By NEIL KING JR. Updated March 4, 2012, 11:15 p.m. ET
Mitt Romney has regained the lead in the Republican presidential contest thanks to new support from conservatives, while evidence emerges that the bitter nomination fight has damaged the GOP candidates' standing among the wider public, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.
The resurgence of Mr. Romney, who hadn't led the Journal poll since November, lays the path for a potential matchup against a president whose own position is strengthening. President Barack Obama's approval rate hit 50% in the poll, its highest since last May, as more voters expressed confidence in the economy.
The survey, conducted as the GOP contest has taken up contentious issues such as contraception, found signs of fatigue with the process. Even among Republicans, voter interest in participating in the general election has fallen sharply since January, a rarity in an election year, while negative views of the GOP candidates have risen among independents and moderates.
Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducted the survey along with Democrat Peter Hart, said he could think of only one word to encapsulate the effect of the nomination fight on his party and its candidates: "Corrosive."
The process, Mr. McInturff said, "is sanding down both the Republican candidates and voters' feelings about the party."
The survey of 800 adults nationwide was conducted from Wednesday through Saturday, just days before voters head to the polls in Super Tuesday contests in 10 states.
The poll tells a stark good news/bad news story for Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who won seven of the first 12 contests.
On the positive front, Mr. Romney's standing among GOP voters has grown substantially. He had the support of 38% of likely GOP primary voters in the survey, his highest mark since launching his campaign in June and up 10 percentage points since January. His closest rival, Mr. Santorum, had 32% support.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Rep. Ron Paul were tied for third at 13%. Support for Mr. Gingrich has plunged by 24 percentage points since January.
Mr. Romney's rise marks the latest turn for a constantly changing GOP field. He last held a substantial lead in July, before being challenged by a series of conservative-backed rivals. In November, Mr. Romney held a mere one-percentage-point lead over Herman Cain. Mr. Gingrich, in turn, had the most support in December and January.
In the latest poll, Mr. Romney gained support among pockets of his party that so far had been tough for him to win over. His backing among tea-party supporters jumped to 35%, up from 21% in January, while his support among Republicans who call themselves "very conservative" nearly doubled, to 32%. He also saw a surge of support in the South, where Mr. Gingrich's own backing plunged to a third of what it was just six weeks ago.
Overall, Mr. Hart said, "Romney has done what he would have wanted to achieve in the last five weeks."
But the poll just as vividly illustrates the challenges Mr. Romney faces, even if he does well on Tuesday and continues to widen his delegate lead, as Republican leaders expect.
Not since the 1996 presidential candidacy of Republican Bob Dole has a party's likely nominee been viewed negatively by a plurality of Americans at this point in an election. Yet Mr. Romney's challenge in building a favorable image is steeper than Mr. Dole's was then.
The poll found that nearly 40% of Americans view Mr. Romney negatively, compared with 28% who view him positively, a gap of close to 12 percentage points. Messrs. Gingrich and Santorum suffer from even larger likability gaps. By comparison, Mr. Dole's gap in March 1996 was four percentage points.
After several widely publicized off-the-cuff comments that highlighted his wealth, Mr. Romney's image took a hit among independent voters, who gave him far lower marks than in January on whether he "cares about average people." While moving closer to capturing the nomination, Mr. Romney "hasn't been capturing the hearts and minds of voters," Mr. Hart said.
In a head-to-head matchup against Mr. Obama, Mr. Romney would lose, 44% to 50%, if the vote were held today, the poll found—little changed from January, but three times the gap from December.
Mr. Obama would beat Mr. Gingrich, 54% to 37%, and Mr. Santorum, 53% to 39%. An Obama-Paul race would be much closer, with Mr. Obama winning 50% to 42%.
Mr. Santorum continues to do well among conservatives, trailing Mr. Romney by just five percentage points when GOP voters were asked to pick between the two. But he is viewed negatively by nearly four in 10 Americans. In a general-election matchup, the poll found him losing to Mr. Obama even in the South.
