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On January 21, Crugar started a Facebook page called “African Americans for Mitt Romney,” and its tagline reads, “Gathering African-American support for a real job creator — Mitt Romney!” The page also charts Romney’s professional and personal successes, while serving as a tool to rally the Black community behind the Republican party:

“I think more people of my race should be Republican because I believe the Republican Party has been looking out for black people a whole lot.”

As the president of the Republican club at his college, Crugar doesn’t mind being the lone Black person at Republican events, “When I go to any Republican event I’m treated like a regular Republican and everyone is welcome. I don’t get any funny looks, like, ‘What are you doing here? We haven’t seen one of you in a long time.’ Anytime I speak with them, they like my presence there.”

And to Cruger, the only reason the majority of Black people even supported President Barack Obama is “because he was Black.”

Right.

While it is indeed positive that Cruger is taking a leadership role in the political process, it is difficult to overlook how almost all of the GOP presidential candidates — as well as much of the wider GOP party — have, at one time or another, disparaged and insulted Black people or clearly hung our issues out to dry.

Michele Bachmann criticized Black farmers for receiving their long-overdue settlement, calling the judgment “modern-day reparations”:

“When money is diverted to inefficient projects, like the [North Carolina farmer Timothy] Pigford project, where there seems to be proof-positive of fraud, we can’t afford $2 billion in potentially fraudulent claims when that money can be used to benefit the people along the Mississippi River and the Missouri River.”

Bachmann conveniently ignored the fact that the majority of Black farmers in this country had been discriminated against for decades, while their White counterparts were given the government assistance needed to flourish.

And even though Newt Gingrich just announced that he would be suspending his run for the president, his campaign was not without its noteworthy insults. At the beginning of this year, Gingrich took  it upon himself to tell a New Hampshire audience that he wished to attend the next NAACP National Convention to lecture Blacks on welfare.

According to Slate journalist Dave Weigel, who tweeted Gingrich’s remarks at the event, this is what the ethically compromised candidate had to say:

And who could forget the tactful Rick Santorum? He thought it would be clever to pick up Gingrich’s hackneyed welfare thread by telling an Iowa crowd that he didn’t want to improve our lives with welfare:

“I don’t want to make Black people’s lives better by giving them other people’s money, I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn their money and provide for themselves and their families.”

Because, obviously, we don’t have the knowledge base to know how to do that for ourselves.

The most-memorable moment of Santorum’s laughable pitch for commander-in-chief, though, was, when talking with a Wisconsin crowd, he called President Obama a “government n*gga.“

Again, it is admirable that Cruger is interested in being involved in the political process, but to ignore all of the overt jabs the Republican party has taken against Black people is not only foolish but dehumanizing. I won’t be joining Team GOP anytime soon. I think they have, for the most part, made it exceedingly clear how they feel about African Americans, and something tells me that Cruger needs to take a hint.

Good luck with that, Cruger.

What do you think?

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In a blistering election-year critique, Obama sought to present himself to voters as the protector of the middle class and the leader of a Democratic Party that is willing to compromise in Washington. He singled out the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, Mitt Romney, for criticism and more broadly said Republicans had shifted from any reasonable debate on health care, debt reduction and the environment.

Republicans “will brook no compromise,” Obama told news executives at the annual meeting of The Associated Press.

He cited a Republican presidential debate late last year when the entire field rejected the prospect of $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases as a means to lower the debt.

“Think about that. Ronald Reagan, who as I recall was not accused of being a tax-and-spend socialist, understood repeatedly that when the deficit started to get out of control that for him to make a deal he would have to propose both spending cuts and tax increases,” Obama said. “He did it multiple times. He could not get through a Republican primary today.”

Republicans called Obama’s remarks a partisan attempt to cover up broken pledges to cut the federal deficit in half, curb spending and make tough choices to reform Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

“The president has resorted to distortions and partisan potshots and recommitted himself to policies that have made our country’s debt crisis worse,” said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.

Andrea Saul, a Romney spokeswoman, said that after the past three years, “the last thing President Obama is qualified to lecture on is responsible federal spending.”

Making his case for re-election, Obama said the nation must restore a sense of security for hard-working Americans and stand for a government willing to help those in hard times. The Democratic president blasted Republicans by name and said the choice between the parties is “unambiguously clear.”

Stirring anew the themes of his State of the Union speech, Obama said the central issue for the country is deciding whether it wants to give everyone a fair chance – with government as a tool to help do that – or whether it is content to let only the wealthy succeed.

Obama used his speech to paint his Republican rivals as protectors of a trickle-down economic philosophy that does not work. He spoke on the day that GOP presidential front-runner Romney was expected to move closer to seizing his party’s nomination as voters went to the polls in Wisconsin, Maryland and the District of Columbia.

Obama directly challenged Romney for embracing a $3.5 trillion budget proposal led by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin that was approved by the House last week. Ryan’s proposal aims to slash the federal deficit and reduce the size of government. It stands little chance in the Democratic-controlled Senate, yet Obama targeted it as a symbol of the Republican vision.

Obama even poked fun at Romney’s word choice. “He even called it `marvelous,’ which is a word you don’t often hear when it comes to describing a budget,” Obama said. “It’s a word you don’t often hear generally.”

The president said that instead of moderating their views even slightly, the Republicans running Congress have “doubled down” and proposed a budget so far to the right it makes the “Contract With America” look like the “New Deal.”

The Contract with America was the policy document that helped Republicans win the House in 1994 and propelled Newt Gingrich into the speakership. The New Deal was President Franklin Roosevelt’s plan for pulling the nation out of the Great Depression.

Yet Obama also sought to buffer himself from criticism that he is a supporter of big government.

Speaking to publishers and editors, Obama said: “I believe deeply that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history.”

Obama went into a lengthy, point-by-point critique of the Ryan budget, showing what he said would be a perilous future for senior citizens, college students, people with disabilities and many other Americans. He condemned the GOP plan as a “prescription for decline.”

“It’s antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it, a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top but grows outward from the heart of the middle class,” he said.

Obama made a separate call for economic fairness encapsulated by the “Buffett Rule,” arguing the wealthy shouldn’t pay a smaller share of their income in federal taxes than middle-class taxpayers. He said maintaining current rates or more tax breaks for the wealthy would mean “higher deficits” or “more sacrifice from the middle class” that would force seniors to pay more for Medicare and lead to college students losing some financial aid.

Republicans have said the new tax on the wealthiest Americans would push investors into sending money overseas where it would be taxed less. The GOP also points to congressional analysts who note the new revenue would be only a small amount compared with the projected budget deficits.

Obama’s focus on tax change has come as Democrats seek to bring attention to Romney’s business background and wealth. Romney is a millionaire who is paying 15.4 percent in federal taxes for 2011 on income mostly derived from investments. The top rate for taxpayers with high incomes derived from wages is 35 percent.

Asked about the fate of his health care reform law, his signature legislative achievement, Obama said his administration was “not spending a whole lot of time planning for contingencies” in the event that the law is struck down.

Obama said the nation’s high court has exercised “restraint” and “deference” to Congress in economic cases in the past and he expected the court “to recognize that and to abide by well-established precedents out there.”

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He also compared his opponents to the critics of the television and the automobile, in their opposition to using alternative sources of energy.

The New York Daily News reports:

“If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail, they probably would have been founding members of the Flat Earth Society,” Obama quipped.

“Maybe they would have agreed with one of the pioneers of the radio who apparently said, ‘Television won’t last. It’s a flash in the pan.’

“Or one of Henry Ford’s advisors who was quoted saying, ‘The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only…a fad.’ I can’t prove this, but I do not think that man got the promotion he was looking for,” Obama said.

All of the options – whether more drilling or increasing gas milage for cars to cut consumption – take time, Obama said.

Read More At The New York Daily News

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Santorum was victorious, as well, in a nonbinding Missouri primary that was worth bragging rights but no delegates, and he led in early returns from Colorado’s caucuses.

“Conservatism is alive and well in Missouri and Minnesota,” the jubilant former Pennsylvania senator told cheering supporters in St. Charles, Mo. Challenging his GOP rival and the Democratic president, he declared that on issues ranging from health care to “Wall Street bailouts, Mitt Romney has the same positions as Barack Obama.”

Returns from 58 percent of Minnesota’s precincts showed Santorum with 45 percent support, Texas Rep. Paul with 27 percent and Romney – who won the state in his first try for the nomination four years ago – with 17 percent. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich trailed with 11 percent.

Romney prevailed in both Minnesota and Colorado in 2008, the first time he ran for the nomination, but the GOP has become more conservative in both states since then under the influence of tea party activists.

In Colorado, with returns counted from 16 percent of the precincts, Santorum had 48 percent support with Romney at 22 percent, Gingrich at 17 and Paul trailing with 12 percent.

If the night was good for Santorum, it was grim for Gingrich, who made scant effort in either state. He ran far off the pace in both caucus states, forced to watch from the sidelines while Santorum boasted of being the candidate with conservative appeal.

There were 37 Republican National Convention delegates at stake in Minnesota and 33 more in Colorado, and together, they accounted for the largest one-day combined total so far in the race for the GOP nomination.

The victories were the first for Santorum since he eked out a 34-vote win in the lead-off Iowa caucuses a month ago, and he reveled in the moment. “I don’t stand here to be the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney. I stand here to be the conservative alternative to Barack Obama,” he told his supporters.

He had faded far from the lead in the primaries and caucuses since, and Gingrich seemed to eclipse him as the leading conservative rival to Romney when he won the South Carolina primary late last month.

While Romney throttled back after victories in Florida and Nevada in the past several days, Santorum campaigned aggressively in all three states on the ballot, seeking a breakthrough to revitalize his campaign.

He won Minnesota largely the way he did Iowa, dispatching his organizers from the first state to the second and courting pastors and tea party leaders alike.

Romney’s campaign moved swiftly to take the sting out of the Missouri vote. The state’s Republican Sen. Roy Blunt, a Romney supporter, congratulated the winner but noted the state’s delegates are still up for grabs. He said, “Mitt Romney has the organization and the resources to go the distance in this election, and I believe he’ll ultimately win our party’s nomination.”

And it was not clear where Santorum could exploit his victory. Aides have already said he has little hope in Maine caucuses that end this weekend, the next event on the calendar.

Paul, a Texas lawmaker, has yet to win a primary or caucus. He claimed credit for a strong second-place finish in Minnesota and said he was optimistic about his chances in Maine.

Romney began the day the leader in the delegate chase, with 101 of the 1,144 needed to capture the nomination at the Republican National Convention this summer in Tampa. Gingrich had 32, Santorum 17 and Paul nine.

Though the delegate total on Tuesday was high, the campaigning was a pale comparison to the Iowa caucuses or primaries last month in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida.

Television advertising was sparse; neither Colorado nor Minnesota hosted a candidates’ debate, and there was relatively little campaigning by the contenders themselves until the past few days.

The same was true in last weekend’s Nevada caucuses, which Romney won on the heels of a Florida primary victory days earlier. The same pattern holds in Maine.

Not until primaries in Michigan and Arizona on Feb. 28 is the campaign likely to regain the intensity that characterized the first few weeks of the year.

