Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

G.O.P. ‘Super PAC’ Weighs Hard-Line Attack on Obama


A campaign playbook by high-profile Republican strategists.

By JEFF ZELENY and JIM RUTENBERG
Published: May 17, 2012

WASHINGTON — A group of high-profile Republican strategists is working with a conservative billionaire on a proposal to mount one of the most provocative campaigns of the “super PAC [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/campaign_finance/index.html ]” era and attack President Obama [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html ] in ways that Republicans have so far shied away from.

Timed to upend the Democratic National Convention in September, the plan would “do exactly what John McCain would not let us do,” the strategists wrote.

The plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/jeremiah_a_wright_jr/index.html ], whose race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign.

“The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” says the proposal, which was overseen by Fred Davis and commissioned by Joe Ricketts, the founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade. Mr. Ricketts is increasingly putting his fortune to work in conservative politics.

The $10 million plan, one of several being studied by Mr. Ricketts, includes preparations for how to respond to the charges of race-baiting it envisions if it highlights Mr. Obama’s former ties to Mr. Wright, who espouses what is known as “black liberation theology.”

The group suggested hiring as a spokesman an “extremely literate conservative African-American” who can argue that Mr. Obama misled the nation by presenting himself as what the proposal calls a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.”

A copy of a detailed advertising plan was obtained by The New York Times through a person not connected to the proposal who was alarmed by its tone. It is titled “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good.”

The proposal was presented last week in Chicago to associates and family members of Mr. Ricketts, who is also the patriarch of the family that owns the Chicago Cubs.

Brian Baker, president and general counsel of a super PAC called the Ending Spending Action Fund, said Mr. Ricketts had studied several advertising proposals in recent months and had not signed off on a specific approach to taking on Mr. Obama.

“Joe Ricketts is prepared to spend significant resources in the 2012 election in both the presidential race and Congressional races,” Mr. Baker said in an interview Wednesday. “He is very concerned about the future direction of the country and plans to take a stand.”

The document makes clear that the effort is only in the planning stages and awaiting full approval from Mr. Ricketts. People involved in the planning said the publicity now certain to surround it could send the strategists back to the drawing board.

But it serves as a rare, detailed look at the birth of the sort of political sneak attack that has traditionally been hatched in the shadows and has become a staple of presidential politics.

It also shows how a single individual can create his own movement and spend unlimited sums to have major influence on a presidential election in a campaign finance environment in which groups operating independently of candidates are flourishing.

Should the plan proceed, it would run counter to the strategy being employed by Mitt Romney’s team, which has so far avoided such attacks. The Romney campaign has sought to focus attention on the economy, and has concluded that personal attacks on Mr. Obama, who is still well liked personally by most independent voters surveyed for polls, could backfire.

Mr. Ricketts has become an increasingly active player in Republican politics through several political action committees, including Ending Spending. He has a son, Pete, who is a member of the Republican National Committee from Nebraska and a daughter, Laura, who is a top contributor to Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign. She has not been involved in her father’s political efforts.

The 54-page proposal was professionally bound and illustrated with color photographs, indicating that it is far beyond a mere discussion. The strategists have already contacted Larry Elder, a black conservative radio host in Los Angeles, about serving as a spokesman, and the plan calls for a group of black business leaders to endorse the effort. The strategists have also registered a domain name, Character Matters.

The proposal suggests that Mr. Ricketts believes the 2008 campaign of Senator John McCain erred in not using images of Mr. Wright against Mr. Obama, who has said that the pastor helped him find Jesus but that he was never present for Mr. Wright’s politically charged sermons. Mr. Obama left the church during the campaign.

Apparently referring to a Wright ad that was produced for the McCain campaign by Mr. Davis’s firm but never used, the proposal opens with a quote from Mr. Ricketts: “If the nation had seen that ad, they’d never have elected Barack Obama.”

The planning document is emblazoned with the logo of Strategic Perception, the political advertising firm of Mr. Davis, the colorful Republican operative who last worked on the Republican presidential campaign of former Gov. Jon M. Huntsman of Utah. Included on his “Recommended Team of Pirates” are the former Huntsman pollster Whit Ayres and the McCain campaign Internet strategist Becki Donatelli.