The poll found Mr. Obama benefiting from an increase in support from white women, Midwesterners and white, blue-collar Americans. For months, Mr. Obama's approval among white, working-class adults had hovered below 40%, a level the pollsters said posed a danger to his re-election chances. The latest poll found that approval for Mr. Obama among that group had nudged up to 43%.
Six weeks ago, Mr. Romney edged out Mr. Obama among those most enthusiastic to vote in November. Now, the president is beating Mr. Romney by nine percentage points among the most enthused voters.
The poll found diminishing signs of economic pessimism. Some 57% of Americans think that the "worst is behind us,'' up from 49% in November, while 36% felt the worst was still ahead. "President Obama is probably in the best political shape he's been in since the first year of his presidency," said Mr. Hart. "If he were the prime minister of Britain, he would dissolve the Parliament and run for re-election in the next three weeks."
The poll found ebbing optimism among Republicans about their party's chances of beating Mr. Obama—a sentiment that wasn't shared by one respondent, Republican Jason Benjamin of Charleston, S.C."I'm optimistic that Obama will be a one-term president," said the 40-year-old carpenter. Currently a Santorum supporter, Mr. Benjamin said he considered Mr. Romney "kind of wishy-washy" but would back him in the general election all the same.
Pamela Kohls, a 63-year-old retiree in Rochester, Minn., was one of many Republicans who said they were dismayed by the lengthy and often messy nominating contest.
"I know it's part of the process, up to a point. But there's been so much bickering back and forth," she said. "Sometimes it's hard to tell who is telling the truth or stretching the truth."
The poll gave a mixed picture of Mr. Obama's efforts to require most employers to cover contraception in their health-care plans. It found wide support for the U.S. government requiring employers to offer free birth control coverage, with 53% supporting the policy and 33% opposed. But support dropped sharply, to 38%, when people were asked about the requirement applying to religiously affiliated hospitals and colleges, and having the insurer pay for the cost. The issue has sparked a partisan furor over the last month.
Catholic bishops have expressed anger over the contraception requirement. Nonetheless, Catholics held a favorable view of Mr. Obama's job performance, with 50% approving and 42% disapproving.
—Brent Kendall contributed to this article.
The Wall Street Journal / NBC News poll was based on nationwide telephone interviews of 800 adults, including a sample of 200 adults who only use a cellphone. It was conducted from Wednesday through Saturday by the polling organizations of Peter Hart and Bill McInturff.
The sample was drawn in the following manner: Individuals were selected proportionate to the nation's population in accordance with a probability sample design that gives all landline telephone numbers, listed and unlisted, an equal chance to be included. Registered voters age 18 or over were selected by a systematic procedure to provide a balance of respondents by sex. The cellphone sample was drawn from a list of cellphone users nationally, and respondents were screened to ensure that their cellphone is their only phone.
The data's margin of error is plus or minus 3.46 percentage points. Sample tolerances for subgroups are larger.
So far, the base of the Republican party has sent Mitt Romney a message: They’re not yet convinced that he’s their guy.
Tuesday, on the verge of his victories in Arizona and Michigan, Romney, in extraordinarily blunt terms, told the base how he felt about them [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDuA1yuQo6E (above, as embedded at source)]:
It’s very easy to excite the base with incendiary comments. We’ve seen throughout the campaign if you’re willing to say really outrageous things that are accusative, attacking of President Obama, that you’re going to jump up in the polls. I’m not willing to light my hair on fire to try and get support. I am who I am.
I must admit, I was stunned by this. In one statement he was able to label the Republican base as easily excitable, enamored of “incendiary comments,” and thirsty for “outrageous things” to be said about President Obama. I couldn’t have put it better myself.
If Romney continues this line of logic, I might invite him to guest write my column one week.
It’s not clear what Romney meant by “the base,” but one way to define it is by its most conservative components — people who describe themselves as very conservative, strongly supportive of the Tea Party and white evangelicals.