Then it roars back to life with a 10-state Super Tuesday on March 6 with 416 convention delegates at stake. Georgia, where Gingrich launched his career in Congress, is the biggest prize that night with 76 delegates. Next is Ohio, which has 63 delegates at stake and where early voting has already begun.

Santorum, in particular, was eager to seize the relative lull to redeem the promise of his Iowa victory.

He campaigned more aggressively this week than any of the other contenders, and he spent Tuesday hopscotching from Colorado to Minnesota to Missouri in hopes of nailing down at least one victory. Touting himself as a true conservative – a slap at Gingrich – he sought to undermine Romney’s electability claim at the same time by predicting the former Massachusetts governor would lose to Obama.

Romney responded by assailing Santorum as an advocate of congressional earmarks – shifting the criticism he had leveled at Gingrich when the Georgian seemed a more imposing threat.

In the hours before the caucuses convened, the front-runner sought to lower expectations.

“Mitt Romney is not going to win every contest,” Rich Beeson, the campaign’s political director, wrote in a memo for public consumption.

“John McCain lost 19 states in 2008, and we expect our opponents will notch a few wins, too,” Beeson wrote. McCain, the Arizona senator, won the Republican nomination four years ago.

In fact, Colorado and Minnesota were among the states that McCain failed to win, and he lost them to Romney.

In the four years since, the GOP has become more conservative in both. That posed a challenge for Romney, who runs as the Republican most likely to defeat Obama and is still trying to establish his credentials among tea party activists suspicious of a one-time moderate who backed abortion rights.

Two years ago in Minnesota, establishment candidates for governor were swept aside in the primary, and tea party-backed insurgents for governor and the Senate in Colorado won the party nominations.

In all three cases, Democrats won in the general election that fall.

Gingrich spent the day campaigning in Ohio, one of the primary states on March 6.

His campaign went into a downward spiral after he won the South Carolina primary in an upset. The former speaker was routed in the Florida primary to Romney, then finished a distant second in Nevada over the weekend.

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Republican supporters said their measure, which would freeze federal worker wages through 2013, would save taxpayers $26 billion. It would not apply to military personnel.

The nation’s 2.3 million federal civilian workers currently are in the second year of a wage freeze imposed as part of efforts to trim budget deficits. Sponsors said the two-year halt in wage increases will save the government $60 billion.

“We must act now to extend the pay freeze on federal workers and on members’ salaries until Washington finally gets its finances under control,” said Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., the bill’s sponsor.

Republicans also have sought to add a year to the federal wage freeze and have federal workers contribute more toward pensions as ways to pay for legislation, now being negotiated between the House and Senate, to extend a payroll tax cut and federal unemployment benefits until the end of this year.

The pay freeze legislation could have difficulty moving through the Democratic-controlled Senate. In the House, most Democrats opposed the measure, saying deficit reduction should not be carried out on the backs of federal workers. Federal labor groups have strongly opposed an extended freeze.

Still, it was a tough election-year vote for some Democrats reluctant to be seen as supporting a raise for themselves. The salary of rank-and-file members of Congress has remained at $174,000 since 2009 and is unlikely to go up as long as the economy sputters.

“What we have here is a very clever political effort to have members vote either for their pay or against their pay being adjusted,” said Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the second-ranking Democrat.

Democrats tried to bring up a separate bill that would have stated opposition to a congressional pay hike, but they were stopped by Republicans. The vote on the pay freeze bill was 309-117, with 72 out of 187 voting Democrats supporting it. Only two Republicans opposed it.

President Barack Obama has proposed ending the pay freeze in 2013, but with a modest 0.5 percent raise.

But Republicans pointed to a Congressional Budget Office report earlier this week that concluded that federal workers, on average, receive total compensation that is 16 percent higher than what their counterparts in the private sector get.

The study found that while federal workers earn about 2 percent more than comparable private sector workers, generous federal pension and other benefit programs boost that difference to 16 percent.

“Those who work hardest to pay taxes are the ones bearing the burden of a bloated federal government,” said Rep. Dennis Ross of Florida, like Duffy a Republican freshman. “The contrast between federal government and private sector is troubling.”

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, said there are now 450,000 federal employees earning at least $100,000 a year.

But Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said more accurate Bureau of Labor Statistics data dispute the CBO findings. “An enormous amount of time and energy is going into studies purporting to show that federal workers are overpaid,” said the head of the largest independent federal union. “It is just a foolish drive for the lowest common denominators.”

The House also passed, by voice vote, a resolution that would cut House committee budgets by an average of 6 percent in 2012. That reduction, combined with a 5 percent cut last year, would produce savings of $28 million.

The House also voted 395-27 for a bill that would ban use of welfare money in gambling casinos, liquor stores and adult entertainment places such as strip clubs. The House passed a similar provision in December, but it never made it through the Senate.

Many states issue welfare recipients Electronic Benefits Transfer cards with cash benefits. The cards are supposed to assist families with basic needs, including food, shelter and clothing. The cards also provide a way of tracking where benefits are withdrawn, and that’s how states discovered the withdrawals at casinos, liquor stores and strip clubs.

The legislation would require states to implement policies to prohibit use of the card in these venues. If a state failed to do that within two years, it would face a 5 percent reduction in its welfare block grant.

___

Associated Press writer Larry Margasak contributed to this report.

Republicans have pushed through the House a bill that would freeze the wages of federal workers for a third year and bar members of Congress from giving themselves a pay raise.

Republican sponsors said their measure, which would freeze federal worker wages through 2013, would save taxpayers $26 billion. It would not apply to military personnel.

Many Democrats objected to the freeze, arguing that federal workers already had done their part in reducing budget deficits. President Barack Obama is expected to propose a 0.5 percent hike in federal employee wages in this 2013 budget proposal.

But some Democrats were also reluctant to cast an election-year vote Wednesday that would suggest they support giving themselves a pay raise. The salaries of rank-and-file members of Congress has remained at $174,000 since 2009.

Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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Romney, talking unity like a nominee, said he was ready “to lead this party and our nation.” In remarks to cheering supporters, the former Massachusetts governor unleashed a strong attack on President Barack Obama and said the competitive fight for the GOP nomination “does not divide us, it prepares us” for the fall.

“Mr. President, you were elected to lead, you chose to follow, and now it’s time to get out of the way, he declared.

Returns from 79 percent of Florida’s precincts showed Romney with 47 percent of the vote, to 32 percent for Gingrich.

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum had 13 percent, and Texas Rep. Ron Paul 7 percent. Neither mounted a substantial effort in the state.

For the first time in the campaign, exit polls showed a gender gap, and it worked to Romney’s advantage.

He was leading Gingrich 51-29 among women voters, and was winning men by a far smaller margin of 41-36.

Ominously for the thrice-married Gingrich, only about half of women voters said they had a favorable view of him as a person, compared to about eight in 10 for Romney.

As in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, about half of Florida primary voters said the most important factor for them was backing a candidate who could defeat Obama in November, according to exit poll results conducted for The Associated Press and the television networks.

Not surprisingly, in a state with an unemployment rate hovering around 10 percent, about two-thirds of voters said the economy was their top issue. More than eight in 10 said they were falling behind or just keeping up. And half said that home foreclosures have been a major problem in their communities.

The winner-take-all primary was worth 50 Republican National Convention delegates, by far the most of any primary state so far. That gave Romney a total of 87, to 26 for Gingrich, 14 for Santorum and four for Paul, with 1,144 required to clinch the nomination.

But the bigger prize was precious political momentum in the race to pick an opponent for Obama in a nation struggling to recover from the deepest recession in decades.

That belonged to Romney when he captured the New Hampshire primary three weeks ago, then swung stunningly to Gingrich when he countered with a South Carolina upset 11 days later.

Now it was back with the former Massachusetts governor, after a 10-day comeback marked by a change to more aggressive tactics, coupled with an efficient use of an overwhelming financial advantage to batter Gingrich in television commercials.

Gingrich brushed aside any talk of quitting the race.

“We are going to contest everyplace,” he said, standing in front of a sign that read “46 states to go.”

“It is now clear that this will be a two person race between the conservative leader, Newt Gingrich, and the Massachusetts moderate,” he said.

The race now turns to Nevada, where Romney won the state’s caucuses four years ago and is favored to repeat his triumph this Saturday. Caucuses in Colorado, Minnesota and Maine follow, with primaries in Wisconsin on Feb. 21 and in Michigan and Arizona at the end of the month.

Gingrich, from neighboring Georgia, swept into Florida from South Carolina, only to run headlong into a different Romney from the one he had left in his wake in South Carolina.

Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, shed his reluctance to attack Gingrich, the former House speaker, unleashing hard-hitting ads on television, sharpening his performance in a pair of debates and deploying surrogates to the edges of Gingrich’s own campaign appearances, all in hopes of unnerving him.

Restore our Future, an outside group supporting Romney, accounted for about $8.8 million in the ad wars, and the candidate and the “super PAC” combined outspent Gingrich and Winning The Future, the organization backing him, by about $15.5 million to $3.3 million, an advantage of nearly 5-1.

Gingrich responded by assailing Romney as a man incapable of telling the truth and vowed to remain in the race until the Republican National Convention next summer. He won the endorsement of campaign dropout Herman Cain and increasingly sought the support of evangelicals and tea party advocates, a former House speaker running as the anti-establishment insurgent of the party he once helped lead.

Bombarded by harsh television advertising, some Floridians said they had soured on both candidates.

“The dirty ads really turned me off on Mitt Romney,” said Dorothy Anderson, of Pinellas Park, adding she was voting for Gingrich. She said of Romney, “In fact if he gets the nomination, I probably won’t vote for him.”

At the same polling place, Romney supporter Curtis Dempsey expressed similar feelings but about Gingrich. “The only thing Newt Gingrich has to offer is a big mouth,” he said.

Voters frequently say they are offended or appalled by negative ads. But polls show consistently that the commercials are able to sway the opinions of large numbers of voters, and they are a staple of nearly all campaigns.

Santorum had no money for television ads to back up his strong debate performances. He left the state at one point, saying he was going home to Pennsylvania to prepare his income tax returns. But he stayed longer than anticipated, because of the hospitalization of his 3-year-old daughter with pneumonia. The girl has a rare genetic disorder, Trisomy 18.

Santorum was already in Nevada Tuesday night, campaigning for the state’s caucuses on Saturday. “Newt Gingrich had his chance. He had his shot,” he said. Now Republicans are “looking for a different conservative.”

Santorum and Paul both also campaigned in Colorado on Tuesday as Florida Republicans were voting. The state has caucuses on Feb 7, the same day as Minnesota.

Even before that come caucuses in Nevada, a state that Romney won when he sought the nomination in 2008 and is favored to capture again.

By contrast, both Romney and Gingrich campaigned across Florida on primary day as the polls opened.

Exuding confidence, the former Massachusetts governor said – even though the figures said otherwise – that he had been outspent in South Carolina.

“I needed to make sure that instead of being outgunned in terms of attacks, that I responded aggressively, and hopefully that will have served me well here,” he told reporters.

Gingrich, combative as usual, said the race for the nomination won’t be decided until summer, “unless Romney drops out.”

