Tiffany Alston declared bankruptcy before running for office 

By Paul Schwartzman, Published: December 30

Former Maryland State Del. Tiffany Alston declared bankruptcy seven months before she tried to use her campaign funds to cover her wedding expenses, according to court records.

Alston’s $182,758 in debts included $26,000 she owed her former law partner, who alleged in a lawsuit that Alston had charged tens of thousands of dollars in personal expenses to the firm, the court records show.

Alston declined to comment on the bankruptcy filing, the existence of which has not been reported before.

“I’m not going to answer any more questions,” the Prince George’s County Democrat said by telephone. Alston also declined to talk about the 2008 lawsuit filed by her former partner, Ara Parker.

Parker and Alston settled their dispute, with Alston agreeing to pay her former partner more than $20,000, the court records show.

Maryland lawmakers, citing the state constitution, stripped Alston of her delegate seat after she was convicted of improperly using state funds to pay an employee of her law firm.  A judge expunged the conviction from Alston’s record after she completed 300 hours of community service. Alston is trying to reclaim her post in an appeal she has filed before Maryland’s highest court, which has scheduled a hearing for Friday.

 

Alston’s downfall has drawn attention in Prince George’s and beyond. An African American lawyer, she grew up in the county, the daughter of a single mother who struggled to support her and her brother. When she was in fifth grade, two businessmen, Abe Pollin and Melvin Cohen, adopted her class at Seat Pleasant Elementary, promising to pay their college tuition if they finished high school. Alston became one of the program’s stars.  Besides losing her delegate seat, Alston’s license to practice law was suspended by Maryland’s highest court after a client accused her of professional negligence.

Alston filed for bankruptcy in May 2010 as she campaigned for election to the Maryland House of Delegates. She won the race and took office in January 2011.  Eight months later, state prosecutors indicted Alston for seeking to pay $3,560 in wedding expenses by writing two checks drawn from her campaign account. Although the checks bounced, prosecutors said Alston’s crime was that she had attempted to use her political funds for a personal expense.

Alston has said that she mistakenly used a campaign checkbook instead of her personal checkbook, an explanation that prosecutors have dismissed because she wrote two checks on two separate days.

Alston pleaded “no contest” in the case involving her wedding. The prosecutor’s probe of her spending led to a second indictment, this one because she used $800 in taxpayer funds to compensate an employee of her law firm. Alston contended that the employee was performing government work. An Anne Arundel County jury found her guilty in that case.

Although prosecutors were unaware of her bankruptcy, they said during her trial that her law firm had bounced dozens of checks. “We portrayed all along that her finances were in a shambles,” said Emmet Davitt, the prosecutor on the case.

Alston has acknowledged making “careless accounting mistakes,” even as she has said that she never intended to commit a crime. During a recent interview with The Washington Post, she portrayed herself as the victim of a political vendetta and of a racially biased justice system.

Alston has never spoken publicly about declaring bankruptcy.  In her filing, Alston listed as her personal property the $100 she had in her pocket, $50 she had in a personal checking account at Industrial Bank, a sofa, two beds, four chairs, a television, and a 2005 Saab that had 90,000 miles. She listed her income as $3,597 a month. Her monthly expenses were $5,993.

Her list of debts included $132,137 she owed Sallie Mae for student loans; $20,664 she owed on her car loan; more than $4,400 to the state of Maryland; $3,800 she owed AT&T Mobility, Verizon and Pepco; and $3,500 she owed to a Lanham karate school.

Parker, her former law partner, accused her of charging more than $35,000 in personal expenses to their firm in a complaint filed in 2008 in Prince George’s County Circuit Court.  Parker, who declined to comment on the case, and Alston opened a practice together in September 2007, according to the complaint. Alston, the complaint states, was responsible for overseeing the firm’s finances.

Three months later, according to the suit, they dissolved their partnership after Parker discovered that Alston had used the firm’s American Express card to charge $8,557 in expenses of a “personal nature, including a trip to Las Vegas, spa treatments, shoes, dining out, etc.”  Alston, in her response to the complaint that she filed with the court, denied that the charges were personal.

Parker also found that Alston had put $24,496 in charges on the firm’s line of credit at M&T Bank, about $17,000 of which Parker said she had not agreed to, according to the complaint. Parker also learned that the bank account that funded the firm’s day-to-day operations was overdrawn by $5,700.

Parker and Alston dissolved their partnership in December 2007, after which Parker filed the lawsuit.

They settled their dispute in 2009. Alston agreed to pay Parker $20,695, according to court records. Nine months later, Alston declared bankruptcy.

PHARMAGGEDON

While the U.S. faces a growing addiction to prescription pain killers, pharmaceutical companies are marketing and influencing research  to promote the use of opiates.

Washington Post / December 31. 2012

Portsmouth, Ohio — Over much of the past decade, the official word on OxyContin was that it rarely posed problems of addiction for patients.  The label on the drug, which was approved by the FDA, said the risks of addiction were “reported to be small.”

The New England Journal of Medicine, the nation’s premier medical publication, informed readers that studies indicated that such painkillers pose “a minimal risk of addiction.”  Another important journal study, which the manufacturer of OxyContin reprinted 10,000 times, indicated that in a trial of arthritis patients, only a handful showed withdrawal symptoms.

Those reassuring claims, which became part of a scientific consensus, have been quietly dropped or called into question in recent years, as many in the medical profession rediscovered the destructive power of opiates. But the damage arising from those misconceptions may have been vast.

The nation is confronting an ongoing epidemic of addiction to prescription painkillers — more widespread than cocaine or heroin — that has left nearly 2 million in its grip, according to federal statistics.

“It turns out that the doctors didn’t know what they were talking about,” said Barbara Howard, whose daughter Leslie, a home-care nurse, died of an overdose in 2009 in this small Appalachian town devastated by the epidemic. She had developed a habit after knee surgery. She left behind a 9-year-old son.

“Leslie trusted the doctors. We thought the doctors knew what was best. But they didn’t. We — and lots of the other victims — had no warning.”

Conflicts of interest

A closer look at the opioid painkiller binge — retail prescriptions have roughly tripled in the past 20 years — shows that the rising sales and addictions were catalyzed by a massive effort by pharmaceutical companies to shape medical opinion and practice.

Opioids are a class of powerful drugs, often used for pain, that includes morphine, heroin and brand names such as OxyContin, Vicodin and Percocet.  For years, doctors had been cautious about prescribing opioids to anyone except patients with cancer or in acute pain.

But drug manufacturers and some pain specialists helped create a body of scientific research assuaging the long-standing worries about opioids and pushed to expand the use of the drugs in people with chronic pain — bad backs, arthritis, sore knees.