The document, which was written by former advisers to Mr. McCain, is critical of his decision in 2008 not to aggressively pursue Mr. Obama’s relationship with Mr. Wright. In the opening paragraphs of the proposal, the Republican strategists refer to Mr. McCain as “a crusty old politician who often seemed confused, burdened with a campaign just as confused.”

“Our plan is to do exactly what John McCain would not let us do: Show the world how Barack Obama’s opinions of America and the world were formed,” the proposal says. “And why the influence of that misguided mentor and our president’s formative years among left-wing intellectuals has brought our country to its knees.”

The plan is designed for maximum impact, far beyond a typical $10 million television advertising campaign. It calls for full-page newspaper advertisements featuring a comment Mr. Wright made the Sunday after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” he said.

The plan is for the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., to be “jolted.” The advertising campaign would include television ads, outdoor advertisements and huge aerial banners flying over the convention site for four hours one afternoon.

The strategists grappled with the quandary of running against Mr. Obama that other Republicans have cited this year: “How to inflame their questions on his character and competency, while allowing themselves to still somewhat ‘like’ the man becomes the challenge.”

Lamenting that voters “still aren’t ready to hate this president,” the document concludes that the campaign should “explain how forces out of Obama’s control, that shaped the man, have made him completely the wrong choice as president in these days and times.”

*

Storyboard: ‘Next’

The following is a storyboard for a five-minute film obtained by The New York Times. The film, titled “Next,” was proposed by Strategic Perception, a political public relations firm founded by Fred Davis. The storyboard provides a rough outline for a film highly critical of President Obama’s background and policies. It is awaiting approval from Joe Ricketts and the “super PAC” he finances.





























http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/17/us/politics/super-pac-storyboard.html

*

Character Matters PAC: Key Players


Joe Ricketts
Ending Spending Action Fund
Mr. Ricketts, a Nebraska native who founded TD Ameritrade, has grown increasingly active in politics. He is an advocate for cutting the nation’s growing debt and overhauling government spending practices. He is the patriarch of the family that owns the Chicago Cubs. He also owns a film company, a digital local news service and is the world’s largest bison retailer. His aides say he is using his fortune to take his biggest leap yet into politics during the 2012 election season, with two of his sons joining him in his effort to elect conservatives to Congress and help defeat President Obama.


Fred Davis
President/Founder, Strategic Perception
A standout advertising strategist in Republican politics, Mr. Davis is best known for attention-grabbing advertisements, including one in 2010 for the California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina that portrayed her primary opponent, Tom Campbell, as a “demon sheep.’’ Mr. Davis was on the presidential campaign teams of George W. Bush, Senator John McCain and former Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah.


Whit Ayres
Republican pollster
Mr. Ayres, a leading Republican pollster, has worked on several presidential campaigns and Congressional races. He most recently worked to support the candidacy of former Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah, who sought the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He is among the strategists who helped compile the plan presented to Mr. Ricketts.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/17/us/politics/20120517-founders.html

*

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/politics/gop-super-pac-weighs-hard-line-attack-on-obama.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/politics/gop-super-pac-weighs-hard-line-attack-on-obama.html?pagewanted=all ]


===


Whites Account for Under Half of Births in U.S.


The New York Times

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: May 17, 2012

WASHINGTON — After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the Census Bureau [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/census_bureau/index.html ] has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States.

Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on Thursday, while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history.

Such a turn has been long expected, but no one was certain when the moment would arrive — signaling a milestone for a nation whose government was founded by white Europeans and has wrestled mightily with issues of race, from the days of slavery, through a civil war, bitter civil rights battles and, most recently, highly charged debates over efforts to restrict immigration [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/immigration_and_refugees/index.html ].

While over all, whites will remain a majority for some time, the fact that a younger generation is being born in which minorities are the majority has broad implications for the country’s economy, its political life and its identity. “This is an important tipping point,” said William H. Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution, describing the shift as a “transformation from a mostly white baby boomer culture to the more globalized multiethnic country that we are becoming.”

Signs that the country is evolving this way start with the Oval Office, and have swept hundreds of counties in recent years, with 348 in which whites are no longer in the majority. That number doubles when it comes to the toddler population, Mr. Frey said. Whites are no longer the majority in four states and the District of Columbia, and have slipped below half in many major metro areas, including New York, Las Vegas and Memphis.

A more diverse young population forms the basis of a generational divide with the country’s elderly, a group that is largely white and grew up in a world that was too.