More than 600,000 Floridians voted before the polls opened, either by absentee or early ballot, exceeding the figure from four years ago, and raising the possibility of a record turnout. Vote totals in the three contests to date – Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina – have all been records.

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The idea has circulated among academics and think-tank researchers for years. But it’s moving quietly into mainstream political discourse, despite the fact that such sweeping changes would almost certainly mean a total rewiring of tax systems at a time when most states are still struggling in the aftermath of the recession.

“I think there’s going to be more action that way,” especially as Republican governors release their budget plans, said Kim Rueben, an expert on state taxation at the Brookings Urban Tax Policy Center.

Last year, GOP lawmakers in many states quickly went to work on a new conservative agenda: restricting abortion, cracking down on illegal immigration, expanding gun rights and taking aim at public-employee unions.

Emboldened by that success, the party has launched income tax efforts in Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma and South Carolina. But it’s not clear how all those states would make up for the lost revenue, and Rueben said she’s not aware of any state in modern history that has eliminated an income tax.

Nine states already get by without an income tax, mostly by tapping other sources of revenue. Nevada and Florida rely on sales taxes that target the tourism industry. Alaska has taxes on natural resources, and Texas imposes substantial property taxes. The other five states are: New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Washington and Wyoming.

But in the rest of the country, income taxes pay for bedrock government services, including roads and bridges and schools and prison systems.

In Oklahoma, Republican Gov. Mary Fallin says gradually cutting the top income-tax rate of 5.25 percent will make the state more attractive to businesses, help spur economic growth and ensure Oklahoma is competitive against neighboring states such as Texas. Although the personal income tax does not apply to corporate earnings, supporters say company executives and employees will prefer to live in a state that doesn’t tax personal income.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is pushing this year to consolidate four personal income tax brackets and to phase out corporate income taxes. She promises to seek more tax cuts in the future.

Missouri has a bill to reduce income taxes and offset the lost revenue by raising the cigarette tax.

And Maine’s GOP-controlled Legislature voted last year to lower the income tax from 8.5 to 7.95 percent, taking 70,000 low-income citizens off the income-tax rolls.

Idaho Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter has suggested reducing the individual income tax rate from 7.8 percent to 7.6 percent, the same as the corporate income tax rate, and then gradually lowering both to 7 percent. But business groups have said they would rather get help eliminating the personal property tax businesses pay on their equipment.

In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich’s 2010 campaign included a pledge to phase out the state’s personal income tax, though without a timetable for doing so. Thus far, the state’s fiscal situation has stymied the governor’s efforts to achieve his goal, other than implementing a previously scheduled income tax cut.

As one way to compensate for the lost revenue, the Oklahoma governor and others have suggested eliminating other kinds of tax breaks and incentives, specifically transferrable tax credits offered to certain businesses. But that would still fall woefully short in Oklahoma, where the income tax provides more than one-third of all state spending.

Still, 23 Republicans in the Oklahoma House have signed up as sponsors of a measure to abolish the income tax over the next decade without raising any other taxes.

“Our goal is to transform Oklahoma into the best place to do business, the best place to live, find a quality job, raise a family and retire in all of the United States. Not just better than average, but the very best,” state Rep. Leslie Osborn said.

Lower taxes appeal to many voters, but some wonder how the state could get by if lawmakers abandon a major source of money.

“I personally would favor paying less taxes, but to me, it’s like where are we going to make up the difference?” said Steve Schlegel, a bicycle shop owner in Oklahoma City. “I already feel like government is underfunded at the moment.”

Roger Garner, a letter courier, said he would accept higher property taxes if it meant eliminating the income tax.

“Get rid of it,” Garner said. “Florida doesn’t have it. Texas doesn’t have it. We don’t need it. If something is needed, we can figure out a way to pay for it at the local level.”

Conservatives say the lost revenue will be made up by increased economic activity – more businesses paying corporate taxes and more employees paying property taxes and spending money. But economists warn those predictions are unrealistic.

Without creating an alternative funding system, “it’s clearly irresponsible to propose taking action against the income tax,” said Alan Viard, an economist with the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank.

Former Oklahoma Treasurer Scott Meacham, a Democrat who helped negotiate a series of small income tax cuts, urged state leaders to be careful tinkering with the state’s economy, which is currently enjoying double-digit revenue growth and has one of the 10 lowest unemployment rates in the country.

“If you look at our state’s economy, it’s doing very well versus virtually any other state, whether they have a state income tax or not,” said Meacham, who is now a member of the board of directors for the State Chamber, an association of Oklahoma business and industry.

Voters, he added, “ought to be very concerned, especially in an election year, when the politicians are telling them they know what’s best for them from an economic standpoint.”

In neighboring Kansas, Republican Gov. Sam Brownback has a sweeping plan to overhaul income taxes that calls for offsetting income tax cuts by canceling a scheduled drop in the sales tax. But it would increase the tax burden for the state’s poorest households. And he faces resistance from within his own party over concern that the sales tax increase was supposed to be a temporary fix back in 2010.

A similar debate is unfolding in Oklahoma, where the plan calls for reducing the income tax from 5.25 percent to 4.75 percent by eliminating the personal exemption for every household member, including children, as well as the child tax credit and earned income tax credit.

An analysis by the Oklahoma Policy Institute shows those steps would raise taxes for 55 percent of Oklahomans, mostly low-income families and those with children.

“We have grave doubts about this proposal,” said David Blatt, director of the institute. “We see stumbling blocks in every direction. You either decimate state services or shift the burden onto those that can least afford it.”

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“If I had a business executive come to me and say I want to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the moon, I’d say, `You’re fired,’” Romney declared. That was just one particularly animated clash between two rivals struggling for supremacy in the race to pick an opponent to President Barack Obama in the fall.

Gingrich responded heatedly. “You don’t just have to be cheap everywhere. You can actually have priorities to get things done.” He said that as speaker of the House he had helped balance the budget while doubling spending on the National Institutes of Health.

The debate was the 19th since the race for the Republican nomination began last year, and the second in four days in the run-up to Tuesday’s Florida primary. Opinion polls make the race a close one – slight advantage Romney – with two other contenders, former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Texas Rep. Ron Paul far behind.

Gingrich’s upset victory in the South Carolina primary last week upended the race for the nomination, and Romney in particular can ill-afford a defeat on Tuesday.

While the clashes between Gingrich and Romney dominated the debate, Santorum drew applause from the audience when he called on the two front-runners to stop attacking one another and “focus on the issues.”

“Can we set aside that Newt was a member of Congress … and that Mitt Romney is a wealthy guy?” he said in a tone of exasperation.

There were some moments of levity, including when Paul, 76, was asked whether he would be willing to release his medical records. He said he was, then challenged the other three men on the debate stage to a 25-mile bike race.

He got no takers.

In the days since Romney’s loss in South Carolina, he has tried to seize the initiative, playing the aggressor in the Tampa debate and assailing Gingrich in campaign speeches and a TV commercial.

An outside group formed to support Romney has spent more than his own campaign’s millions on ads, some of them designed to stop Gingrich’s campaign momentum before it is too late to deny him the nomination.

With polls suggesting his South Carolina surge is stalling, Gingrich unleashed a particularly strong attack earlier in the day, much as he lashed out in Iowa when he rose in the polls, only to be knocked back by an onslaught of ads he was unable to counter effectively.

Thursday night’s first clash occurred moments after the debate opened, when Gingrich responded to a question by saying Romney was the most anti-immigrant of all four contenders on stage. “That’s simply inexcusable,” the former Massachusetts governor responded.

“Mr. Speaker, I’m not anti-immigrant. My father was born in Mexico. My wife’s father was born in Wales. … The idea that I’m anti-immigrant is repulsive. Don’t use a term like that,” he added.

At the same time, Romney noted that Gingrich’s campaign had been pressured to stop running a radio ad that called Romney anti-immigrant after Florida Sen. Marco Rubio called on Gingrich to do so.

He called on Gingrich to apologize for the commercial, but got no commitment.

About an hour later, Romney pounced when the topic turned to Gingrich’s proposal for an permanent American colony on the moon – an issue of particular interest to engineers and others who live on Florida’s famed Space Coast.

A career businessman before he became a politician, Romney said: “If I had a business executive come to me and say I want to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the moon, I’d say, `You’re fired.’”

The audience erupted in cheers, but Romney wasn’t finished.

He said the former speaker had called for construction of a new Interstate highway in South Carolina, a new VA hospital in northern New Hampshire and widening the port of Jacksonville to accommodate the larger ships that will soon be able to transit the Panama Canal.

“This idea of going state to state and promising people what they want to hear, promising hundreds of billions of dollars to make people happy, that’s what got us into trouble in the first place,” Romney said.

Gingrich responded that part of campaigning is becoming familiar with local issues, adding, “The port of Jacksonville is going to have to be expanded. I think that’s an important thing for a president to know.” He went on to refer to completion of an Everglades project that he did not describe, then noted he had worked to expand NIH while he was speaker.

Gingrich raised questions about Romney’s wealth and his investments. “I don’t know of any American president who’s had a Swiss bank account,” Gingrich said. Romney replied that his investments were in a blind trust over which he had no control. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” declared Romney, who has estimated his wealth at as much as $250 million.

Earlier Thursday, it was disclosed that Romney and his wife, Ann Romney, failed to list an unknown amount of investment income from a variety of sources including a Swiss bank account on financial disclosure forms filed last year. His campaign said it was working to correct the omissions.

Gingrich also failed to report income from his 2010 tax return on his financial disclosure. The former Georgia congressman will amend his disclosure to show $252,500 in salary from one of his businesses, spokesman R.C. Hammond said.

Debating in a state with a large and influential Jewish population, Romney and Gingrich vied to stress their support for Israel rather than criticize one another.

And all four men were quick to name prominent officials of Hispanic descent who deserved consideration for the Cabinet. Gingrich trumped the other three, saying, “I’ve actually thought of Marco Rubio in a slightly more dignified and central role,” an evident reference to the vice presidential spot on the ticket.

Immigration was a recurring theme.

Gingrich said Romney was misleading when he ran an ad accusing the former House speaker of once referring to Spanish as “the language of the ghetto.” Gingrich claimed he was referring to a multitude of languages, not just Spanish.

Romney initially said, “I doubt it’s mine,” but moderator Wolf Blitzer read it aloud and pointed out that Romney, at the ad’s conclusion, says he approved the message.

As for immigration policy, it was difficult to discern their differences.

Both men said they want to clamp down in illegal immigration, create programs to make sure jobs go only to legal immigrants and deport some of the 11 million men and women in the country unlawfully.

Gingrich has never said how many illegal residents he believes should be deported, preferring to say that the United States is not going to begin rounding up grandmothers and grandfathers who have lived in the United States for years.

Romney agreed that was the case – and Gingrich said that marked a switch in position.

“Our problem is not 11 million grandmothers,” Romney said. “Our problem is 11 million people getting jobs that many Americans, legal immigrants would like to have.”

Romney and Gingrich also exchanged jabs over investments in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two mortgage giants that played a role in the national foreclosure crisis that has hit Florida particularly hard.

Gingrich said Romney was making money from investments in funds that were “foreclosing on Floridians.”