Their studies reported minimal risks of addiction and dependence. These, in turn, were accepted by the FDA and the nation’s medical journals. State medical boards made their rules for prescribing opioids more liberal. Academic and industry articles dismissed the old fears as “opiophobia.”

These reports reached doctors through marketing efforts and told them that there were few risks in using opioids to treat chronic pain.

But according to a Washington Post examination of key scientific papers, a court document and FDA records, many of those claims were developed in studies supported by Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, or other drug manufacturers. In addition, the conclusions they reached were sometimes unsupported by the data, and when the FDA was struggling to come up with an opioid policy, it turned to a panel populated by doctors who had financial relationships with Purdue and other drugmakers.

●A review of 16 key clinical trials on the subject shows that five were funded by Purdue and an OxyContin distributor, two were co-authored by Purdue employees, and two were sponsored by other drug companies making different opioids. None of the 16studies showed clear warnings about the addiction dangers or the physical dependence generated by the drugs. The low rate of addiction reported in these studies is at odds with more recent findings indicating that diagnoses of addiction are common in opioid patients.

●Internal company documents indicate that one of the key published studies sponsored by Purdue — the one reprinted 10,000 times — omitted suspected cases of withdrawal symptoms. The published paper offered assurance that only two of more than 100 OxyContin patients had withdrawal symptoms; the internal documents showed that at least 11 exhibited possible signs of withdrawal, and some experts say it is likely that at the doses given, most of the patients would have experienced withdrawal.

●To refine its policy on opioids, the FDA convened a key meeting in 2002 and invited 10 outside experts for advice. Five of them reported having served as speakers or investigators for Purdue. Three others reported working as speakers for or as advisers and consultants to other pharmaceutical companies.

One of those FDA advisers, Russell Portenoy, who was then the chair of the Department of Pain Medicine and Palliative Care at the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, has since expressed regret for his evangelism on behalf of opioids.

He was “trying to create a narrative so that the primary care audience would . . . feel more comfortable about opioids,” Portenoy said in a 2010 interview with Andrew Kolodny, the chief of a group seeking to rein in drug use, Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing. “Because the primary goal was to destigmatize [opioids], we often left evidence behind. . . .

“To the extent that some of the adverse outcomes now are as bad as they have become in terms of endemic occurrences of addiction and unintentional overdose deaths, it’s quite scary to think about how the growth in that prescribing driven by people like me led in part to that occurring.”

Through a spokesman, Portenoy declined to comment for this report, but he has said that he continues to believe that many patients with chronic pain can benefit from opioids, though the estimates of how many patients may become addicted are larger than previously thought.

At the time of the 2002 FDA meeting, Portenoy reported being a speaker for Purdue Pharma. He also reported involvements on contracts and grants with Parke-Davis, Boehringer Ingelheim, Elan, Ortho Biotech, Endo, Ametek, Medtronic, Purdue Pharma, Pfizer, Janssen, Abbott, Curatech, Ortho-McNeil and Searle.

James Heins, a spokesman for Purdue, said that “it is implausible that our marketing caused an upsurge in overall prescriptions of opioids or in the incidence of abuse” because the company commands only a small portion of the painkiller market.

Moreover, he said, the notion that the risk of addiction was small was “not based on studies funded by Purdue but rather on the larger body of medical literature and clinical experience.”Even today, he said, it is difficult to say exactly how many people who are prescribed opioids become addicted.

‘Absolutely devastating’

In few places are the effects of the opioid epidemic clearer than in Portsmouth, a town near Ohio’s borders with West Virginia and Kentucky. About 10 percent of babies are born addicted to opioids. At one point, nine “pill mills” operated out of this region of 80,000 people. About 20 people a year die of drug overdoses. Last year, for every resident, more than 100 doses of opioids were prescribed and dispensed.

Ask someone here whether the risks of opioid addiction are minimal, and some snort or roll their eyes.

“Around here, we call it ‘pharmageddon,’ ” said Lisa Roberts, the public health nurse for the town, whose primary job is to reduce the fatalities associated with drug use. “This has been absolutely devastating to Appalachia. From what we’ve seen, the risks of addiction were tremendous.”

For decades, many doctors had been wary of prescribing opioids except for use by cancer patients and the terminally ill.

In 1992, for example, a survey of state medical board members, most of them physicians, found that only 12 percent described prescribing opioids for an extended period for chronic pain as a “lawful and generally acceptable medical practice.”

Advocates for opioid prescription, backed in part by drugmakers, set about seeking to change those attitudes. More than 20 states changed their rules. And in December 1995, these marketing efforts surged as Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin, a controlled-release form of the opioid oxycodone.

From 1996 to 2000, the company doubled its sales force from 300 to 671, according to a 2003 report by what was then the General Accounting Office. The amount of sales bonuses Purdue Pharma offered tied to OxyContin grew from $1 million a year to $40 million a year. It sponsored pain-related Web sites, advertised in medical journals and paid influential doctors such as Portenoy to talk to other physicians.

As the number of overdoses and reports of addicts rose in the early 2000s, key questions arose. How were the addicts becoming addicted? Was it by going to the doctor with a legitimate pain and getting a legitimate prescription? Or was it just people seeking a high and buying the prescription drugs off the street?  If it was only the latter, limiting prescriptions might have little direct effect on the problem and could penalize pain sufferers.  But it was both.

 Although many addicts started on opioids just to get high, experts say, a good portion arrived at their habits after coming into contact with opioids after a doctor’s visit for a legitimate pain. That’s how Leslie Cooper came to the drug, and it is reportedly the way some celebrities became addicted: Rush Limbaugh, Matthew Perry, Cindy McCain.

Other trials have reported that significant numbers of pain patients are addicted. In one review out of Yale School of Medicine, investigators found that diagnoses of addiction are “common” in patients given opioids for back pain, with as many as 24 percent engaging in “aberrant” or peculiar ways of taking the pills.

Early on, officials at the Drug Enforcement Administration perceived the danger to patients.

“The company’s aggressive methods, calculated fueling of demand and the grasp for major market share very much exacerbated OxyContin’s widespread abuse and diversion,” a November 2003 memo from the agency said. “The claim in Purdue’s ‘educational’ video for physicians that opioid analgesics cause addiction in less than one percent of patients is not only unsubstantiated but also dangerous because it misleads prescribers.”

But amid the marketing blitz, concerns about addiction in patients appear to have faded from the medical profession.  The FDA, which must approve drug labels, allowed Purdue to say on its label: “The development of addiction to opioid analgesics in properly managed patients with pain has been reported to be rare.”

The agency warned that drug abusers and addicts might try to obtain the drugs, but it indicated that the risks seemed minor for patients: “We do not know how often patients with continuing (chronic) pain become addicted to narcotics, but the risk has been reported to be small.”  The agency, however, would later change its mind.