A review of available exit polls from the contests so far finds that Romney has lost these groups in a majority of cases (exit polls were not available for Maine, Missouri, Colorado or Minnesota):
Romney’s comments are not likely to go over well with these groups of voters and that could prove problematic heading into Super Tuesday. Of the 10 Republican contests on March 6 this year, six had exit polls taken in 2008. Of those, only one, Massachusetts, where Romney served as governor, has a white evangelical voting bloc that’s less than 40 percent of all Republican primary voters.
If those voters continue to be ambivalent toward Romney, he might be forced to revisit the idea of igniting his immaculate mane.
As is well known, even notorious by now, the Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently stated that he “almost threw up” after reading John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 campaign speech on the proper relation between church and state in American politics. Santorum has become the most highly visible face of culturally and politically conservative Catholicism as a result of this and other statements. A cradle Catholic myself, I was moved to re-read that speech and as a result I didn’t “almost” cry – I flat out cried. Cried in gratitude to J.F.K. and his speechwriter Ted Sorensen for being so transcendentally right and for erasing, with some 1,500 well-chosen words, a vile cloud of suspicion that had hung over our nation’s Catholics.
I was all of 10 years old and an altar boy attending St. Anselm’s parochial school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn on Sept. 12, 1960, the day Kennedy entered the lion’s den of the Greater Houston Ministerial Association of Protestant clergymen to deliver his speech. I of course knew precisely nothing about politics at that age, but the nuns who taught us, the School Sisters of Notre Dame, were heavily recruited from the Boston area and the excitement that one of their own was running for president had been fully communicated to us.
Nor can I remember, five decades later, whether my parents discussed that speech at the breakfast or dinner table or if the 50-plus boys and girls in Sister Mary Othilia’s fifth-grade classroom were apprised in any way as to what Senator Kennedy had to say. But what I do retain from that period is a powerful sense that we Catholics were finally and completely coming into our own as Americans and that a last barrier to acceptance was about to fall.
The election of Jack Kennedy as president on Nov. 8, 1960 was certainly the happiest day in the history of American Catholicism, in good part because it helped heal a deep historical wound we had suffered 32 years previously.
Both of my parents were the same age in 1928 that I was in 1960, and doubtless no more politically aware, when New York’s governor Al Smith, an Irish Catholic from the Lower East Side, ran as the Democratic candidate for president against the Republican Herbert Hoover. That campaign is considered by historians to be one of the dirtiest in American history, which is really saying something.
The Protestant religious establishment mobilized fully against Smith, and libels were spread [ http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/when-a-catholic-terrified-the-heartland/ ] that he would be nothing but the tool of the Vatican, a k a the Whore of Babylon, a sort of Roman Candidate inserted into the American polity to turn the United States into a Catholic theocracy. It worked.
Al Smith went down to humiliating defeat, with only 40.8 percent of the popular vote. And every American Catholic, particularly New York-based ones like my parents and their families, knew why this had happened. It rankled so badly that all those years later my parents would often bring it up in conversation.
Smith’s defeat was the uneasy subtext of the Kennedy campaign and the precise reason why the candidate had to make a speech, to Protestant ministers and well below the Mason-Dixon line where anti-Catholic prejudice was still strongest, to defuse the issue of his religion.
Kennedy didn’t just disarm a ticking bomb that would have derailed his campaign; he provided the template for dealing with one of the trickiest issues in American governance, the proper coexistence of church and state. For more than 50 years that speech has stood as the essential guiding statement of right thinking on this matter.
More sophisticated political scientists and legal scholars than I can parse Kennedy’ speech [ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16920600 ; video above, as embedded at source, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SsVpkh5yvE ] with far greater acuity and pinpoint possible weak points in its argument, but there really are no permanent and definitive bright lines demarcating church and state in American society, try as we might to outline them. The boundaries of debate on politics and religion are ever shifting, as new issues arise, and our thinking as a result must evolve to suit circumstances. (And why, pray tell, have we not heard from the Irish Catholic Joe Biden on these matters? He is, after all, the first Catholic vice-president in American history and is on record as having been inspired by the Kennedy campaign.)