Romney quickly noted that Gingrich, too, was invested in mutual funds with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He then added that the former House speaker “was a spokesman” for the two. That was a reference to a contract that one of Gingrich’s businesses had for consulting services. The firm was paid $300,000 in 2006.

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“You’ve been walking around the state saying things that are untrue,” Gingrich told his rival in a two-hour debate marked by occasional interruptions and finger-pointing.

The event marked the first encounter among the four remaining GOP contenders – former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and Texas Rep. Ron Paul shared the stage – since Gingrich won the South Carolina primary in an upset last weekend.

His double-digit victory reset the race to pick a rival to challenge Democratic President Barack Obama this fall, and the next contest is the Jan. 31 Florida primary.

With a week of campaigning ahead, Romney is expected to release his income tax return for 2010 as well as an estimate for 2011 on Tuesday. He said it will show he paid all the taxes he was obligated to pay, adding, “I don’t think the voters want a president who pays more than he owes.”

Following his defeat in South Carolina, Romney can ill afford to lose in Florida, and he was the aggressor from the opening moments Monday night. He said Gingrich had “resigned in disgrace” from Congress after four years as speaker and then had spent the next 15 years “working as an influence peddler.”

In particular, he referred to the contract Gingrich’s consulting firm had with Freddie Mac, a government-backed mortgage giant that he said “did a lot of bad for a lot of people and you were working there.”

Romney also said Gingrich had lobbied lawmakers to approve legislation creating a new prescription drug benefit under Medicare.

“I have never, ever gone and done any lobbying,” Gingrich retorted emphatically, adding that his firm had hired an expert to explain to employees “the bright line between what you can do as a citizen and what you do as a lobbyist.”

Romney counterpunched, referring to the $300,000 that Gingrich’s consulting firm received in 2006 from Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage giant.

And when Gingrich sought to turn the tables by inquiring about the private equity firm that Romney founded, the former Massachusetts governor replied: “We didn’t do any work with the government. …I wasn’t a lobbyist.”

As for the Medicare prescription drug benefit, Gingrich expressed pride in having supported it. “It has saved lives. It’s run on a free enterprise model,” he said in a state that is home to millions of seniors.

Whatever the stated subject, the debate’s subtext was character – and electability, the quality that Republican voters say consistently matters most to them in the race.

Gingrich said voters don’t want a president who will “manage the decay,” but change the country. “That requires sending somebody who’s prepared to be controversial when necessary.”

Romney pointed to his career in business, his turn as head of the Salt Lake City Olympics and a term as governor of Massachusetts.

Obama took his lumps, as customary in a Republican debate.

Romney said the president lacks a vision for NASA, and said, “There are people on the Space Coast that are suffering and Florida itself is suffering as a result.”

He proposed that “a collection” of academics and private investors consult with the president on a new mission for the space agency and have the program funded jointly by the government and private industry.

Gingrich called that answer “building a bigger bureaucracy” and instead proposed handing out prizes to people who come up with ways to “make the Space Coast literally hum with activity.” Going back to the moon permanently, putting a man on mars and building space stations should be priorities, he said.

When the debate turned to immigration, one moderator noted that Romney and Santorum have said they would veto the “Dream Act,” which would create conditions under which illegal immigrant minors might achieve U.S. citizenship, and asked if Gingrich agreed.

“No, I would work to get a signable version,” he said. “I think any young person brought here by their parents when they were young should have the same opportunity to join the American military and earn citizenship.”

Romney said that was the same as his position.

Moments later, he was asked to reconcile two other statements he has made about immigration, that while he doesn’t want to deport millions of illegal immigrants, he wants them to return to their home countries and apply for citizenship. “The answer is self-deportation, which is people decide they can do better by going home,” he said.

At times, the other two contenders on stage were reduced to supporting roles.

Asked if he could envision a path to the nomination for himself, Santorum said the race has so far been defined by its unpredictability.

He jumped at the chance to criticize both Romney and Gingrich for having supported the big federal bailouts of Wall Street in 2008.

He also said both men had abandoned conservative principles by supporting elements of “cap and trade” legislation to curb pollution emissions from industrial sites. “When push came to shove, they were pushed,” he said.

Paul sidestepped when moderator Brian Williams of NBC asked if he would run as a third-party candidate in the fall if he doesn’t win the nomination. “I have no intention,” he said, but he didn’t rule it out.

Paul has said he will largely bypass Florida to concentrate on states that are holding caucuses.

Hit at the outset with Romney’ charge that he had resigned Congress in disgrace and went on to a career peddling his own influence, Gingrich said two men who had run against the former governor in the 2008 campaign, John McCain and Mike Huckabee, had said he couldn’t tell the truth.

The polls post-South Carolina show Gingrich and Romney leading in the Florida primary. That and the former speaker’s weekend victory explained why the two were squabbling even before the debate began, and why they tangled almost instantly once it had begun.

Romney began airing a harshly critical new campaign ad and said the former House speaker had engaged in “potentially wrongful activity” with the consulting work he did after leaving Congress in the late 1990s.

Gingrich retorted that Romney was a candidate who was campaigning on openness yet “has released none of his business records.”

He followed up two hours before the debate by arranging the release of a contract his former consulting firm had with the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. for a retainer of $25,000 per month in 2006, or a total for the year of $300,000. The agreement called for “consulting and related services.”

Despite Romney’s attempts to call Gingrich a lobbyist, the contract makes no mention of lobbying.

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“She couldn’t vote before 1965, just as I couldn’t,” said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, referring to the Voting Rights Act that abolished poll taxes, literacy tests and other ways whites across the Deep South kept minorities from voting.

Jackson and other critics have said the law is merely a new, covert effort to take away the right to vote from older blacks and poor people, groups who historically tend to vote for Democrats and are less likely to have a driver’s license or other government-issued ID.

Both Haley’s parents were born in India and came to South Carolina before she was born. Haley – a Republican who became the state’s first female governor – never dwells on her heritage, but she has occasionally mentioned it in her inaugural speech or stories from her childhood. Almost all have the same theme of overcoming adversity.

She refused an interview for this story, instead sending a statement through her spokesman, Rob Godfrey, defending her support of South Carolina’s law requiring photo identification at the polls. The governor has said the measure is needed to prevent voter fraud.

“Those who see race in this issue are those who see race in every issue, but anyone looking at this law honestly will understand it is a commonsense measure to protect our voting process. Nothing more, nothing less,” Godfrey said in the statement.

Haley has invoked strong rhetoric against the federal government and the Obama administration on the voter ID issue and two others. A federal judge temporarily put a halt to the state’s law cracking down on illegal immigrants, while the National Labor Relations Board fought Boeing Co.’s efforts to build a plant in North Charleston that would employ 1,000. The board had claimed Boeing built the plant in South Carolina – a right-to-work state where workers are not required to join unions – to retaliate for past union disputes with its workers in Washington state.

But leaders of the NAACP said after a Martin Luther King Day rally at the South Carolina Statehouse that they would expect a governor who experienced some prejudice growing up to have some compassion, especially when it comes to the voter ID law.

“At the end of the day, it’s one more governor who is willing to deify the dreamer and desecrate the dream,” said Benjamin Todd Jealous, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Jealous was referring to politicians that he said will give speeches praising King’s work while at the same time supporting laws that undermine his message of equality.

Haley was born in 1972, and her first memories came more than a decade after the height of the civil rights struggle, when South Carolina finally gave up allowing only whites to vote. Her family lived in Bamberg County, where about 50 percent of the 16,000 residents were black, according to the 1970 Census. Her father wore a traditional Sikh turban and taught biology at the local historically black college, while her mother was a middle school social studies teacher.

During her 2010 campaign, Haley didn’t make her heritage a point. But when asked, she wouldn’t shy away from how her brown skin affected her life. She told a story about her third-grade classmates refusing to play kickball with her until they figured out if she was black or white. She insisted she was brown, and said instead of stewing about the problem, simply took the ball and ran to the field. Her classmates followed, and they played.

One story she has repeatedly told is how she and her sister entered a children’s beauty pageant in Bamberg County, which crowned black and white winners. Organizers didn’t know where to put the girls, so they were disqualified.

“I grew up knowing that we were different. But it’s also the reason why I think that I focused so much on trying to find the similarities with people as opposed to the differences,” Haley said during the campaign.

Haley also wasn’t around to hear Southern governors like George Wallace in Alabama rail against the federal government during the civil rights movement. In June 1963, Wallace briefly blocked a doorway at the University of Alabama as the National Guard tried to help two black students inside to register. He called the federal intrusion “unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted and force-induced.”

But NAACP leaders said Haley’s fiery pledges to fight the federal government reminds them of that time five decades ago.

On the King holiday last week when a thousand people rallied at the Statehouse to honor the slain civil rights leader, Haley was in Myrtle Beach talking to a tea party convention about how she plans to sue the Justice Department over its rejection of the voter ID law. She told them the hardest part of her job in her first year in office was dealing with President Barack Obama.

“What they don’t know is you don’t mess with us in South Carolina,” Haley said, pausing as the crowd cheered. “We’re going to fight, and as much as President Obama has decided to continue his assaults on South Carolina, we’re going to fight back.”

North Carolina NAACP President the Rev. William Barber shook his head when he heard about Haley’s comments. He was invited to the South Carolina King Day event to speak about the Confederate flag, saying it represented a “nightmarish vision of democracy.” The flag still flies on the front lawn of the Statehouse after a compromise in 2000 pulled it off the capitol’s dome.

“It is quite eerie, on the day we remember Dr. King saying he hoped his children would grow up in a world where they would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, that a governor saying the content of my character is how many laws can I fight that have opened up democracy,” Barber said.

In her speech to the tea party, Haley dismissed a number of her critics, including Jackson, who gave the same line about the Voting Rights Act helping Haley in several stops across the state earlier this month.

“Jesse Jackson was talking smack last week, so it’s really a good track record, I’ll tell you that,” Haley said. “I think that means we’re doing just fine.”

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The air of inevitability that surrounded Romney’s candidacy just days ago is gone, at least for now. And his rivals, led by Gingrich, have 10 days before Florida’s Jan. 31 contest to prove South Carolina was no fluke.

Florida, being much larger, more diverse, and more expensive, brings new challenges to Gingrich, who again must overcome financial and organizational disadvantages as he did Saturday.

“We don’t have the kind of money at least one of the candidates has. But we do have ideas. And we do have people,” Gingrich, the former House speaker, told cheering supporters Saturday night. “And we proved here in South Carolina that people power with the right ideas beats big money. And with your help, we’re going to prove it again in Florida.”

Romney struck a defiant tone before his own backers gathered at the South Carolina State Fairgrounds, saying: “I will compete in every single state.” And wasted no time jabbing at Gingrich, saying: “Our party can’t be led to victory by someone who also has never run a business and never led a state.”

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, having finished third in South Carolina, vowed to compete in Florida and beyond. His presence in the race ensures at least some division among Florida’s tea party activists and evangelicals, a division that could ultimately help Romney help erase any questions about his candidacy by scoring a victory of his own a week from Tuesday.

Texas Rep. Ron Paul likely will not be a factor in Florida, having declared that he’s bypassing the expensive state in favor of smaller subsequent contests.

