Super Tuesday voters could put brakes on Trump -- but will they? -- Feb. 25, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

When Southern Democrats dreamed up Super Tuesday in the 1980s, they hoped to reinvigorate the party in the South by giving it clout in choosing the party’s presidential nominee.

Or as then-Tennessee Democratic Chairman Dick Lodge memorably put it in 1986: “When your dog bites you four or five times, it’s time to get a new dog. We’ve been bitten and it’s time for the South to get a new dog.”

Two years earlier, conservative Southerners, long fed up with Democrats’ presidential picks, not only rejected Walter Mondale and helped re-elect Ronald Reagan but also voted for Republicans for Congress.

Even the new dog couldn’t bring those voters back. They’ve been voting Republican ever since.

Today officials in both parties worry about the down-ballot consequences if insurgents Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders actually become their parties’ nominees.

Both parties are pinning their hopes on Super Tuesday, March 1, when more delegates will be chosen than on any other day during the primary season. Voters in a dozen states -- including Alabama, Tennessee and Virginia -- will cast ballots.

Big question: Will Super Tuesday help choose a widely acceptable nominee – or prolong the agony for the party establishment?

In 2008, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama kept fighting after Super Tuesday’s 22 contests were inconclusive.

Today though, Clinton holds a commanding lead over Sanders in polls in Virginia and other Super Tuesday Southern states, where black voters dominate.

Among Republicans, Ted Cruz, who won the Iowa GOP caucuses, says Super Tuesday will be “the most important night of this campaign.” Rivals Marco Rubio and John Kasich also hope to break out and put the brakes on Trump.

Trump Fever, however, seems to be spreading. The billionaire businessman’s margin of victory widened from New Hampshire to South Carolina to Nevada. In Nevada, Trump won 46 percent of the vote, about the same as Rubio and Cruz combined.  Kasich and Ben Carson together didn’t reach 10 percent.

Super Tuesday was also more snooze than shock in 2012. President Barack Obama was running unopposed for re-election in most states, so all the action was on the Republican side.

Mitt Romney hoped to sweep Super Tuesday states and force his rivals from the GOP race. Romney captured 40 percent of the popular vote and about half the delegates – a performance seen as underwhelming and predictable, much like the candidate himself.

Georgia went for Newt Gingrich and Alabama and Tennessee supported Rick Santorum, who also won North Dakota and Oklahoma and came within a whisker of beating Romney in Ohio. Neither Gingrich nor Santorum was able to qualify for the ballot in Virginia, where Romney won.

“With No Knockout Punch, a Bruising Battle Plods On,” read a headline in The New York Times the day after Super Tuesday.

This time around, Trump -- endorsed by Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University and son of the late televangelist – has surprised the establishment by winning support from white evangelical voters, who dominate the Southern GOP.

In Alabama and Tennessee, for example, more than 70 percent of GOP primary voters are white evangelical Christians, an analysis by Geoffrey Skelley of the University of Virginia Center for Politics found.

In Tennessee, record numbers of Republican voters have turned out for early primary voting, which could bode well for Trump, although that’s uncertain as there have been no recent polls. Cruz and Rubio are also courting evangelicals.

In Virginia, while about 40 percent of the Republican primary vote is evangelical, 58 percent of voters are college educated, says UVa’s Skelley who suggests Northern Virginia voters could blunt Trump, and Rubio could benefit. Trump led in a Christopher Newport University poll of likely Republican primary voters in Virginia in mid-February.

The richest delegate states on Super Tuesday are Texas and Georgia, where Trump is strong. He and Cruz were neck and neck in the latest polls, released Thursday, while earlier Cruz had led handily in his home state. Trump leads by double digits in Georgia and Alabama, according to the polls.

Trump appears to have momentum, and the South is poised to solidify him as the GOP frontrunner. How ironic if Super Tuesday, which was intended to give Southern conservatives a moderating influence on presidential choices, made Trump unstoppable.

If that happens, the parties may want to get a new dog.  

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Ignored no more -- why this Super Tuesday matters -- Dec. 31, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Democratic presidential contender Martin O’Malley soon may be a footnote in history, but he made news the other day by simply showing up.

Braving a blizzard, O’Malley made it to Tama, Iowa, population 2,877, and found exactly one voter waiting for him.

“The very last event of the night, we actually had a whopping total of one person show up, but by God, he was glad to see me. So we spent the time with him,” O’Malley told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Tuesday.

O’Malley sat and talked with the man, identified only as Kenneth, about Syrian refugees, prison reform and other issues. In the end, though, Kenneth remained undecided. He needs to see some other candidates before making up his mind.