The contrast raises important policy questions. The United States has a spotty record educating minority youth; will older Americans balk at paying to educate a younger generation that looks less like themselves? And while the increasingly diverse young population is a potential engine of growth, will it become a burden if it is not properly educated?

“The question is, how do we reimagine the social contract when the generations don’t look like one another?” said Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, co-director of Immigration studies at New York University.

The trend toward greater minority births has been building for years, the result of the large wave of immigration here over the past three decades. Hispanics make up the majority of immigrants, and they tend to be younger — and to have more children — than non-Hispanic whites. (Of the total births in the year that ended last July, about 26 percent were Hispanic, about 15 percent black, and about 4 percent Asian.)

Whites still represent the single largest share of all births, at 49.6 percent, and are an overwhelming majority in the population as a whole, at 63.4 percent. But they are aging, causing a tectonic shift in American demographics. The median age for non-Hispanic whites is 42 — meaning the bulk of women are moving out of their prime childbearing years.

Latinos, on the other hand, are squarely within their peak fertility, with a median age of 27, said Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. Between 2000 and 2010, there were more Hispanic births in the United States than there were arriving Hispanic immigrants, he said.

The result is striking: Minorities accounted for 92 percent of the nation’s population growth in the decade that ended in 2010, Mr. Frey calculated, a surge that has created a very different looking America from the one of the 1950s, when the TV characters Ozzie and Harriet were a national archetype.

The change is playing out across states with large differences in ethnic and racial makeup between the elderly and the young. Some of the largest gaps are in Arizona, Nevada, Texas and California, states that have had flare-ups over immigration, school textbooks and priorities in spending. The nonrural county with the largest gap is Yuma County, Ariz., where just 18 percent of people under 20 are white, compared with 73 percent of people over 65, Mr. Frey said.

Perhaps the most urgent aspect of the change is education. A college degree has become the most important building block of success in today’s economy, but blacks and Latinos lag far behind whites in getting one. According to Mr. Frey, just 13 percent of Hispanics and 18 percent of blacks have a college degree, compared with 31 percent of whites.

Those stark statistics are made more troubling by the fact that young Americans will soon be faced with caring for the bulging population of baby boomers as they age into retirement, said William O’Hare, a senior consultant to the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore, on top of inheriting trillions of dollars of government debt.

“The forces coming together here are very clear, but I don’t see our political leaders putting them together in any coherent way,” he said, adding that educating young minorities was of critical importance to the future of the country and the economy.

Immigrants took several generations to assimilate through education in the last large wave of immigration at the turn of the 20th century, Mr. Suarez-Orozco said, but mobility was less dependent on education then, and Americans today cannot afford to wait, as they struggle to compete with countries like China.

“This is a polite knock on the door to tell us to get ready,” said Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “We do a pretty lousy job of educating the younger generation of minorities. Basically, we are not ready for this.”

But there are bright spots. Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, said the immigration debate of recent years has raised the political consciousness of young Latinos and he is hopeful that more will become politically active as a result. Only half of eligible Latino voters cast ballots in 2008, he said, compared with 65 percent of eligible non-Hispanic voters. “We have an opportunity here with this current generation,” Mr. Vargas said. About 50,000 Latinos turn 18 every month, he said.

And the fact that the country is getting a burst of births from nonwhites is a huge advantage, argues Dowell Myers, professor of policy, planning and demography at the University of Southern California. European societies with low levels of immigration now have young populations that are too small to support larger aging ones, exacerbating problems with the economy.

“If the U.S. depended on white births alone, we’d be dead,” Mr. Myers said. “Without the contributions from all these other groups, we would become too top-heavy with old people.”

*

Largest Generational Gaps in Minority Births
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/17/us/largest-generational-gaps.html

*

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/whites-account-for-under-half-of-births-in-us.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/whites-account-for-under-half-of-births-in-us.html?pagewanted=all ]


===


King’s Forgotten Manifesto

By DAVID W. BLIGHT and ALLISON SCHARFSTEIN
Published: May 16, 2012

New Haven

ON May 17, 1962, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an extraordinary manifesto [ http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/list?field_term_topic_tid=Second%20Emancipation%20Proclamation ( http://tinyurl.com/77n2y2c )] to the White House. Constructed as both a moral appeal and a legal brief, the 64-page document called on President John F. Kennedy to issue a “second Emancipation Proclamation,” an executive order outlawing segregation — just as President Abraham Lincoln had done with slavery a century earlier.