As the first Southern primary, South Carolina has been a proving ground for Republican presidential hopefuls in recent years. Since Ronald Reagan in 1980, every Republican contender who won the primary has gone on to capture the party’s nomination.

Returns from 95 percent of the state’s precincts showed Gingrich with 41 percent of the vote to 27 percent for Romney. Santorum was winning 17 percent, Paul 13 percent.

But political momentum was the real prize with the race to pick an opponent to President Barack Obama still in its early stages.

Already, Romney and a group that supports him were on the air in Florida with a significant television ad campaign, more than $7 million combined to date.

Gingrich readily conceded that he trails in money, and even before appearing for his victory speech he tweeted supporters thanking them and appealing for a flood of donations for the Jan 31 primary. “Help me deliver the knockout punch in Florida. Join our Moneybomb and donate now,” said his Internet message.

Aides to Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, had once dared hope that Florida would seal his nomination – if South Carolina didn’t first – but that strategy appeared to vanish along with the once-formidable lead he held in pre-primary polls.

Romney swept into South Carolina 11 days ago as the favorite after being pronounced the winner of the lead-off Iowa caucuses, then cruising to victory in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary.

But in the sometimes-surreal week that followed, he was stripped of his Iowa triumph – GOP officials there now say Santorum narrowly won – while former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman dropped out and endorsed Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry quit and backed Gingrich.

Romney responded awkwardly to questions about releasing his income tax returns, and about his investments in the Cayman Islands. Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, benefited from two well-received debate performances while grappling with allegations by an ex-wife that he had once asked her for an open marriage so he could keep his mistress.

By primary eve, Romney was speculating openly about a lengthy battle for the nomination rather than the quick knockout that had seemed within his grasp only days earlier.

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Thursday’s trip is the latest attempt by the White House and Obama campaign to steal a share of the spotlight from Republicans in the midst of their nomination fight. Obama held a live video conference with Iowa voters during the Republican caucus, Vice President Joe Biden held a similar event with voters in New Hampshire as primary votes there were being counted, and next week Obama will travel to Nevada, which follows Florida on the primary calendar.

Obama’s high-profile trip to Florida – the president will speak at Walt Disney World – could help him counter attacks on his record lobbed by Republican presidential candidates during stops across the state, and in television ads already running in Florida. And it allows Obama to lay the groundwork for the general election campaign in Florida, a key political battleground he carried in 2008.

The White House said Obama would unveil a new strategy to boost tourism and travel during his speech at Disney. The announcement is part of the president’s “We Can’t Wait” initiative aimed at promoting executive actions Obama can take without congressional approval.

Tourism is a key component of the economy in Florida, which is burdened by 10 percent unemployment and rampant home foreclosures.

Republican front-runner Mitt Romney already has been testing economic attacks on Obama in Florida. A campaign mailer sent recently to Florida Republicans said: “Our economy has fallen flat. Who’s to blame?” Another proclaims that Romney is the strongest to lead the country out of economic turmoil, arguing, “With conservative leadership, America can be first in the world in job creation again.”

A recent Quinnipiac University poll showed the president in a near-statistical tie with Romney in a head-to-head matchup.

The White House insists the president’s trip to Florida is not purely political. Obama spokesman Jay Carney said that if the White House couldn’t travel to any state with a primary, “that would make it impossible for us.”

From Florida, Obama will fly to New York City for four glitzy campaign fundraisers, including an event at the famed Apollo Theater featuring performances by Al Green and India Arie. Tickets to that fundraiser start at $100.

The president also will attend a $35,800 per ticket fundraiser at the home of director Spike Lee, and two small fundraisers at Daniel, an exclusive Manhattan restaurant. Tickets start at $5,000 for the first restaurant fundraiser and $15,000 for the second.

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Sure, one could argue ’08 was a major election with even bigger implications because of the dire situation the economy was in. But for all the rhetoric of repealing health care reform or Pres. Barack Obama being a one-term president, Republican voters aren’t lining up to make that a reality.

In 2008, both Democrats and Republicans grew increasingly satisfied with the quality of the candidates for their party’s nomination as the campaign progressed… lackluster ratings offered by Republicans this year track more closely with how Democrats viewed their options in early 2004, according to Pew Research Center.

That’s definitely not a good sign. Last I checked, 2004 wasn’t so kind to Democrats in the run for the White House. And Republicans may be under the impression they can just pick a fiery VP candidate who can bridge that enthusiasm gap, but there are two things wrong with that — actually make that three.

(1) Lack Of Exciting VP Candidates

Three come to mind: Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, and Sarah Palin. The chances of Huckabee giving up his fairly new Fox Show and vacating his multimillion-dollar Florida beach house to play second fiddle in the White House are fairly small. And Palin? Has their been a back-to-back failed VP candidate before? If not, chances are she would be the first. Her negatives are just too high — 59 percent of general election voters view her unfavorably. Yes, GOP voters would be excited, but it would prove to be a short fuse considering independents would run in the opposite direction.

(2) The Tea Party Is On Hiatus

Little doubt the Tea Party fired up the GOP base and was a prime reason for the strong victories in the 2010 midterm elections. But where have they been since? I can’t think of one presidential candidate they have endorsed. And to make matters worse, debate moderators haven’t really mentioned them or their core issues — debt, deficit spending, or the debt ceiling — since the summer.

(3) The GOP Base Is Split — Real Conservative vs. Real Winner

For all the talk of Republicans coalescing around one nominee, that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. Sure, Romney is on his way to being crowned the nominee, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the GOP base nationwide is behind him. Ironically, a quick end to the primaries (where Romney wins overwhelmingly and candidates begin to drop out as financing dries up) may exacerbate the problem. Part of the purpose of a drawn out primary system, where candidates stump from state to state, is so a consensus can organically emerge after voters have all the facts and feel comfortable making a decision. Crowning Romney early doesn’t shore up any doubt a voter may have about him, especially if they haven’t even had a shot to hear him speak and see his campaign up close.

But the GOP has little choice. They know Romney has the best chance of beating Obama. According to Fox News, if the election were held today, Obama would lead Romney by one point, 46-45. Such has been the case pretty much since Romney announced months ago. Most striking thing about the poll? 58 percent of Romney voters would be casting a ballot “primarily to beat Obama” than “for Romney.” Contrast that with Obama voters who, 74 percent of which, are voting pro-Obama, not anti-GOP.

For many this is frustrating. For others it is proof of their bigotry. But as one New York Times article says, it may be all by design. Especially for Mitt Romney:

Of course, I’m not talking about a strict count of melanin density. I’m referring to the countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways he telegraphs to a certain type of voter that he is the cultural alternative to America’s first black president. It is a whiteness grounded in a retro vision of the country, one of white picket fences and stay-at-home moms and fathers unashamed of working hard for corporate America.

Yes, since 1978 the church has allowed blacks to become priests. But Mormonism is still imagined by its adherents as a religion founded by whites, for whites, rooted in a millenarian vision of an America destined to fulfill a white God’s plans for earth.

The piece gives stunning credit to the reality many of us have tried to deny since Barack Obama got into office. Mainly that America has not really moved forward that much. There are many people, eager to take us back to the “good old days”- whatever those are.

In this way, whether he means to or not, Mr. Romney connects with a central evangelic fantasy: that the Barack Obama years, far from being the way forward, are in fact a historical aberration, a tear in the white space-time continuum. And let’s be clear: Mr. Obama’s election was not destiny, but a fluke.

According to the New York Times, many Americans are banking on that fluke philosophy.

We talked earlier about all of these different comments that Republican candidates have been making when it comes to African-Americans and food stamps and welfare and things along those lines. Let’s be clear. This is all by design in terms of they want to push the buttons of White conservatives who’re walking around with particular views, as well as subjective views, of African-Americans. And so it appears as if they simply want to get a rise out of African-Americans every time they do it.

So, what should we be doing? First of all, not fall for the okey doke. Certainly, keep people accountable [for] what they say, but also continue to push them on policy and challenge them on policy, but also change the conversation to being mad with what somebody says, but explain to the American public that, “Look, more White folks are on welfare and receive food stamps than anybody else.” Black folks don’t need to own poverty. We don’t need to own the issue of welfare, just like when I discuss Affirmative Action, I make it clear that White women have benefit from Affirmative Action more than any other group in this country. So, some things we don’t need to own. Certainly, hold them accountable, but trust me. Let’s not fall for the tricks that they always play when it comes to trying to push the buttons of Black folks.

The former 2 Live Crew frontman writes that he’s dismayed at today’s candidates from the party of Abraham Lincoln, a party that he says once “stood up for African-Americans.”

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Campbell is no stranger to politics.

Last year, he launched an unsuccessful bid for the mayoral seat in Miami-Dade County on a platform that included advocating the rebuilding of some of the city’s housing projects and a tax on strippers. And two decades prior to that, he was at the center of a political firestorm when South Florida authorities tried to ban his album As Nasty As They Wanna Be on state obscenity charges.

In his most recent column, Campbell seems bent on ruffling a few feathers with some blunt critiques of Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul. He lays into Romney like this:

Long before he was the presumed frontrunner for the White House and Massachusetts’ governor, Mitt Romney was actively spreading his Mormon faith. At the time, church leaders preached that dark skin was a curse from God. Between 1966 and 1968, Romney was a missionary in France. He believed and taught that God was so displeased with “spirit children” who remained neutral in the war against Lucifer that he turned their skin black.

Then Campbell debunks Gingrich’s claim the Barack Obama is “the finest food stamp president” in history and Santorum’s recent comments about African-Americans and the welfare system.

It might come as a shock to Newt and Rick, but 39 percent of welfare recipients are white and 17 percent are Hispanic. Stop accepting the stereotype that poor black folks are always looking for a government handout, you mindless wonders.

And Campbell goes in on Paul too, arguing that Paul’s take on what the federal government should have done to end slavery totally ignores the practice of institutional racism. Campbell concludes:

If he gets elected, I’m moving my family to the Bahamas.

Campbell’s perspective isn’t exactly the most nuanced but it doesn’t mean he’s wrong. What do you think of his take on these GOP candidates?

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Romney won the small evangelical vote last night in New Hampshire (just as he did in Iowa, where it is much larger). Which leads me to think he’ll have no prob in South Carolina, which is second to only Iowa in their number of evangelicals. If he wins South Carolina handily, it’s likely that Jon Huntsman, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum will be effectively run out of the race. It’s not just voters watching the race with interest, donors are too, and they rarely reward losers with the spoils of, well, defeat.

Romney has essentially won evangelicals and overcome the Mormon gap, which means he has overcome the uneasiness voters feel about the Mormon religion. For instance, Pew Research Center found that “53 percent of Evangelicals don’t even consider it to be a religion.” So Romney had long odds indeed to convert enough voters to win an extremely close race against Santorum, a die-hard social conservative, in Iowa. But he pulled it out.

Let’s face it, New Hampshire isn’t exactly a beacon of diversity. Whites accounted for more than 92 percent of the vote last night, with Asians and Latinos accounting for 5 percent. What’s most interesting about Romney’s values-based campaigning and wooing of evangelicals is that he seems to not think any of it is applicable to Black voters, particularly Black conservatives. Yet promoting faith-based initiatives and education reform is typically an easy way to woo Black voters, even for the GOP.