Of course he does. Iowa and New Hampshire voters expect to see the whites of presidential candidates’ eyes while voters elsewhere rarely catch a glimpse a contender in the flesh.

As the election year begins, candidates and the news media are focused on the first four contests – Iowa caucuses Feb. 1, New Hampshire primary Feb. 9, and South Carolina’s Republican primary and Nevada’s Democratic caucuses Feb. 20.

This year, though, another date looms large -- March 1. That’s Super Tuesday, when a dozen states hold presidential primaries or caucuses, the most on a single day. They are: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont and Virginia. 

Some have dubbed March 1 the “SEC primary” after the Southeastern Conference in college sports.

After the first Super Tuesday in 1988, former Virginia Gov. Chuck Robb, an architect of Super Tuesday, said it was intended to “reduce the influence of the so-called Iowa syndrome” and nationalize the political message. Southern Democrats also hoped it would give the region more clout.   

It hasn’t worked out that way, but in 2016 Super Tuesday may live up to its potential. It could do what Iowa and New Hampshire likely won’t do – winnow the crowded Republican field.

Super Tuesday states are getting more attention than usual. Ted Cruz took a bus tour of the South last summer and blitzed a dozen cities in a week in December. Marco Rubio stumped in Georgia and announced dozens of endorsements in Virginia. He plans a rally in Texas Jan. 6.

Donald Trump drew a huge crowd to a rally in Mobile, Ala., in August. Just how many attended was in dispute – he claimed 31,000 while some media outlets estimated about 20,000.

Determined to be ignored no more, Alabama Secretary of State John H. Merrill, a Republican, says he will promote visits by candidates of both parties, although deep red Alabama draws more Republican contenders.

Trump conceded the other day that he might not win Iowa. He was looking ahead to Super Tuesday when he lambasted Virginia Republicans for requiring a party loyalty pledge to vote in the primary. The pledge -- “My signature below indicates that I am a Republican” -- could turn off independents and Democrats who might be Trump voters.

“Suicidal mistake,” Trump tweeted.

If Super Tuesday delivers a Republican candidate that appeals broadly, it could finally weaken Iowa’s parochial influence. 

Iowa’s record picking nominees is dismal. Rick Santorum won the Republican caucuses in 2012 and Mike Huckabee won in 2008. After Lindsey Graham of South Carolina dropped his presidential bid the other day, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad said Graham told him he had learned two things about Iowa: “You need to love Jesus and ethanol.”  

Mitt Romney and John McCain won the New Hampshire primary in 2012 and 2008, respectively, and both became the party’s presidential nominees.

In the 2008 Democratic contests, Barack Obama won in Iowa – and Hillary Clinton came in third, behind John Edwards. She won the New Hampshire primary that year.

The hard truth is that most presidential candidates end up as also-rans. If they’re lucky, they may be remembered for a good line. Mo Udall was a Democratic congressman from Arizona when he ran for president in 1976. He finished second in six primaries the year Jimmy Carter rode his win in the Iowa caucuses to victory.

Udall often told a story about meeting some elderly fellows in a barber shop in New Hampshire, where he said, “I’m Mo Udall, and I’m running for president of the United States.”

“Yeah,” the barber replied, “We were just laughing about that this morning.”

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved. 30

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Beware the hype about special election in Florida -- March 13, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

If you’ve ever looked at a leaf through a microscope, you know that tiny details appear enormous.

A special election is a rare moment in politics when the nation focuses its telescope on a single contest and then greatly magnifies the results.

Back in 1991, in a special Senate election, newly appointed Democratic Sen. Harris Wofford of Pennsylvania handily defeated Republican challenger Dick Thornburgh, and pundits read the tea leaves to say that health care had instantly jumped to the top of the national agenda.

Wofford did champion health care reform, as did Bill Clinton, elected president the next year. But we know how the Clinton health plan turned out.

In 1994, Wofford lost his Senate seat to a 36-year-old upstart named Rick Santorum. Health reform foundered for another decade.

When Democrat Kathy Hochul won a special House election in New York in an upset in 2011, analysts saw it as a sign Democrats would make fighting a Republican plan to cut Medicare their No.1 issue. By 2012, Hochul’s district had been redrawn, and Medicare was old news. She lost her seat. 

So perhaps it’s no surprise that when Republican David Jolly won Tuesday’s closely watched special House election in Florida, pundits saw it as a big deal. One political editor in the Sunshine State lifted his eyes from the microscope and said it was a “big, big, big, big win” for Republicans.