By 2008, the claims that the risks of addiction in patients were small were removed from the OxyContin label, after “extensive negotiations” with Purdue, an FDA spokeswoman said.

“The labeling information, including language regarding addiction, has evolved over time as data has become available,” Morgan Liscinsky said.

The FDA did not say what evidence led the agency to allow the previous claims or what new findings led it to ask for the removal of those claims.

Early on, however, the agency relied on industry experts for advice. In the 2002 FDA meeting, for example, eight of the 10 invited experts had connectionswith pharmaceutical companies. Of those, five had served as speakers, consultants or investigators for Purdue, including Portenoy and Kathy Foley, a neuro-oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Together, Portenoy and Foley had published a key study on opioids in 1986 that found that only two of 38 patients seemed to abuse the drugs and that both had histories of substance abuse.

“Their past work with industry should not preclude them from sharing their expertise with government agencies or their peers in the medical community,” Heins, the Purdue spokesman, said.  The FDA and doctors also could turn to a spate of other trials that seemed to suggest there was little reason to worry that chronic pain patients could get addicted to opioids.

 

Take, for example, a 2003 report in the New England Journal of Medicine, which reviewed the conclusions from several studies.

“The general finding is that patients with chronic pain . . . can achieve satisfactory analgesia . . . with a minimal risk of addiction,” it said, while questioning the use of high doses.

What may be most striking about the paper, though, is that its lead author has become one of the top critics of opioid prescribing habits. But Jane Ballantyne, a pain specialist at the University of Washington, said that at the time there were very few clinical trials that showed any sign of an addiction risk.

“There were very few studies then that suggested that any more than 8 percent of people on prescription opioids exhibited addiction-type behaviors,” Ballantyne said. Now, she said, the understanding is that the number may be as high as 50 percent.

How did all these studies — co-authored by doctors with university affiliations and published in academic journals — lead to conclusions that now are in dispute?

One reason, according to critics, is that most of the studies were conducted by drug companies.

“A pharmaceutical company that has a vested interest in promoting their product should not be seen as a reliable source of safety information,” said Orman Hall, director of the Ohio Department of Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services. “Some of those estimates are ludicrous.”

Consider the 16 clinical trial reports that Ballantyne highlighted and used in her article, which reflect the medical literature at the time. Her summary did not discuss sponsors of the studies. But of those 16, six were sponsored by Purdue Pharma or co-authored by its employees, one was sponsored by Mundipharma, which distributed OxyContin and other opioids, and two were sponsored by another drug company or co-authored by drug company employees.

In the trials, patients were given an opioid for pain, but in most, there were no systematic checks for withdrawal symptoms or addiction. Instead, in most of the trials, regardless of whether they were sponsored by drug companies, the investigators generally found that the benefits of pain relief outweighed the risks of side effects such as constipation and dry mouth.

If investigators were looking for signs of addiction, they weren’t looking hard.

 “In the absence of rigorous evaluation and surveillance, it’s hard to know whether the low levels of addictive behavior reported in those studies are accurate,” said David A. Fiellin, a professor of medicine at Yale with an expertise in addiction.

Fiellin noted that the design of a study can dramatically change the results and that entrusting the design to scientists with conflicts of interest could introduce bias. What patients are admitted to the trial? How are side effects measured? How large are the doses?

“All of those are scientific decisions that should be made by people without any regard for how the findings will affect the company’s bottom line,” Fiellin said, adding that the government could play a larger role in funding.

                                                            Data Discrepancy

In one of the studies sponsored by Purdue that Ballantyne covered, and that played a large role in the marketing of OxyContin, there appear to have been significant discrepancies between the data that were gathered and those that were published.

A March 2000 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine published a study that followed 106 arthritis patients treated with OxyContin for several months.  Six times during the trial, researchers intentionally stopped the doses.  Remarkably, according to doctors who study addiction and dependence, there were no reports of withdrawal during those respites.

Two patients had withdrawal problems, but one was at the end of the study, and the other had simply run out of the medication.

“Withdrawal syndrome was not reported as an adverse event for any patient during the scheduled respites,” the authors reported.

The trial also showed that the drug was effective and was embraced by the Purdue marketing team, which ordered 10,000 reprints to distribute to its sales staff, with instructions to highlight the finding on withdrawal.  But according to company documents disclosed in a court case, the paper left out several cases of withdrawal.

Inside Purdue, supervisors and employees reviewed a more complex set of data, according to a document signed by company attorneys and prosecutors, which accompanied a 2007 settlement in which federal prosecutors charged Purdue with misbranding the drug.  The document has not previously been linked to the Archives article.

“Multiple” patients, a company review said, “directly stated or implied that an adverse experience was due to possible withdrawal symptoms.”  Eleven study patients “reported adverse experience due to possible withdrawal symptoms during these periods,” according to the court document.

 

How did this discrepancy arise?

One of the authors of the Archives article, Roy Fleischmann, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, said the authors were given the data by Purdue.

“We reported on the data which was provided to us,” he wrote.  He said the discrepancy may have arisen because some of the side effects — such as insomnia, nausea and anxiety — were not characterized by Purdue “as withdrawal symptoms, although, in retrospect, they probably were,” he said in an e-mail.

Doctors who have treated OxyContin addicts, and some former addicts, moreover, say that considering the doses given to the patients in the trial and its duration, even the internal document undercounted patients reporting withdrawal symptoms. They say the majority of patients were likely to have suffered withdrawal symptoms when the drug was cut off.

At the doses given in the trial, most patients are “pretty consistently” going to have withdrawal symptoms, said Phillip Prior, a board-certified addictionologist in the Portsmouth area who has treated thousands of patients addicted to opioids.

He said the lower estimates are “flawed conclusions from a very flawed study.” 

“I’ve never seen anyone come off of them and not get withdrawal,” said Billie Taylor, 42, a former addict who works at a treatment center in Portsmouth. “I would have quit a lot earlier if it had not been for the withdrawal. You feel like you want to die. Even if you take them at prescribed levels, you get withdrawal.”

“You could say these marketing tactics are merely concerning,” Prior said. “But I think of them as satanic. What the data are telling us is that these drugs are ruining people’s lives.”

Commentary: Obama's New Second-Term Swagger

In his first post-re-election news conference, the president is more opinionated and forceful.

By Andre Showell

Posted: 11/16/2012 12:20 PM EST

It’s perhaps one of the most overused words ever to enter the American English vernacular: swagger. And more times than not, the word is used inappropriately. But if you had the chance to see President Obama’s first post-election White House news conference, you were seeing the word “swagger” exemplified.

It had very little to do with the way he walked or talked or his style of dress. The president’s swag during his first second-term presser was a testament to what appears to be a new attitude. He seemed to shrug off his excessively polite, methodical, careful demeanor for a more opinionated, forceful and at times abrupt manner.