George W. Bush used both on his way to winning 16 percent of the Black vote in Ohio, a crucial swing state, in his 2004 reelection.

What does Romney’s education-reform plan look like? Good question, let everyone know when you find it. There’s no mention of education under the issues area on his site, mittromney.com. Quite odd for a candidate who clearly has taken advantage of his own educational opportunities, having earned two graduate degrees from Harvard (an MBA and a law degree), and invested in those of his family, sending three of his five sons to Harvard Business School.

One could argue that Romney has no imperative to woo the black vote, not only because of the historical low rate of return but also because there aren’t that many self-identified Black Republicans in general, and both early primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, have even fewer Black voters. But this is an example of short-term thinking. Fact is, Romney has a golden opportunity to present himself as presidential candidate focused on all of America, not just the evangelicals of the midwest or the disillusioned independents he’s hoping to snare from President Barack Obama. It’s a critical mistake Romney may soon regret.

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Vietnam veteran Ron Paul has called Newt Gingrich a “chicken hawk,” asserting in Saturday’s GOP candidates debate that Gingrich shirked military service and so shouldn’t have the power to send others to war.

A review of government records finds no evidence that Gingrich dodged any legal responsibilities as a draft-aged young man in the 1960s. Paul was drafted, but Gingrich wasn’t, apparently the result of changing draft regulations.

Here’s the testy exchange the two had when the subject came up Saturday:

PAUL: “I think people who don’t serve when they could and they get three or four or even five deferments … they have no right to send our kids off to war.” He added: “I’m trying to stop the wars, but at least, you know, I went when they called me up.”

GINGRICH: “The fact is, I never asked for deferment. I was married with a child. It was never a question…”

PAUL: “…When I was drafted, I was married and had two kids, and I went.”

THE FACTS: It’s true that Paul was a husband and father when he served as an active-duty Air Force doctor from 1963-1965. He turned 18 in 1953, finished medical school in 1961 and was drafted in 1962 under a law that said fathers had to serve unless their induction would cause their dependents extreme hardship.

But the draft was changed the following year, giving all fathers a pass without having to prove hardship. Gingrich registered for the draft when he turned 18 in 1961 and was contacted by his draft board to fill out a general information questionnaire in mid-1963. Upon reviewing the questionnaire, the board gave him a deferment on the basis of having a child, Selective Service System officials said Tuesday after reviewing ledgers from the era.

“I wasn’t eligible for the draft,” Gingrich said in Saturday’s exchange, repeating for emphasis: “I wasn’t eligible for the draft.”

Strictly speaking, it’s true that fathers were not eligible to be drafted at that time – just as students got deferments and were not eligible to be compelled into the armed forces then. That doesn’t mean Gingrich couldn’t serve – he could have joined the military voluntarily. It only means the government couldn’t conscript him.

In a 1985 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Gingrich said: “Given everything I believe in, a large part of me thinks I should have gone over.” Then, he added: “Part of the question I had to ask myself was what difference I would have made.”

As for Paul’s feelings on who should be in a position to send troops to war, it’s hardly a new sentiment. But the number of veterans who eventually found their way to Congress or the White House or as other national leaders also has shifted with changing American times.

The reality today is that less than 1 percent of Americans serve in the all-volunteer armed forces built after the draft was ended. That has meant a greatly diminished pool of veterans available to run for political office and far fewer serving in Congress than in the past. Upcoming budget cuts will shrink the force further.

Over the nation’s history, about two-thirds of presidents have served in the military in some capacity.

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The White House plans a forum Wednesday, called “Insourcing American Jobs,” that will bring together business leaders who shifted work back home. The president said Saturday in his weekly radio and Internet address that the event will discuss ways business leaders can return more jobs to the country.

“We’re heading in the right direction. And we’re not going to let up,” Obama said on the heels of the government reporting Friday that the unemployment rate fell to 8.5 percent in December.

Obama noted that the jobs report showed the economy added more than 200,000 private sector jobs last month and that more than 3 million private sector jobs had been added during the past 22 months. He said the nation was “starting 2012 with manufacturing on the rise and the American auto industry on the mend.”

The president said the U.S. couldn’t return “to the days when the financial system was stacking the deck against ordinary Americans,” citing his decision to install former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray as the director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau while the Senate was on break, circumventing Republican opposition to the appointment.

Obama said his “New Year’s resolution” to all Americans was to “keep doing whatever it takes to move this economy forward and to make sure that middle-class families regain the security they’ve lost over the past decade.”

New York Rep. Nan Hayworth, delivering the GOP address, said the jobs report showed the difficulty that many Americans face in finding work. Hayworth said the unemployment rate has remained above 8 percent for 35 straight months, “the longest such stretch since the Great Depression.”

“Leaders in Washington should have no higher priority this year than getting our economy back to creating jobs,” Hayworth said.

The New York congresswoman said House Republicans would promote small business and reduce government regulation.

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Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum sought to rally conservatives to his side after coming achingly close to victory in Iowa, saying he “hoped to surprise a few people just like we did” in the campaign’s first contest.

“This is a wide-open race still,” added former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who skipped the Iowa caucuses in hopes of making his mark in next Tuesday’s first-in-the-nation primary.

Romney is the odds-on favorite to win the New Hampshire primary, though, and it is unclear how much campaign cash any of his rivals has available to try to slow or even stop his momentum. Additionally, in a measure of his establishment support, the former governor announced he would campaign with South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley on Thursday, as he was joined by McCain in New Hampshire.

“The time has arrived for Republicans to choose a presidential nominee, a new standard bearer who has the ability and determination to defeat President Obama,” said McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, and a man with a demonstrated appeal to the state’s independent voters.

Already, the Republican field of challengers was dwindling.

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann ended her campaign after a dreary 5 percent showing in Iowa, the state where she was born.

After suggesting he, too, might withdraw, Texas Gov. Rick Perry decided otherwise. “Here we come, South Carolina!!!” he tweeted. That primary is Jan. 21, and will mark the first balloting in the South as well as in a state that is part of the Republican Party’s conservative, political base nationally.

Iowa, for months ground zero in the Republican race, yielded an almost impossibly close finish.

Romney emerged with an eight-vote victory over Santorum, whose grass-roots campaigning produced a late surge that fell just shy of victory. Texas Rep. Ron Paul finished third, followed by Gingrich, Perry and Bachmann.

A survey of Iowa caucus-goers highlighted the internal divisions in the GOP as it sets out to find a challenger for President Barack Obama in the general election campaign.

Romney, who campaigned as the man best positioned to defeat Obama, was the favorite by far among caucus-goers who said that goal was their priority. Paul was preferred by those who said what mattered most was backing a true conservative. Santorum ran particularly well among those who said they were looking for a candidate with strong moral character.

Paul outpolled his rivals among younger voters and gained an estimated 48 percent share of self-identified independents, a group that traditionally plays a major role in determining the outcome of New Hampshire’s primary.

“If you look to bringing new people in, the frustrated young people that Obama had, you have to look at my campaign. I mean that’s where the enthusiasm is,” he said.

McCain and Romney clashed sharply as rivals in 2008 before reconciling for the fall campaign.

The Arizona senator did well among younger and independent voters in his two New Hampshire primary campaigns. Now, in a supporting role, he said, “Our message to President Obama is, you can run but you can’t hide from your record.”

Romney was more scathing. Paraphrasing the president, he recalled, “He said, `If I can’t turn this economy around in three years, I’ll be looking at a one-term proposition.’

“Well, I’m here to collect,” he added.

Before leaving Iowa, Romney made the round of early morning interview programs, sounding at times more like an analyst of a race than a competitor.

“I think there’s a real boost coming out of Iowa, not just for me but also of course for Rick Santorum and Ron Paul,” he said.

At the same time, he brushed aside suggestions that his share of the vote in Iowa, less than 25 percent, was a sign of weakness.

“Ronald Reagan got 29 percent of the votes here and ultimately he was able to become our nominee,” said, referring to the 1980 campaign that put Republicans in the White House.

He had a stiffer response to Gingrich, who refused to extend congratulations in the wake of the Iowa outcome.

“I’m sure he’s disappointed in the results last night. But I expect he’ll go on and mount a spirited campaign,” he said.

Spirited might be an understatement, given the sharp escalation in rhetoric from the former House speaker in the final hours in Iowa. His campaign purchased a full-page advertisement in the Union Leader, New Hampshire’s largest newspaper, calling Romney a Massachusetts moderate.

Talking with reporters in Concord, N.H., Gingrich described himself as a “conservative leader for the last generation,” and depicted Romney as something entirely different.

“In that same time period, Gov. Romney was first an independent, then repudiated Reagan-Bush, then voted for Paul Tsongas, the most liberal candidate in the `93 campaign, then ran to the left of Teddy Kennedy and then became a moderate to run for governor in Massachusetts in 2002.”

Gingrich accused his rival of including state-funded abortions in the health care legislation he signed into law in Massachusetts and said he had “specifically designated Planned Parenthood as a part of Romney care, appointed liberal judges to placate Democrats and raised taxes on business…”

“I suspect it’s going to be a very lively campaign,” he added.

Gingrich was briefly the leader in opinion polls in Iowa, before his support eroded under the weight of attack ads by a super PAC run by Romney’s allies. Short of funds, the former speaker was unable to respond in kind, and declared he would run only a positive campaign.

Having jettisoned that approach, it is unclear how much money his campaign has left after Iowa, and how willing a separate super PAC set up to support him is to spend.

Personally, Romney was able to remain largely above the fray in Iowa’s ad wars, generally running positive commercials while his allies took on Gingrich and other rivals.

Except for appearing at debates, Perry is not expected to compete in New Hampshire, saving his energy and cash for South Carolina.

In bowing out, Bachmann bestowed no endorsement. Nor did she say if she intended to seek re-election to the House from Minnesota.

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It’s not Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich or Ron Paul. It’s Obama for America, the president’s re-election campaign, which badly wants to win this battleground state in November, as it did in 2008.

“The Republicans are here today, gone tomorrow,” said Obama volunteer Pat Walters, of Johnston, a suburb of Des Moines. “We’ve been doing this since 2009.”

Next Tuesday’s Republican caucus has dominated political conversations. Largely overlooked is that Obama is running unopposed in the Democratic caucus the same night.

It’s a dramatically different scene from four years ago, when Obama set his course for the White House by beating John Edwards and Hillary Rodham Clinton after months of intense campaigning in Iowa.

Obama can coast as far as this year’s nomination is concerned. But Iowa remains a general election swing state, and no one assumes his 9-point win here over John McCain in 2008 will give him a cushion next November.

Obama’s campaign never entirely left Iowa or several other competitive states, where he hopes relentless organizing can overcome a weak economy and his mixed record of fulfilling campaign pledges in the face of strong GOP opposition in Congress. If thousands of volunteers flocked to Obama’s 2008 campaign, this time he’s having to work a bit harder to recruit and energize them.

“People say, `The mood is different this time, it’s not the same,’” said Peggy Whitworth, an Obama volunteer in Cedar Rapids. “Well of course it’s not the same. But it’s not about mood or feeling. It’s about the future of the country.”