It was a win, certainly, but a narrow one.

The late C.W. Bill Young, a Republican, had held the seat more than 40 years. Jolly, who was Young’s former aide and general counsel, won by 3,400 votes out of 183,000 cast. It’s believed to be the costliest special election in history with about $12 million spent, most -- $9 million -- by outside groups.

Florida’s 13^th Congressional District in Pinellas County on the Gulf Coast was subject to a blizzard of negative ads. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for example, ran a TV spot blasting Democrat Alex Sink for her support of Obamacare, claiming that 300,000 Floridians will lose their current coverage and that the law will hurt seniors, families and others.

“With Alex Sink, the priority is Obamacare -- not us,” the narrator intones.

Republicans say the special election foreshadows GOP gains in congressional races this fall. Sink was “ultimately brought down because of her unwavering support for Obamacare and that should be a loud warning for other Democrats running coast to coast,” said Rep. Greg Walden, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Had Democrats won, they too would have played up the significance, claiming it portends victories in November and a strengthened Democratic hand in the Senate. Instead, they said it was unsurprising that the seat stayed Republican. Still, they couldn’t deny that the loss is disappointing and could affect morale.

But what neither party says is how few seats are actually in play in November. Most districts have been drawn to favor incumbents and avoid tight races, so even though all 435 House seats are up in the midterm election, about 370 are considered safely Republican or Democratic. The House is expected to remain in Republican control for Obama’s final two years.

In the Senate, Republicans need six seats to wrest control from Democrats. That’s where Republicans hope their relentless attacks on the president and his health care law pay off.  

For his part, with six months until the election, Obama is already warning Democrats about the consequences of complacency and staying home.  

“In the midterms, Democrats too often don’t vote,” the president said March 6 at a Democratic National Committee event in Boston. “Too often, when there’s not a presidential election we don’t think it’s sexy; we don’t think it’s interesting. People tune out. And…we get walloped. It’s happened before and it could happen again.”

It could. So much depends on what happens in the next six months that it’s wise, when you hear anyone  talking about the significance of the Republican victory in Florida, to remember the leaf under the microscope. 

©2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Obama the marriage president? -- Jan. 31, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

President Barack Obama made history and gladdened many hearts when he endorsed gay rights and gay marriage in his second inaugural address.

Just think what additional good he could have done had he also endorsed marriage generally.

   

I know. The tired phrase “marriage between one man and one woman” has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the political and religious right. But that need not scare the president or anyone else from talking about its benefits to individuals and society.  Married people live longer, healthier, more prosperous lives than singletons, studies show.

And you don’t have to be Rick Santorum to know that marriage is a grand anti-poverty program. Many studies have shown that If people marry before they start families, the children fare far better. This isn’t a news flash.

In 1965, an obscure assistant secretary of Labor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a report for President Lyndon Johnson about the breakdown of the black family. Moynihan warned that the crumbling family structure left many households headed by single women and these were more likely to be stuck in poverty. He hoped the report would be the impetus for a national strategy to break the cycle of poverty.

But Moynihan’s report was leaked to the press, causing an uproar. Any hope of a national conversation was lost as critics lambasted Moynihan for blaming the victims of poverty, insulting single moms and ignoring supports in the black community. His controversial report  notwithstanding, Moynihan went on to serve 24 years in the U.S. Senate. He died in 2003.

The problem of the collapsing American family has only gotten worse since the Moynihan report.

“Nearly 50 years later, the picture is even more grim – and the statistics can no longer be organized neatly by race,” says Isabel V. Sawhill, a budget expert and scholar at the Brookings Institution. “Moynihan’s bracing profile of the collapsing black family in the 1960s looks remarkably similar to a profile of the average white family today.”

Sawhill writes in the latest Washington Monthly: “White households have similar—or worse—statistics of divorce, unwed childbearing, and single motherhood as the black households cited by Moynihan in his report.

“In 2000, the percentage of white children living with a single parent was identical to the percentage of black children living with a single parent in 1960: 22 percent,” she says.

While Moynihan saw family formation as a racial divide, Sawhill says it’s increasingly a class issue.

“Because the breakdown of the traditional family is overwhelmingly occurring among working-class Americans of all races, these trends threaten to make the U.S. a much more class-based society over time,” she writes.

When educated, middle-class couples form two-parent families, they’re able to give their children “time and resources that lower-and working-class single mothers, however impressive their efforts to be both good parents and good breadwinners, simply do not have,” Sawhill says.