The civil rights era, like the Civil War, produced a wealth of great writing. But unlike King’s “I Have a Dream” speech or his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” which we remember for their visionary rhetoric, this extraordinary document has been virtually forgotten.

And yet the manifesto is a wonderful example of King’s close reading of American politics, as well as his understanding of the role that moral leadership, in this case through an executive order, could have on the American public. It’s a lesson we should take to heart today, when a deadlocked Congress stands in contrast to a president willing to take a bold stand on same-sex marriage. Americans have rarely explicitly voted for equality; history, through institutions and a few courageous leaders, has enacted it.

During the 1960 presidential debates, Kennedy had suggested that he would address equality of opportunity by the “stroke of the president’s pen.” Yet when civil rights activists pressed him on this promise, his political ties to white Southern Democrats proved to be a formidable obstacle. Indeed, it was the hold of Southern segregationists on Congressional committee chairmanships that prompted civil rights leaders to put their hope in an executive order rather than legislation.

King infused his executive-order campaign with the gravitas of the centennial of the Civil War and emancipation. “What we need to do,” he told Clarence B. Jones, his trusted legal adviser, “is to get Kennedy to issue a second Emancipation Proclamation on the anniversary of the first one.”

On June 6, 1961, at a news conference in New York, King explicitly invoked [ http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F00817FF395D1B728DDDAF0894DE405B818AF1D3 ] the memory of the Civil War: “Just as Abraham Lincoln had the vision to see almost 100 years ago that this nation could not exist half-free, the present administration must have the insight to see that today the nation cannot exist half-segregated and half-free.”

Mr. Jones assembled a team of legal scholars to compose a proposal, while King publicized his idea in churches, in newspapers and in the White House itself. During an intimate tour with the president through the Lincoln Sitting Room in October 1961, King paused to ask Kennedy for a proclamation “outlawing segregation.” Kennedy said he would consider it, and asked King to submit a draft of the proposal.

Two months later, King sent Kennedy a personal telegram from the midst of his protest campaign in Albany, Ga., again urging the president to prepare a “second Emancipation Proclamation.” The New York Times and other papers covered this developing story, even debating the constitutionality of such an executive order outside of wartime.

King and his lawyers, who now included members of the Gandhi Society for Human Rights, scheduled the debut of the document for May 17, 1962, the eighth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

The preamble, most likely written by King himself, referenced numerous cultural precedents of American freedom, including Bruce Catton’s popular Civil War books, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” the Gettysburg Address, Frederick Douglass’s autobiography and Kennedy’s own “Strategy for Peace.”

Citing hundreds of legal precedents, especially Harry S. Truman’s military desegregation order in 1948, as well as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and, of course, the Emancipation Proclamation, the document demanded that the powers of the executive office be used to eliminate all forms of discrimination.

“The time has come, Mr. President,” it declared, “to let those dawn-like rays of freedom, first glimpsed in 1863, fill the heavens with the noonday sunlight of complete human dignity.”

Kennedy balked, however, at the opportunity to issue the second Emancipation Proclamation and noticeably avoided all centennial celebrations of emancipation. While he did issue an executive order banning discrimination in federal housing in November 1962, and introduced an omnibus civil rights bill a few months later, the demands of the second Emancipation Proclamation were not fulfilled until President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Though King’s manifesto failed to spur a second Emancipation Proclamation from the White House, it was an important and emphatic attempt to combat the structured forgetting of emancipation latent within Civil War memory.

As we commemorate the sesquicentennial of the war, the legacy of the second Emancipation Proclamation lives on in a million conversations about the lasting meaning of the Civil War.

It also lives in our political agony over narrowly partisan doctrines of states’ rights and individualism, and over whether we are still a “house divided,” half-free or half-equal: in the right to vote, to marry the person we choose, to be educated, to have health insurance, to imagine immigrants’ dreams — to assume we have a secure and fair place in the modern social contract, which Lincoln introduced with those words: “then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

David W. Blight [ http://www.yale.edu/history/faculty/blight.html ] is the author of “American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era [ http://www.amazon.com/American-Oracle-The-Civil-Rights/dp/0674048555 ]” and a professor of history at Yale, from which Allison Scharfstein is graduating this month.

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/opinion/kings-forgotten-manifesto.html


===


(linked in):

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=72230084 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=72657890 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75672032 and preceding (and future following)