Adelson just gave Mitt Romney's Super PAC convince Romney to tone down his tough talk on China? As Reuters points out today, Romney has been threatening to declare Beijing a currency manipulator from day one if he is elected president (despite the candidate's cuddly dealings with China in the past). | |
| Wouldn't a currency or trade war be inconvenient for Adelson? | |
| Or maybe the millions in campaign funds come with no strings attached? | |
| Just as founders intended MT @samsteinhp: $31 mil from Adelson so far is $2 mil more than Carter/Reagan received in fed funds in 1980 | |
| — Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) June 13, 2012 | |
| 12.22pm: We're listening to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee on the FY2013 budget request for the Defense Department. | |
| It's on CSPAN-3. | |
| The 2013 budget is subject to mandatory $500 billion cuts (over ten years) under last year's Budget Control Act.* Panetta has warned the committee of a "disaster" if the cuts happen. The AP has a report: | |
| Panetta said the automatic cuts "was designed as a meat axe, it was designed as a disaster. ... It would be a disaster." | |
| President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans agreed last summer on a $492 billion reduction in projected defense spending over 10 years. In a deficit-driven step, the budget agreement established a special bipartisan congressional committee to come up with $1.2 trillion in spending cuts. The failure of that committee set in motion the automatic cuts - known as sequestration - that would slash domestic and defense by $1.2 trillion over a decade. | |
| *Note: This post has been updated to clarify that the approximately $500 billion in Defense cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act would be spread over 10 years, beginning in FY2013. | |
| 12.28pm: Panetta has put a number on how much Pakistan's closure of ground routes to NATO forces in Afghanistan is costing the United States. | |
| $100 million a month, Panetta says. As Spencer Ackerman points out: It's month seven. | |
| The Washington Times: | |
| "The result of that is that it's very expensive because we're using the northern transit route in order to be to drawdown our forces and also be able to supply our forces," Mr. Panetta told the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on defense. | |
| Pakistan closed the supply routes after NATO airstrikes accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers along the Afghan border in November. Islamabad has demanded an apology, but Washington has refused, offering only an expression of regret. | |
| 12.38pm: The Appropriations Committee is taking a break. | |
| Time to look at how President Obama is playing overseas. Not well, my colleague Katie Rogers notes; unease about Obama's policies is reverberating abroad. Here's Katie: | |
| A new Pew report indicates majority confidence in Obama has waned in Europe and Japan, and confidence has plummeted from already small numbers in Muslim countries and in China. The report also shows that, for key allies of the US, focus has shifted from America to China as the world's leading economic power. | |
| Some additional global leadership trivia: Greece has only 7 percent confidence in German chancellor Angela Merkel, and Russian President Vladimir Putin is viewed negatively in most of the countries surveyed. Chris McGreal fleshes out the report here. | |
| 12.50pm: It appears that the Senate Appropriations Committee will not reconvene to hear more from Leon Panetta after all. The committee has adjourned. | |
| Panetta's main point was that deep Defense cuts mandated by Congress would be a "disaster" for the Pentagon and for US policy. The cuts would threaten troop supplies for Afghanistan, maintenance of bases around the world and upkeep of aging warcraft and equipment, Panetta said. | |
| Panetta said the US is now spending $100 million a month to ship supplies to troops in Afghanistan, since the closure by Pakistan of cross-border supply routes. That adds up fast. | |
| 1.00pm: Here's a lunchtime snippet from Katie Rogers, pulled from our recently built list of Top 50 Twitter accounts to follow for 2012: | |
| Pres Obama out to lunch with a couple of military personnel & two barbers to mark upcoming Father's Day weekend. | |
| — Mark Knoller (@markknoller) June 13, 2012 | |
| The move is part of a program the White House is calling "Fatherhood Buzz," an offshoot of the administration's Fatherhood and Mentoring initiative; the goal, as you might guess, is to use barber shops as a way to spread the message of responsible parenting. | |
| POTUS isn't the only Obama putting an emphasis on Father's Day ahead of the weekend. Michelle Obama debuted her Pinterest page today, and one of FLOTUS' three "pin boards" features family photos and a digital Father's Day card for the president. | |
| Source: Uploaded by user via Michelle on Pinterest | |
Alas, no gift ideas for the procrastinators out there. (PSA: Father's Day is June 17.) | |
| 2.19pm: We neglected earlier to link to Richard's list of the top 50 Twitter accounts to follow for Election 2012 news. The list is here. | |
| 2.49pm: JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon testified before Congress today, and he was the object of one of the most – what – vociferous attacks on heedless Wall Street greed ever to be brought by the elected representatives of the people? – no... more like, one of the most obsequious displays of political groveling ever broadcast. | |
| You may have followed Richard Adams' live coverage of Dimon's testimony; here's his wrap-up: | |
| Jamie Dimon will probably be happy with the way today's hearing went – apart from a few snippy responses to Jeff Merkley, the questioning was benign and in most cases the senators involved failed to probe Dimon on any weaknesses. | |
| On the possibility of further regulation via the Volker Rule, Dimon insisted that there was no case to answer, and intertwined his response with paens to America's deep capital markets, implying that anything that detracted from them would be a bad thing. | |
| So a bunch of senators testified before Jamie Dimon today bit.ly/LX1vs4 | |
| — Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) June 13, 2012 | |
| 3.32pm: When politicians lie. It's not quite as memorable as when politicians attack, but it's a dependable sideshow. | |
| Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been trying out a new talking point on the campaign trail: President Obama's health care law, Romney says, has been hurting small businesses. | |
| Here's Romney's line, as quoted by Michael Barbaro in the New York Times: | |
| "[Obama] said he didn't understand that Obamacare was hurting small business," Mr. Romney said. "You have to scratch your head about that." | |
| One person who found himself scratching his head was Washington Post writer Jonathan Bernstein. This morning Bernstein decided to nail down what foundation, if any, Romney had for the line. | |
| It turns out the line was based on a radio interview Obama did in Iowa in which a host told the president that a local business closed "as a direct result" of the health care law. | |
| "That's the point that Obama looked totally puzzled," Bernstein writes, "and said that it was 'gonna be hard to explain' given that the Affordable Care Act hasn't done anything to small businesses so far." | |
| Now Doug Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, has weighed in on whether the health care law is hurting small businesses. Nonsense, he said. Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo reports: | |
| "We don't think that the health care law is having a significant impact on the economy today," Elmendorf told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast roundtable Wednesday. | |
| But Bernstein has the kicker. The local business the Iowa radio host said had closed "as a direct result" of the health care law? It didn't actually close: | |
| ...the jobs weren't lost at all; they were moved from Iowa to Wisconsin.... What we have here is a claim that a company relocated from Iowa to Wisconsin because of unspecified "direct" effects of the health law. Obama is puzzled because the story he's been told can't possibly be true. | |
| 4.07pm: The Obama campaign has produced a video pushing back against the Romney accusation that the president is "out of touch" with the average American. | |
| Hat tip to McKay Coppins, who tweets, "I'm pretty sure every single clip in this Obama campaign ad is out of context." | |
| Here's a question: Why is Mitt Romney seeming like a more self-assured and capable politician now, with the general election fundamentally underway, than he did during the primaries? Rick Santorum's moments of irresistible charisma notwithstanding, no primary opponent of Romney's can hold a candle to Obama as a campaigner. So why does Romney look better up against Obama than he did up against Santorum? | |
| Maybe it's the peer effect by which competitors adjust to the level of competition. Maybe Romney has just improved. Maybe he's enjoying a string of luck with no embarrassing on-camera gaffes or moments of trademark awkwardness. | |
| What do you think? | |
| 4.18pm: Former presidential candidate John Edwards will not be retried on charges that he violated campaign finance laws. Last month a North Carolina jury found Edwards not guilty on one such charge. Jurors couldn't reach a decision on five other counts. | |
| #BreakingNews: Justice Department drops John Edwards prosecution | |
| — POLITICO (@politico) June 13, 2012 | |
| 4.27pm: The Justice Department has released a statement on why it is dropping its case against John Edwards. NPR has the statement issued by Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. | |
| Breuer said prosecutors brought their best game last month: | |
| "We knew that this case – like all campaign finance cases – would be challenging. But it is our duty to bring hard cases when we believe that the facts and the law support charging a candidate for high office with a crime. Last month, the government put forward its best case against Mr. Edwards, and I am proud of the skilled and professional way in which our prosecutors from the Criminal Division's Public Integrity Section and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina conducted this trial. The jurors could not reach a unanimous verdict on five of the six counts of the indictment, however, and we respect their judgment. In the interest of justice, we have decided not to retry Mr. Edwards on those counts." | |
| 4.39pm: Click through for POTUS POV. Kind of scary if you ask us. | |
| Picture of the Day: Being president tpm.ly/KVzqDG | |
| — Talking Points Memo (@TPM) June 13, 2012 | |
| 4.53pm: Oh bother. The Daily with breaking cufflinks news: | |
| Jamie Dimon weathered protesters and questioning at a Senate Banking Committee hearing today about JPMorgan's $2 billion in trading losses — armed with cufflinks that appear to be inscribed with the presidential seal. | |
| Click through for a look at the cheeky links. | |
| Congress calls in a titan of Wall Street to explain startlingly risky behavior that down the line could cost taxpayers even more hundreds of billions of dollars. Dimon's words were contrite. But his jewelry said: Who's the Boss? | |
| But no one who watched the senators falling over themselves to praise Dimon's inspired leadership and thank him for gracing the Hill with his presence was left with any doubt about who the boss is. (h/t: @GrahamDavidA) | |
| 5.33pm: John Edwards' daughter, Cate, who appeared with him daily at his North Carolina trial, is on Twitter. | |
| Big sigh of relief. Ready to move forward with life. | |
| — Cate Edwards (@Cate_Edwards) June 13, 2012 | |
| 6.00pm: We're going to wind down our live blog coverage of the day in politics. Here's a summary of the latest developments: | |
| • The Obama campaign sought to dispel the impression that it has lost direction by hitting Mitt Romney with a new video. The video turns Romney's accusation that Obama is out of touch against the Republican. | |
| • The Justice Department announced it is dropping its campaign finance case against John Edwards. | |
| • Defense Secretary Leon Panetta testified that the half-trillion in cuts to the defense budget over the next ten years required by Congress would be a "disaster" for US defense. Panetta also said the US spends $100m a month on workaround routes into Afghanistan to supply NATO forces. | |
| • Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson gave Mitt Romney's Super PAC $10 million. It was nothing, really. | |
| • JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon told Congress he took full responsibility for billions in losses at his bank and the anarchic trading culture that produced them. Congress thanked him for his time. |