In his autobiography, “The Audacity of Hope,” Sen. Barack Obama writes that liberal policy makers and civil rights leaders, in their urgency to avoid blaming the victims of historical racism, wrongly labeled Moynihan a racist and “tended to downplay or ignore evidence that entrenched behavioral patterns among the black poor really were contributing to intergenerational poverty.”   

As president, Obama has approached making families stronger by focusing on the responsibilities of fatherhood, usually around Fathers Day. In June 2010, he announced a nationwide Fatherhood and Mentoring Initiative, but he conceded that it’s hard for government to change attitudes or behavior.

“Now, I can’t legislate fatherhood – I can’t force anybody to love a child. But what we can do is send a clear message to our fathers that there is no excuse for failing to meet their obligations,” he said.

That may be sound social policy, but it doesn’t make anyone’s heart sing.   

As Obama and other leaders promote the value of gay marriage, they shouldn’t be silent on the value of marriage between a man and woman. It’s not either-or. Both are good.    

©2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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When 'free ride' on health care became conservative -- Feb. 16, 2012 column

By MARSHA MERCER

When Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney signed his state’s health care plan in 2006, requiring everyone to buy insurance, he bragged that the free ride was over.

“The Republican approach is to say, `You know what? Everybody should have insurance. They should pay what they can afford to pay. If they need help, we will be there to help them, but no more free ride,’” Romney told Neil Cavuto on Fox News.

Romney cast his plan as the ultimate conservative idea, but this was before Barack Obama was elected president, before Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, before the anti-government folks rattled politicians’ tea cups. In 2012, Romney’s leadership in promoting personal responsibility has made him the GOP’s piñata.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it also can be political death-making. Romney’s presidential campaign has suffered because President Obama’s health-care law also shuts down the free ride on health care. Obama requires most people to buy insurance by 2014 or pay a tax penalty.

Romney still tries to sell the mandate to buy insurance as a conservative idea, but Rick Santorum has surged by whacking continuously at the Massachusetts law and by linking Romney with Obama.

Damning it as the “stepchild of Obamacare,” Santorum says that requiring people to buy health insurance is nothing short of an assault on personal liberty – and there’s “no greater issue in this race than freedom.” Whoa, the freedom to freeload?

There’s a difference between campaigning and governing. While Congress and the Republican candidates bash “Obamacare” for political gain, the ranks of the uninsured continue to grow. About 50 million Americans now lack insurance. Some have lost jobs and benefits in the recession while others are working for employers who have dropped health benefits.

And so, as Mitt Romney said back in 2006, we already have socialized medicine. People who lack insurance still get sick and in car accidents and wind up in the emergency room where they get care. Taxpayers and the people with insurance foot the bills.

Romney’s and Obama’s health laws are attempts to bring people into the system to rein in costs and improve access to care.

Interestingly, none of the legal challenges to the federal law dispute the basic fact that the nation faces a crisis in health care cost and access.

Today Massachusetts has the highest level of health insurance coverage in the country, and, here’s a surprise, “Romneycare” enjoys widespread support. Almost two-thirds of state residents like the Massachusetts plan, according to a new survey for WBUR, a public radio station in Boston. The finding is consistent with previous surveys over the years.

Until 2009, Gallup polls found that large majorities of Americans believed government had a responsibility to make sure Americans had health care coverage. About half of us still believe it.

And, while most Americans hate the idea of socialized medicine, one in four Americans now get their health care through government programs -- Medicare, Medicaid, military and veterans’ benefits. They just don’t think of themselves as receiving government health care. Who can forget the protesting seniors waving signs that read “Keep Your Hands Off MY Medicare.”

One in two Americans favor repeal of the Affordable Care Act, polls tell us. At the same time, young people, now eligible to stay on their parents’ health insurance until age 26, are getting coverage as never before. The Census Bureau estimated that at least half a million people 18 to 24 have gotten coverage under the law.

All the Republican presidential candidates favor speedy repeal of Obama’s plan, if the Supreme Court doesn’t do it first. The court is expected to rule on the constitutionality of the law in June.

Santorum insists that Romney is the “worst possible person” to confront Obama on the health care issue in the fall, because he “built the largest government-run health-care system in the United States.”

Romney, who could argue he has the experience to work with Democrats as he did in Massachusetts, instead says that what was good for Massachusetts isn’t good for the whole country.

Promising “no free rides” may have been a conservative concept, but in 2012 it’s too liberal for a Republican seeking his party’s presidential nomination.


© 2012 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.