Still, I know that what Jack Kennedy had to say on Sept. 12, 1960, to those ministers and its subsequent effect on his electoral fortunes was greeted with gratitude and pride in a culturally and politically conservative Catholic white ethnic urban enclave as an exorcism (if you’ll excuse the term) of the ghost of Al Smith’s defeat. For Rick Santorum, a white ethnic Catholic not to know all this or at least to appreciate it, well, it just makes me want to . . . cry.
Plaintiff In Landmark Anti-Obamacare Lawsuit Bankrupted By Medical Bills - You And I Pick Up Her Tab
Image via Wikipedia
Rick Ungar, Contributor 3/10/2012 @ 12:10PM
Oh, the irony.
Mary Brown is your average, 56 year old Florida resident. And while you may never have heard of Mary, her name is destined to live on in American history as a key player in one of the most important legal cases ever decided by the United States Supreme Court.
Mary Brown is a name plaintiff in one of the challenges to the Affordable Care Act —Obamacare—that will be taken up by the Court in just a few weeks.
Why Mary? When the National Federation of Independent Business was preparing their court challenge, the organization needed an individual to put their name to the lawsuit. Mary Brown fit the bill.
As someone who chose not to purchase health insurance —and felt strongly that the federal government had no business telling her that she had to buy it whether she liked it or not—Mary had become an active and outspoken critic of the law. As a result, she was the perfect candidate to be a human face on the challenge to Obamacare.
As it turns out, Mary is, indeed, a great symbol for the court challenges to the ACA—but not for the side she had in mind.
Last fall, Mary Brown and her husband filed a petition of bankruptcy seeking relief for some $55,000 in debts the couple had run up when they suffered a reversal of fortune in their auto repair business. Like so many Americans who have experienced small business failures during these difficult times, Mary could no longer earn enough money in her business to keep up with her bills and she needed a way out.
The thing is, among the debts listed in the bankruptcy filing are $4500 worth of medical bills—obligations that, presumably, would have largely been paid had Mary chosen to purchase health insurance, something she will be required to do come 2014 when the insurance mandate of the healthcare reform law kicks in.
Almost half of the medical debt run up by the Browns is owed to Bay Medical Center in Panama City, Florida. A spokesperson for the hospital [ http://www.latimes.com/health/la-na-healthcare-plaintiff-20120309,0,6657163.story ] had this say about their experience with the Browns and the many others who cannot pay their medical bills because they have chosen to remain uninsured.
“This is a very common problem. We cover $30 million in charity and uncompensated care every year,” “If it’s a bad debt, we have to absorb it.”
Of course, ‘absorbing it’ means that the loss will be passed along to the rest of us who do take responsibility for the medical obligations that, for almost all of us, are inevitable.
While the bankruptcy court will forgive Mary’s medical debt, taking Brown and her husband off the hook, this by no means suggests that the bills won’t be paid.
In fact, they will.
The bills will be paid by you and they will be paid by me. They will be paid by every American who takes responsibility for planning for their healthcare needs and, as a result, purchases health insurance in the knowledge that almost every one of us will need the coverage at some point in our lives.
The medical providers will pass along the losses suffered as a result of the Browns’ non-payment to the insurance companies by raising the prices the insurance companies pay for the services provided. The insurance companies will, in turn, pass along those increases to their customers by raising the price of our monthly premiums.
It is precisely this cost shifting away from those who will not take personal responsibility for covering the costs of their own health care and onto the rest of us that forms the very basis of the government’s argument as to why Congress acted properly and within the Constitution when creating the insurance mandate as there is a true economic consequence to most Americans when Mary decided to let the rest of us pay for her medical care.
Yes, Mary Brown will be remembered for her role in the war against Obamacare. However, it won’t be for the reason she intended.
As it turns out, Mary Brown, the named plaintiff in the case that seeks to bring Obamacare to an end, is the poster child for why the mandates in the ACA are so completely necessary.