No example showed off the president’s swag more than his approach to one question about whether he would deter from nominating U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to the Secretary of State post amid Republican threats to block her nomination because of her handling of the recent attacks in Benghazi

The president was sure-footed and resolute in his defense of Rice saying, “Let me say specifically about Susan Rice, she has done exemplary work. She has represented the United States and our interests in the United Nations with skill and professionalism and toughness and grace.”

Critics had questioned whether a White House with such a reputation for putting only the most drama-free candidates before Congress would stand by Rice now that she finds herself in the hot seat.

But the most swagger-filled moment came shortly after President Obama’s defense of Rice when he gave the following retort: “As I’ve said before, she made an appearance at the request of the White House in which she gave her best understanding of the intelligence that had been provided to her. If Senator McCain and Senator Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me. And I’m happy to have that discussion with them. But for them to go after the U.N. Ambassador, who had nothing to do with Benghazi, and was simply making a presentation based on intelligence that she had received, and to besmirch her reputation is outrageous.”

I, for one, was pretty amazed that the president would stare Congress in the face, gangster-style and dare them to come after him. In so many words, he said he’d take a bullet if he had to so that a trusted appointee would not have to take the fall.

Is this a new President Obama? Without fear of making a re-election snafu, has he found his new stride? And is he emboldened to be more declarative and get a little gangsta now that he has received a new mandate to govern? If his performance in his first press conference is any indication of how he will proceed during the second term, we could be seeing a new side of President Obama, one defined by a new, yet fitting incarnation of the word "swagger."

Justice official says, Register voters automatically

 

 

By PETE YOST | Associated Press – 21 hrs ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — One of the top enforcers of the nation's civil rights laws said Friday government should be responsible for automatically registering citizens to vote by using existing databases to compile lists of all eligible residents in each jurisdiction.

 

The proposal by Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, chief of the Justice Department's civil rights division, follows an election with breakdowns that forced voters in many states to wait in line for hours.

 

In remarks at George Washington University law school, Perez said census data shows that of 75 million adult citizens who failed to vote in the 2008 presidential election, 60 million were not registered and therefore ineligible to cast a ballot.

 

Perez says one of the biggest barriers to voting in this country is an antiquated registration system.  President Barack Obama has said the problem must be dealt with and "we in the Justice Department ... have already begun discussing ways to address long lines and other election administration problems, whether through proposed legislation, executive action and other policy measures," Perez said in prepared remarks. He welcomed his audience to contribute suggestions.

 

"For too many people in our democracy, the act of voting has become an endurance contest," said Perez. "I used to run marathons; you should not feel like you have endured a marathon when you vote."

 

Perez said the current registration system is needlessly complex and forces state and local officials to manually process a crush of new registrations, most handwritten, every election season. This leaves "the system riddled with errors, too often, creating chaos at the polls," Perez said. "That's exactly what we saw at a number of polling places on Election Day last week."

 

"Fortunately, modern technology provides a straightforward fix for these problems - if we have the political will to bring our election systems into the 21st century," Perez said. "It should be the government's responsibility to automatically register citizens to vote, by compiling - from databases that already exist - a list of all eligible residents in each jurisdiction. Of course, these lists would be used solely to administer elections - and would protect essential privacy rights." He did not say which level of government should be responsible for implementing such changes.

 

Perez said the nation also must address the problem that 1 in 9 Americans moves every year, but voter registration often does not move with people who move.

 

Election officials should work together to establish a program of "permanent, portable registration so that voters who move can vote at their new polling place on Election Day," Perez said. In the meantime, he said states should implement fail-safe procedures to correct voter-roll errors and omissions by allowing every voter to cast a regular, nonprovisional ballot on Election Day.

 

Perez supported allowing voters to register and cast their ballots on the same day. He called same-day registration "a reform we should be considering seriously" because it would promote voter participation.  He said that in the 2008 presidential election, five of the six states with the highest turnout in the country were states with same-day registration. Preliminary turnout estimates for the 2012 election, he said, show that this pattern will likely continue. 

 

Perez also said:

 

—The Justice Department will consider whether national standards for counting provisional ballots for federal elections are needed to ensure that voters are not disenfranchised by appearing in the wrong polling place or by poll worker errors.

 

—It is "time to rethink our largely partisan system of state and local election administration. We risk leaving our election processes open to partisan mischief — or to the perception of such mischief. We should have a serious conversation about solutions to this risk, including developing an entirely professionalized and nonpartisan system for administering our elections."

 

—Congress should enact legislation that would deter and punish lawbreakers who conduct misinformation campaigns such as telling people that Election Day has been moved or that only one adult per household can cast a ballot. Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Ben Cardin, D-Md., have introduced the measure.

Why Mitt Romney will regret blaming his loss on Obama's 'gifts' to minorities

By The Week's Editorial Staff | The Week – 9 hrs ago

Related Content

The defeated GOP candidate faces a backlash after he points the finger at young and minority voters in the wake of his landslide defeat

Mitt Romney is taking fire from both the left and the right after telling donors on Wednesday that he lost last week's election because President Obama had showered young voters, minorities, and other key liberal constituencies with "big gifts." "With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest, was a big gift," Romney said on a conference call with his national finance committee. "Free contraceptives were very big with young college-aged women." He also said that Obama's health care reform was a "huge" gift for Latinos and blacks. Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, among other GOP leaders hoping to reach out to Latinos and other groups that spurned Romney, quickly denounced Romney's comments. "We have got to stop dividing American voters," Jindal. "We're fighting for 100 percent of the vote." 

Here, four reasons why critics say Romney was wrong to place the blame where he did:

1. First, he's simply incorrect
Romney's analysis is somewhere on the spectrum from "incomplete to inaccurate," Mike Allen, Politico "Obama didn't win Janesville, Iowa or New Hampshire because of gifts to minorities." Those places are overwhelmingly white. Indeed, Doug Mataconis, OPutside the Beltway, Obama didn't somehow buy votes by showering Americans with "free stuff." He convinced people "he actually cared about the problems they were dealing with," which "is something that Romney never seemed to be able to do." Still, it's silly to deny that Obama made several major gestures to his liberal base — from imposing a safe harbor for young illegal immigrants to "evolving" on gay marriage — during the campaign, Allah Pundit. So the question "isn't whether O is guilty of 'clientelism'" — "it's whether clientelism was decisive."