Whitworth, 69, said she joins other Obama volunteers four hours every Tuesday night, and sometimes on other evenings as well, to telephone potential supporters. Many say they will vote for Obama again, she said, and some volunteer to help the campaign. But some are disappointed or angry that the president fell short on campaign promises such as ending the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy, and bringing a greater spirit of bipartisanship to Washington.

“Sometimes they simply want to have someone listen to them,” Whitworth said. Most say they will stick with Obama after they’ve had a chance to vent their frustrations, she said.

Obama lacks some key advantages he enjoyed in 2008. They include a deeply unpopular GOP president who was largely blamed for a faltering economy, and a widespread excitement about Obama’s precedent-breaking campaign built on “hope and change.”

In exchange, of course, he has the power of the presidency and a well-oiled political organization that has been refining its practices for five years. Obama will raise many millions of dollars, although his eventual Republican opponent may do nearly as well.

Nowhere does Obama have a bigger base to build on than in Iowa, where he campaigned for months in 2007. Romney, Gingrich and other GOP contenders have not made comparable efforts, although they say the economy and other issues will make Obama’s task much harder next year.

In activities that rarely compete with the hoopla of the GOP nominating contest, Obama’s campaign has placed a handful of paid staffers in each of several key states. They try to leverage their clout by recruiting and training scores of volunteers. The volunteers, in turn, knock on doors, organize house parties and, above all, place phone calls to voters in hopes of identifying likely Obama supporters and tracking them through Election Day.

In a tortoise-versus-hare strategy, Obama supporters hope their steady chugging will build support precinct by precinct, town by town, while Republicans spend resources chasing the nomination for a few more weeks or months. The Republican candidates and their broadcast ads are flooding Iowa this week, but they will abruptly shift to New Hampshire on Jan. 4, the day after the caucuses.

Walters, a 60-year-old insurance executive, said he is a “neighborhood team leader” who helps organize house parties, phone banks and other activities. His chief recruiting tools, he said, involve reminding Iowans of Obama’s accomplishments that include expanding medical benefits in the hard-won 2010 overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

Walters said he hopes the week-by-week, month-by-month effort will build a strong ground operation to turn out Obama’s voters next November. The Republican nominee will have to play catch up, he said.

Obama’s ground game “is already in place,” Walters said. “It’s just a matter of growing it.”

Iowa Democratic Chairwoman Chair Sue Dvorsky underscored the methodical nature of the efforts in a conference call with reporters Wednesday.

Since April, she said, “this has been a systematic grassroots effort. The same exact way we did it last time. It isn’t very glamorous. It’s not a very secret plan. It is voter to voter, one-to-one, then a street, then a precinct, then a county.”

Dvorsky said Obama will beam “a live address to Iowa Democrats in every caucus site next Tuesday night.

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Things have not gone as planned.

Turned off by Mitt Romney’s style and evolution on several important issues, they have bounced from one candidate to another in hopes of finding a formidable alternative to the former Massachusetts governor to focus their enthusiasm.

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After a series of disappointments – Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and businessman Herman Cain among them – the anti-establishment movement has settled, for now, on a favorite: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, even though he has spent more than three decades in Washington politics.

With the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3 and tea party support fractured at best, some activists worry that the passion that defined the movement 13 months ago may become lost in the selection of the next president.

Infighting among conservative groups, a growing sense of pragmatism, and glaring weaknesses among the candidates have forced some tea party leaders to acknowledge their limits and shift their attention to Congress.

“I wish that we had coalesced behind one candidate earlier on. It’s not because of the tea party movement, it’s because there hasn’t been that candidate out there so far that has stirred the passion – the fire in the belly,” said Amy Kremer, president of the Tea Party Express. “Everybody wants to focus on presidential politics. I think we need to be focused on the Senate. That’s where we really, really need to be engaged.”

Lacking a presidential contender to rally behind, Kremer’s organization and others have begun eyeing congressional elections that could shift the balance of power on Capitol Hill next fall regardless of the presidential race winner.

Other tea party groups, despite a desire to play prominently in the White House contest, are left to focus on policy debates in Congress.

They’ve already helped shape the debate over federal spending, pushing the House to pass a balanced budget amendment while rejecting Democrats’ effort to raise new revenues to help close the federal deficit.

“We’ve changed the discussion on Capitol Hill and we’ve let the politicians know we get the game they’re playing,” said Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots. “We always said last year that after the November election that our work was just beginning.”

Despite fractures within the conservative movement, the presidential campaigns are courting tea party leaders, recognizing the potential political muscle of a grassroots movement that helped deliver the House to Republicans in November 2010.

Romney and Gingrich have met privately with Kremer, although the two men generally have followed different strategies in trying to capture the tea party vote.

Romney, Gingrich, Bachmann and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum answered questions from Martin about curbing federal spending and other tea party priorities, and gave their pitch to more than 100,000 supporters, during a national conference call conducted by the Tea Party Express Sunday.

Since his 2008 presidential bid, Romney has invested time and money in building relationships with Republican leaders inside and outside the tea party movement.

That investment helped produce endorsements from conservative favorites including South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and unsuccessful Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell of Delaware.

Romney had endorsed all three politicians in their most recent elections, donated thousands of dollars, and in the case of Haley and Christie, traveled to their states to campaign by their side.

Gingrich, after such a long Washington career, represents the kind of political insider that many tea party activists generally oppose. But Gingrich had used his now-defunct organization, American Solutions, to support the tea party movement for years. American Solutions was an original sponsor of the movement’s original tax day rallies, Kremer notes. Gingrich himself was one of their first speakers.

“A lot of people don’t realize this, but he has been involved from the beginning,” Kremer said.

Gingrich’s critics say he’s bought tea party support by hiring influential activists.

In New Hampshire and South Carolina in particular, several staffers hired in recent weeks come from the conservative movement. Andrew Hemmingway, who leads his New Hampshire operation, is a 29-year-old tea party activist with no campaign experience. Gingrich’s national Coalitions Director, Kellen Giuda, helped create New York City’s tea party movement.

But that’s not enough to win over many grassroots conservatives.

Some reluctantly have embraced Romney. Others have latched onto Texas Rep. Ron Paul’s fiery candidacy. Many more say they’re simply not sure where to go.

Martin says her organization is gearing up to boost turnout in early voting states. Just don’t ask which candidate she’d like to be the nominee.

“What I’ve heard from a lot of tea party people is that they wish they could interchange the parts, like a Mister Potato Head – take parts they like from the candidates and put them together into a new candidate,” Martin said. “But we obviously can’t do that so we’re working with what we have.”

According to an AP-GfK poll from December, 55 percent of Republicans consider themselves supporters of the tea party, including 20 percent who say they are strong supporters of the movement. By comparison, 22 percent of political independents say they support the tea party, as do 10 percent of Democrats.

Tea party preferences contribute heavily to the prevailing sentiment in the GOP’s nomination contest. In the AP-GfK poll, for example, Republican tea party backers prefer Gingrich over Romney 42 percent to 26 percent. Among non-tea party Republicans, it’s Romney 29 percent to 23 percent for Gingrich.

Some say they’ve learned painful lessons from the 2010 elections, when the tea party helped nominate polarizing GOP Senate candidates who proved too conservative for voters in Nevada, Delaware and Colorado.

“The tea party in Colorado has become more pragmatic,” said former Colorado GOP chairman Dick Wadhams. “There is such an urgency to defeat Obama, I think the vast majority of tea party members are going to look at this election the way any Republican would.”

But not everyone agrees.

The tea party ally FreedomWorks, in particular, has aggressively opposed a Romney bid from the beginning. But the group, established by the conservative Koch family, is also cool to a Gingrich candidacy.

Both Romney and Gingrich “have been on the wrong side of some major policy debates,” according to Brendan Steinhauser, Freedomworks’ director of federal and state campaigns. “We do worry about whether they would follow through on their promises to shrink government if they get to the White House.”

In Massachusetts, the president of the Greater Boston Tea Party president says groups like FreedomWorks need to avoid bashing any of the Republicans.

“It seems really irresponsible to me,” Christen Varley said. “We all have to get together and back whoever it is in the end. That’s what I think is ridiculous. If the nominee is Mitt Romney, is FreedomWorks really going to sit out the 2012 election? Of course not.”

No it won’t, says Steinhauser.

But like the Tea Party Express and the Tea Party Patriots, FreedomWorks may divert its energy elsewhere.

“FreedomWorks is going to focus mostly on taking back the U.S. Senate,” Steinhauser said. “FreedomWorks’ members are divided in their support of various candidates and they would like us to hold off on any endorsements until we get through some of these early states.”

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Without a Democratic challenger who might tug him to the left, Obama is free to try to neutralize Republican efforts to tar him as a liberal ideologue by taking steps toward the political center.

At the same time, he is finding opportunities to boost his standing with his most committed backers. For example, he has appealed to environmentalists by delaying an oil pipeline that would run from Canada to Texas, and to gay rights activists by bolstering gay rights overseas and helping end a ban on gays in the military.

The sometimes seemingly contradictory moves come as Obama maneuvers toward next year’s election. Critical to his success in 2012 is retaining support from independent voters who could be won over by his GOP opponents, given the country’s high rate of unemployment and economic distress.

The White House denies that politics is at play. But as with any president, some of Obama’s most potent campaign tools derive from the powers of his office, from the bully pulpit to decisions on issues that affect people’s lives.

In the most recent example, Obama’s health secretary overruled scientists at the Food and Drug Administration to block sales of the morning-after contraceptive bill Plan B to girls under age 17 without a prescription.

Social conservatives applauded and women’s rights groups were livid, but Obama backed up Health and Human Services chief Kathleen Sebelius.

“As the father of two young daughters, I think it is important for us to make sure that, you know, we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine,” the president said Thursday.

In September, Obama overruled scientific advisers at the Environmental Protection Agency and scrapped a clean-air regulation intended to reduce health-threatening smog. That angered environmentalists, but won praise from business leaders and even Republicans, who argued that the costs and potential job losses that could result from the proposal were too high.

Yet environmentalists cheered and Republicans and business groups groused last month when the administration delayed a decision on the oil pipeline from Canada to the Texas until the U.S. government can study routes that avoid environmentally sensitive areas of Nebraska. Final action on the pipeline is not expected now until after next November’s election.

“There are politics in every issue, and there’s an upside and a downside to every issue,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said. “And usually, it’s hard to know in advance how these things will play out politically. Which is just another reason why decisions like these ought to be made on the merits.”

Melinda Pierce, a lobbyist for the Sierra Club, said that despite the disappointing decision on smog rules, environmentalists still believe they are coming out ahead with Obama as president. In addition to the pipeline delay, she cited rules from the administration on fuel efficiency for cars.

Pierce noted that one of Obama’s most important roles in the eyes of environmental groups was to guard against bills being passed by majority House Republicans that would roll back environmental regulations.

“The kind of backstop the Obama presidency has provided against the barrage of anti-environmental attacks from the House is critical, and until the face of the House changes we need that backstop,” Pierce said.

That underscores a calculation confronting Obama’s liberal supporters: Even if Obama disappoints them, they would have to think twice before voting for his Republican opponent or staying home on Election Day, given how a Republican president might act on issues they are advocating.