Copyright 2012 Forbes.com LLC™ (emphasis in original)
Mary Brown, a 56-year-old Florida woman who owned a small auto repair shop but had no health insurance, became the lead plaintiff challenging President Obama's healthcare law because she was passionate about the issue.
Brown "doesn't have insurance. She doesn't want to pay for it. And she doesn't want the government to tell her she has to have it," said Karen Harned, a lawyer for the National Federation of Independent Business. Brown is a plaintiff in the federation's case, which the Supreme Court plans to hear later this month.
But court records reveal that Brown and her husband filed for bankruptcy last fall with $4,500 in unpaid medical bills.
Now, you might expect Brown to be a bit, well, chagrined at this turn of events. But remember, as Savage wrote, she "was passionate about the issue."
And she apparently still is:
Brown, reached by telephone Thursday, said the medical bills were her husband's. "I always paid my bills, as well as my medical bills," she said angrily. "I never said medical insurance is not a necessity. It should be anyone's right to what kind of health insurance they have.
"I believe that anyone has unforeseen things that happen to them that are beyond their control," Brown said. "Who says I don't have insurance right now?"
Who says? Well, Mary, your lawyer for one. Remember: She "doesn't have insurance. She doesn't want to pay for it. And she doesn't want the government to tell her she has to have it."
Oh yeah, that. Those lawyers, always running their mouths.
And for that matter, Mary, those aren't your husband's medical bills, at least not anymore. Now that you've filed for bankruptcy, they are probably our medical bills, aren't they?
Although it's not as though Brown is totally anti-government: The couple's Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition said her income was $275 a month in unemployment benefits.
So perhaps she intends to put that toward what she owes: "$2,140 to Bay Medical Center in Panama City, $610 to Bay Medical Physicians, $835 to an eye doctor in Alabama and $900 to a specialist in Mississippi."
Or maybe, as the story says, there's that other way out:
"This is a very common problem. We cover $30 million in charity and uncompensated care every year," said Christa Hild, a spokeswoman for the hospital center. "If it's a bad debt, we have to absorb it."
Although when the hospital center says "we," it means "us" -- as in you and I, the ones who do pay for health insurance. We absorb it, in higher premium costs.
It's called the free market, or "there's no free lunch." (It's also why a single-payer system such as Medicare would've been a better option than the law we've got, but that's another post.)
But it's also why the "individual mandate" requiring all Americans to purchase health insurance was put into the law.
Why that is so hard for Brown and millions of other citizens to understand is beyond me.
This isn't Charles Dickens' London: We don't have debtors' prisons. If Brown and her fellow travelers have their way and the healthcare law is ruled unconstitutional, many others will take the risk "of unforeseen things that happen to them that are beyond their control."
And if they get sick, and have medical bills they can't pay, then they won't pay. And neither will the Tooth Fairy, or the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus.
The rest of us will pay.
You see, Mary, the requirement that everyone buy health insurance isn't big bad government taking away your freedom.
This is even better than the revelation that Ron Paul's chief-of-staff didn't bother to buy health insurance and died owing $400,000 in medical bills -- much more than his estate was worth. The Republican poster girl to get their attack on Obamacare to the Supreme Court is also a medical bill deadbeat.
"Brown, reached by telephone Thursday, said the medical bills were her husband's. 'I always paid my bills, as well as my medical bills,' she said angrily. 'I never said medical insurance is not a necessity. It should be anyone's right to what kind of health insurance they have.' "
Other hilarious quote (from lawyers explaining why they chose the logic-challenged Brown as their representative plaintiff:
"Harned said. 'And candidly, it is not as easy as it sounds' to find someone."
Sorta like Joe the Plumber, who would have been a fine example of a small businessman oppressed by government regulation except that, as even a slight inquiry revealed, he didn't bother to comply with government regulations.
Let's hope that if the Republicans control the government next year, they apply more due diligence to, say, what's going on in Russia than they ever have to what's going on in their own party.
Most hilarious quote of all:
" 'I believe that anyone has unforeseen things that happen to them that are beyond their control,' Brown said. 'Who says I don't have insurance right now?' "
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