2. Romney is hurting the GOP effort to broaden its appeal
It's hardly a surprise that Romney's fellow Republicans, including Jindal and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, are upset, Aaron Blake, Washington Post. They're obviously "ready for the Romney chapter to be over." Romney's White House dreams might have vanished, but theirs haven't. And Romney's sour grapes "won't help the GOP's efforts to win over minority voters," especially given his earlier  remark about how the "47 percent" of Americans who pay no federal income taxes were destined to vote for Obama because they're dependent on the government. "What Jindal says is not political rocket science," Joe Gandelman, THE Moderate Voice. If the GOP "wants to thrive and even survive nationally, it must expand its tent and compete to get more voters inside its tent," not by offering better "gifts," but by offering "policies relevant to their dreams and lives."

3. Republican constituencies get plenty of loot, too
"On the off-chance this nonsense still needs rebutting, let's be very clear: There are plenty of reliable Republicans who get heaping piles of government goodies," Noam Scheiber, New Republic. Seniors get Medicare, veterans get VA benefits, and corporations "gorge on lavish subsidies" — all with a thumbs-up from Romney. "Believe it or not, there are even wealthy financiers out there who don't pay income taxes on their loot and who deduct the mortgage interest on their vacation homes. (Not that I have anyone specific in mind.)" And don't forget, "Romney himself promised an exceedingly large 'gift' to elderly Republican voters: restoring $718 billion worth of savings from Medicare that Obama had achieved through the Affordable Care Act." 

4. This just shines a light on Romney's other failures
"Romney, a famously data-driven decider, has completely missed the boat when it comes to explaining his loss," Peter Cohan, Forbes. The real cause was "a self-inflicted wound — the failure of Romney's online voter turnout system — ORCA." The Romney campaign touted ORCA as an "unrivaled high-tech means of communicating with more than 30,000 field workers who were stationed at polling places on Election Day." It failed miserably, and it was that "lack of tactical execution excellence" that sank the campaign. Plus, "Romney's favorable ratings were among the lowest recorded for a presidential candidate in the modern era," Andrew Kohut, Wall Street Journal It's true that Obama benefited from a big turnout among Latinos, blacks, young people, and other members of his base. But anyone chalking up the GOP's defeat to supposed gifts to these voters is "paying too little attention to how weak a candidate Mitt Romney was, and how much that hurt Republican prospects."

Socialite's climb halted by unfolding scandal

By ALLEN G. BREED, DONNA CASSATA and TAMARA LUSH | Associated Press – 10 hrs ago

    

• Jill Kelley leaves her home Tuesday, …

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Jill Kelley's climb to the top of Tampa's social ladder may be as spectacular as her fall from it.

Accounts of lavish parties at her bay front mansion with politicians and military generals have been replaced by reports of her family's financial woes and other dirty laundry, and claims she used her close friendship with David Petraeus to try to further lucrative business dealings. Now, even her "Friends of MacDill" Air Force base access pass has been unceremoniously revoked.

The tangled web enveloping the daughter of Lebanese refugees, her twin sister, former CIA chief Petraeus, and Marine Gen. John Allen, who succeeded Petraeus as the top American commander in Afghanistan, has spread to include questions about a cancer charity Kelley and her doctor-husband, Scott, founded.

Although Petraeus' affair with his biographer, Army Reserve officer Paula Broadwell, was the immediate cause of his downfall, Kelley and her relations with the Tampa base and the U.S. Central Command have surfaced as a sort of connective tissue for the growing scandal.

On Wednesday, a New York businessman said Kelley was introduced to him at the Republican National Convention in Tampa in August as someone whose friendship with Petraeus would help facilitate a no-bid deal with South Korea on a coal-gasification project. She would supposedly be in a position to help broker the billion-dollar deal directly with the Korean president, and expected a 2 percent commission, said Adam Victor, president and chief executive officer of TransGas Development Systems.

Kelley is an honorary consul for South Korea, a ceremonial position, and got diplomatic plates for her car. But after flying Kelley to New York to discuss how she could help, Victor says he concluded she had little to offer in the way of deal-making expertise or connections with Korean leaders.

The AP also learned Wednesday that Kelley attended an FBI "Citizens' Academy" last year. It was Kelley's complaints to an FBI agent about alleged threats from Broadwell that led to the general's resignation last week and has sidelined Allen's nomination to become the next commander of U.S. European Command and the commander of NATO forces in Europe.

The agent was Frederick W. Humphries, 47, a veteran counterterrorism investigator in the Tampa office, and he was among the FBI employees Kelley met during the academy, which lasted from Sept. 13 to Nov. 30, 2011, the AP learned.

Both Petreaus and Allen have been guests at the Kelleys' 5,000-square-foot home on Bayshore Boulevard, which records show they purchased in 2004 for about $1.5 million. Jill Kelley's twin sister, Natalie Khawam, also lives there.

The five-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath brick Colonial with its stately white columns is on the main parade route for the Gasparilla Pirate Festival, Tampa's answer to Mardi Gras. And the couple soon gained a reputation for their sumptuous and well-attended affairs.  Jill Kelley, 37, and her husband — a cancer surgeon — are members of the Tampa Yacht and Country Club.

The relationship between the Kelleys and Petraeus began in late 2008, when he came to MacDill to assume command of CENTCOM. The couple threw a welcome party for him, and he reportedly watched his first Gasparilla pirate parade from the Kelleys' lawn.

Kelley's overtures to the military brass are, in and of themselves, nothing extraordinary. In fact, most of these civilian-military relationships begin innocently enough.  For instance, the connection of another local couple, John and Leslie Osterweil, with MacDill and CentCom started more than two decades ago, when a teacher at their son's exclusive prep school asked him to take a general's boy "under his wing." That boy's father was then CentCom commander in chief, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf. Since then, John Osterweil has become a regular presence on the base. He counts Allen and Petraeus as close friends, and each has visited the other's home.

"You know, a lot of people are enamored by people who are high-ranking generals and admirals," he says. "I mean, a lot of people look at them in some type of a different light. I look at them as nice people that are my friends."

But Petraeus aides say Jill Kelley took it to another level, winning the title of "honorary ambassador" for her extensive entertaining at her home on behalf of the command, throwing parties that raised her social status in Tampa through the reflected glow of the four-star general in attendance.

Petraeus honored the couple with an award, given to them in a special ceremony at the Pentagon just before he departed the military for his post at the CIA, an aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the matter publicly.

Aaron Fodiman, who's been publisher of Tampa Bay Magazine for 27 years, said people like Petraeus and Allen usually don't know anyone when they arrive, and that people like Kelley act as "the welcome wagon." But while he described the hostess as "outgoing and effervescent," he said her parties "were like everybody else's parties."

"Nothing different or special," who has attended several events at the Kelley home. "Standard procedure. Have a caterer. Feed people. Give them something to drink. And let them mix." 

But behind the scenes, this veneer of upward mobility was showing signs of cracking.
Hundreds of pages of court files in numerous cases portray the occupants of 1005 Bayshore Boulevard as both litigious and financially strained.