So Obama has some latitude to make decisions that will anger interest groups that support him, especially if he mixes in other moves in their favor.

Such as the case this month when the White House announced plans to use foreign aid to promote gay rights abroad.

It was a relatively narrow step on gay rights, and one without great resonance domestically. What gay rights activists would really like Obama to do is endorse gay marriage, a step that seems unlikely before the election.

But Obama’s done enough other things, such as repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the military, that he’s likely to maintain strong support from gay activists even without taking the final step on gay marriage that could hand ammunition to his GOP critics.

With the 2012 election approaching some analysts said it was hard to avoid viewing Obama’s decisions through the lens of politics.

“He has no primary challenger and he’s in full re-election mode, so he’s triangulating, as Bill Clinton would say,” said Paul Light, professor of public policy at New York University, using the term for Clinton’s strategy of splitting Republican and Democratic differences.

“And that means quashing some major regulations and maneuvering toward the center on a host of issues, and he’s perfectly willing to alienate core constituencies like the environmental movement,” Light said.

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I think back to the night Barack Obama was first elected. I kissed my wife and walked outside. I looked up into the clear night and reflected on the fact that I was standing on American soil as a descendant of slavery. Now under this same sky I was standing under there was a Black man, who was now the leader of this nation. I didn’t cry, I didn’t have a breakdown or catch the Holy Ghost. But I let a shout out into the night “He did it! Whoooo!”

By the time Obama’s inauguration had come those who were already aware knew the country was in bad shape. President Bush had squandered the surplus he inherited from Clinton. Bush then led this nation into two unnecessary wars that cost American’s billions of dollars. As the housing market went unchecked, whispers of foreclosures were becoming common place. Families you used to see daily, taking the kids to school moved away quietly in the night without notice.

Since then, if I’m honest, things have only gotten worse. I don’t blame him for all of it. I had no illusions about President Obama being a Civil Rights leader or a magician. But I’m deeply disappointed in where we are right now. Some say our President is too academic. They say he’s not mentally tough enough to play hardball with the Right. I’m not sure about that. He does come off soft a lot. Then again, if he could clap Osama Bin Laden, and use drones to take out a lot of other Al-Qaeda operatives – he’s no cream puff.

Let me be clear, I am much more conservative today than I used to be. I was raised as a Democrat. After my conversion to Islam and having a family I became instinctively more conservative. I did a lot of activism for the hard left in my youth, but over time I found them just as disconnected as the hard right. They are both wrong to me for different reasons. I don’t occupy Wall St. I occupy the three jobs I’m blessed to have and spend what’s left with my wife and children. But I understand why they do all they have done. At the same time, I feel the Left has an unfocused, Communist agenda I want nothing to do with.

I was never voting for Cain. I had a bad feeling in my gut n my gut from the start. It apparently proved right. I have never believed Romney was ready for prime time. I still don’t even think Gingrich is seriously running. I’ve always believed he’s been trying to re-consolidate his power within the Republican Party and nothing more. If he gets into the Oval Office, that’s just gravy for him. In the end, actual performance is much more important to me than party affiliation.

But back to Obama. I realize now that the issue for me is not if I will vote for Barack Obama or whomever wins on the Republican nomination. Its about whether I will vote for Barack Obama or not at all. I still can’t believe I’m even saying it. So many ancestors were killed as they fought for their right to vote. Sadly, for the first time I may deliberately not do it. President Obama’s Administration has made me question everything about how we got here. A few months ago a lady told me she wasn’t going to vote, I really went hard on her about how foolish she was. Today, I really understand her position.

Here is my list of things I must see from him to show up at the polls:

1. He must address everything about how Wall Street is working. He must get Holder to start jailing those responsible for hijacking our economy. The President must start naming the names and showing the faces of those who have robbed and looted the American people. He must understand that Wall Street is being occupied because he failed to address it with aggression and consistence. Bernie Madoff did not act alone. We need to know their names and faces just like we know those of Kim Kardashian or Justin Bieber.

2. Guantanamo must be closed. There is no reason it should have ever existed. Even less of a reason it should stay open after he used it as a campaign platform.

3. Radical changes in the American public school system must be made. I’m sure if this is an issue purely related to funding or to function, but things must change now. I know of schools where good teachers are underfunded and the structure is simply not there to prepare the youth for tomorrow. Whats even worse is that the kids know this. That’s why they turn to drugs and alcohol and gangs.

4. Poverty has rapidly become a cancer to this nation. I do not blame Obama for it, but we are well beyond epidemic levels of poverty here. I’ve seen kids pass out from starvation in San Francisco. When MLK Jr. and James Baldwin spoke of this extensively, I never understood it. I see clearly now, and it is time for him to act on it.

5. I believe there needs to be a review of our justice system in regards to political prisoners. I am not asking you to free every political prisoner. However, an independent panel needs to be created to honestly look at the process of surveillance, methodology of the prosecution and the legitimacy of the testimony of witnesses. Our prisons are overflowing as it is. I don’t want anyone free who has truly done wrong. But I don’t want anyone in, who was unjustly prosecuted.

I doubt he will get all of these things addressed before the 2012 election. I can only assure you that my vote for Obama, let alone at all, will hinge on him addressing all the above. What are your top 5 things you would like to see Obama address openly and aggressively?

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Now comes the counteroffensive.

The president of the United States is defending his faith in America, confronting GOP efforts to undercut his leadership and raise questions about his patriotism as he seeks re-election.

In the battle over “American exceptionalism,” Obama used a recent trip to Asia to highlight America’s role as the strongest and most influential nation on earth. In this election season, responding to the Republican critique is essential for Obama, the only incumbent ever compelled to show a birth certificate to defend his legitimacy.

“Sometimes the pundits and the newspapers and the TV commentators love to talk about how America is slipping and America is in decline,” Obama said Wednesday at a New York fundraiser. “That’s not what you feel when you’re in Asia. They’re looking to us for leadership. They know that America is great not just because we’re powerful, but also because we have a set of values that the world admires.”

“We don’t just think about what’s good for us, but we’re also thinking about what’s good for the world,” he said. “That’s what makes us special. That’s what makes us exceptional.”

Republicans have seized on “American exceptionalism,” a belief among many in the nation that the U.S. is special among global powers, and tried to portray Obama as expressing ambivalence about the promise of his own country. The message resounds with party activists who still admire President Ronald Reagan, who memorialized America as that “Shining City on a Hill” during the 1980s.

“We have a president right now who thinks America’s just another nation. America is an exceptional nation,” Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, said during a GOP debate in Las Vegas last month. Even his campaign slogan – “Believe in America” – suggests that the current president doesn’t.

Others have tried to use it to their advantage.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, in an interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly last month, said Obama had “traveled around the country making excuses for America, apologizing for America, saying that America is not an exemplary country.”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich criticized Obama after 16 Latin American and Caribbean nations filed “friend of the court” briefs in a Justice Department lawsuit against a tough new immigration law in South Carolina, home to an important GOP primary. “It makes you wonder what country does President Obama think he is president of,” Gingrich said.

Obama has given detractors ample material for their attacks.

At a San Francisco fundraiser in October, the president talked about the importance of investing in education, new roads and bridges and other ways to build the economy.

“We used to have the best stuff. Anybody been to Beijing Airport lately?” Obama said, asking what has changed. “Well, we’ve lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam.” Republicans picked up on the comments, accusing Obama of calling Americans unambitious.

During a meeting with business executives in Honolulu last month, Obama was asked about impediments to investment in the U.S. He said many foreign investors see opportunity here, “but we’ve been a little bit lazy, I think over the last couple of decades.” The “lazy” comments were quickly turned into an attack ad from Perry.

During a 2009 news conference, Obama was asked whether he subscribed to the concept of American exceptionalism. He said he believed in American exceptionalism, “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

The president said he was “enormously proud of my country” and highlighted the nation’s “core set of values enshrined in our Constitution” that ensure democracy, free speech and equality. Words that voters are likely to hear more of during the next year.

A Gallup poll in December 2010 found that 80 percent of Americans thought the U.S. had a unique character that made it the greatest country in the world. The survey found that 91 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement.

In the same poll, 34 percent of Republicans said Obama believed the U.S. was the greatest country in the world, while 83 percent of Democrats said he did.

The American exceptionalism argument has traditionally signaled U.S. strength overseas and the promotion of American values such as freedom of speech and religion. But with Obama’s rise, it has taken on a new meaning.

At a time of economic discord, it builds on the notion that America’s weakened economy could hurt its standing across the globe. It offers a critique of Obama’s foreign policy credentials, even as troops begin heading home from Iraq and the U.S. role in Afghanistan is transitioning.

It also represents a subtle way to question Obama’s patriotism, the seeds of which reside in the “birther” movement that questioned the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency. Suspicions over Obama’s citizenship eventually prompted the White House to produce the president’s long-form birth certificate showing he was born in Hawaii.

Yet Democrats don’t see this as a debilitating issue for the president, but more a matter of fodder in the Republican primary. Obama, they say, can draw upon it to show optimism in the country.

“Obama is powerful proof of American exceptionalism, that this country has certain set of ideals,” said Democratic consultant Bob Shrum. “His election and his presidency is a testament to the character of the country.”

Obama has been assertive in recent weeks about America’s unique role in the world as it shifts away from conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. During his nine-day Asian trip last month, the president reiterated the U.S.’s growing role in the region and stressed that “American leadership is still welcome.”

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Roland Martin and the Washington Watch roundtable discuss Herman Cain’s Libya flub and President Obama saying that Americans have become lazy.

Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Perry both ripped Obama this week for his remarks, which he made during a speech during last week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in Hawaii.

Although Obama was referring to America’s pursuit of foreign investment, his detractors immediately pounced.

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“Can you believe that? That’s what our president thinks is wrong with America. That Americans are lazy?” says a denim-clad Perry in a new campaign ad released Wednesday evening in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Perry makes the remarks after a clip of Obama plays of the president saying, “We’ve been a little bit lazy, I think over the last couple of decades.”

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The montage, a banner on a mass email to Loudoun Republicans, mingles seasonal images including a jack-o-lantern, a disfigured U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi and a throng of flesh-hungry zombie Obama supporters.

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The posterized image of a rotting, undead Obama with a bleeding, large-caliber hole an inch above his right eye prompted Democrats to cry foul and Virginia’s Republican governor to denounce it as “shameful and offensive.”

“This is a disgusting and violent portrayal of the president of the United States,” said Democratic Party of Virginia spokesman Brian Coy.

Gov. Bob McDonnell, through spokesman J. Tucker Martin, called on the Loudoun GOP to “apologize for their actions, and to immediately ensure that such imagery is never used again.”

Virginia GOP Chairman Pat Mullins said such an image “has no place in our politics. Ever.”

Loudoun County GOP chairman Mark Sell said in an email response to The Associated Press that the graphic was “a light-hearted attempt to inject satire humor into the Halloween holiday.”

“Apparently, some individuals have interpreted an image of Barack Obama that appeared within the email as intending to portray the President as a victim of a violent crime,” Sell wrote. “Nothing could be further from the truth, and we deeply and sincerely apologize to the President and anyone who viewed the image if that was the impression that was left.”