The Kelleys' investment in a Tampa office building went sour when a $28,000-a-month tenant balked at payment because of problems with the air conditioning system. The couple later defaulted on the mortgage and the property went into foreclosure.

An attorney who represented the Kelleys in that case, Barry Cohen, ultimately became the target of a lawsuit over his legal fees. Chase Bank sued Scott Kelley over a $25,880.56 unpaid credit card bill.

Meanwhile, Khawam, Kelley's twin, has had legal troubles of her own.  She sued Cohen's firm, where she was an attorney, claiming sexual harassment by the chief financial officer.

In court responses, Cohen said Khawam "has a judicially documented recent history and continuing propensity for the commission of perjury." He cited a court filing in the District of Columbia that described Khawam as having a "willingness to say anything, even under oath, to advance her own personal interests at the expense of ... others."

Khawam, who earned $270,822 in 2010, according to a court filing, has filed for bankruptcy. During a news conference Wednesday, Cohen said both sisters had been heard dropping Petraeus' name often, though he never heard Allen's name invoked. He said both subscribed to the idea that you should "join these clubs and have these parties and drop these names."  Referring to Jill Kelley, he said: "She does what she thinks is necessary to be perceived as being important."

Her apparent importance and connections were described to Victor, when the New York businessman was introduced to her.

"We went down to the convention to spread our message about coal gasification and I met someone who seemed to be very well connected in Tampa" — and was described as a friend of Petraeus and someone who could deal with the president of South Korea.

In an interview, Victor continued: "It was Jill Kelley. She was a very vivacious woman. She seemed eager to assist us in our project and she confirmed that she was very close to Gen. Petraeus ..."
Victor said she talked about helping with a non-competitive bid. "And so that if the (South Korean) president liked it, as a favor to Gen. Petraeus, there would be one no-bid contract. Every developer likes a no-bid contract, or sole source. This certainly seemed worthwhile pursuing."

Victor said his company flew Kelley to New York, first class, for meetings, and then she flew to Hawaii, allegedly for meetings on the deal.  They discussed her compensation, Victor said. "I said, 'what do you think a fair fee would be?'" And she emailed me back, 2 percent of the deal," which he said could have amounted to tens of millions of dollars.

The company decided to work through others on the deal. "We decided that she simply was not a skilled negotiator in these large projects, she's never been in these large projects and I sort of felt that I wasted my time," Victor said.

In 2005, the Kelleys established Doctor Kelley Cancer Foundation Inc., with themselves and Khawam as its sole directors, according to the Florida Department of State. Its mission statement says the organization, which was based out of the Kelley home, was created to "conduct research studies into efforts to discover ways to improve the quality of life of terminally-ill adult cancer patients."

In 2007, the last year for which it filed paperwork, the foundation reported revenues of $157,284 to the Internal Revenue Service, all from direct donations, according to its tax filing. The document lists expenses totaling precisely the same amount, including $43,317 for meals and entertainment, $38,610 for travel, $25,013 in legal fees, $8,067 for supplies and $5,082 in phone bills.

The filing claims $58,417 of its expenses went toward program services, but it's unclear what those services entailed.

Christopher Pietruszkiewicz, dean of the Stetson University Law School and expert on nonprofits and taxation, said the foundation's filing "raises a lot more questions than it does provide answers."

"I'm not sure that we can come up with any conclusions about how the money was spent by the organizers of the charitable organization, but it does give us a sense about how $157,000 was spent," he said. "And I do think it raises some issues that either the Internal Revenue Service or the State of Florida may be interested in looking at."

The Tampa Bay Times reported Wednesday that as late as February 2010, Jill Kelley was soliciting contributions in the foundation's name to fund a dinner for the homeless. The paper cited an email in which she asked prospective donors for "in kind' donations (i.e. more food, drinks, banners, decorations)" and noted that the charity was a "tax write-off."

As the Pentagon looks into up to 30,000 pages of emails and other documents — some characterized as "inappropriate communications" — between Jill Kelley and Allen, MacDill's commander on Tuesday revoked her access pass.

Kelley was issued the pass, one of about 800 handed out under a program to promote interaction with the civilian population, in November 2010, according to a military source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to comment on the situation. It was renewed this past February.

Several months ago, Jill Kelley was appointed an honorary local consul for South Korea, said Kristen Smith, executive assistant at the South Korean consulate in Atlanta, which also covers Florida. The license plate on Kelley's silver Mercedes-Benz reads, "Honorary Consul 1JK."

Smith was not authorized to say anything more about Kelley's activities on that country's behalf, although she confirmed that Kelley still maintained her position. When Kelley called police Tuesday to complain of reporters staking out her home, she cited her honorary position and requested "diplomatic protection."

During last year's FBI citizens academy, which Kelley attended, Natalie Shepherd, a reporter with Channel 8 in Tampa, was one of two media representatives also invited. Among the 30 people on the list was the head of the host committee for the Republican National Convention, a vice president of security for Walt Disney Corp., and the Hillsborough County tax collector.

"She's the only person on the list who's just listed as her name," Shepherd said.
Each Tuesday evening session at the local field office covered a different topic, such as domestic terrorism, international terror or cybercrime. Shepherd said agent Humphries led one talk about Afghanistan.

Shepherd recalled Kelley as attentive and inquisitive, but otherwise low-key — especially given recent revelations.

"She wasn't dropping names or alluding to those connections at all," she said. "She seemed like one of the normal people in the class."

The FBI did not immediately return a call requesting information on Kelley and the class.
Frodiman, the magazine publisher, said there's a sense that Kelley's many efforts to rise socially have been undercut by the scandal.

"I think she has now been tainted," he said. "Just too much has come out, that even if it's not true, people will remember. I would imagine that they will ultimately leave the community."
___

Cassata reported from Washington. Also contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Matt Sedensky and Tony Winton in Tampa, and Adam Goldman in Washington.

Gingrich ‘dumbfounded’ by Obama win

 



"I was wrong last week, as was virtually every major Republican analyst. And so, you have to stop and say to
yourself, 'If I was that far off, what do I need to learn to better understand America.''

Add Newt Gingrich to the list of Republicans coming to terms with the loss of the presidential election.

On Monday, the former speaker of the House sounded reflective on the "Today" show, saying,

"We need to stop, take a deep breath and learn." He added, "The president won an extraordinary victory. And the fact is, we owe him the respect of trying to understand what they did and how they did it."

Gingrich said,

"But if you had said to me three weeks ago Mitt Romney would get fewer votes than John McCain and it looks like he'll be 2 million fewer, I would have been dumbfounded."

The former GOP candidate had previously predicted that Romney would enjoy an easy victory. He said on Fox News,

 "My personal guess is you'll see a Romney landslide, 53 percent-plus ... in the popular vote, 300 electoral votes-plus."

But Gingrich sounded a different tone postelection, writing for Politico,  

"For the conservative movement and the Republican Party to succeed in the future (and while they are not identical the two are inextricably bound together) we will have to learn the lessons of 2012. An intellectually honest and courageous Republican Party has nothing to fear from the current situation."

Asked about the editorial on "Today," Gingrich admitted,

The Romney lesson

By Charles Lane, Published: November 12

Republicans pondering the lessons of November 6 should consider two events, almost exactly 49 years apart, involving the Romney family and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

On June 29, 1963, Gov. George Romney of Michigan joined hundreds of marchers through Grosse Pointe, a white suburb of Detroit, demanding an end to housing segregation. At Romney’s side strode Edward Turner, president of the NAACP’s Detroit chapter. In 1966, Romney was reelected with 30 percent of Michigan’s black vote.

On July 10, 2012, George Romney’s son Mitt stood before the NAACP’s annual convention as the soon-to-be Republican nominee for an office his father had coveted in vain: president. “If you want a president who will make things better in the African American community,” he declared, “you are looking at him.” He invoked his father’s legacy.

The audience responded with catcalls.

And on Election Day, Democrat Barack Obama, the first black president in U.S. history, won reelection with the support of approximately 80 percent of non-white voters.  Romney got six out of 10 white votes, but given the country’s changing demography, it was a paltry consolation prize.

 

The NAACP didn’t boo Mitt Romney because he is especially hostile toward civil rights, much less a racist — or even because the NAACP’s delegates thought of him that way. It happened because the delegates could not easily forget the intervening political history, in which the GOP had evolved from the party of George Romney into the party of white backlash. They could not forget it, and Mitt Romney’s personal heritage was not sufficient to trump it.

How different history might have been if George Romney had prevailed in the intra-party debates of his day.

The 1960s were a time of robust competition for black votes between Republicans and Democrats. Richard Nixon won about a third of African American votes in both 1960 and 1968. This is one reason the period was so fruitful, legislatively, for civil rights.

Romney was a leader of the GOP’s then-sizable liberal-to-moderate wing. He was pro-business, chilly toward labor unions — and believed civil rights was both good policy and, for Republicans, good politics.

He fiercely resisted Barry Goldwater’s right-wing takeover of the party in 1964 and, after his own 1968 campaign for president fizzled, joined Nixon’s administration as housing secretary. In that role, Romney the “Open Communities” initiative, which made federal grants for local infrastructure conditional on fair housing.

When white suburbs in Romney’s home state complained to the White House in 1970, Nixon ordered Romney to stop. Romney hung on until the end of Nixon’s first term, but his power was gone and so, it turned out, was his political career.

Nixon, of course, was eyeing a 1972 reelection campaign and beginning to see the advantages of pursuing white votes over black ones. That would more or less be the strategy of every GOP presidential candidate — and many other Republicans lower down on the ballot — for the next four decades. The party remade itself as a shifting coalition in which white Southerners increasingly dominated. Republicans all but forfeited African American votes to the Democrats from 1972 on, and competed intermittently for Latinos thereafter.

In cold political terms, Nixon, not Romney, was probably right about where the GOP’s interests lay in the 1970s. There was more hay to be made by catering to the “silent majority” — whose fears reflected not only racism but also legitimate concern about crime, social unrest and the mistakes of liberal policy.

In 2012, Mitt Romney did not commit his father’s mistakes. He made peace with the Republican base. Alas for him, he conquered the party just as demographic and attitudinal changes were undermining its whites-mostly electoral strategy.

The day George had warned against had finally arrived, albeit in a form he hadn’t quite foreseen. But Mitt either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see it coming — much less respond effectively.

The Republican future could be brighter than it seems. Free markets and limited government are powerful themes, and the GOP still owns them. The party does not need to win a majority of blacks, Latinos and women, merely a significant share of them. Certainly more two-party competition for everyone’s vote would be healthy for the political system overall.

But that probably won’t happen unless the GOP practices more inclusiveness, in word and deed — as George Romney did a half-century ago.

The son lost. The father, though, could still win.

Supreme Court to Revisit Voting Rights Law

By MARK SHERMAN | Associated Press – 14 hrs ago

 

Enlarge Photo

Reuters/Reuters - People line up for admission at the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington October 1, 2012. REUTERS/Gary Cameron

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court will consider eliminating the government's most potent weapon against racial discrimination at polling places since the 1960s. The court acted three days after a diverse coalition of voters propelled President Barack Obama to a second term in the White House.

 

With a look at affirmative action in higher education already on the agenda, the court is putting a spotlight on race by re-examining the ongoing necessity of laws and programs aimed at giving racial minorities access to major areas of American life from which they once were systematically excluded.

 

"This is a term in which many core pillars of civil rights and pathways to opportunity hang in the balance," said Debo Adegbile, acting president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

In an order Friday, the justices agreed to hear a constitutional challenge to the part of the landmark Voting Rights Act that requires all or parts of 16 states with a history of discrimination in voting to get federal approval before making any changes in the way they hold elections.

The high court considered the same issue three years ago but sidestepped what Chief Justice John Roberts then called "a difficult constitutional question."

 

The new appeal from Shelby County, Ala., near Birmingham, says state and local governments covered by the law have made significant progress and no longer should be forced to live under oversight from Washington.

 

"The America that elected and reelected Barack Obama as its first African-American president is far different than when the Voting Rights Act was first enacted in 1965. Congress unwisely reauthorized a bill that is stuck in a Jim Crow-era time warp. It is unconstitutional," said Edward Blum, director of the not-for-profit Project on Fair Representation, which is funding the challenges to the voting rights law and affirmative action.

 

But defenders of the law said there is a continuing need for it and pointed to the Justice Department's efforts to block voter ID laws in South Carolina and Texas, as well as a redistricting plan in Texas that a federal court found discriminated against the state's large and growing Hispanic population. "What we know even more clearly now than we did when the court last considered this question is that a troubling strain of obstructing the path to the ballot box remains a part of our society," Adegbile said.

 

Since the court's decision in 2009, Congress has not addressed potential problems identified by the court. Meanwhile, the law's opponents sensed its vulnerability and filed several new lawsuits.

Addressing those challenges, lower courts have concluded that a history of discrimination and more recent efforts to harm minority voters justify continuing federal oversight.

 

The justices said they will examine whether the formula under which states are covered is outdated because it relies on 40-year old data. By some measures, states covered by the law are outperforming some that are not.

Tuesday's election results also provide an interesting backdrop for the court's action. Americans re-elected the nation's first African-American president. Exit polls across the country indicated Obama won the votes of more than 70 percent of Hispanics and more than 90 percent of blacks. In Alabama, however, the exit polls showed Obama won only about 15 percent of the state's white voters. In neighboring Mississippi, the numbers were even smaller, at 10 percent, the surveys found.

 

The case probably will be argued in February or March, with a decision expected by late June.

The advance approval, or preclearance requirement, was adopted in the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to give federal officials a potent tool to defeat persistent efforts to keep blacks from voting.  The provision was a huge success, and Congress periodically has renewed it over the years. The most recent occasion was in 2006, when a Republican-led Congress overwhelmingly approved and President George W. Bush signed a 25-year extension.

 

The requirement currently applies to the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia. It also covers certain counties in California, Florida, New York, North Carolina and South Dakota, and some local jurisdictions in Michigan and New Hampshire. Coverage has been triggered by past discrimination not only against blacks, but also against American Indians, Asian-Americans, Alaskan Natives and Hispanics.

 

Before these locations can change their voting rules, they must get approval either from the U.S. Justice Department's civil rights division or from the federal district court in Washington that the new rules won't discriminate.

 

Congress compiled a 15,000-page record and documented hundreds of instances of apparent voting discrimination in the states covered by the law dating to 1982, the last time it had been extended.

Six of the affected states, Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas, are backing Shelby County's appeal.

 

In 2009, Roberts indicated the court was troubled about the ongoing need for a law in the face of dramatically improved conditions, including increased minority voter registration and turnout rates. Roberts attributed part of the change to the law itself. "Past success alone, however, is not adequate justification to retain the preclearance requirements," he said.

 

Jurisdictions required to obtain preclearance were chosen based on whether they had a test restricting the opportunity to register or vote and whether they had a voter registration or turnout rate below 50 percent.

A divided panel of federal appeals court judges in Washington said that the age of the information being used is less important than whether it helps identify jurisdictions with the worst discrimination problems.

 

Shelby County, a well-to-do, mostly white bedroom community near Birmingham, adopted Roberts' arguments in its effort to have the voting rights provision declared unconstitutional.

 

Yet just a few years earlier, a town of nearly 12,000 people in Shelby County defied the voting rights law and prompted the intervention of the Bush Justice Department.

 

Ernest Montgomery won election as the only black member of the five-person Calera City Council in 2004 in a district that was almost 71 percent black. The city redrew its district lines in 2006 after new subdivisions and retail developments sprang up in the area Montgomery represented, and the change left his district with a population that was only 23 percent black.

 

Running against a white opponent in the now mostly white district, Montgomery narrowly lost a re-election bid in 2008. The Justice Department invalidated the election result because the city had failed to obtain advance approval of the new districts.

 

The case is Shelby County v. Holder, 12-96.

 

 

GOP Political Action Committees Taking Stock After 

$380 Million Loss

President Barack Obama, election night November 6, 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican-leaning independent groups were supposed to be a key to victory for Mitt Romney. But they ended up being among the big losers of the presidential race, spending an eye-popping $380 million on ads to oust President Barack Obama only to come up woefully short.

Unleashed by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which allowed wealthy individuals and corporations to spend freely to influence elections, these super political action committees and other groups played a big role in GOP victories in 2010 — only to fall down badly two years later in their first national electoral test. Republican losses from the top of the ticket on down are forcing the groups' leaders to re-examine their strategy and determine how best to spend their donors' money going forward.

Among those feeling the sting of defeat:

• American Crossroads and its nonprofit arm, Crossroads GPS. Together, the two groups spent $180 million on ads to oust Obama. The Crossroads organization, cofounded by former President George W. Bush's longtime political counselor Karl Rove, also spent $76 million on ads to help Republicans running in competitive Senate seats, but the GOP lost five of seven of those races. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent $33 million on ads for losing Republican Senate candidates.

• Restore Our Future, a super PAC founded by former Romney advisers specifically to boost him, spent $91 million on commercials. Americans for Prosperity and American Future Fund, two nonprofits founded by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, together spent about $66 million on presidential campaign ads.

• Several smaller groups rounded out the total, including the Republican Jewish Committee, the Ending Spending Action Fund, and Thomas Petterfy, a Hungarian-American billionaire who spent $2.8 million on ads he starred in himself.  Several other enormously wealthy donors also saw their investments in outside groups apparently go down the drain.

• Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, were the top contributors to Republican-leaning groups. The couple gave at least $53 million to organizations supporting former House Speaker Newt Gingrich during the GOP nominating period and later to groups trying to help Romney, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign spending.

• Texas-based leveraged buyout specialist Harold Simmons and his wife, Annette, contributed $24 million; Texas builder Bob Perry gave $21 million, and TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts gave nearly $13 million.

Carl Forti, a senior strategist for the Crossroads groups and Restore Our Future, said the ads run by outside groups helped mitigate Obama's fundraising advantage and kept Romney in the game.

"I don't buy the premise that it didn't bear fruit. We did what we needed to do to critique Obama's record," said Forti. "If we hadn't spent on TV, the race wouldn't have been as close as it was. We spent out of necessity."

Asked what the organizations should do now to regroup for the future, Forti said, "That's what we have to figure out."

There are no end to theories about how and what the Republican-leaning super PACs could have done differently.

John Geer, a Vanderbilt University political science professor who studies campaign commercials, said the groups fell short in part because their ads were just not that persuasive. Research conducted by Geer's Vanderbilt Ad Rating Project found that few of the super PAC ads had much impact on voters — the vast majority of whom had made up their minds long ago about whether to give Obama another term.

"These ads didn't have a recurring theme, and they weren't particularly good," Geer said. "I was surprised that the super PACs ran a huge amount of ads that collectively were uninspired."

Geer and other critics also said the various groups' ads worked at cross purposes with the Romney campaign and with one another.

Some Republican-favoring spots assailed Obama on spending and tax policy while others went after him on Solyndra, the green energy company that received millions in federal loan guarantees but ended up going bust. Still other ads criticized the president on welfare reform.

The disparate messages may have become muddled for voters.

"The Republican groups could have made a difference," said Bill Burton, whose pro-Obama super PAC, Priorities USA Action, spent about $67 million on ads. "Instead they blew through money with discordant messages and an erratic spending strategy."

Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, defended the groups' emphasis on TV advertising in the 2012 election.

But he said Republicans need to recruit better candidates up and down the ballot and make structural changes such as improving their field operations to boost their chances in future races

"We need a deeper, stronger bench and we need to better message our issues and principles. The Romney campaign should have done this and outside groups should have done this," Phillips said.
Fred Wertheimer, a longtime campaign finance reform advocate, predicted that super PACs and other outside groups would be back with a vengeance.

"Some millionaires and billionaires will throw up their hands as a result of this election and say, 'I don't want to do this.' But other people with an interest in government decisions aren't going to walk away from the corrupting influence this system provides," Wertheimer said.